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Papers
- -Key Link in Human Evolution: Australopithecus sediba? (Time.com)
"Evolution skeptics like to trot out the argument that if Darwin had been right, scientists would have discovered transitional fossils by now — creatures with a mix of features from earlier and later species. Since they haven't, the deniers say, evolution must not be true."
"The truth is that paleontologists have found transitional species by the score, from many different time periods. But none have materialized from as crucial a point in our evolutionary past as a pair of skeletons whose discovery was announced today by the journal Science"
"The fossils, which have been determined to be a new species, Australopithecus sediba, were initially found by Matthew Berger, the 9-year-old son of paleontologist Lee Berger of South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand (the elder Berger tried in vain to get the editors of Science to list Matthew as a co-author on the paper). The bones belong to a pre-teenage boy and a woman estimated to be in her late 20s or early 30s; the individuals died at about the same time, and before their remains had fully decomposed, they were entombed in an avalanche of sediment and nearly perfectly preserved deep in the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa." 04-10
- Australopithecus (Mr.Donn.org)
"About this same time in history, around 3 million years ago, the higher primates, including apes and early man, first appeared. There was a difference between apes and man. Human-like hominids could stand upright. Apes could not. Their hands were different, too. Ape hands were made for climbing and clinging. Early man's hands were jointed differently, which allowed them to not only use tools, but to make tools." 03-06
- Classification of Hominids 1c - Australopithecus anamensis (Foley)
Provides a paragraph. Anamensis lived 4.2 - 3.9 million years ago and may be a link in human evolution.
- Evolution of Humans - A New Genus (National Geographic Society - Krause)
Reports of a possible new genus of early hominids. The name of the new hominid is Kenyanthropus platyops. 3-01
- Kenyanthropus platyops (Wikipedia.org)
"Kenyanthropus platyops is a 3.5 to 3.2 million year old (Pliocene) extinct hominin species that was discovered in Lake Turkana, Kenya in 1999 by Meave Leakey. The fossil found features a broad flat face with a toe bone that suggests it probably walked upright." Its taxon is still being debated. Some identify it as a missing link between Australopithecus and modern humans, a "proto-human." 03-06
- Missing Link Found Between Australopithecus afarensis and Earlier Species (New York Times)
"Tim D. White, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a team leader, and his colleagues said the 4.1-million-year-old fossils were anatomically intermediate between the earlier species Ardipithecus ramidus [the earliest Hominids] and the later species Australopithecus afarensis, the Lucy family. The newfound bones and teeth are the earliest remains of the most primitive Australopithecus, known as anamensis."
"The Australopithecus genus — resembling apes in stature and brain size but unlike the great apes in that it walked on two legs — is thought to have given rise to our own genus, Homo."
- Robust Australopithecines (Wikipedia.org)
"The robust australopithecines, members of the extinct hominin genus Paranthropus, were bipedal hominins that probably descended from the gracile australopithecine hominins (Australopithecus). All species of Paranthropus were bipedal, and many lived during a time when species of the genus Homo (which were possibly descended from Australopithecus or more likely from Kenyanthropus), were prevalent. Paranthropus first appeared roughly 2 million years ago, just before the beginning of the Pleistocene. Most species of Paranthropus had a brain about 40 percent of the size of modern man."
Provides a chart of hominids, including humans, at the bottom of the page. 03-06
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