Footprint find on Crete may push back date humans began to walk upright

[Political Junky]

Amazing discovery.

The footprints older than feet

HUMAN-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.

They shouldn’t be there.

Testing puts the rock’s age at 5.7 million years.

That’s a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.

And they lived in Africa.

<more>

 

[IsaacNewton]

Amazing discovery.

The footprints older than feet

HUMAN-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.

They shouldn’t be there.

Testing puts the rock’s age at 5.7 million years.

That’s a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.

And they lived in Africa.

<more>

'human-like', there are a million ways to get odd footprints in mud. This isn't going to push back 'modern humans' to 6 million years ago, that is when the first fossils of something not an ape and something of human characteristics have been found. Evolution cannot be short circuited by millions of years on the scale of change involved with these species. Just as we will never find a T-rex fossil in the Triassic, or a footprint of one.

Stories like the OP are interesting though.

 

[westwall]

Amazing discovery.

The footprints older than feet

HUMAN-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.

They shouldn’t be there.

Testing puts the rock’s age at 5.7 million years.

That’s a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.

And they lived in Africa.

<more>

'human-like', there are a million ways to get odd footprints in mud. This isn't going to push back 'modern humans' to 6 million years ago, that is when the first fossils of something not an ape and something of human characteristics have been found. Evolution cannot be short circuited by millions of years on the scale of change involved with these species. Just as we will never find a T-rex fossil in the Triassic, or a footprint of one.

Stories like the OP are interesting though.

I disagree. Evolution is very poorly understood, we know it happens, but we don't know the rate at which it happens, or the percentage of beneficial mutations. The fossil record is so incomplete that the holes that we could drive trucks through and not ever find a thing are legion.

 

[Old Rocks]

Could well be a case of parallel evolution.

 

[IsaacNewton]

Amazing discovery.

The footprints older than feet

HUMAN-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.

They shouldn’t be there.

Testing puts the rock’s age at 5.7 million years.

That’s a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.

And they lived in Africa.

<more>

'human-like', there are a million ways to get odd footprints in mud. This isn't going to push back 'modern humans' to 6 million years ago, that is when the first fossils of something not an ape and something of human characteristics have been found. Evolution cannot be short circuited by millions of years on the scale of change involved with these species. Just as we will never find a T-rex fossil in the Triassic, or a footprint of one.

Stories like the OP are interesting though.

I disagree. Evolution is very poorly understood, we know it happens, but we don't know the rate at which it happens, or the percentage of beneficial mutations. The fossil record is so incomplete that the holes that we could drive trucks through and not ever find a thing are legion.

Utterly ridiculous. Evolution is very well understood it is only layman that think it isn't. It's like saying 'we don't know what caused the big bang so physicists are entirely in the dark about the universe'. I find people that have a religious bent tend to try to cast scientific facts and theories as 'well we just really don't know' if there is some area that research is still taking place while at the same time they believe in something for which there is no physical evidence. Don't know who is religious here it is a general statement.

It's like when they were still filling in the periodic table of the elements. 'Well there are still many elements that they 'think' are out there but they haven't found them so the entire table of the elements is just guessing and we don't really know, the whole thing could be wrong'. Sorry that isn't how it works. Go to ANY local college and talk to a biologist and ask them if footprints that are 'human-like' from 6 million years ago could be human. They'll laugh and then explain why it's impossible.

But fantasy has it's fans.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Exactly. To flesh out what you are saying, a species could have evolved some of the expected foot traits of walking upright, and then have gone extinct. Meanwhile, a mountain ridge away, another species with less human-like feet was starting to walk upright, and then led to the human line.

This discovery seems, to a layman watching science from the outside, to be yet another in a series of discoveries which shows our ancestors' family being more diverse and maybe more widespread than we thought. And no, people, that doesn't upend the evolutionary tree, or even just the story of human evolution.

 

[MarkDuffy]

This newsweek link shows several of the footprints. They look very different from each other. One long and narrow with "imagined" 5 toes. The other short and fat with only 4 very wide toes.

Why this footprint is challenging established theories of human evolution

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

 

[MarkDuffy]

Original article ~ Possible hominin footprints from the late Miocene (c. 5.7 Ma) of Crete?

Fig. 8. Photograph of two prints possibly representing a static stance of one individual.

This is very interesting. Dates are always in question, but this is added to the stack of data points. We need repetition when we find something that claims to be outside the norm of understanding.

 

[MarkDuffy]

Human evolution in Europe has always been difficult to study due to all the civilization there wiping out the evidence before we can get to it.

 

[MarkDuffy]

The Journal Nature at least mentions the find

Footprints on Greek island are 5.7 million years old

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

The date is solid.

 

[MarkDuffy]

Established story about how humans came from Africa may be wrong, claims controversial new study
A footprint could re-write the entire narrative of human evolution, according to the researchers that discovered it

But the new discovery of a footprint that appears to have belonged to a human that trod down in Crete 5.7 million years ago challenges that story. Humans may have left and been exploring other continents including Europe far earlier than we knew.

"This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate," said Professor Per Ahlberg, who was an author on the study. "Whether the human origins research community will accept fossil footprints as conclusive evidence of the presence of hominins in the Miocene of Crete remains to be seen."

At the time the footprint was made, the Sahara Desert didn't exist and lush, savannah-like environments went all the way from North Africa to the eastern Mediterranean, and Crete hadn't yet detached from the Greek mainland. All of that makes it easier to see how those early hominins made their way to the island.

