Convoluted human evolution: new footprints on Crete (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, September 03, 2017, 13:56 (2639 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: There seem to be new discoveries every other week, and they all add to the confusion. One thing seems pretty certain, though: if there is a designer, and if his primary purpose was to design homo sapiens, he sure had problems getting there.

DAVID: I think all God did was open the flood gates of different hominin types for further development. What other family of organisms did this? None! Apes made no changes.

I agree that the floodgates opened. But I thought your God was always in total control. Why bother with all these different hominin types if his primary purpose was homo sapiens?

I don’t know why you keep harping on about hominins being the only family that changed. If apes all descended from a common ancestor, there are loads of variations. Perhaps you mean that only homos developed into homo sapiens, whereas gibbons only developed into 16 species of gibbon, and none of them are homo sapiens. (I’m not denying the uniqueness of the human brain here, just the statement that “apes made no changes”.) Here’s a sample of “family” changes taken from Wikipedia:

• The family Hylobatidae, the lesser apes, include four genera and a total of sixteen species of gibbon, including the lar gibbon and the siamang, all native to Asia. They are highly arboreal and bipedal on the ground. They have lighter bodies and smaller social groups than great apes.
• The family Hominidae (hominids), the great apes, includes two extant species of orangutans and their subspecies, two extant species of gorillas and their subspecies, two extant species of chimpanzees and their subspecies, and one extant species of humans in a single extant subspecies with several geographic populations.[1][a][2][3] There are seven extant species of great apes: two in the orangutans (genus Pongo), two in the gorillas (genus Gorilla), two in the chimpanzees (genus Pan), and a single extant species, Homo sapiens, of modern humans (genus Homo).[4][5]

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