9/4/2007 7:55:11 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time

The fossil record is giving paleoanthropologists fits as it makes the path of modern human development over the past seven million years rather hard to follow.  None of the facile correlations between one set of developments and another, such as adoption of tools and the descent from trees, once pronounced with the tone of scholarly certainty, now appear to be validated in any particular by the fossils that keep cropping up to rebut these shibboleths of old bone science.  The theory of evolution itself, helped out by what appears to be confirmation by mitochondrial DNA research evidence, as yet still prevails against the increasingly diverse and fragmentary fossil record, but the sheer diversity of human and proto-human remains distributed all over the globe makes things appear much more complex than implied by the magisterial pronouncements of such fellows as Dr. Richard Leakey.  The true facts are that we know that there is some common genetic link between ourselves and all simians, particularly chimpanzees and gorillas, and that it appears that our human predecessors shared some key DNA with us that suggests that everyone on the Earth today shares a common ancestry that geneticists suggest was around a couple of million years ago.  While the genetic evidence is impressive, I wonder if all of the assumptions that go into that conclusion are unassailable or if it is another artifact of the convergent conclusions based upon self-fulfilling assumptions, as has occurred in science before over the past 150 years.

What still seems surpassingly odd to me in my simple, unschooled way, is how whole new human types seem to occur in the fossil record without any transitional antecedent.  E.g., the world bumps along for tens of thousands of years with Neanderthals populating much of the Old World, for at least 635,000 years before Homo sapiens sapiens happens upon the scene (according to the earliest conventional estimates).  They then coexist for about another 165,000 years before the last Neanderthal bites the dust, leaving modern humans as the heirs apparent.  But the question remains:  from whence did modern humans spring?  If not from the Neanderthals, then from whom, and how?  It is not enough to argue that the fossil record cannot fill in the gaps.  Until we have more evidence to do this for us, the evolutionary, natural selection model will forever be under attack as insufficiently supported by the physical evidence.--SuperSleuth



http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070902/sc_livescience/humanfamilytreenowatangledmessybush