by Playfuls Staff |
21st September 2006
Every television, every Internet radio or news site (including Google News) has been stuffed with fresh details from about 3 million years ago concerning a…skeleton. Which should have been our eldest ancestor.[more]
The bones discovered in Ethiopia are now thought to be the oldest ever discovered, with an estimated age of 3.3 million years. That is 150,000 years before Lucy in Dikika area, North Eastern Ethiopia, Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Plank Institute in Leipzig, Germany, said.
If you didn’t know this by now, Lucy (her bones to be more exact) was considered until the recent dig from her “natal” country the oldest of OUR ancestors. The scientific community that has been studying the relics from which allegedly we were born says they have now found an older ancestor, which apparently died at the age of three.
The skeleton was included in the primitive human ancestor category Australopithecus afarensis and Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist who led the team that discovered it, said about it that: "This is something you find once in a lifetime."
Apparently, this relic offers clues about how the line between ape and human got blurred in the past. From the waist down, the skeleton looks like a human's. But her upper body had many apelike features: a small brain, a nose flat like a chimpanzee's and a face long and projecting. Her finger bones were curved and almost as long as a chimp's.
The discovery was praised by Lucy’s discoverer, Donald Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. “Clearly, we have a species in transition" and the species "sits at a critical point of human evolution."
The first piece of the child was found on December 10, 2000 in Dikika area. Recovering the partial skeleton, however, required intensive searching and sifting over four successive field seasons from 2000-2004, said the leader of the team of paleoanthropologists.
Some parts of the skeleton are missing-the pelvis, the lowest part of the back and parts of the limbs-but what is preserved is remarkably complete. The brain case, the lower jaw with most of its teeth, both collar bones, many vertebrae and ribs, the fingers, both kneecaps and the delicate bone that holds open the throat, called the hyoid, are all present.
"One must travel forward in time more than 3 million years, to a Neanderthal infant from Dederiyeh, Syria, to find a comparably complete infant skeleton," anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University wrote in an editorial for Nature.
"We don't often get the opportunity to see a 3 to 4 million-year-old hominid in the course of growing up," Wood said in an interview. "This fossil is a bright beam of light on the problem of human growth and development and how it evolved."
The fossil has been named "Selam", which means peace in Ethiopia's official Amharic language.
"The scientific significance of the finding is multifold, contributing substantially to our understanding of the morphology, body plan, behavior, movement and development patterns of our early ancestors," Dr. Zeresenay said.
"Reconstruction of an entire body of a three-year-old Australopithecus afarensis child would take place after full cleaning and preparation of the fossil," he added.
But, allow me to express some scientific doubts concerning not only the remains of the so-called human ancestors, but also about the entire evolutionary theory involved in explaining how human kind appeared.
First, I do agree that evolution is a certain and palpable fact in every domain of life, as we know it. It has rules that are beyond doubt and can even be seen in action during our life cycle.
But these rules are just so primitive to explain the complexity of the human being, as known by the same scientific community. Paleoanthropologists think that at one moment in time, apes separated from their humanoid counterparts and evolved differently.
But this raises some serious questions, among which many of you might find familiar interrogations: why apes evolved so little during the same period in which “humanoid apes” allegedly evolved so dramatically? What triggered such separation (was it the environment, the social interaction of those “special apes” or a conglomerate of factors) and are we ever going to find the famous “missing link” that united the two species?
But what about the “missing link”? Was it a single individual that has “given birth” to a whole new species, whose genome would modify repeatedly in such short time and eventually become us? According to the verified laws of genetics, modifications in a species’ genome take place rather randomly and in order for these modifications to “live” a multitude of favorable factors have to occur to make that species adopt on a large scale the new features (we are talking about a certain “inertia” of a species, which protects it from potentially aberrant “evolutions”).
One key feature for a genetic modification to resist is to be adaptative. The famous missing link should have found its way better into the world and this should have been the reason for its thriving and evolution. But this also means two things: the interaction with the “former-species” should have been abruptly and bilaterally suppressed, and the ape species must have been way inferior to the apes we know today.
Arguments: an interaction between our primitive ancestors and the apes from which they supposedly evolved would have lead to some sort of annihilation between the “new” and the “old” The individuals would wither sexually interact (and since we are discussing about a small minority of humanoid individuals their new features would again fall into oblivion when confronted with the majority’s) or the new “smarter” minority would begin hunting down their ape-relatives for food.
I have no intention of exhausting the questions or arguments against or in favor of evolutionism in this article. But I have to warn you that evidence points towards where we want them to point. If we want to believe that our grand-grand-grand…father was a monkey, we will search for a proof to sustain our belief. But if we believe in God we already have the proof in front of us, even before we begin our search
I honestly dislike considering myself a relative of some funny chimp, although I heard about the performances Sultan had in Kohler’s experiments. And I don’t find a reliable source of explanations for the complexity that surrounds me a partial skeleton which dates back million years ago.
I do have a soul and I do believe in God. I know that he created the Universe and that he created the humans. I dispatch Good from Evil because I am a moral human being, and I also know that I am far from perfection. I have come to know that on course of my evolution, but I don’t compare my evolution to an animal’s.
The God in which I believe created me as the ultimate purpose of His entire creation and he also gave me the power to protrude His secrets with the wisdom He has endowed me with. He didn’t give that to a monkey. Moreover, he made the monkey and all other animals obey me as their master.
And no, He did not sacrifice His Son for an ape, nor is His Son a relative to a chimpanzee.
This is my scientific belief. I call it scientific because I have far better proof of the existence of God than I have for the existence of the famous “missing link” between me and the animal world.
Who doesn’t believe me should go to Israel on the day the Resurrection of Jesus is celebrated by the Orthodox Church. He would then witness there how candles in the Holy Tomb kindle without “logical” explanation and their fire, along with the candles’ fire, burns without hurting those who keep their palms above. And how the Patriarch’s beard remains intact although he first enters in contact with the fire of Resurrection.
I DO believe in God but I don’t believe in Australopithecus afarensis.
