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Why are there gaps in the fossil record?

philadiddle

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Cambrian Period, plain and simple. Rarity of fossilization has nothing to do with the fossil trends, by the way.
Do you think that the body plans that arose in the Cambrian represent all life on earth? Why don't we find any modern organisms in the Cambrian?

Also, if there are no transitions or nowhere near enough transitions, it isn't even possible to conclusively prove that one set of organisms arose from a previous set. This is circular reasoning.
We have proven it with genetics, but that's another topic. (Here's an old post of mine on it.)
 
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juvenissun

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With evolution we know there would be different sets of organisms as we move in time through the layers of strata, creationism doesn't even have a basic argument to explain this. How do you figure it is an equally hard question for evolutionists?

It is on the evolution process itself. If it were true, then what you said could then be true.
 
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juvenissun

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If you don't understand what a prediction is I'm not going to argue with you further about it.

Name some. I know of Glenn Morton who went into the oil industry as a YEC, and I'm sure you know what happened to him.

The age of oil matters because we can study core samples to locate eras that left a lot of oil behind. Creationism doesn't help us with this, only the old earth model and evolution (using stratigraphy) helps us in the real world.


While I disagree I think I'll leave this alone for now so that our topic doesn't keep ballooning out. Feel free to start a new thread on how creationism provides a superior model for explaining plate techtonics.

That is what I said as the "apparent age". It is only a tool to identify the position of the oil. And, it has nothing to do with evolution. It is all about classification.

Since you get into this topic, the morphology of forams is a good example of gap. They have to have gaps among them. Otherwise, strata identification may become a lot harder. Since forams tend to be preserved pretty well, so any gradual change should have very good chance to be preserved.
 
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mark kennedy

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If humans and chimps had a common ancestor and that ancestor had evolved from an even earlier version then some of the fossils we find that are human ancestors would also be chimp ancestors.

How far back you got to go for that?

Do you think that as we dig through older and older layers of strata we find different organisms? Why is it that we see subsets of older organisms as we get into newer layers? I will agree that fossil evidence is the weakest, but what we do have still matches evolution and contradicts special creation. As I'm sure you've been told genetic evidence is the strongest and most compelling evidence for evolution, but that's another topic.

What is have are chimpanzee ancestors being used to create the illusion of a transitional species of apemen. The genetic evidence is showing far greater divergence then evolutionists are willing to admit. We have went from 99% the same to 96% the same and the myth of 98% the same is still being propagated. Yea, that's another topic and another line of evidence where homology arguments fall apart under close scrutiny.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

Don't worry about it.

Ardi is one. How many do you need to fully satisfy you?

One believable one and an explanation for the absence of chimpanzee ancestors would help. What makes the most compelling case against evolution is that the chimpanzee ancestors are absent in the fossil record while our ancestors bear a strong resemblance to chimpanzees.

Sorry but I don't know what you mean by defining my central term.

I mean evolution.
 
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Notedstrangeperson

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Mark Kennedy said:
What makes the most compelling case against evolution is that the chimpanzee ancestors are absent in the fossil record while our ancestors bear a strong resemblance to chimpanzees.

No, what that suggests is that both humans and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor. How can that be evidence against evolution?
 
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Assyrian

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Let me respond by asking you two questions that evolutionists rarely address. Where are the chimpanzee ancestors and what is the scientific definition for evolution? The so called 'gaps' in human evolution from apes are simply being filled in with chimpanzee ancestors. and evolution as it is properly defined in the epistemology otherwise know as science simply focuses on cause and effect relationships for a given phenomenon.
By saying evolutionist rarely address chimp ancestry, do you mean you have been answered but you keep asking the question over and over again anyway? I seem to recall it being pointed out to you that chimps live in dense forests which is not great for preserving fossils. Besides with humans being a pretty egotistical species, palaeontologists are much more interested in human ancestors and so look for fossils in areas which were open savannah beside lakes in the strata they are looking at. If they wanted to search for chimp ancestors in the last 4 million years they would look in strata that used to be forest.

an explanation for the absence of chimpanzee ancestors would help. What makes the most compelling case against evolution is that the chimpanzee ancestors are absent in the fossil record while our ancestors bear a strong resemblance to chimpanzees.
The problem is not that our ancestors bear a strong resemblance to chimpanzees, that is to be expected if we share a common ancestor. Your problem is that that our ancestors bear a much stronger resemblance to hominids that come after them in the fossil record. And as you follow the hominid species through time, they each closely resemble the species before and after, and resemble them much closer than they do to chimps, and as you track these very similar species through time, they get more an more human looking the nearer you get to homo sapiens.

