The Ancestor's Tale

[billvon 3,131]

I'm currently reading a fascinating book by Richard Dawkins called "The Ancestor's Tale." It traces humanity's evolution back through each 'concestor' or each of our ancestors that existed just before a branching point. For example, our most recent 'convergence' was with the chimpanzees and bonobos, then the gorillas, then the Old World monkeys and so on and so forth. For each convergence he presents the fossil records, information on how our genome has diverged from each of these concestors, how the biology of our closest relatives has changed etc. There's a section on colorblindness in monkeys, for example, that explains a lot about why we still have the tendency for it in our genome.

I'm at convergence 7, where we split with the animals that eventually became colugos (flying lemurs.) Colugos are really cool - small rodent-like mammals with a pretty big wingspan for their size. They can glide over 100 meters with a good launch. They (or rather ancestors that resembled them) lived during the Cretaceous, just before the extinction event that let mammals take the ecological slots that dinosaurs once held (i.e. the open plains in the daytime.) Hence they're tree dwelling nocturnal animals.

[SpeedRacer 1]

hmmm, so then these wingsuit fliers are lower primates than chimps or gorillas???

Speed Racer
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[markd_nscr986 0]

Now we're talkin'

Being a non practicing archaelogist,it sounds like a good read,thanks Bill

Marc SCR 6046 SCS 3004

[Lindsey 0]

I haven't read this book, but I did read The Devil's Chaplain last year. It's a collection of essays that run a pretty wide gamut, but are all based on seeking truth in/about the natural world. He's an awesome writer, and does a very good job of writing science for people who aren't scientists. While his niche is definately evolutionary biology, he does a pretty good job when writing outside of his immediate area. Most people with a relatively open mind can enjoy his writing.

linz

--
A conservative is just a liberal who's been mugged. A liberal is just a conservative who's been to jail

[Muenkel 0]

What amazes me Bill is that you're still awake! [sarcasm seriously intended]

Seriously, I do not have a scientific mind at all. I don't know if I could get through one chapter of that book.

Chris

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Chris

[Shotgun 1]

Sounds like an interesting read... except that thinking about chimpanzees is creeping me out today, after reading that horrible news story about the guy getting attacked (somewhere around LA?)...

And a different subject (but it sounds like something you might have read)... I was just trying to decide whether to order a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul" by Francis Crick. It is mostly about brain research, but having been written in 1994, I'm wondering if it's already kinda out of date.

And I'm wondering how you find time to read so much (but maybe that's because I'm about the slowest reader in the world).

[TheAnvil 0]

That sounds pretty cool Bill!

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[Shotgun 1]

So what exactly does a "convergence" mean?

[billvon 3,131]

>So what exactly does a "convergence" mean?

His made-up term for when our ancestry joins with another species. In a way he's looking at the tree backwards. It's really the point at which we diverge from another currently living species, for example our most recent divergence from chimpanzees/bonobos. (We diverged from the Neanderthals at some point as well, but they're no longer living, so he doesn't count them in his tree system.)

[Shotgun 1]

Quote

It's really the point at which we diverge from another currently living species, for example our most recent divergence from chimpanzees/bonobos.

So before this divergence, were we supposedly the same thing as chimpanzees/bonobos but then we evolved in different directions?

[jaaska 0]

Thanks for the info - I will definetly read that book.

Have you read Bill Bryson's "The Short History of Nearly Everything"? I'm sure you'd like it!

Jaakko

[billvon 3,131]

>So before this divergence, were we supposedly the same thing
>as chimpanzees/bonobos but then we evolved in different directions?

No; we share a common ancestor though. In other words, at one point a primate population (don't have the book here so I don't have the name handy) started evolving in two different directions. In evolutionary terms it speciated. It may have happened because of geographical isolation; a small group may have been trapped on an island/continent by a land bridge that disappeared, and the two groups started evolving in different directions. One eventually split again and eventually became the chimpanzees and bonobos; the other group evolved into homo erectus and eventually homo sapiens.

An interesting thing to consider - species generally tend to evolve in different directions when they are isolated. We now know there are places where human-like species existed until fairly recently (the hobbits of flores island) that were almost certainly their own species. Had we not discovered how to travel across oceans, even Homo Sapiens may have speciated again as the humans on different continents evolved in different directions. Compare eskimos to watusis and imagine what they each would have evolved into with another 100,000 years of competitive pressures in ther respective environments.

[Shotgun 1]

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we share a common ancestor though

That's what I meant. Guess I didn't word it very well though (imagine that!)... For a long time I had the misconception that we were supposed to have evolved from chimpanzees (or something like that), but I now understand that we are related in that we evolved from a common ancestor.