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13-Million-year-old ape skull discovered


Still Waters

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More than 13 million years ago in what’s now northern Kenya, an infant ape ended up dead in a lush forest, its body blanketed in ashfall from a nearby volcanic eruption.

Millions of years later, scientists uncovered the baby ape’s skull, the best-preserved of its kind ever found, and got an extraordinarily glimpse into the early stages of ape evolution.

“We’ve been looking for ape fossils for years—this is the first time we’re getting a skull that’s complete,” says Isaiah Nengo, the De Anza College anthropologist who led the discovery, funded in part by a National Geographic Society grant.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/08/fossil-ape-skull-nyanzapithecus-kenya-africa-science/

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It never ceases to amaze me that something so many millions years old could be so well preserved.

Awesome find, but sad that it was a little one that had perished.

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I guess if you can keep air and moisture away buried items can last virtually forever.  I would be interesting to see if the earth right around the skull is different than the dirt first removed when  looking for the skull.

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Such nonsense. Whenever a primate's skull is found which is thousands of years old, it has to be linked to humans. It can't be any other primate, no way. They didn't evolve, only humans did, lol.

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A Primate is a Primate and NOT Homo Sapiens there is no way that this animal represents a Human. If we evolved from this creature we should be still hanging around in trees.The "missing link" from Apes to Humans has never been found and from my p.o.v never will as there is no link.

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2 hours ago, spud the mackem said:

A Primate is a Primate and NOT Homo Sapiens there is no way that this animal represents a Human. If we evolved from this creature we should be still hanging around in trees.The "missing link" from Apes to Humans has never been found and from my p.o.v never will as there is no link.

And here we can see how the education system is failing us. :,(

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^^^^^^
We didn't evolve from apes but we share a common ancestor with them. That's why monkeys are around today

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1 hour ago, Bavarian Raven said:

And here we can see how the education system is failing us. :,(

^^^^

We didn't evolve from apes but we share a common ancestor. That why apes are still around today 

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6 minutes ago, AstralHorus said:

^^^^

We didn't evolve from apes but we share a common ancestor. That why apes are still around today 

No, we did indeed evolve from apes. We are just not descended from modern species, but share a common ancestor with them.

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Here's my simplified phylogenetic tree of the Hominoidea (apes) for reference:

Hominoidea Phylogeny.png

The newly-discovered Nyanzapithecus alesi would be somewhere at the base of the Hominoidea.

Edited by Carnoferox
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Guest brizink

This is psudo-science. This species could be completely and utterly disconnected from the han family tree, or it could be an ancestor of ours. But they ALWAYS claim a new ape species is our relative if it's remains are from pre-antiquity. This is bull crap, they make these claims with little to no evidence and we know they don't have DNA because it degrades too quickly to last millions of years. All conjecture, and there's no real science that we know of that really tells us the real story. They can examine the bones and compare them to humans, but you could find a chimpanzee skull from a couple million years ago and the claim would be made that it's an ancestor. There's no missing link btw, it doesn't exist because we didn't evolve in the way text books say we did. Evolution wouldnt have created humans anyway, tree dwellers die out all the time due to deforestation, and yet we still have no examples of adaptation to a treeless environment that's verifiable. We can make assumptions about a lot of things but I'm just not buying this. Not to mention this small creature should have been getting smaller, not bigger the last 20 million years of fossil evidence has shown that species as a whole have been getting smaller, not tripling in size.

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17 hours ago, brizink said:

This is psudo-science. This species could be completely and utterly disconnected from the han family tree, or it could be an ancestor of ours. But they ALWAYS claim a new ape species is our relative if it's remains are from pre-antiquity. This is bull crap, they make these claims with little to no evidence and we know they don't have DNA because it degrades too quickly to last millions of years. All conjecture, and there's no real science that we know of that really tells us the real story. They can examine the bones and compare them to humans, but you could find a chimpanzee skull from a couple million years ago and the claim would be made that it's an ancestor. There's no missing link btw, it doesn't exist because we didn't evolve in the way text books say we did. Evolution wouldnt have created humans anyway, tree dwellers die out all the time due to deforestation, and yet we still have no examples of adaptation to a treeless environment that's verifiable. We can make assumptions about a lot of things but I'm just not buying this. Not to mention this small creature should have been getting smaller, not bigger the last 20 million years of fossil evidence has shown that species as a whole have been getting smaller, not tripling in size.

 

On 11/8/2017 at 1:57 AM, Bavarian Raven said:

And here we can see how the education system is failing us. :,(

Repetita iuvant? 

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23 minutes ago, MisterMan said:

I weep for the future.

Same. Science used to be about finding answers and questioning everything. Now we seem to believe that any sort of evidence, no matter how farfetched it is, gets classified as fact. You essentially tell me I must believe in this idea, or else I'm an idiot. That's dangerous for our future and moving forward. Can this skull be from a previous ancestor? Maybe. But they truly know? Absolutely not. I don't even believe in evolution. Evolution is an idea that makes sense so it can be believable, but it's not more than that.

Edited by Trenix
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9 minutes ago, Trenix said:

I don't even believe in evolution.

There's no need to "believe" in evolution.  The evidence for evolution and its principal driving force, natural selection, are overwhelming. 

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3 hours ago, MisterMan said:

There's no need to "believe" in evolution.  The evidence for evolution and its principal driving force, natural selection, are overwhelming. 

