What did the ancestral ape look like?

[RSNorman]

The problem of what the ancestral ape looks like has been addressed
here in, I believe, several venues and has raised the usual personal
vendettas and virulent demands for pictures and published citations.
Having found such I choose to start a new thread so that, for a short
time at least, the discussion can remain on the actual subject of ape
evolution.

I did pose the subject line in the incendiary phrase of "the"
ancestral ape knowing that there will be an immediate uproar (totally
justified, of course) that we cannot know or even speculate on whether
this fossil or that is an actual ancestor let alone "the" ancestor. So
let me just confess that this bluster was just to attract attention.
The real question is "what did a very early ape, perhaps at the origin
of the line look like. You might want to consider all the apes, the
hominidea, or just the great apes, the hominids, or just the African
great apes, the hominins.

The information comes in an essay in the New York Review of Books by
Steven Milthen titled "On Ancestor Apes in Europe".

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/nov/19/ancestor-apes-europe/
Unfortunately the full article is available "free" only to
subscribers, i.e. to those who already paid.

This is a review of the book "The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story
of Human Origin" by David R. Begun
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10552.html

Start with the apes in general and a 30 million year old find from
Egypt. "In the trees sat Aegyptopithecus, looking like a cross
between a monkey and a lemur, picking and peeling ripe fruit. This
primate, known from an assortment of fragmentary fossils, is likely to
resemble the common ancestor between Old World monkeys and apes, their
evolutionary divergence being dated by the molecular genetic clock at
thirty- one to thirty-eight million years ago." The picture is at
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegyptopithecus

Bugun produces a new hypothesis: that although the earliest apes
appeared and proliferated in Africa around 30 million years ago, by
some 12 million years ago the climate changes caused African apes to
go extinct while those who migrated to Europe perpetuated the line.
"The first apes in Europe are grouped together as griphopiths,
described by Begun as the first 'hominids' " This account differs
from the classic descriptin of Griphopithecus in Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griphopithecus
where the group is ancestral to Hylobates, the gibbons, as well as the
great apes. I don't know the reasons for the difference but the
Begun's full book being reviewed seems to go into great details about
some 50 genera of apes.

"Critical to Begun’s thesis is that between 12.5 and 9.5 million years
ago Africa was effectively devoid of apes." And then "It was from
Dryopithecus that genera of apes evolved in Europe with distinctively
African ape characteristic" Dryopithecus, itself, was known to
Darwin. Pictures at

http://faculty.cascadia.edu/tsaneda/anth205/lectures/unit2/primate_evol4.html

From there we get "It is the descendants of apes such as
Hispanopithecus and Rudapithecus that—Begun argues—dispersed into
Africa around nine million years ago, providing the evolutionary
foundation for the present-day African apes and the species that
became the global ape, Homo sapiens. Why did they go to Africa?
Because beginning fifteen million years ago Europe had been becoming
cooler, drier, and more seasonal, conditions unsuitable for apes but
ideal for monkeys. So the apes moved out, heading south into Africa,
and a population of monkeys moved into Europe."

So take your pick of which level of ancestry you wish on which time
frame but there are claims that "groups such as X" which lived in the
proper place at the proper time were "probable" ancestors or our
ancestors "resembled" these and there do, indeed, exist pictures even
those are, no doubt, imaginative reconstructions. Remember, from 4 to
30 million years ago, neither selfie sticks were available for the
true ancestors to take their own photographs nor was there symbolic
language to enable them to ask their friends or relatives to snap the
pictures for them.

[erik simpson]

> Hispanopithecus and Rudapithecus that--Begun argues--dispersed into

> Africa around nine million years ago, providing the evolutionary
> foundation for the present-day African apes and the species that
> became the global ape, Homo sapiens. Why did they go to Africa?
> Because beginning fifteen million years ago Europe had been becoming
> cooler, drier, and more seasonal, conditions unsuitable for apes but
> ideal for monkeys. So the apes moved out, heading south into Africa,
> and a population of monkeys moved into Europe."
>
> So take your pick of which level of ancestry you wish on which time
> frame but there are claims that "groups such as X" which lived in the
> proper place at the proper time were "probable" ancestors or our
> ancestors "resembled" these and there do, indeed, exist pictures even
> those are, no doubt, imaginative reconstructions. Remember, from 4 to
> 30 million years ago, neither selfie sticks were available for the
> true ancestors to take their own photographs nor was there symbolic
> language to enable them to ask their friends or relatives to snap the
> pictures for them.