Wouldn't you think if fossils were chimp ancestors, they would get more like chimps?
 
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duordi

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Have you considered Fred Hoyle, you can Wiki him for information.
He is a Nobel Prize Atheist which believes that life came from meteors landing on Earth as viruses.
The reason he believes this is that the fossil record is intermittent in one strata and explosive in another.

It is not just gaps or that the gaps are not randomly distributed. It is that the great majority if the species all appear fully developed in the Cambrian strata.
Why do you think they call the “missing link” the “missing link”? Because its missing!
Why do you think they call the “Cambrian explosion” the “Cambrian explosion”?

It is easy to prove this and I do not have to get into a debate pointing at trees instead of the forest.

Anyone can Google “Cambrian explosion” and get pages and pages of research by evolutionist documenting the Cambrian explosion.

Admit it, the fossil record does not support the long slow steady evolution model.

The thing that is so disgusting to me about many of the posts is that someone who knows this would choose to deny it.

Some of the posts are intended to hid information and muddy the water so the facts can not be understood. Is this done due to ignorance, self delusion, in defense of a theory held by faith, or just to win, I do not know but the scientific evidence disagrees with you on this one point.

I have many evolutionist friends who are sincere and honest and would never stoop to the methods being used here. I have had many discussion debating the good and bad sides of many theories and all theories have weak points. Why not just admit it and let us discuss why you still hold to your opinion.

Duane
 
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shernren

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By saying evolutionist rarely address chimp ancestry, do you mean you have been answered but you keep asking the question over and over again anyway?

Exactly. This happened two and a half years ago:

Where are the chimpanzee ancestors from 2 million years ago? The are in natural history museums marked Homo XXX.
Somewhere under the rainforest? Possibly eroded away without a trace?

I wasn't sure if chimps had a fossil record at all, so I googled "fossil chimp". Apparently, the first one ever found was only published three years ago, so I wasn't far off... The remains are, judging from the specimen designations, in the National Museum of Kenya. Only half a million years old, though.
Three maybe four teeth and that is all that's left of their ancestors?

Most of the Homo habilis skulls are the size of a chimpanzee and I'm convinced they are the chimpanzees ancestors.

I don't know if this counts as "not being answered" but then again mark has a bad habit of not considering anything other than awestruck worship of the greatness of Mark-o-creationism as an answer to his questions. Over to you mark, are you still convinced that Homo habilis fossils represent chimpanzee ancestors?
 
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mark kennedy

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By saying evolutionist rarely address chimp ancestry, do you mean you have been answered but you keep asking the question over and over again anyway? I seem to recall it being pointed out to you that chimps live in dense forests which is not great for preserving fossils. Besides with humans being a pretty egotistical species, palaeontologists are much more interested in human ancestors and so look for fossils in areas which were open savannah beside lakes in the strata they are looking at. If they wanted to search for chimp ancestors in the last 4 million years they would look in strata that used to be forest.

That does little to address the important issue of our supposed ancestors bearing a striking resemblance to chimpanzees. What is more, we know what they are doing today because they are still alive. Had they become extinct we would have no evidence that they ever existed. I keep asking the question because you know full well you don't have an answer for it.

The problem is not that our ancestors bear a strong resemblance to chimpanzees, that is to be expected if we share a common ancestor. Your problem is that that our ancestors bear a much stronger resemblance to hominids that come after them in the fossil record. And as you follow the hominid species through time, they each closely resemble the species before and after, and resemble them much closer than they do to chimps, and as you track these very similar species through time, they get more an more human looking the nearer you get to homo sapiens.

No, they don't, they consistently look like variations of apes. Taung, was found in southern Africa and was considered a chimpanzee for nearly half a century until the demise of Piltdown. Paranthropus was never anything more then an ape and by the way, inhabited savannah woodland territories. That in addition to the Olduvai Gorge fossils all add up to apes being pushed off as human ancestors. They are apes and their cranial capacity is consistent with that fact.

Wouldn't you think if fossils were chimp ancestors, they would get more like chimps?

They do. The precursors to modern apes would have been larger and more robust as are all antediluvian parental forms. What is absent is the molecular basis for a cranial capacity three times larger and a neural denisty 50% greater in humans then modern apes.

