Saturday, August 11, 2007

Evolution Theories Challenged by Fossils

The more we know, the more complex the story gets…..so says Bill Kimbel of Arizona State University.

I agree.

A discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man's early evolution — that one of those species evolved from the other.

Keep reading my excerpts or read the whole thing here.

A new find further discredits that iconic illustration of human evolution that begins with a knuckle-dragging ape and ends with a briefcase-carrying man. The old theory is that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became human, Homo sapiens. But Leakey's find suggests those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years. She and her research colleagues report the discovery in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.

Overall what it paints for human evolution is a "chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us," Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya.


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1 comment:

30plusteacher said...

The article is very interesting. One of the things I believe we need to keep in mind is the evidence is always changing...theories are just that...theory...a best educated guess based on the current finding.

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