Where are all the apes leading up to humans?

Hi Taq, And why are brothers and sisters alive today when their great-great-great grandparents have mysteriously disappeared ...As did the species of apes that are ancestral to the modern apes. The apes alive today are not the species that lived when australopithecines and other early hominids existed.The apes alive today have evolved from their ancestral species and those ancestral species are also extinct.ALL living species today have evolved from ancestral species that are now extinct, a pattern repeated and repeated and repeated in the fossil record, AND a pattern that is evidenced in the cladograms developed from the DNA evidence.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : nglis

We also have living species that have a mixture of characteristics from divergent taxa. Look at the platypus. It has a mixture of reptile and mammalian features (e.g. leathery eggs and fur). Platypusses are transitional even if they are not ancestral to placental mammals. So we have the very species that Cryto is looking for, and yet Cryto does not accept evolution.As you mention, we also have ironclad DNA evidence that demonstrates shared ancestry between us and other apes. Transitional hominid fossils are just the icing on the cake.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

I get my science from scientists--
not people who imagine themselves saved for what they believe.

What counts as "evidence" to someone who is afraid they'll go to hell if they don't believe a particular creation story?What do YOU imagine the world would look like if evolution WAS true-- how do you imagine it would be different?In your mind is this what the world would look like if an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being was in charge? --Cancer, malformations, all kinds of kinky animal sex, a huge and wasteful amount of spermatazoa, ebola, Tay Sachs disease, extinctions, suffering, bugs that eat other bugs alive... an entire universe with mostly no life at all... etc.I mean it's a great world (though not what I'd expect of an omnipotent being), but what exactly is your alternative hypothesis-- God did it? How is that more useful than saying "it's magic"?In science, hypothesis must be able to predict new evidence to become a theory-- and a scientific theory is the best explanation for the observed facts. I think even you might be able to understand this with germ theory, for example. Sure, demons could be causing illness as many people believed (including your bible writers), but that belief doesn't allow us to learn more. The idea that micro-organisms cause disease does... hence modern medicine.So what is your hypothesis and what can it predict? Evolution has given us forensic tests and paternity tests and flu vaccines and tiktaalik (etc. etc.) So what can you hypothesis do for us? How is it useful and how can scientists learn more? How can we know if it's not true? How would things be different if it wasn't true? Why should someone not afraid of hell give credence to the notions of those who are? (Don't those afraid of hell have a vested interest in deluding themselves?) How can we compare your hypothesis with other unfalsifiable claims (like that we are in a Matrix or an experiment of aliens from a parallel universe?)Scientists are interested in the truth-- not what somebody thinks you should believe to be saved. It's the only way we can learn more and bring forth the modern marvels of today's world.So-- how does your (so far unexplained) alternative hypothesis explain the evidence better than the theory of evolution? Because if it can't or doesn't, then scientists can't or won't care about it. It's just more "woo".I strongly suggest you stop the silly cut and paste jobs. It makes you look as stupid, crazy, and dishonest as the people you are cutting and pasting from. The ONLY people who take such nutters seriously are people like you-- those who think that they must believe nonsense in order to be "saved". Edited by articulett, : No reason given.Edited by articulett, : corrected typos

I have discussed the problem here.To summarize, the creationist will recite a collection of words that he thinks are true.But these words do not describe a view of the world that the creationist thinks is true.CrytoGod is a good instance of this case. He believes a set of words: "If apemen had existed they'd still be around", something like that.But this is not an account of a mental model that he possesses. When he is asked how primitive hominids could possibly have survived, he has no idea. He's got nothing. He believes (I'll grant him this much) that the words that he recites are true. But he does not believe in the meaning of the words that he recites. He has never considered the actual meaning of the words that drool out of his mouth. And so when he is repeatedly challenged to explain how early hominids could have escaped extinction, he has nothing, because he has never constructed a mental model in which they could do so. Instead, he has learned to recite certain phrases which are not descriptive of any model that he has in his head, not because he is deliberately deceptive but because he has no such model.