All issues you are familiar yet you resort to fallacious rhetoric as a matter of course. You just make a shallow statement as if it were gospel, blame me because I don't agree with it, wash, rinse and repeat.
 
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Notedstrangeperson

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Mark Kennedy: Correct me if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be saying that all of the 'hominid' fossils are actually just apes ... but then you say that there are no chimpanzee ancestors in the human family tree. That doesn't make sense.
 
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Assyrian

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That does little to address the important issue of our supposed ancestors bearing a striking resemblance to chimpanzees. What is more, we know what they are doing today because they are still alive. Had they become extinct we would have no evidence that they ever existed. I keep asking the question because you know full well you don't have an answer for it.
So shernren is right, you just ignore the answers you have been given. If chimpanzees were extinct, we would have no evidence they ever existed (ignoring the chimp fossils Naraoia mentioned) but so what? There are plenty of extinct species we know nothing about, if we did know all the extinct species we wouldn't still be discovering new ones. Anyway, to address your non answer, why shouldn't our earlier ancestors look more like chimps if human and chimps descended from a common ancestor?

No, they don't, they consistently look like variations of apes.
You mean they don't look less and less like other apes and more and more like humans as we track the fossils through time? If you want to believe that I can't help you.

Taung, was found in southern Africa and was considered a chimpanzee for nearly half a century until the demise of Piltdown.
There may have been some bias because Piltdown was British, but the biggest problem with the Taung child was that he was a child with a child's cranial capacity. Claims about what an adult would look like were hypothetical, and the Taung child was dismissed off hand as an immature chimp. Or at least, it was dismissed until adult australopithicines were found and confirmed Raymond Dart's find. That is how science works. When the evidence backed up Dart scientists could no longer dismiss the Taung child. What is interesting is you go back to the claims made about Taung child before we evidence of what the adults looked like.

Paranthropus was never anything more then an ape and by the way, inhabited savannah woodland territories.
You mean it was an australopithicus species that didn't evolve into humans, so what?

That in addition to the Olduvai Gorge fossils all add up to apes being pushed off as human ancestors. They are apes and their cranial capacity is consistent with that fact.
Their cranial capacity is what you would expect if human ancestors slowly started developing larger and larger brains. Obviously you would need at some stage to have ancestors with a similar cranial capacity to chimps. Of course you already know about the way hominid cranial capacity increases gradually from the early austropithicenes to modern man and can only try to get around it by cherry picking the data to try to create a sudden jump. Same way you commented on Lucy's cranial capacity over in the Bone of contention thread.
Dude, her skull is small, even for a chimpanzee. That means 3 million years ago there would be apes running around who became our ancestors with chimpanzee size skulls and smaller but no chimpanzee ancestors.
Totally ignoring the fact that Lucy belonged to a species with a range of cranial capacities, and while australopithicus afarensis cranial capacities overlapped that of chimps, the range included cranial capacities larger than any chimp.

They do. The precursors to modern apes would have been larger and more robust as are all antediluvian parental forms. What is absent is the molecular basis for a cranial capacity three times larger and a neural denisty 50% greater in humans then modern apes.
Sure we don't know which particular genetic changes between chimp and human account for the change in cranial capacity, and we know nothing of cranial density in fossil hominids, it doesn't fossilise. What we do know is that the cranial capacity of fossil hominids increased gradually over three and a half million years from the australopithicus afarensis (on average slightly larger than a chimp) to homo sapiens

fossil_hominin_cranial_capacity_lg_v1-1.png

But you know all that.

All issues you are familiar yet you resort to fallacious rhetoric as a matter of course. You just make a shallow statement as if it were gospel, blame me because I don't agree with it, wash, rinse and repeat.
:doh:
 
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mark kennedy

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So shernren is right, you just ignore the answers you have been given.

No, I just no the difference between an actual answer and flawed rhetoric.

If chimpanzees were extinct, we would have no evidence they ever existed (ignoring the chimp fossils Naraoia mentioned) but so what? There are plenty of extinct species we know nothing about, if we did know all the extinct species we wouldn't still be discovering new ones. Anyway, to address your non answer, why shouldn't our earlier ancestors look more like chimps if human and chimps descended from a common ancestor?

Naraoia? My only guess here would be those teeth they found in the Rift Valley. In answer to your question your asking in circles, they do.

You mean they don't look less and less like other apes and more and more like humans as we track the fossils through time? If you want to believe that I can't help you.