I read this with interest because I thought the idea that 'apes' (hominidea)
originated in Africa, left and came back sounded familiar. Looking in Dawkins'
"The Ancestor's Tale", I confirmed the familiarity, but the out-of-Africa
account involved evidence not from Europe, but Asia. I wonder how the
Euro-centric theory will play out.

[Bob Casanova]

On Mon, 02 Nov 2015 19:22:11 -0500, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by RSNorman
<r_s_n...@comcast.net>:

Good refs; thanks! I skimmed them rather than reading them
closely, but in addition to some issues I was unaware of,
such as the postulated European genesis of apes before they
migrated to Africa, I noted the following:

Despite almost certain objections from a least two specific
individuals, while Aegyptopithecus, which predates the
monkey/ape split, looks like a monkey, all the others in the
purported "ape" line look, at least to me, like apes.
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[RSNorman]

On Tue, 03 Nov 2015 11:46:29 -0700, Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>
wrote:

>>"Critical to Begun痴 thesis is that between 12.5 and 9.5 million years

>>ago Africa was effectively devoid of apes." And then "It was from
>>Dryopithecus that genera of apes evolved in Europe with distinctively
>>African ape characteristic" Dryopithecus, itself, was known to
>>Darwin. Pictures at
>>
>>http://faculty.cascadia.edu/tsaneda/anth205/lectures/unit2/primate_evol4.html
>>
>>From there we get "It is the descendants of apes such as

>>Hispanopithecus and Rudapithecus that唯egun argues妖ispersed into

>>Africa around nine million years ago, providing the evolutionary
>>foundation for the present-day African apes and the species that
>>became the global ape, Homo sapiens. Why did they go to Africa?
>>Because beginning fifteen million years ago Europe had been becoming
>>cooler, drier, and more seasonal, conditions unsuitable for apes but
>>ideal for monkeys. So the apes moved out, heading south into Africa,
>>and a population of monkeys moved into Europe."
>>
>>So take your pick of which level of ancestry you wish on which time
>>frame but there are claims that "groups such as X" which lived in the
>>proper place at the proper time were "probable" ancestors or our
>>ancestors "resembled" these and there do, indeed, exist pictures even
>>those are, no doubt, imaginative reconstructions. Remember, from 4 to
>>30 million years ago, neither selfie sticks were available for the
>>true ancestors to take their own photographs nor was there symbolic
>>language to enable them to ask their friends or relatives to snap the
>>pictures for them.
>
>Good refs; thanks! I skimmed them rather than reading them
>closely, but in addition to some issues I was unaware of,
>such as the postulated European genesis of apes before they
>migrated to Africa, I noted the following:
>
>Despite almost certain objections from a least two specific
>individuals, while Aegyptopithecus, which predates the
>monkey/ape split, looks like a monkey, all the others in the
>purported "ape" line look, at least to me, like apes.

The "what did an ancestor look like?" is a question filled with hidden
potholes.

I wrote primarily to defuse the ignorant and the idiots who demanded
names of specific organisms along with detailed photographic images.
However there are two serious technical questions that quickly raise
their ugly heads; the notion of ancestor and the notion of "look
like".

On the first, curiously, I just discovered Thomas Hunt Morgan's "A
Critique of the Theory of Evolution"

https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/A_Critique_of_the_Theory_of_Evolution.pdf
This, of course, is a critique and not a criticism; a critical
analysis ending in an overwhelmingly endorsement of Darwin with the
application of Mendelian Genetics to mutation/selection. Morgan, for
those not into the history of biology, is the founder and primary
proponent of fruit fly (Drosophila) genetics. This work which is just
a few months shy of being 100 years old already countered the problem
of determining ancestry:

"Paleontology has been criticised on the ground that she cannot
pretend to show the actual ancestors of living forms because, if in
the past genera and species were as abundant and as diverse as we find
them at present, it is very improbable that the bones of any
individual that just happened to be preserved are the bones of just
that species that took part in the evolution...but even then the
evidence is, I think, still just as valuable... It suffices to know
that there lived in the past a particular "group" of animals that had
many points in common with those that preceded them and with those
that came later. Whether these are the actual ancestors or not does
not so much matter, for the view that from such a group of species the
later species have been derived is far more probably than any other
view that has been proposed."

