tronvillain

Kosh:
You have to get it a valid URL, otherwise you're out of luck.

Oolon Colluphid

Sorry, I guess it wasn't entirely clear. However, yeah thanks, I know Ramapithecus is in the orang-utan lineage. I’ve known it since I first read Gribbin and Cherfas’s The Monkey Puzzle back in 1985. In fact, I’m sure I’ve posted about this as an example of a paradigm shift, where the ‘molecular clock’, disbelieved for quite a while by palaeontologists, was gradually confirmed by the fossils, and knocked about 10 million years off the human-ape divergence.

So the questions (still) are:

1) References please for “the mandibular structure of Australopithecus afarensis look[ing] very similar to Ramapithecus”. Which palaeoanthropologist or anatomist has ever said so?

2) You can decide for yourself. After looking at “the mandibular structure” of the afarensis and orang skulls above, and/or these mandibles:

Ramapithecus (Lufengpithecus) lufengensis



Australopithecus afarensis (composite reconstruction)



... please define ‘very similar’.

Oolon

[ March 28, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Valentine Pontifex

I accessed it the really old fashion way: Walk the mile and a half to the library and visited the stacks. There is simply no claim in paper in question that anything called a hominin is quadrupedal whatsoever. The citation of this paper as supporting that view is an out-and-out lie. I will start a new thread on this issue.

Valentine Pontifex

Was she having trouble counting the change or making the change?

Most people these days seem to have problem making change if they can't use the machine to do it for them (like for example they enter the cash tendered wrong close out the order). The trick to do this is rather simple: but most retail establishments don't bother to teach their employees it anymore. Do not try to do the subtraction in one's head, but rather start at the amount of purchase and count up to the amount of money given by the customer. Say a ten was given for a 3.33 order. Start at 3.33. Two pennies go to 3.35. A nickle and a dime to 3.50. Two quarters to 4.00. Give a picture of George Washington to 5.00 and a picture of Honest Abe to 10.00. Many clerks will have trouble doing the subtraction in their head, or will try to find a paper and pen and start doing the subtraction. But this method is easier and faster though very few clerks know it these days. It NOT because they are stupid, it is because no one ever took the minute to explain the procedure to them.

Valentine Pontifex

Can't even get the number of footprints correct Bait?

There are at least 69 of them!

Valentine Pontifex

A small barefoot Homo sapiens COULD have made them. But the point is not that H. sapiens made them, but that they are walking in a similiar fashion to modern humans. The book From Lucy to Language addresses Tuttle's claims.
I do quibble about the last sentense of the first paragraph, but it is clear that Bait is pulling an outdated assertion.

Ergaster

I have already smacked Bait upside the head with this one (since I've had this paper in my files for some years now), and he is contrite (see our exchange somewhere in the middle of page 7). However, in his contrition he established that he has not read the paper for himself, but got it from some other "source". I wonder if the "source" has read the paper, or whether we're involved in some bizarre creationist version of "Telephone".

If anyone has a reference to do with hominid evolution they would like to check out, you can try me: I don't have everything, of course, but I have a lot, and I try to keep my Endnote database up to date. At least I can tell you pretty quickly if I don't have it.

I admit that I was rather shocked to see so blatant an invention myself, but at least Bait did not try to make excuses for it. Perhaps he will learn to check his facts; I have already found a large number of plain factual errors he has made, and I haven't read all of his posts yet.

Deb

Ergaster

Hi Oolon: a nitpick--what was the source of your picture of "Ramapithcus"? I ask because of the caption Ramapithcus "Lufengpithecus" lufengensis.

These days "Ramapithecus" is a junior synonym of Sivapithecus, and Lufengpithecus is an entirely distinct genus, generally placed either within the Subfamily Ponginae (which includes Ankarapithecus, Sivapithecus, Gigantopithecus, and Pongo) or within Dryopithecinae with (what else?) Dryopithecus.

(If this is off Dennis Etler's site, I think he does explain this a bit).

I think that the fossil Bait probably has in mind is not this one, but a rather more fragmentary anterior mandible of Sivapithecus.

Deb

Oolon Colluphid

Nit-pick away by all means! I have to admit to never having previously heard of Lufengpithecus, and simply (ie in a creationist manner ) copied it off the site I found it. Now you mention it, Sivapithecus I know is right, but like I say, I was doing it from work...

Now, ref the picture, here's the cheat: the way I said about getting the URL of a picture... well it works here too. Just right-click the image, and its Properties tell you the source. In this case, it was the first useful thing Google brought up when looking for 'Ramapithecus', 'jaw' and 'picture'. It's from <a href="http://www.chineseprehistory.org" target="_blank">http://www.chineseprehistory.org</a> ... and that's how I found the site again now, sitting at home...

