The Missing Link

Glad to see my sarcasm is still lost on the masses. I'll go back to staring at my desktop's LED indicator.

DF, clarify for me please - I said apes are my great-great-great-etc ancestors. Not lemurs. Are apes just cousins too? I thought we were more directly related, but it's been fifteen years since my college biology classes 😊

Nethie- Apes living now are just cousins, too. Everything is continuously evolving, so it's not that some creatures stopped when they reached ape and some moved on to human. We just co-evolved and at some point share a common ancestor that was alive more recently than say our common ancestor with dogs or cats.

Bollocks.

An ape is "any member of the Hominoidea superfamily of primates" (Wikipedia).

“We aren’t descended from apes, we are apes.” (Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior Frans de Waal).

"Ardipithecus means "root ape" in the Afar language, and the species has been explicitly proposed to be a "root species" ancestral to all later hominids." (American Scientist).

"Over the past few years, researchers have made a string of stunning discoveries—Brunet’s among them—that may go a long way toward bridging the remaining gap between humans and their African ape ancestors. These fossils, which range from roughly five million to seven million years old, are upending long-held ideas about when and where our lineage arose and what the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees looked like" (Scientific American).

"Extant African great apes and humans are thought to have diverged from each other in the Late Miocene. However, few hominoid fossils are known from Africa during this period. Here we describe a new genus of great ape (Nakalipithecus nakayamai gen. et sp. nov.) recently discovered from the early Late Miocene of Nakali, Kenya. [...] N. nakayamai could be close to the last common ancestor of the extant African apes and humans." (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

I've had a girlfriend call me an ape before. "Stop groping me like an ape!" she'd say. I wondered what reference point (being groped by an ape) she was measuring from.

Glad that didn't last long.

Girls have never used the word "lemur" in referring to a guy.

I don't know, I've had a couple mention my "ring-tail" before now. 😉

Did you buy one of those "butt chains" from the story on Monday?

Don't need to, work are always yanking my chain enough as it is.

"Y'all are nutz! The universe is only 5,000 years old and all these fossils and bones were put there by the devil to lure us into perdition and relegate us to fire and brimstone for eternity!" :lol:

Somehow, I can actually see this being the case. And what is up with the super critical of "weird"? Instead of asking "is this weird enough?", please just post whatever ACTUALLY is weirder, so everyone benefits from it. Give solutions, not questions. I honestly don't come across enough weirdness to share(I know, it is depressing), but I also don't criticize what I do find here.

Easy there imnotyoursavior. There's enough weirdness in our daily lives that we often overlook it as common place.

In addition, the three that created this site didn't ask, they just posted, knowing that it should be weird even though to some of us a story or two is not at all weird.

The new "team" of posters are doing a great job, as weird as that is.

Paul-
Oopsie daisy. My apologies. That is essentially what I was saying in my post(in defense of the new posters and WU in general), but I can see how it can taken as being a little hostile. I've just noticed the recent criticalness of some of the posts, which I have found to be great posts anyway. In the defense of some of these "questionable" posts, I wanted to point out, as you eloquently put, "there's enough weirdness in our daily lives that we often overlook...as common place."

Anyhoo, As long as this site exists, I will always be a fan of whatever may be on it : )

Frankly, I'm disappointed. I was hoping to get a rise out of someone for saying that men are apes 😉

What they are saying is Ida is similar to lower primates (which includes lemurs and many others, they state lemur as a reference), but she demonstrates some characteristics of higher primates, which is what we are. The previous existence of these creatures have been known for a long time, but we've had no specific examples to show for it. Bits, pieces, and supposition, but every step we take forward is a gamble in anthropology because we have to interpret the data. Many times, the date has been interpreted wrongly. There's no such thing as a missing link. I truly hate that term. Our lineage back through mammalia has numerous dead ends and separate successes. Remember the hobbit specimen? He was not a modern human on a smaller scale, nor was he microcephalic. Of course, much of this is still considered conjecture, but the evolving scientific studies are suggesting Homo Florensiensis is a separate species entirely. Ida is unique in that she's incredibly complete and well preserved, but she really belongs to both categories of high and low primates. We may or may not be directly related to her, but you can bet if her species was not successful in evolving, another one highly similar to hers was. That is just like our own evolution. Neanderthals, cromagnon, modern humans, some species die out after moderate success, and others continue to evolve, but at different points in our history there were many variations of bi-pedal primates with advanced cognitive abilities that existed during the same time period. Some of those bi-pedal primates died out, and some adjusted. It's like setting out on a trip with five different model cars and no idea where you're going. Some of the five will end up at a dead end, and some of the five might end up in a town. Evolution is nature's way of insuring survival.