ANSWERS: 2
  • Probably not. Scientists love to argue and prove each other wrong. You will never get them all to agree on anything. But most believe that man evolved from some previous creature.
  • The general agreement on human origins can be summarised thus: The hominid lineage arose in Africa. We are primates, and our closest living relatives are chimps and bonobos. Sahelanthropus tchadensis, found in Chad, is one of the earliest ancestors known, very close to the split between the chimp and human lineages. For a picture of a skull and a description, see here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/toumai.html There are a variety of Australopithecine species represented in the fossil record; all of these species display a mixture of ape and hominid characteristics (e.g. their brain size was no larger than chimps and their faces were apelike, but they were bipedal and had teeth closer to our own than to apes), and the genus is considered to be ancestral to our own, although a lot of people enjoy arguing over exactly which species in that genus were ancestral. There is agreement that our ancestors were among the gracile australopithecines (that is, the smaller and more slender ones) rather than the robust australopithecines, which are now alternatively classed as Paranthropus. Among the gracile Australopithecines, our ancestors could have been afarensis, africanus or garhi. Homo habilis are widely accepted as the transitions between australopithecines and the hominid lineage proper, although there is such a wide range of australopithecine-to-human characteristics in the skeletons classed as H. habilis that it is agreed that not all the skeletons currently classed as habilis are a single species, and that there are probably representatives of other, closely allied species being subsumed under that umbrella as well. Homo ergaster is accepted as the next transitional Homo species, on the line between H. habilis and us. Homo erectus was either an ancestor or a close cousin, developing from H. ergaster. They demonstrate increasingly "modern" features, and were the first hominid to range widely out of Africa. There is no clear dividing line between late specimens of H. erectus and specimens of archaic H. sapiens, or H. heidelbergensis. This makes the "cousin or ancestor" question complicated. There are some researchers who claim that H. ergaster or H. erectus evolved into the H. heidelbergensis lineage more than once, in different parts of the world, but there is no solid evidence to support this and it is a distinctly minority view. The majority, and accepted, view is that this evolution happened only once, although where that origin point is, is heavily contested. It is widely accepted that Homo neanderthalensis (Neandertals) are not direct ancestors, but cousins, who most likely split off from the lineage at H. erectus. It is accepted by all but one or two researchers that there was no significant gene transfer between Neandertals and H. sapiens where the two were contemporary. It is well accepted that once H. sapiens was on the scene the species spread rapidly, displacing earlier hominid species which had left Africa in previous migrations, and eventually replacing them entirely. That does leave a great deal in there to fight over, and people do. There is a great deal more discussion of fossils and timelines over at the Talkorigins.org hominids pages, at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/. Edit: Suggest that people read carefully. This summary is accurate as to what is accepted.

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