Cheers, Oolon

[ March 28, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Ergaster

A reply in three parts.

Part One.


Glad to do it for him. It has turned out to be a rather longer project than I anticipated, though.

Part of the problem is that you do not have much, if any background in human evolution studies. This is readily apparent by your continual errors in anatomy, and your continual misinterpretation of the context of the quotes you use (I should also observe that the very fact that you seem to believe that out-of-context quotes constitute some kind of evidence demonstrates your naivete about how science in general works). A lot of time has to be spent simply countering the inappropriateness of your choice of "evidence".

I have to say, though, that I find the notion of quoting a source without a) having read it first or b) at least ascertaining that it is accurate, to be rather appalling, but I suppose that is because in a formal academic setting we would never dare to do it. It would be considered very poor scholarship. Of course, this is because quotes do not constitute evidence. Data are evidence, and what counts is the evidence the researchers provide in the primary literature, and not what they muse about to the popular press or in their own popular books.

Quotes in the absence of context are meaningless, and context can only be understood if you are familiar with a body of work. Clearly you are not. But perhaps creationists have a different notion of honest scholarship than the rest of us…..

[…]

Not entirely accurate. Whatever her personal views of Johanson (and they no more reflect on the reality of the evidence than his opinion of her does-in other words, it is irrelevant), she believed (as did Richard) that the origin of the genus Homo went deeper in time than generally thought, but she did NOT believe that the genus Homo had no non-Homo ancestors, irrespective of her opinion about any particular species having that status. She was mistaken about the timing, as continuing finds and research demonstrates. I suggest you get up to speed in it. I will gladly recommend some resources, but for the most part they will be drawn from the professional peer-reviewed literature, and not from second-, third-, or worse-hand sources.

In case you do not know, the main peer-reviewed journals they will be drawn from are: Journal of Human Evolution; American Journal of Physical Anthropology; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; and (less importantly) Nature and Science (less important because they are very short articles without the necessary detail). There is also an enormous quantity of work collected in a large number of important edited volumes.

Please note that National Geographic, New Scientist, Natural History, and Scientific American, are not considered "peer-reviewed" journals. These present boiled-down, simplified, and popularized overviews, often from a single person's perspective.

The Leakeys certainly believed that humans evolved from non-human ancestors, and Don Johanson was most assuredly not the last person to ever study "Lucy" and her conspecifics. It is unclear why you think that focussing on these people helps make your point. Is it perhaps because you are completely unaware of all the work that has been done?

"They insist"? Do you perhaps have the actual quotations and page numbers?

Of course, the genus Homo does not equal the species Homo sapiens-some of the earliest members of the genus Homo were quite primitive-looking. You seem often to confuse the genus Homo (which consists of a number of different species) with H. sapiens, and that would be a rather embarrassing error on your part. You've already made a number of fairly blatant gaffes. I suppose Homo erectus and H. habilis may be "rarely mentioned" in creationist literature…but so what? What counts is the professional paleoanthropological literature. You might be surprised at what gets mentioned there. Besides, it has been known for some time that some species of australopithecines and some species of early Homo co-existed (but not 3.8 million years ago at Laetoli…). Why is that a surprise to you?

…

And once again-so what? How does this either a) make afarensis an "ape" and/or b) negate human evolution? On the face of it, the actual ancestral status of A. afarensis is irrelevant to those points (which seem to be the ones you are trying to make). Perhaps you do not understand the nature of the debate. There are a large number of australopithecine species currently known. Several co-existed. Clearly they all couldn't be the ancestor to Homo If "Lucy" wasn't, one of the others (or even a hominid we have not yet found) surely was.

Not to mention the fact that the elder Leakeys do not participate in paleoanthropological research any more (and to be quite accurate, Mary Leakey never really did-she proffered opinions on occasion, but she was an archaeologist and preferred to stick with artifacts). There have been considerable advances in knowledge since they died/retired, and if their beliefs have not withstood the test of time and evidence, well, thems the breaks. You need to focus less on individuals and more on the actual evidence and the expertise needed to evaluate it.

...

