Well, actually, it’s a whole series of human evolutionary reconstructions, all of them quite good. I have a lot of respect for John Gurche, the reconstructor. In this particular instance, he’s done a spectacularly good job of reconstruction. And I stumbled across this piece via Julien Riel-Salvatore's "A Very Remote Period Indeed" So thanks, Julien Riel-Salvatore, for sharing this with us.
For those interested in the Neandertal, you can see the picture here:
Is there some archaeological evidence, somewhere, that Neanderguys wore ponytails? Just wondering. I should have thought they didn’t have messy hair.
Anne G
5 comments:
A great series of reconstructions, aren't they. And the Neanderthal looks very 'human'. It's becoming more and more difficult to believe that hybrids weren't formed. Interesting that Dienekes has just put up a post that claims archaic humans have made a contribution to modern humans in Oceania (I presume actually in SE Asia before they reached Oceania). "Genetic analyses reveal a history of serial founder effects, admixture between longseparated founding populations in Oceania, and interbreeding with archaic humans":
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2010/03/abstracts-from-aapa-2010.html
terry:
Dienekes is kind of a "funny" guy. He sometimes has good human evolution stuff on his blog, but generally it is strictly "genetic". In part because of this, small differences that may well be relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things, tend to loom large for him. This is true for a lot of biologically or "genetically" oriented people, at least when looking at Neandertals. To them, large separations of the sort Dienekes thinks were the case between Neandertals and "modern" humans is the only logical way to view the emergence of "modern" humans; he is basically of the Recent African Origins school.
Anne G
"he is basically of the Recent African Origins school".
That's partly why I found it interesting that he had linked to the paper.
"small differences that may well be relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things, tend to loom large for him".
Not just him. And not just humans. In NZ we are constantly hearing about the discovery of a 'new' species. It usually turns out it is just slightly genetically different to another very similar species, in fact it's usually difficult to separate them without genetic testing. In that case, though, I suppose it can be supported if it leads to better conservation measures. But the public is likely to see through it fairly soon.
terryt:
This "unique new species" as a conservation ploy is not confined to NZ. A few years ago, someobody "discovered" a "species" of wolf that (a) liked to swim to nearby islands(this local variety eats spawned-out salmon in season, I later found out), and (b) were often a somewhat unusual cinnamon-brownish color, rather than the usual brownish-gray of most wolves. Voila! Instant species! Now it just so happened that these wolves inhabet an old growt forest that is constantly under logging threat. It also turned out later, that these wolves were just a local variety of Canis lupus, and that this is the same locally widespread variety of Canis lupus that has, by way of two recently-settled packs, come to Washington State. One of these packs, the last I heard, lives in a forest almost directly to the north of the town where one of my cousins lives.
I don't really have a problem with people using 'unique species' as a conservation ploy. What I have a problem with is that soon it will lose its effectiveness, and then where will we be?
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