Darwinist ignorance: new genes needed for new animals (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 13, 2018, 20:09 (2354 days ago) @ David Turell

Another aspect of this view is that we have no idea how or when H. erectus appeared. the gap from arthropithicous (Lucy) is enormous:

https://evolutionnews.org/2018/06/on-hominid-fossils-and-universal-common-ancestry-deni...

"The focus is on the fact that the fossils that we do have don’t form an evolutionary sequence from apelike precursors to humanlike fossils.

***

"We have ample fossils of australopithecines, and Homo erectus, and Neanderthals, and now we have numerous bones of Homo naledi, and there are many others.

***

"From its first appearance, Homo erectus was very human-like, and differed markedly from prior hominins which were not human-like. Yet Homo erectus appears abruptly, without apparent evolutionary precursors. An article in Nature explains:

“'The origins of the widespread, polymorphic, Early Pleistocene H. erectus lineage remain elusive. The marked contrasts between any potential ancestor (Homo habilis or other) and the earliest known H. erectus might signal an abrupt evolutionary emergence some time before its first known appearance in Africa at -1.78 Myr [million years ago]. Uncertainties surrounding the taxon’s appearance in Eurasia and southeast Asia make it impossible to establish accurately the time or place of origin for H. erectus . … Whatever its time and place of origin, and direction of spread, this species dispersed widely, and possibly abruptly, before 1.5 Myr.”

"That article was written in 2002, but the problem remains. A 2016 paper admits, “Although the transition from Australopithecus to Homo is usually thought of as a momentous transformation, the fossil record bearing on the origin and earliest evolution of Homo is virtually undocumented.” While that paper argues that the evolutionary distance between Australopithecus and Homo is small, it nonetheless concedes that ”By almost all accounts, the earliest populations of the Homo lineage emerged from a still unknown ancestral species in Africa at some point between approximately 3 and approximately 2 million years ago.”

***

"The problem is that most hominin fossils can’t be organized in a manner that leads to an evolutionary lineage, especially one that bridges the gap between the apelike australopithecines and the humanlike members of Homo."

Comment: This, in a way, is as a dramatic gap as the Cambrian explosion. Lucy is quite ape like with long arms and a tiny head with 400+ cc of brain. Erectus approaches modern brain size at just under 1,000 cc, and a much larger body with shorter arms.