A complete distortion of the truth. The knee was assigned to the A. afarensis species, because that is where it fits best anatomically and temporally (i.e. there was nothing else around it could belong to). It is unambiguously bipedal, BUT it is not modern human in its anatomy. Therefore, even before "Lucy" was found, Johanson knew that a bipedal hominid had lived in the landscape. However, "Lucy" was understood to be bipedal on the strength of her own anatomy alone. She has femora, and she has hip bones, and by those bones alone (in A. robustus and A. africanus) it was known that australos were bipedal long before "Lucy" was discovered. She has almost exactly the same locomotor anatomy as those other two australos (see a whole bunch of articles from the peer-reviewed professional literature by Henry McHenry, one of the foremost functional anatomists).

Here's a clue (I tried to give this to you earlier, but I do not think you picked it up): there is no reason to believe that the only way to be bipedal is to be like modern Homo sapiens. It is abundantly clear that australos were completely bipedal, even if it was not identical to us. In other words, it is entirely possible to be bipedal and not be identical to us, and if you think that a competent anatomist cannot determine that from a skeleton, you are sadly mistaken.

Oops. No, sorry, but there hasn't. Debates about the nature of bipedality are not debates about the fact of bipedality. The first is ongoing, but less lively than it used to be. The second (the FACT of bipedality) is not debated at all. Surely the distinction here is not too subtle for you, is it?

….

Sigh. I've looked at more than photos of them, Bait. I've looked at casts of the prints at least twice a week for about five years running. I've seen Philip Tobias take a cast of "Little Foot", which is of an australopithecine, and place it into one of the prints of the cast, where it fit very nicely, thankyouverymuch (and one desperately hopes, if you are determined to have this discussion, that you are aware of Philip Tobias at least). The only people who could claim that "everything about them screams Homo sapien (sic)…" are people who have actually never seen them.

It may come as a surprise, but the Laetoli prints do not, and have never, constituted the primary evidence (heck, they are barely secondary) of bipedalism in australos. That is restricted to skeletal anatomy and the conclusions that can be drawn as to function. We would know for absolute certain that australos were bipedal if the prints had never existed-and make no mistake about it-australo bipedalism is one of the facts in paleoanthropology that is NOT disputed at all.

And before you start declaring "WRONG" and tossing even more irrelevant and erroneous quotes around, you should realize that I am in a rather better position than you are to know what the workers in the field of human evolution actually believe or do not believe. And when you say that there are questions about the fact of australo bipedality, you are either ignorant or deliberately lying. Please refer back to the distinction above. Every single quote you have tried to use relates to the debate about the nature of australo bipedality, not its fact.

…

There are no Homo erectus or H. habilis fossils found 3.8 mya at Laetoli. There were no H. erectus or H. habilis fossils found at the same age level at Olduvai, because the oldest level at Olduvai is only about 1.96 million years old (Walter et al. 1991. Laser-fusion 40Ar/39Ar dating of Bed I, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Nature 354:145-149).

There is no "stone hut". Louis Leakey thought he saw a pattern in an arrangement of stones, but further research has shown that this arrangement was purely natural. (See Potts, R. 1988. Early Hominid Activities at Olduvai. New York: Aldine de Gruyter).

….

Who said they were "ape"? They were made by australos. Australos are not apes. You are trying to set up a false dichotomy. Won't work.

….

Let me briefly address some of the issues above. There are a number of them, and I have taken the liberty of cutting out the earlier responses to save space.

But first: It is pointless to argue over a series of out-of-context quotes, Bait. Quotes ARE NOT EVIDENCE. Furthermore, quotes taken from popular articles are generally oversimplified and dumbed-down versions of the research, anyway, which makes them worth even less. However, since the people you quote manifestly DO NOT believe that the prints were made by modern humans, and have NEVER claimed that they were, and since they are trained in anatomy, comparative and functional morphology, archaeological methods, are experienced in field work and have first-hand and intimate knowledge of the fossils, their conclusions are far more trustworthy than yours. You have not demonstrated a sufficient grasp of any of the relevant disciplines, nor have you any experience whatsoever in any first-hand comparisons of even good-quality casts. You may wish that the prints are human to your heart's content, but what you wish, in the absence of any corroborating evidence, is irrelevant. Likewise you may try to distort the words of others to insist that they mean something they simply do not, but that is plainly dishonest.

Issue: the prints are not all that well preserved, in the sense that they are not perfect. They are distorted; the edges squished up, the details blurred, and because of the overlap of one print into another, there just isn't a lot of information to be extracted. The best one can do with them is a very general comparison, and in a general comparison they are quite similar to human prints. They are NOT identical (i.e. the hallux is more abducted than is normal in humans, even if it is "aligned" compared to the hallux of chimps). It is impossible to identify the maker of the prints from the evidence of the prints alone. You have not ruled out-heck, you haven't even addressed-the obvious possibility that whatever features exist in common between human and the Laetoli prints are there because they are common to bipedal primates-i.e. they are functional necessities.

