Proteins, Apes & Us (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 10, 2012, 16:28 (4611 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: Then instead of his sensational "existing apes have a human ancestor" and Amazon's even more explicit "apes descended from humans and not the other way round", we have "humans and modern apes have common ancestors". But that means goodbye to the self-proclaimed "revolutionary" dimension of Filler's theory.
 
DAVID: Forget the hype. Filler himself is reasonable as I have said, and if he is correct, it is sensational: his proposal is an ancient ape started on the road to upright bipedalism and every one else branched off. Since humans are the only truly bipedal survivors of the process of evolution, everyone branched off the 'human line'. Not an unreasonable viewpoint.-Who is "everyone"? Monkeys and apes are still with us, and a single fossil from 21 million years ago plus three other bipedal fossils don't mean there weren't other, different monkey/ape/hominin/hominid lines (convergence comes to mind). As you say in your post to Tony: "The specimens are so sparse, it will be another 50 years before we have enough to really follow the lines without lots of guessing."-However, it is indeed the hype that has put me off, and "existing apes have a human ancestor" are his own words, not someone else's. Sadly, I can't get the article you've referred to. I only get "Article not found" ... and I have far too much respect for you to push this issue. If you think the original paper makes a good case for "the start of a line that leads to upright humans", that's fine with me. After all, there has to be such a line if we believe in common descent.