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following is an excerpt:
"However, there is the rashness of this and other colleagues, White now very convenient to emphasize in lectures the most important result of the analysis of Ardis skeleton. That this creature had precisely no resemblance to a chimpanzee
stands Ardipithecus us time less close than the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, who have lived for six or seven million years has nevertheless had Ardi, unlike chimpanzees and other great apes, straight legs -. just the big toes opposable . The lady was therefore probably a good but slow climber, their feet in the trees do not like to Schimpansenart could use another pair of hands. But they had a pool that enabled them to long distances on two legs to walk. Also, the bit has to do with the chimpanzees of nothing. Especially by the small canine teeth - even with Ardipithecus-men, of which teeth were also found - it looks like much more like the later hominids our lineage than that of today's great apes. "We had always imagined to be, the further we go back in time, the chimpanzee-like our ancestors have been"
says White. "It gave us Darwin already warned against this fallacy." In fact, it turns out now, what would be expected to Darwin: Today's chimps have six million years of evolution, independently developed by us and it all made other adjustments. Your finger bones, their front teeth, her short back, her feet, all that was the nature of which descended the man to do nothing, "White says. There are adaptations to specific habitats of chimpanzees in tropical forests. But if this is so, says White, then there is no reason to believe the behavior of chimpanzees, their social structure or their mating behavior different from those adjustments are. Accordingly have little to do all that with our evolutionary ancestors, let alone one might add, with us humans.
"The chimpanzee researchers were upset about this pretty," says White. "You just have to believe with the chimpanzees a model for early hominids." But according to White, they are neither in its ecology still in their diet, nor in their mode of transport, yet anatomically. Why should it then be in the behavior?
It is this hope, however, many researchers seem to have had. "A very famous primatologist, has strongly attacked me shortly after our publication in Science at a meeting of the Royal Society," recalls White. "And in the coffee break he then told me I had to research on chimpanzees by 30 Years thrown back. "White still struggles with the text." Yes, what I would do because to do? Ardis fossils bury again? Do not dig the first place? Or maybe to put a couple of chimpanzees teeth? "
his view, something went wrong after it had been found by the molecular genetics that the chimps are our closest relatives. With a genetic match of 98 percent did this relationship even quantified." But no one knows what these numbers mean biologically what actually is, "White says, pointing out that around the foot of a gorilla is similar to that of humans than that of a chimpanzee, further genetic relationship or not. "Nevertheless Schimpansologen came and told the agencies distribute the research funds, we must explore chimpanzee to learn about the evolutionary origin of man. And if we cut off the chimpanzees, we would get the never." This White
will be misunderstood. "I'm not against research on chimpanzees and certainly not against it, to preserve them from extinction." The thesis here is something about our evolutionary past, he has won little more than the bones of scores on the Nature cover. But he can formulate a polite: "The past is a different place," he says, citing again to Darwin. "It can be understood only from their own terms out."
> to the full article (online version, dated 11/02/2010)
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> previous post (from 3.10.2009) to Ardipithecus on this blog
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