South African fossils could be 'new human ancestor'

[HappySqurriel]

highwaystar101 said:

HappySqurriel said:

A few years back, after a hunter was charged with shooting a polar bear/grizzly bear cross when he only had a grizzly bear hunting licence I started to think that humanoids may not have had an ancestor (or missing link) species in the way that people imagine it. Basically, imagine Africa as a continent being full of pre-human apes that have adapted to their environment as best as they could, and then (for some reason) these species start heavily inter-breeding; being that the mortality rate would be very high for a variety of reasons, the random mixing of traits would result in offspring that were both dramatically more successful and unusually unsuccessful. Within a very short period of time (a couple hundred years) all of the distinctive species could be virtually eliminated in favour of one dominant species.

 

So essentially you believe that rapid evolution occurred? I can see your point when you look at animals like dogs or horses, who rapidly evolved in a matter of a few thousand years when put under new, more extreme, circumstances. Inter-breeding with high mortality rates and high mutation rates would possibly cause rapid evolution.

However, I would personally refute that and say that human evolution occurred over millions of years, but that recent evolution has occurred at an exponential rate due to changing environments such as civilisation and migration.

I’m not (necessarily) saying that mutations would occur rapidly because of inter-breeding (although that might be possible); I was actually thinking that rapid inter-breeding from a wide variety of diverse groups could lead to a consolidation of beneficial mutations. If you took any animal and put them into a particular environment for 1,000 in a reasonably isolated fashion they will probably develop some traits that make them better suited to that environment. After this, if you took several of these different distinct groups and inter-bred them I wouldn’t be surprised if the result was something much different than the other groups; and if enough of these traits that were beneficial in these isolated environments were beneficial in general you could (potentially) think of this as a super species (and it could lead to the elimination of all of the variants rapidly).