New fossil moves mankind back 1m years

Well then, he's wrong. Our oldest recognizably known ancestor is considered to be Pikaia, which is 505 million years old. This is nonsense. The oldest fossil of what? Hominid? The earliest known Hominid is Sahel Tchadensis, which is approximately 7 million years old. The article is complete nonsense: The author has the approximate knowledge of evolution that an 8th grader should have. Taken from your link? http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1001/1?rss=1 'Evidence has been hard to come by, however, because there are almost no fossils of early chimpanzees and gorillas. Until ... [More]

Taken from your link?http://sciencenow.sc...09/1001/1?rss=1 'Evidence has been hard to come by, however, because there are almost no fossils of early chimpanzees and gorillas. Until now, the oldest known skeleton of a human ancestor was Lucy' Although this author's statement is bizarre, it is clear she meant something along the lines of: "Before this evidence came to light, Australopithecus afarensis was the oldest known hominid species that could almost certainly be considered extremely closely related to the common ancestor of humans." Anyway, the original author was just wrong by saying Luc... [More]

If i follow that tree relationship back from humans it doesn't join to anything 2.5mil years ago. Does that mean we are missing a fossil or we don't know which of the ancestor species we came from? Nobody here has mentioned where the first Sahelanthropus tchadensis came from. Did they simply crawl out of a body of water and begin walking??? And then there is the problem of...if we evolved from apes or monkeys why are there still apes and monkeys? Why did they not evolve? I believe God created man. This was written about 3,500 years ago and has never changed. However, modern scientists keep cha... [More]

Although this author's statement is bizarre, it is clear she meant something along the lines of: "Before this evidence came to light, Australopithecus afarensis was the oldest known hominid species that could almost certainly be considered extremely closely related to the common ancestor of humans." Anyway, the original author was just wrong by saying Lucy was the "previously oldest discovered fossil". Incredibly wrong. More than anything, this telegraph article looks like Creationist propaganda, or at least the ramblings of someone pathetically ill-informed on the topic. That is because Sahel... [More]

Science articles, or something such as this, should be from credible sources. Anyone who's done proper research knows you need credible sources to prove your research; primary, and secondary sources especially, when writing a paper. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1927200,00.html?cnn=yes -- is where I found this article before it was posted.

Nobody here has mentioned where the first Sahelanthropus tchadensis came from. Did they simply crawl out of a body of water and begin walking??? And then there is the problem of...if we evolved from apes or monkeys why are there still apes and monkeys? Why did they not evolve? We didnt evolve from monkeys dude, see you say you dont belive in this kind of science and yet you dont have a clue what it is about. Just as I say I dont belive in god and I hate all the christians but I dont know what christianity is about. A bit ridicoulous...huh? Educate your self my friend, ignorance is never a good... [More]

That is because Sahelanthropus tchadensis is still not widely accepted as a fossil hominid. Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Orrogin tugenensis lived around the same human and chimp's last common ancestors did. With the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus (Ardi lived 4.4 million years old), we know the split already occured and A. ramidus is on the "human" line instead of the "chimp" line. Previous to this discovery was Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy lived 3.2 million years old). That is why the author said "Before this evidence came to light, Australopithecus afarensis was the oldest known homin... [More]

"Until now, the oldest known skeleton of a human ancestor was Lucy" SQLServer, the author (Ann Gibbons) probably do not think Sahelanthropus and Orrorin as human ancestors hence attributed Lucy as the oldest known human ancestor skeleton. Sahelanthropus and Orrorin might not be human ancestors but ancestors of both humans and chimps.

I'm still not quite sure what you mean by human ancestors. I do not have a complaint with Gibbon's article. I have several complaints with the OP article, one of which is about the sentence: "The seven stone, four-foot tall female roamed forests 4.4 million years ago – a million years before the previous oldest discovered fossil.".

Human ancestor is just another word for hominin (which is not self explanatory for those that do not know what hominin is). You right, OP's article is totally bull. It's like reading an article out of The Sun.