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Showing posts with the label pan troglodytes

Ardipithecus ramidus: what can we really say definitively about it??

The breaking news today was the announcement by researchers that they have found a new species of hominin that predates "Lucy" the previous oldest known fossil find of the hominin line (which includes human beings). The lead researchers are interpreting the morphology of this new find to indicate that it had "advanced" bipedal capabilities that do not lend credence to the idea that the hominin line and the chimp line share a common ancestor. However, this line of reasoning is not necessarily proven by the "ardi" finds made. I export a section of an answer to this that I posted on a friends Facebook wall to explain : "The chimp line could have diverged earlier (as molecular data suggests it did) and Ardi is simply an intermediate species along the line from last recent common ancestor with chimps and modern day hominin (of which the only extant species is us)lineage. Strictly speaking chimps are an "offshoot" (or reciprocally ... the hominin...