Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Turns Out We Did Come From Monkeys

4 comments:

Baconsbud said...

This video is an example of why some creationist deny evolution. I was lost from the start of this video. I can see people wanting to learn about evolution seeing something like this and thinking they are wasting their time. It would be better if evolution could be easier to understand.

Baconeater said...

I understand that this isn't the best evolution video. We might as well call every animal on this planet sponges using his logic.

Baconsbud, for a great series on evolution check out Potholer54 on Youtube.

Unknown said...

Baconeater, we can't say all animals are sponges because eumetazoans didn't evolve from sponges. We evolved from something similar to a sponge nymph that never developed into a sponge. The name for that is 'eumetazoa' and that name still applies.

Some words have a consistent taxonomic value. If it doesn't, it's useless and should be discarded.

ApeEater said...

Scientists have arrived at the conclusion that we haven't come from apes after making a close study of the way chimpanzees scale trees - virtually vertically and with ease - and then comparing chimpanzee ankle joints with those of hominins, humans' ancestors.

The hominins lived between 1.5 and 4.1 million years ago, a relatively short time after proto-humans and chimpanzees split from a common ancestor (generally thought to have been between four and eight million years ago). Many experts have argued that this ancester was probably quite chimpanzee-like, and as a result it has been widely assumed that the earliest humans were ape-like, too.

But the research contradicts this idea, showing that - unlike modern chimps - ancient humans were not designed to climb trees. Dr Jeremy DeSilva, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, came to this view after carrying out the first ever study of the mechanics of chimpanzees' tree-climbing abilities, using a group of animals in the Kibale National Park of western Uganda.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Desilva says: "Early hominins may have climbed trees like modern humans can and occasionally do today; however, this study suggests that vertical climbing and arboreality were not significant parts of their locomotor repertoire."