I never expected you to help me, you bash creationists, that's all you do. I've seen how the fossils have been handled and mishandled and chimpanzee ancestors are being passed off as our's, Taung being the most glaring example.

There may have been some bias because Piltdown was British, but the biggest problem with the Taung child was that he was a child with a child's cranial capacity. Claims about what an adult would look like were hypothetical, and the Taung child was dismissed off hand as an immature chimp. Or at least, it was dismissed until adult australopithicines were found and confirmed Raymond Dart's find. That is how science works. When the evidence backed up Dart scientists could no longer dismiss the Taung child. What is interesting is you go back to the claims made about Taung child before we evidence of what the adults looked like.

Taung is a chimpanzee.

This deep crescent-shaped sulcus approximates the rostral boundary of primary visual (striate) cortex (Brodmann’s area [BA] 17) in monkeys and apes, and is located much further forward (more rostrally) on their brains than is the case for lunate sulci...

In 1980, I published an independent analysis of the sulcal patterns reproduced on the Taung endocast and six other australopithecine natural endocasts, and concluded that they appeared apelike rather than human-
like (Falk, 1980). (The Natural Endocast of Taung (Australopithecus africanus): Insights From the Unpublished Papers of Raymond Arthur Dart
Dean Falk)​

You mean it was an australopithicus species that didn't evolve into humans, so what?

Not chasing this in circles, just not going to happen.

Their cranial capacity is what you would expect if human ancestors slowly started developing larger and larger brains. Obviously you would need at some stage to have ancestors with a similar cranial capacity to chimps. Of course you already know about the way hominid cranial capacity increases gradually from the early austropithicenes to modern man and can only try to get around it by cherry picking the data to try to create a sudden jump. Same way you commented on Lucy's cranial capacity over in the Bone of contention thread.
Dude, her skull is small, even for a chimpanzee. That means 3 million years ago there would be apes running around who became our ancestors with chimpanzee size skulls and smaller but no chimpanzee ancestors.


Her skull was smaller then the Chimpanzee mean average, a prime canidate for a chimpanzee ancestor. The fact that she does represent an older age specimen indicates that chimpanzee variation has not changed drastically.


Totally ignoring the fact that Lucy belonged to a species with a range of cranial capacities, and while australopithicus afarensis cranial capacities overlapped that of chimps, the range included cranial capacities larger than any chimp.

That's not something I ignored, it's just a pointless fact that was and is off topic.

Sure we don't know which particular genetic changes between chimp and human account for the change in cranial capacity, and we know nothing of cranial density in fossil hominids, it doesn't fossilise. What we do know is that the cranial capacity of fossil hominids increased gradually over three and a half million years from the australopithicus afarensis (on average slightly larger than a chimp) to homo sapiens

:yawn:

fossil_hominin_cranial_capacity_lg_v1-1.png

But you know all that.

:doh:

For us to have evolved from apes it would have required an accelerated evolution of brain related genes. The evolution of the human brain would have had to start it's accelerated evolution on a molecular basis some 2 million years ago and within Homo Erectus (considered human by most creationists) would have had a brain size twice that of the Austropihicene and early Hominids:

Early Ancestors:

A. Afarensis with a cranial capacity of ~430cc lived about 3.5 mya.
A. Africanus with a cranial capacity of ~480cc lived 3.3-2.5 mya.
P. aethiopicus with a cranial capacity of 410cc lived about 2.5 mya.
P. boisei with a cranial capacity of 490-530cc lived between 2.3-1.2 mya.
OH 5 'Zinj" with a cranial capacity of 530cc lived 1.8 mya.
KNM ER 406 with a cranial capacity of 510cc lived 1.7 million years ago.

(Source: Smithsonian Human Family Tree)​

Homo Erectus Skulls:

Hexian 412,000 years old had a cranial capacity of 1,025cc.
ZKD III (Skull E I) 423,000 years old had a cranial capacity of 915cc.
ZKD II (Skull D I) 585,000 years old had a cranial capacity of 1,020cc
ZKD X (Skull L I) 423,000 years ago had a cranial capacity of 1,225cc
ZKD XI (Skull L II) 423,000 years ago had a cranial capacity of 1,015cc
ZKD XII (Skull L III) 423,000 years ago had a cranial capacity of 1,030cc

Sm 3 >100,000 years ago had a cranial 917cc

KNM-WT 15000 (Turkana Boy) 1.5 million years ago had a cranial capacity of 880cc

(Source: Endocranial Cast of Hexian Homo erectus from South China, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 2006)​

Homo habilis that would have lived. 2.5–1.5 mya with a cranial capacity of ~600 cc. The next link would have been Homo erectus with a cranial capacity of ~1000cc. KNM-WT 15000 (Turkana Boy) would have lived 1.5 mya and the skeleton structure shows no real difference between anatomically modern humans. The skull while smaller then the average cranial capacity of humans but close to twice that of his ancestors of 2 mya.

