History of the Human Evolution

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: 321Go

After all, we are the only species to do it our development is somewhat different to most others.

We are also the only species to have developed language (not to mention the necessary "hardware"). Is that less important than the mastery of fire?

Once we had fire under control, the game was on.
Sciecnce, Bitch!

Obviously, the next logical step was the Bunsen burner. And then the marshmallow.

a reply to: taylor73

Nice post. I was explaining something like this to my 13 year old son this morning. I printed out your post and gave it to him to read. Children give their parents much more credibility when others confirm. Thanks.

originally posted by: taylor73
I'm just not getting how we can come to the conclusion that we have the same evolutionary path as gorillas or gibbons. Yeah i guess gorillas and gibbons could develop the same evolutionary path as us, but it would take homo sapiens not being around and some climate change and a couple millions years and a lot of other factors for gorillas and gibbons to evolve like we are now.

It's all about the environment. When you say they follow the same evolutionary path, that's not entirely true since the evolutionary line with gorillas and chimps split off some 6-8 million years ago. Likely there was an event that split our common ancestor into 2 isolated groups. One group lived in a different environment and adapted to it over the years leading to bidepal hominids. The other group evolved in a different direction and became chimps, gorillas and other great apes (non hominid).

If you're asking how we know that, we can paint a good evolutionary picture via fossils and their respective dates and most of them show the slow change over time. We also have improved the field of genetics drastically in the last couple decades and we can trace it through DNA as well.

You seem very interested in hominid evolution so I will refer you to one of my favorite sites to learn about it. There are actually 20+ different species of hominid that have been discovered now and this site offers great information broken down for each one.

humanorigins.si.edu...

Smithsonian has some great interactive studies where you can compare various fossils in 3D and it breaks down each species. They also have some good interactive educational material.

a reply to: taylor73

I am skeptical of the whole missing link thing. Especially if lucy is a composite of different types of bones just to make it museum presentable. Lets work on being a productive good species now maybe then the missing pieces will fall in.

a reply to: taylor73
You repeat the notion the human 'EVOLVED"; so obviously have a predetermined bias/premise for its creation (self created by attrition) last one standing.