Issue: there are no fossils of Homo anything found at 3.8 mya. If you think that there are, then the onus is on YOU to provide the citations from the literature to support your claim. Unsupported assertions are meaningless and irrelevant. There is zero corroborative evidence of Homo at the relevant time frame, and since the prints themselves are not well-enough preserved to draw any conclusions as to identity, one has to go with the evidence that exists. The only biped around at the same time as the prints is Australopithecus.

Issue: Australopithecines were bipedal. Full stop. There are not a lot of issues in paleoanthropology on which a complete consensus exists, but the fact of australo bipedality is one of them. As noted above, you have misidentified the nature of the debate.

Issue: Australos are not "apes". They are distinctly different in fundamental ways from any great ape, living or extinct, we know of, so trying to insist they are "apes" simply because they are not human is specious and irrelevant hand-waving, not to mention circular.

Issue: it is irrelevant what Johanson claims or did in the absence of corroborative evidence. If he claims that "Lucy" was a biped, and the evidence, as determined by other trained paleoanthroplogists, supports this claim, then that's what the evidence says. If he claims that "Lucy" flew but the evidence does NOT support it, then he can claim and proclaim and write books til he's blue in the face, but all the proclaiming in the world won't make it true. What matters is the evidence, not the individual. Why you have it in for Don Johanson is entirely unclear. The vast majority of the studies of "Lucy" and her kind in the almost-thirty years since she was discovered have NOT been done by Johanson.

Issue: there is a large degree of sexual dimorphism (size difference between the sexes) in australopithecines. "Lucy", as a female, was too small to have made the largest of the prints, but a male A. afarensis definitely could have.

Issue: since I have seen more than photos of the prints, and I have seen and personally handled more than photos of the fossils, and since I have some formal training in the relevant disciplines, I am willing to trust my own experience and knowledge (whether anyone else reading this wants to trust my judgement is up to them). Contrary to your assertion, I have ignored none of the evidence, and I have ignored none of the quotes that you have provided. I have given them all the consideration they deserve. What is important is the evidential context that the author of the quotes used and was aware of, and in that context there is no evidence at all that Homo made the prints.

Issue: please note where Tuttle says: "…in all DISCERNIBLE morphological features…"-now why do you think that word ("discernible") is there?

Issue: this probably bears repeating. The genus Homo is not restricted to Homo sapiens. The earliest members of our genus were quite primitive, and in many ways did not resemble Homo sapiens very closely.

Issue: it is not "pretty obvious" in the least that A. afarensis did not make them. There still is no definitive evidence of any other hominid that existed at the same time as the prints. You have completely failed to show otherwise.

Issue: You have still failed to support your assertion that any paleoanthropologist claims the prints were made by modern humans.

Since you know nothing whatsoever of australo social life or their intellectual capabilities, and since australos are not apes, this little assessment of yours is meaningless. You have not demonstrated that such behaviour is a "distinctive human trait" at all. How do you know that chimps would not do it? Wishful thinking?

So what? He STILL never looked at afarensis, and his conclusions were never corroborated by the evidence.

The orang issue is addressed in a reply to Oolon: briefly, with a quote from that very paper that plainly states orangs are not the model for australos. You will also find it under the new thread "Australopithecine bipedalism".

This really does seem to be difficult for you to grasp, doesn't it? The evidence for bipedalism has NOTHING to do with the footprints. The footprints are confirmation that the maker was not an ape, and that the form of the foot that made them was closer in morphology to a human foot than to an ape foot. Since australos are bipedal, and they are not apes, and there is no evidence of any other bipedal hominid around at the time the prints were made, then we have no reason to assume that australos did NOT make them. You, and NO-ONE ELSE, are the only one who seems to think that if someone says that A is similar to B, then A must be B, a logical fallacy clear to everyone but you.

The evidence that australos are our closest extinct ancestors is not dependent upon the prints, nor is it dependent upon bipedalism. The evidence that they are our closest relatives and probably ancestral lies in the fact that all life on earth is related in a specific hierarchical pattern, and the morphology of australos is entirely consistent with this fact. Australos share features in common with modern humans that they do not share with apes, features that are more recent in origin than the features that they do share with apes. They also possess features that are unique to them, so of course they are not identical to modern humans. Only those with an extremely poor and cartoonish understanding of evolution could claim that australos can't be related to modern humans because they do not look or act like modern humans.

----------------
End part one.

[ March 31, 2002: Message edited by: Ergaster ]</p>