That means for our ancestors to have evolved it would have required a dramatic adaptive evolution of the size just under 2 mya sandwiched between two long periods of relative stasis. One such gene would have been the HARf regulatory gene involved in the early development of the human neocortex from 7 to 19 gestational weeks. With only two substitutions allowed since the common ancestor of the of 310 mya the divergence between humans and chimpanzees indicates 18 substitutions as early as 2 mya. (Nature, vol. 443, no. 7108, pp. 167-172 September 14, 2006)The ASPM gene while 99.3% the same for the human–chimpanzee comparison is marked by ten insertions/deletions equal to or longer than 50 bp, all of them located within introns. Primary microcephaly (MCPH) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by global reduction in cerebral cortical volume.(Genetics, Vol. 165, 2063-2070, December 2003) In addition, a total of 2014 genes or ~10% of brain related genes analyzed differed in expression between humans and chimpanzees brains.(Genome Res. 14:1462-1473, 2004 ).

Evolutionists used to be able to use a 10 million year timeline, then it was 5 million years but when it comes to the most important adaptation you are looking at less then 1 million years and realistically it's only half that.

Darwin's null hypothesis for common descent is not unanswerable:

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” (Darwin, On the Origin of Species)​
 
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philadiddle

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mark kennedy said:
The so called 'gaps' in human evolution from apes are simply being filled in with chimpanzee ancestors
So just to be clear, you think that all of the skulls in the following diagram, with the exception of homo sapiens and modern humans, are actually chimpanzee ancestors? So let me get this straight, chimp ancestors had a brain size of 400cc and then their brain capacity increased slowly to over 1000cc and then suddenly it dropped somehow back to 400cc? They also started walking more and more upright and then suddenly became hunched over again?
Since human ancestors are actually chimp ancestors according to you, could you please remove humans from this chart and add chimps? It would be interesting to see how it looks.
 
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shernren

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Early Ancestors:
A. Afarensis with a cranial capacity of ~430cc lived about 3.5 mya.
A. Africanus with a cranial capacity of ~480cc lived 3.3-2.5 mya.
P. aethiopicus with a cranial capacity of 410cc lived about 2.5 mya.
P. boisei with a cranial capacity of 490-530cc lived between 2.3-1.2 mya.
OH 5 'Zinj" with a cranial capacity of 530cc lived 1.8 mya.
KNM ER 406 with a cranial capacity of 510cc lived 1.7 million years ago.

(Source: Smithsonian Human Family Tree)​
ER1470 with a cranial capacity of 752-810 cc lived about 1.89 mya.
ER1805 with a cranial capacity of 582 cc lived about 1.85 mya.
Dmanisi A with a cranial capacity of about 775-780 cc lived about 1.8 mya.
Dmanisi B with a cranial capacity of about 650 cc lived about 1.8 mya.
ER3733 with a cranial capacity of about 800-850 cc lived about 1.78 mya.
KNM-WT 15000 (Turkana Boy) with a projected adult cranial capacity of about 910 cc lived about 1.6 mya.
ER3883 with a cranial capacity of about 800-850 cc lived about 1.57 mya.
Sangiran 4 with a cranial capacity of about 750-900 cc lived about 1 mya.
Trinil 2 with a cranial capacity of about 850-1000 cc lived about 0.9 mya.

Source: Variation in hominid brain size: How much is due to method?

Homo Erectus Skulls:
Hexian 412,000 years old had a cranial capacity of 1,025cc.
ZKD III (Skull E I) 423,000 years old had a cranial capacity of 915cc.
ZKD II (Skull D I) 585,000 years old had a cranial capacity of 1,020cc
ZKD X (Skull L I) 423,000 years ago had a cranial capacity of 1,225cc
ZKD XI (Skull L II) 423,000 years ago had a cranial capacity of 1,015cc
ZKD XII (Skull L III) 423,000 years ago had a cranial capacity of 1,030cc

Sm 3 >100,000 years ago had a cranial 917cc​
Egads! The gap disappeared!

