Aborigines "Living Anscestors"?

I always get, "where's the missing link," and I assume that question to mean, "where's the mendelian genetic baggage carrying on into this generation." If that's what the question means... that according to mendelian genetics, there should be at least one anomolous popup of erectus in our genepool somewhere, asuming we came from erectus *prepares for a blow*. Anyway, that question vexed me too; however, in my archaeology class today my teacher put some skulls on the table. It ranged from a. africanus to habilis, then erectus, heidelbergensis, and then three more... the first of the three was a robust one, which he called cro-magnon, the second was clearly h. sapiens, then the last one everyone thought to be another erectus. However, he picked it up shaking his head to every attempt and finally said, "Modern aborigine. Just a few years ago. There's your genetic baggage." It exhibited, arguably, as many erectus traits as sapien traits. The take was either coexisting convergence, or sapien/erectus sex resulting in the earlier mentioned anomolous mendelian "popups" of genetic baggage. Evidentally, at least according to my teacher, you can find about as many gracile erectus looking aborigines today as sapiens in one population.{Modified topic title from Living anscestors to Aborigines "Living Ansestors"? - Adminnemooseus}This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 11-06-2004 11:19 AM

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

There is going to be variation in any population, I'm sure you can find some white people with some H. erectus traits. Aborigines are thought to have colonized Australia about 50,000 years ago, while I think H.erectus fossils are mostly older than 500,000 years ago. It could be that Aborigines have traits that look like those of H. erectus, but that doesn't really mean that they are more closely related to primitive humans than we are. Convergent evolution might have played a role, they probably look the way they do because of mutations and natural selection favoring their current appearance. I think that is more important than their relation to H. erectus, because they have had enough time apart from other races that they’ve had a chance to go in their own direction and look a little bit different from others.Cro-magnon is the same thing as H.sapiens, so if it appeared more robust than the modern human, that is probably simply due to variation. Some people have bigger heads than others, like me. I've tried on hats before only to find that they are too small. I probably have a very robust skull.

While the question is still open, it appears that H. floresiensis is close to H. erectus. That suggests that near Australia there was a species close to erectus over the last 100,000 years.