But the journey might not run into problems. Mark Maslin from University College London told The Times that while the discovery supports the idea that our ancestors used their new found bipedalism to walk into modern Europe, the absence of evidence for later humans could suggest that the journey "may not have ended well".

The idea that humans came from Africa is wrong, claims new study

 

[MarkDuffy]

LOL love this comment from a reader of this linked site.

2ndiceberg • a day ago
Will await further developments. In the meantime, I doubt this speculative thinking on the basis that it fits too well into certain prejudicial attitudes that would love to think we white folk did not evolve from Africa. Sorry, and all that, and am still open should those future developments prove me wrong.

New study reveals humans may have originated from Europe | Latest News & Updates at Daily News & Analysis

 

[MarkDuffy]

If this is true, poor Ardipithecus gets pushed off the direct human tree totally with its still ape-like feet. He was always controversial anyway.

Ardipithecus - Wikipedia

When I was just starting evolutionary biology we thought bipedalism was a major cause of brain improvement. Freeing the hands to do other things.

It is getting more and more evident, we were running around still dumb for millions of years.

Human Evolution Timeline Interactive | The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program

 

[MarkDuffy]

The Naked Truth
Our nearly hairless skin was a key factor in the emergence of other human traits

• Humans are the only primate species that has mostly naked skin.
• Loss of fur was an adaptation to changing environmental conditions that forced our ancestors to travel longer distances for food and water.
• Analyses of fossils and genes hint at when this transformation to bare skin occurred.
• The evolution of hairlessness made way for the emergence of large brains and symbolic thought.

Sweating It Out

Keeping cool is a big problem for many mammals, not just the giant ones, especially when they live in hot places and generate abundant heat from prolonged walking or running. These animals must carefully regulate their core body temperature because their tissues and organs, specifically the brain, can become damaged by overheating.

Humans, in addition to lacking fur, possess an extraordinary number of eccrine glands—between two million and five million—that can produce up to 12 liters of thin, watery sweat a day.

The loss of most of our body hair and the gain of the ability to dissipate excess body heat through eccrine sweating helped to make possible the dramatic enlargement of our most temperature-sensitive organ, the brain.

The Naked Truth ~ Scienterrific American

This was a much more drastic change physiologically than just bipedalism. Probably why it took so long between bipedalism and brain enlargement.

 

[MarkDuffy]

LOL, I just found this interesting piece from Evolution News

Fossil Footprints from Crete Deepen Controversy on Human Origins | Evolution News

After I started to read it, I went WTF ("evolutionists") halfway through. It's still worth reading.

Then went to the About link at the site.

About | Evolution News

copyright by Discovery Institute

Ever heard of them?

 

[Vastator]

Amazing discovery.

The footprints older than feet

HUMAN-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.

They shouldn’t be there.

Testing puts the rock’s age at 5.7 million years.

That’s a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.

And they lived in Africa.

<more>

'human-like', there are a million ways to get odd footprints in mud. This isn't going to push back 'modern humans' to 6 million years ago, that is when the first fossils of something not an ape and something of human characteristics have been found. Evolution cannot be short circuited by millions of years on the scale of change involved with these species. Just as we will never find a T-rex fossil in the Triassic, or a footprint of one.

Stories like the OP are interesting though.

This article was just as lame yesterday, when posted by weatherman in this thread... Looking for reasonable explanations for the Paluxy River footprints.
As it is today...

 

[MarkDuffy]

What Made These Footprints 5.7 Million Years Ago? - Dead Things

With an update from the original investigator.

and commentary

Our controversial footprint discovery suggests human-like creatures may have roamed Crete nearly 6m years ago

 

[MarkDuffy]

The Great Human Migration
Why humans left their African homeland 80,000 years ago to colonize the world

The Great Human Migration | History | Smithsonian

 

[westwall]

Amazing discovery.

The footprints older than feet

HUMAN-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.

They shouldn’t be there.

Testing puts the rock’s age at 5.7 million years.

That’s a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.

And they lived in Africa.

<more>

'human-like', there are a million ways to get odd footprints in mud. This isn't going to push back 'modern humans' to 6 million years ago, that is when the first fossils of something not an ape and something of human characteristics have been found. Evolution cannot be short circuited by millions of years on the scale of change involved with these species. Just as we will never find a T-rex fossil in the Triassic, or a footprint of one.

Stories like the OP are interesting though.

I disagree. Evolution is very poorly understood, we know it happens, but we don't know the rate at which it happens, or the percentage of beneficial mutations. The fossil record is so incomplete that the holes that we could drive trucks through and not ever find a thing are legion.

Utterly ridiculous. Evolution is very well understood it is only layman that think it isn't. It's like saying 'we don't know what caused the big bang so physicists are entirely in the dark about the universe'. I find people that have a religious bent tend to try to cast scientific facts and theories as 'well we just really don't know' if there is some area that research is still taking place while at the same time they believe in something for which there is no physical evidence. Don't know who is religious here it is a general statement.

It's like when they were still filling in the periodic table of the elements. 'Well there are still many elements that they 'think' are out there but they haven't found them so the entire table of the elements is just guessing and we don't really know, the whole thing could be wrong'. Sorry that isn't how it works. Go to ANY local college and talk to a biologist and ask them if footprints that are 'human-like' from 6 million years ago could be human. They'll laugh and then explain why it's impossible.

But fantasy has it's fans.

It is? Describe how it works then. Use your own words, not a cut and paste job.