Actually that's not true at all. I believe in natural selection, but only at some levels. I don't believe a fish will turn into a bird, or a bird will turn into a fish. We don't have evidence of such things. Even fish becoming land animals is a little farfetched, we see plenty of animals nowadays which are both land and water animals, that doesn't mean they're evolving to become one or the other. Take for example frogs, we have frogs and toads, is the water frog proof that a fish evolved into a frog and then became a toad? That's just ridiculous. I used to believe in evolution, because school forced me to. However overtime you learn that evolution theory has to be pretty perfect for it to work correctly. There is no chance in evolution, there is just intentional adaptation. Evolution also doesn't explain how all these organisms came about anyway. Just random chemical reacation in a pool of water? Oh please.

Edited by Trenix
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1 hour ago, Trenix said:

Actually that's not true at all. I believe in natural selection, but only at some levels. I don't believe a fish will turn into a bird, or a bird will turn into a fish. We don't have evidence of such things. Even fish becoming land animals is a little farfetched, we see plenty of animals nowadays which are both land and water animals, that doesn't mean they're evolving to become one or the other. Take for example frogs, we have frogs and toads, is the water frog proof that a fish evolved into a frog and then became a toad? That's just ridiculous. I used to believe in evolution, because school forced me to. However overtime you learn that evolution theory has to be pretty perfect for it to work correctly. There is no chance in evolution, there is just intentional adaptation. Evolution also doesn't explain how all these organisms came about anyway. Just random chemical reacation in a pool of water? Oh please.

Actually evolution depends on chance mutation. Some small adaption giving an advantage over previous existence.

 Meanwhile, it isn't fish to birds. That's a straw man at best. 

 We go have a length fossil record. We have animals that develop complexity as we move upthe chain. We see very primitive amphibians and more complex reptiles. We see theropods with arms becoming more suited for flight over time. 

 We don't see anything that appears suddenly without precident. 

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On ‎8‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 9:05 PM, AstralHorus said:

^^^^^^
We didn't evolve from apes but we share a common ancestor with them. That's why monkeys are around today

That's sort of begging the question.  That common ancestor looked so much like a chimp, we'd all swear it was one.

Doug

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On ‎8‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 3:08 PM, Trenix said:

Actually that's not true at all. I believe in natural selection, but only at some levels. I don't believe a fish will turn into a bird, or a bird will turn into a fish. We don't have evidence of such things.

Evolutionary biologists don't believe that either.  They believe in evolution, not made up stories.

Doug

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On ‎8‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 5:38 PM, ShadowSot said:

Actually evolution depends on chance mutation. Some small adaption giving an advantage over previous existence.

 Meanwhile, it isn't fish to birds. That's a straw man at best. 

 We go have a length fossil record. We have animals that develop complexity as we move upthe chain. We see very primitive amphibians and more complex reptiles. We see theropods with arms becoming more suited for flight over time. 

 We don't see anything that appears suddenly without precident. 

I don't believe mutation is responsible for evolution whatsoever, if the theory is right that is. Adaptation is way more believable. I mean mutations are rare, they are usually not beneficial, you then have to rely on having that animal reproduce with that rare mutation, and you then have to hope that animal wouldn't die before it reproduces, you than have to hope it passes down to the offspring, I mean just so much probability that it just ridiculous. As for my straw man, it just shows that we never have a change of kind. An animal truly never completely changes, it adapts. People claim we all came from the Ocean, but there is so little proof of that. We already have trouble trying to link us to monkeys, so good luck linking us to a fish. With all the evidence we get from fossils, we have to assume these animals are somehow linked to each other during the evolution process, but they can be their own animal.

We also never have organs or limbs that never serve a function during so called, "evolution". We really don't give much credit of how we adapt to our environment, nor do we trust our body with anything. Sure, we can make medicines, change genes, alter food, and do a bunch of crap and still survive. However I think all of that is damaging to our entire species and I feel like we're doing more harm than good. If a outbreak happens that we have no cure for, I bet current day tribes will be the last ones alive and a VERY few individuals. You could thank science for that. I mean I'm not against medicine, gene changing, selective breeding, or any of that, but it's not perfect. Our bodies will do far better than what our science could and only time will tell.

Also it's interesting how humans don't have that many children when compared to other animals. You'd believe animals which produce more frequently, would evolve the fastest. I mean you believe in probability right? But yet, humans, which don't have much offspring, surpassed all other animals in evolution. Meanwhile the ones that reproduce the most, are probably the most behind in evolution. Weird.

Edited by Trenix
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On ‎8‎/‎16‎/‎2017 at 3:17 PM, Doug1o29 said:

Evolutionary biologists don't believe that either.  They believe in evolution, not made up stories.

Doug

Of course they don't believe a change of kind, because that's one of the arguments that disprove evolution. Surely after all of our mutations that we had, we'd have human living in water and flying in the air. Oh wait no. Humans are on the ground, birds are in the air, fish are in the water, and magically no new animals form into existence. I just find it funny how people laugh at creationism, but yet they believe in the stories like the big bang, life's existence, and evolution. Those are pretty much 3 miracles that need to happen for us to get where we are at. I'm not saying creationism is any better, but I laugh when you feel like your stories are more accurate than mine. Because we all pretty much have no idea.

Edited by Trenix
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