6 million year old hominid

Posted by Bill Gill on Dec 13, 2002 at 22:02
(208.191.75.61)

Tuesday night on PBS I saw a program about a 6 million year old fossil claimed to be a hominid. The program went through the claims of the finders and showed how they proved it was the oldest hominid ever found.

Now I recall this being discussed on here earlier, and my impression is that the matter is not nearly as settled as what they said on the program. Did I miss something sometime?

Also in the program they had a brief discussion of Lucy, the 3.2 million year old fossil found in the seventies. They feel that Lucy is not in the line of humanity, because she had some characteristics that were more ape like than the new fossil they found, and they didn't think that evolution would back track as much as was seen in Lucy's skeleton. Now I have a problem with that conclusion. It seems to me that if Lucy was a hominid, and was not descended from their creature, then she must have been the product of a parallel evolution. So she has as good a chance of being our ancestor as theirs does.

So it seems to me that they were getting way out on a limb in the whole program.

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