Darwin feeling the heat? Monkey-to-Man Icon Continues to Wilt

Just a quick one for today. Gotta hurry on something that's gotta get done.





In case you did not see it, I just wanted to share how the (in)famous monkey-to-man icon featured on the cover of Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution continues to wilt in the heat of continued investigation. Do they really still teach this stuff to kids? Or to adults?








The opening line of the AP news story today said:


"Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution with its knuckle-dragging ape and briefcase-carrying man."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070808/ap_on_sc/human_evolution&printer=1;_
ylt=Au7xIdMV6KpB.thRx0dIWfZxieAA



I would say that Darwin is feeling the heat, but since he devoted his life to pulling down the King of the Universe, the Almighty Creator, from the eternal throne in Heaven, Sir Charles might be feeling a different kind of heat at the current time.



But I diverge.



So what is it this time? It seems Maeve Leakey and team in the year 2000 dug up a Homo erectus complete skull within walking distance of an upper jaw of the Homo habilis, and both dated from the same general time period. "That makes it unlikely that one evolved from the other, researchers said." The discovery is reported by Leakey and colleagues in a paper published in Thursday's (August 9, 2007) journal Nature.


Sooo ... here is the quote I hope you will all like, depending on your bent (or hate, depending on your twist):

"Overall what it paints for human evolution is a 'chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us,' Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya.

That old evolutionary cartoon, while popular with the general public, keeps getting proven wrong and too simple, said Bill Kimbel, who praised the latest findings. He is science director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and wasn't involved in the research team."

Wasn't that fun? For more fun, read Wells' book Icons of Evolution.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.