By the way, it was highly amusing to observe that a highly conserved deleterious insertion, a single extraneous full stop, is present today in mark's screed:

Homo habilis that would have lived. 2.5–1.5 mya ...

just as it was three years ago:

Homo habilis that would have lived. 2.5-1.5 mya ...

It's quite a potent symbol for the complete absence of progress in mark's thought for the past three years.
 
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lucaspa

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I've seen how the fossils have been handled and mishandled and chimpanzee ancestors are being passed off as our's, Taung being the most glaring example.
All the fossils near the chimp-human split have been debated as to which side of the split they belong.

However, A. africanus (what you are calling "Taung") is not near the split. As you noted, Falk-Dart noted that Taung had an ape-like feature. BUT, Taung also had features that are like H. sapiens. This is what you get when you have an intermediate: a mosaic of features.

Notice that Dart did not say that the sulcus was identical to modern chimps. Instead, he says it is similar to monkeys. So what we have is a trait that was present in the ancestors of both chimps and humans.


Her skull was smaller then the Chimpanzee mean average, a prime canidate for a chimpanzee ancestor. The fact that she does represent an older age specimen indicates that chimpanzee variation has not changed drastically.
But you have to look at the rest of the individual, not just the skull. Lucy's pelvis is much more like modern humans. Chimp pelvi more closely resemble primates. Also, Lucy was bipedal. Chimps are more quadripedal like monkeys. So for Lucy to be a chimp ancestor she had to evolve two derived characteristics of humans and then her descendents reverted to the more primitive (in a taxonomic sense) traits.

The alternative hypothesis is that the common ancestor of chimps and humans had a small skull and brain. Bipedality evolved first, which is seen in Lucy. Then larger brains evolved. Now, there are individual tansitional skulls linking Lucy to the next species in the sequence: H. habilis. OH24 is one. If Lucy is a chimp ancestor, those transitional individuals should not exist.

KNM-WT 15000 (Turkana Boy) would have lived 1.5 mya and the skeleton structure shows no real difference between anatomically modern humans.
That is fudging it. The post-cranial skeleton does show differences with modern H. sapiens.
 
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Assyrian

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No, I just no the difference between an actual answer and flawed rhetoric.
You could call it flawed rhetoric if you like. You have been given a explanation for the lack of chimp fossils but instead of addressing it, you keep asking the question pretending we can't answer.

Naraoia? My only guess here would be those teeth they found in the Rift Valley. In answer to your question your asking in circles, they do.
So humans evolved from a common ancestor to chimps, and the further back we trace our ancestry the more chimp like they appear, then saying the fossils 'look like apes' is not evidence against them being our ancestors, but what you would expect our ancestors to look like.

I never expected you to help me, you bash creationists, that's all you do. I've seen how the fossils have been handled and mishandled and chimpanzee ancestors are being passed off as our's, Taung being the most glaring example.
If Taung look so much like a juvenile chimp, why did palaeontologists stop calling it a chimp once they found adult australopithicuses? And why do you cling to a claim based on incomplete evidence when we have all the evidence we need to identify Taung as an australopithicus? Why use a juvenile skull to try to claim australopithicus are chimp ancestors, when fossils need to be compared using fully developed adult features?

Taung is a chimpanzee.
This deep crescent-shaped sulcus approximates the rostral boundary of primary visual (striate) cortex (Brodmann’s area [BA] 17) in monkeys and apes, and is located much further forward (more rostrally) on their brains than is the case for lunate sulci...

In 1980, I published an independent analysis of the sulcal patterns reproduced on the Taung endocast and six other australopithecine natural endocasts, and concluded that they appeared apelike rather than human-
like (Falk, 1980). (The Natural Endocast of Taung (Australopithecus africanus): Insights From the Unpublished Papers of Raymond Arthur Dart
Dean Falk)​
Is Falk saying Taung and the australopithicenes are chimpanzees? Or that one aspect of Australopithicus physiology, some of the pattern of folds in the brain, is ape like and that changes in the way the fold pattern followed the enlargement of our brains instead of preceding it? Here is a quotation from the discussion section at the end of the paper you quoted
To me, the entire sulcal pattern on the Taung endocast
continues to appear apelike, and I still believe that this
was the case for australopithecines in general, despite
the claim of a caudally-located L on the endocast from
Stw 505 (Holloway et al., 2004), which will be addressed
elsewhere. Nevertheless, certain shape features dis-
cussed above and elsewhere (Falk et al., 2000; Falk and
Clarke, 2007) indicate that parts of the brain of Taung
and the other gracile australopithecines (occipital lobe,
lateral prefrontal cortex) had begun to expand toward a
human condition.

