Op-Ed: Ape with a twist suggests chimps evolved from early humans

Wind up your theologians, this is going to be an interesting exercise in anthro-apologia for everyone. Research on a hominid called Ardipithecus suggests that evolution has been at work, with chimps as descendants from proto human forms of hominids.

The Toronto Star, referring to a special edition of Science Magazine:

What's closer to the truth is that our knuckle dragging cousins descended from us.

…Meet Ardi, a 1.2 metre, 50-kilogram female that is going to cause a big fuss throughout the anthropology world.

…Among other things, research on the 4.4 million year old creature suggests that humans are far more primitive in an evolutionary sense than the great apes -- like chimps and gorillas -- of today.

"In a way we're saying that the old idea that we evolved from a chimpanzee is totally incorrect," he says. "It's more proper to say that chimpanzees evolved from us.", (Quoting Owen Lovejoy, biological anthropologist and primary author of the study at Ohio's Kent State University).

Apart from causing sociologists to take to the trees and get jobs, and getting political scientists to walk on all fours like they should, this is a shot that just wasn’t on the board in conventional theory. It means that hominids and chimps evolved parallel to each other, but in quite different ways than previously proposed. Apparently humans have much more in common with Ardi than chimps, which underwent drastic physical changes in the course of their evolution. So humans are under-evolved, compared to chimps, and “relatively primitive”. Many relatives are. (Next time you’re attempting to explain something utterly basic to someone, remember you’re talking to an under-evolved hominid from the pre Stone Age. It might help.) The Creationists won’t have much trouble with this. Adam and Eve, lacking deportment classes, hairdressers and fashion shows (there’s only so much you can do with a fig leaf as haute couture, and let’s leave the “brooch issue” out of it), naturally looked like that. Anthropologists and biologists, however, now have some thinking to do. How does a hominid morphology happen to rework itself into something as functionally different as a chimp morphology? Evolution requires a working principle for that sort of massive adaption. Being arboreal does have a few obvious clues, but four hands? They’re pretty complex physiology, and even if all monkeys and other aboreals have similar basic morphologies, isn’t that a rather big leap for a 50kg hominid? Did some raging individualists decide “To hell with this, don’t want to watch game shows, let’s be chimps instead”? To better illustrate the concept, I’ve done a graphic showing hominid evolution as proposed by Ardipithecus, and another well known evolutionary tree as a comparison. My thanks to 666divine for showing me this article.