How We Won the Hominid Wars, and All the Others Died Outhttp://discovermagazine.com/...3-how-we-won-the-hominid-wars

How did our species come to rule the planet? Rick Potts argues that environmental instability and disruption were decisive factors in the success of Homo sapiens: Alone among our primate tribe, we were able to cope with constant change and turn it to our advantage. Potts is director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and curator of the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, which opened at that museum last year. He also leads excavations in the East African Rift Valley and codirects projects in China that compare early human behavior and environments in eastern Africa with those in eastern Asia. Here Potts explains the reasoning behind his controversial idea.

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Why did our close relativesfrom Neanderthals to their 
recently discovered cousins, the Denisovans, to the hobbit people of Indonesiadie out while we became a global success?


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That is the million-dollar question. My view is that great variability in our ancestral environment was the big challenge of human evolution. The key was the ability to respond to those changes. We are probably the most adaptable mammal that has ever evolved on earth. Just look at all the places we can live and the way we seek out novel places to explore, such as space.

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The classic view of human evolution doesn’t emphasize adaptability. It focuses more on the idea that we were inevitable: that famous march from ape to human. It’s a ladder of progress with simple organisms at the bottom and humans at the top. This idea of inevitability runs deep in our societal assumptions, probably because it’s comfortinga picture of a single, forward trajectory, ending in modern humans as the crown of creation.

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But recently discovered fossils show an incredible diversity in the human family tree. That seems like the opposite of a ladder.


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Edited by Admin, : Fix blockquote.

For a class I took in college on human evolution, we read the novel Dance of the Tiger. Its basically a fictional account of those "Hominid Wars". It was an enjoyable read. Its kinda follows a classic format:

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Dance of the Tiger is a short novel, published in English in 1980, by palaeontologist Bjrn Kurtn that deals with the interaction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Set 35,000 years ago in Scandinavia, during a thaw in the great Ice Age, the novel follows a Cro-Magnon named Tiger as he tries to defeat Shelk, a tyrant and a hybrid (Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon), the man who killed his father. With his family and much of his tribe dead, Tiger meets, interacts, and allies himself with groups of Neanderthals. He eventually marries a Neanderthal woman.

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Neanderthals are depicted as white-skinned, while Cro-Magnons are dark.

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The author himself says "The book is not intended to be a 'theory about interaction between Neanderthals and Modern Humans', it is just a fictive description of one possible scenario among several that might have taken place".

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Cro-Magnon children and adults are portrayed as having smooth brows and small faces; the characteristic features of childhood act as "innate releasing mechanisms" for feelings of affection.

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To the Whites, the Blacks were godlike, tall and eloquent, with a speech as varied and flexible as that of the birds. And there was something else. No White could look at the clear brow of a Black without feeling a mysterious tenderness, such as a child might evoke in the heart of his parents. (Kurtn, p. 33, 5th printing, paperback)

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Kurtn postulates that this attraction led to intermarriage between the two people, which produced sterile offspring. He emphasizes the possibility of Neanderthal extinction through inter-breeding rather than through violence. He also presents social differences between the two groups, presenting the Cro-Magnon people as more aggressive, practicing slavery and choosing violence to solve social problems. The Neanderthal society, based on a matriarchal system, is drawn as peace loving with elaborate social rituals designed to resolve problems.

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Dance of the Tiger - WikipediaSo the Neadertals were big dumb white guys that spoke like cavemen (the author uses the same language for both groups for ease of reading, but the whites speak in "broken-english" with grunts n'stuff). The Cro-Magnons were intelligent and beautiful black people that were plainly "better" than the Cro-Magnons. There's some interbreeding going on that leads to sterile offspring. The jist of the story is that we out bred them rather than out fighting them. It goes into the details of the interactions between a handful of individuals within the groups. It was worth reading as a fictional novel, and it wasn't very long either. I don't think its worth 25 bucks, but here's a link to amazon:http://www.amazon.com/...e-Tiger-Novel-Ice-Age/dp/0520202775