It, therefore, seems reasonable to hypothesize that
changes in hominin sulcal patterns occurred after cer-
tain cortical regions began to expand and alter their con-
nections (Kaas and Preuss, 2008). It is well known that
bigger brains have more gyri (bulges) and sulci (valleys
between gyri), which is true for primates as well as
other animals. Increased gyrification appears to be due
partly to mechanical effects in which surface areas of
brains buckle in order to keep pace with the volumes as
brains enlarge (Jerison, 1973, 1991)…
Although ‘‘reorganization prior to brain
enlargement’’ (Holloway, 1988, p 33) may occur at
neocortical, subcortical, and limbic levels, and may
involve changes in neural density, neuroglial cells, and
dendritic branching (Holloway, 1966), the analysis
presented above suggests that, when it came to sulcal
patterns, reorganization occurred in larger-brained hom-
inins that lived more recently than Taung, and that sulci
altered in cortical regions that had begun to expand ear-
lier (e.g., prefrontal, parieto-occipital), perhaps in con-
junction with an overall increase in brain size. In other
words, dynamically expanding cortical areas eventually
triggered sulcal changes in keeping with the processes
described by Van Essen and Connolly.

www.anthro.fsu.edu/people/faculty/falk/Natural_Endocast_of_Taung.pdf
I don't think Dean Falk would think much of your quote mine, or agree with your claim Tuang was just a chimp

Not chasing this in circles, just not going to happen.
Ok you were just waving Paranthropus around without being able to make any serious point.

Her skull was smaller then the Chimpanzee mean average, a prime canidate for a chimpanzee ancestor. The fact that she does represent an older age specimen indicates that chimpanzee variation has not changed drastically.
So you are back to cherry picking again, ignoring the the Australophithicus afarensis skulls larger than any chimp, and the fact that as time goes on australopithicus skulls get larger not smaller.

That's not something I ignored, it's just a pointless fact that was and is off topic.
Pointless I suppose if you just want to cherry pick and ignore everything else we know about australopithicenes.

Yes, so much better to base your conjecture on information we don't have, than on the information we do.

For us to have evolved from apes it would have required an accelerated evolution of brain related genes. The evolution of the human brain would have had to start it's accelerated evolution on a molecular basis some 2 million years ago and within Homo Erectus (considered human by most creationists) would have had a brain size twice that of the Austropihicene and early Hominids:

Early Ancestors:
A. Afarensis with a cranial capacity of ~430cc lived about 3.5 mya.
A. Africanus with a cranial capacity of ~480cc lived 3.3-2.5 mya.
P. aethiopicus with a cranial capacity of 410cc lived about 2.5 mya.
P. boisei with a cranial capacity of 490-530cc lived between 2.3-1.2 mya.
OH 5 'Zinj" with a cranial capacity of 530cc lived 1.8 mya.
KNM ER 406 with a cranial capacity of 510cc lived 1.7 million years ago.

(Source: Smithsonian Human Family Tree)​
Homo Erectus Skulls:
Hexian 412,000 years old had a cranial capacity of 1,025cc.
ZKD III (Skull E I) 423,000 years old had a cranial capacity of 915cc.
ZKD II (Skull D I) 585,000 years old had a cranial capacity of 1,020cc
ZKD X (Skull L I) 423,000 years ago had a cranial capacity of 1,225cc
ZKD XI (Skull L II) 423,000 years ago had a cranial capacity of 1,015cc
ZKD XII (Skull L III) 423,000 years ago had a cranial capacity of 1,030cc

Sm 3 >100,000 years ago had a cranial 917cc

KNM-WT 15000 (Turkana Boy) 1.5 million years ago had a cranial capacity of 880cc

(Source: Endocranial Cast of Hexian Homo erectus from South China, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 2006)​
Homo habilis that would have lived. 2.5–1.5 mya with a cranial capacity of ~600 cc. The next link would have been Homo erectus with a cranial capacity of ~1000cc. KNM-WT 15000 (Turkana Boy) would have lived 1.5 mya and the skeleton structure shows no real difference between anatomically modern humans. The skull while smaller then the average cranial capacity of humans but close to twice that of his ancestors of 2 mya.

