Are we descended from apes and chimpanzees? Good question and one expert, Robin Crompton of the University of Liverpool, says it's the other way around.
Based on the fossilized bones of a 3.7 million year old human ancestor, Austrolipithecus, Crompton believes that our early ancestors lived in trees and were bipedal, they could walk upright. Chimps and other monkeys went on to knuckle drag in the interests of speed and ease but we didn't.
This means that the apes and ourselves, for that matter, come from a common ancestor that's more like us than some kind of chimp and that we took the high road and the apes didn't. Well done, human forebearers, you made the right choice.
Well so what. So a lot. We've been taught that humans started out as chimps, got bigger, became apes and then somehow became rational or irrational human beings. Ascent of the Species and thank you very much, Darwin, Boom.
But this lineal progression may not be true. Something very like a human existed in the happy canopy of the trees, according to Crompton, and advanced on. Others, coming from the same stock devolved into bestial apes, leaving us where we are today.
I'm no expert but maybe Crompton has a point, his early hominin fossil seems to say so, but consider this. When did monkeys become rational? When did apes start to reason?
We did, at some point, albeit imperfectly. When and how did this happen and why didn't it happen for the rest of the monkeys and still hasn't now. No one knows but it should have done, right?
If we all come from a common arboreal ancestor and the ability to reason is simply part of the evolutionary process, then the monkeys that devolved from us should be able to pick up the plot, but they haven't.
Perhaps they're evolutionary dead ends. But serious question. There's a massive leap from irrational animal to rational human. How did that occur and if it could do so for us and not our ape allies, then why not?
After all, we have a common ancestor, or not.
Harambe Weeps,
LSP
You could ask Harambe a lot of these poignant truths were - well, true. IF he was here, but he's not, assassinated because he adopted a young, unattended afro-American youth into his pod, or whatever you call a gaggle of gorillas. It's important to remember that gorillas are not guerrillas. And the other way around. You can ask guerrillas whatever you want, but all they do is grunt and scratch....I know.
ReplyDeleteMy uncle (by marriage) was one of the founders of the Creation Research Society and was its first president back in around '63, so my view of evolution evolved early on.
ReplyDeletehttp://creationwiki.org/Walter_Lammerts
https://creationresearch.org/
Checking out Chicago is all the proof I need that evolution is bunk.
It sounds like you have been watching 'Ancient Aliens' on the History Channel. All of those guys, from Erich von Daniken on down the line, believe to a man that aliens came to earth thousands of years ago, and interfered with the DNA of the aboriginal pool, and this explains away all of the mystery of our climbing our way to the top of the food chain. That elusive 'missing link', in fossil form or otherwise from dumb ape to smart Neanderthal, would not ever have happened, since the aliens side-stepped that phase of the evolutionary process.
ReplyDeleteI would think that your position would be that God created man in His image, and that woman was from Adam's rib, etc. And all of this happened in 6 days, then God rested on the seventh.
I blame global warming.
ReplyDeleteBecause it is so much easier to believe that aliens created man than God.
ReplyDeleteAnd who knows how long Gods days are..
Linda, God's got this, never fear. The aliens? Not so much.
ReplyDeleteWhat! Infidel, you've got me there. YES.
ReplyDeleteI'm no expert Fredd, but I'm not saying that ancient aliens didn't come down and lift us out of the primordial soup. On the other hand, I'm not saying they did, either. It could've been God.
ReplyDeleteThen there's ribs. I love ribs and they're easy to cook, almost as easy as a ham sandwich.
Fascinating Lammerts info, Adrienne. And evolution's weird -- on the one hand it makes sense, life and its species develop. Fair enough, but then then there's these strange disjunctions; life on the planet goes extinct and then amazingly flourishes again in great abundance. Or perhaps more basically, irrational if intelligent ape beasts and then boom, rational humans.
ReplyDeleteI don't know much about it and don't have a philisophical/theological dog in the fight -- contingent being relies up necessary being, regardless of evolution or not.
Still, curious and it seems as though catastrophism is gaining ground over the last decade or two.
LL, Harambe WEEPS.
ReplyDeleteWe will never forget him.
Pastor: ancient man thought those aliens WERE God. Ribs: yes, almost as easy as a ham sandwich, but much like Hillary Clinton, they can't be indicted.
ReplyDelete