That means for our ancestors to have evolved it would have required a dramatic adaptive evolution of the size just under 2 mya sandwiched between two long periods of relative stasis.
I suppose if you want, you can make it appear as though there is this great jump by labelling Homo habilis as ~ 600cc (ignoring the actual range from which was from 510 to 750), and describe Homo erectus as ~1000cc (ignoring the actual range of cranial capacities from 750 to 1140 or 380 to 1140 if you include homo floresiensis). It is interesting that you dismiss with a
yawn.gif
the beautifully laid out graph of cranial capacities against time, preferring to cherry pick your dates. Of course the graph show how cranial capacity changes gradually over time.

One such gene would have been the HARf regulatory gene involved in the early development of the human neocortex from 7 to 19 gestational weeks. With only two substitutions allowed since the common ancestor of the of 310 mya the divergence between humans and chimpanzees indicates 18 substitutions as early as 2 mya. (Nature, vol. 443, no. 7108, pp. 167-172 September 14, 2006)The ASPM gene while 99.3% the same for the human–chimpanzee comparison is marked by ten insertions/deletions equal to or longer than 50 bp, all of them located within introns. Primary microcephaly (MCPH) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by global reduction in cerebral cortical volume.(Genetics, Vol. 165, 2063-2070, December 2003) In addition, a total of 2014 genes or ~10% of brain related genes analyzed differed in expression between humans and chimpanzees brains.(Genome Res. 14:1462-1473, 2004 ).
Like I said we don't know nearly enough about these genes to say how it happened, what we do know from the gradual change from the early australophiths, is that it did happen. It wasn't just between habilis and erectus, our brain larger than erectus and our cousin's the neanderthals had larger cranial capacities still. Looking back at australopiths, the later they are the larger their cranial capacities, A africanus are larger than afarensis, and the later australopiths that aren't ancestral to us, like robustus, still have larger cranial capacities than earlier forms.

Evolutionists used to be able to use a 10 million year timeline, then it was 5 million years but when it comes to the most important adaptation you are looking at less then 1 million years and realistically it's only half that.
Sure, if you ignore the real growth in cranial capacities over millions of years.

Darwin's null hypothesis for common descent is not unanswerable:
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” (Darwin, On the Origin of Species)​
Somehow, I don't think Darwin would be impressed by 'our brains are bigger' as an impossible modification.
 
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lucaspa

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I never expected you to help me, you bash creationists, that's all you do. I've seen how the fossils have been handled and mishandled and chimpanzee ancestors are being passed off as our's, Taung being the most glaring example. ... Her [Lucy] skull was smaller then the Chimpanzee mean average, a prime canidate for a chimpanzee ancestor.

This occurred to me last night. If I am following this, your argument runs something like this:
1. We have found very few fossils of chimp ancestors.
2. The fossils claimed to be in the human ancestry belong to the chimp ancestry. So, chimps have lots of ancestors and evolved.
3. Humans have few fossil ancestors; this means humans did not evolve and were specially created by God.

So please tell me why this argument, very similar to yours, isn't equally valid:
1. We have lots of fossil human ancestors. This means humans evolved.
2. We have found very few fossil chimpanzee fossils.
3. Therefore, chimpanzees did not evolve and were specially created by God.

Why move all the human ancestors to be ancestors of chimps? Why do the chimps have to be the ones to have ancestors? By your logic, our lack of ancestors for chimps shows that they were the ones that did not evolve but were specially created.
 
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shernren

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Why move all the human ancestors to be ancestors of chimps? Why do the chimps have to be the ones to have ancestors? By your logic, our lack of ancestors for chimps shows that they were the ones that did not evolve but were specially created.

Very good point. After all, wasn't everything specially created a few thousand years ago? "No chimpanzee fossils found; scientists can't explain their evolution!" is a perfect AiG headline.

What a terrible thing it is to have blinders superglued to your sideburns for three years.
 
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tyronem

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My question to creationists then is; Why is the fossil record found in such a way that there are different sets of organisms in each era, in succession, that seem to progress from one set to the next?


Liquefaction causes things to distribute into rock layers (and causes the rock layers themselves.)
 
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philadiddle

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Liquefaction causes things to distribute into rock layers (and causes the rock layers themselves.)
You're explaining how you think the layers of strata were formed. I was asking if you could explain why the fossils are distributed the way they are.
 
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