So much for "but that is not THE ancestor!" This is all ancient
history, a century old.

Second, there is the appearance. To the casual observer, and I lump
myself here with you in not being learned in comparative anatomy of
primates and so just take my first impressions, the listed African
species that possibly is closely related to (and closely similar in
appearance to) a transition between monkey-types and true ape-types
looks rather like a monkey being arborial with a long tail. Even that
Wikipedia citation says " It likely resembled modern-day New World
monkeys".

However to the specialist casual appearance is not sufficient. For
example did you happen to notice that "the ribs of all Hominoidea are
more heavily bent near their articulation with the thoracic vertebrae
than in other primates?" Or that "This Dryopithecus molar pattern of
the occlusal molar surface in contrast to the bilophodont pattern of
cercopithecines is of crucial diagnostic value as a feature separation
... the Hominoidea and the Cercopithecoidea?"
from "Primate Anatomy: An Introduction" By Friderun Ankel-Simons

No? Neither did I. So the thing may "look" like an ape but unless it
has the critical identifying characters of an ape, then it is not one.

For what it is worth, my opinion is that the last common ancestor of
all modern great apes looked like a great ape. Period.

Incidentally I did say I am not learned in primate comparative anatomy
and then go on to cite very technical details precisely in primate
comparative anatomy. That just means I google well and can understand
what I find.

.

[Glenn]

"RSNorman" <r_s_n...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:r4bi3bt8qm8n2iate...@4ax.com...

>>>"Critical to Begun's thesis is that between 12.5 and 9.5 million years

>>>ago Africa was effectively devoid of apes." And then "It was from
>>>Dryopithecus that genera of apes evolved in Europe with distinctively
>>>African ape characteristic" Dryopithecus, itself, was known to
>>>Darwin. Pictures at
>>>
>>>http://faculty.cascadia.edu/tsaneda/anth205/lectures/unit2/primate_evol4.html
>>>
>>>From there we get "It is the descendants of apes such as

>>>Hispanopithecus and Rudapithecus that-Begun argues-dispersed into

Oh, my!

[RSNorman]

I accept that as the most intelligent concept I have ever seen you
produce.

[Glenn]

"RSNorman" <r_s_n...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:vifi3bp4834gvddh8...@4ax.com...

You are a really rude person and if you were intelligent you would know it and not be.

[RSNorman]

Part of what you wrote may well be true.

[Bob Casanova]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2015 15:55:41 -0700, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by "Glenn" <g...@invalid.invalid>:

Poorly- concealed envy is not Your Friend.

[Bob Casanova]

On Tue, 03 Nov 2015 17:32:34 -0500, the following appeared

>>>"Critical to Begun’s thesis is that between 12.5 and 9.5 million years

>>>ago Africa was effectively devoid of apes." And then "It was from
>>>Dryopithecus that genera of apes evolved in Europe with distinctively
>>>African ape characteristic" Dryopithecus, itself, was known to
>>>Darwin. Pictures at
>>>
>>>http://faculty.cascadia.edu/tsaneda/anth205/lectures/unit2/primate_evol4.html
>>>
>>>From there we get "It is the descendants of apes such as

>>>Hispanopithecus and Rudapithecus that—Begun argues—dispersed into

Ya think? ;-)

Thanks again; that's the point I was trying, apparently
without much success, to make; that the LCA of modern apes,
*even if unknown*, almost certainly would "look like an ape"
to most people. That statement drew a *lot* of flak, most of
which boiled down to "show me"; the idea of continuity of
morphology was ignored.

>Second, there is the appearance. To the casual observer, and I lump
>myself here with you in not being learned in comparative anatomy of
>primates and so just take my first impressions, the listed African
>species that possibly is closely related to (and closely similar in
>appearance to) a transition between monkey-types and true ape-types
>looks rather like a monkey being arborial with a long tail. Even that
>Wikipedia citation says " It likely resembled modern-day New World
>monkeys".
>
>However to the specialist casual appearance is not sufficient. For
>example did you happen to notice that "the ribs of all Hominoidea are
>more heavily bent near their articulation with the thoracic vertebrae
>than in other primates?" Or that "This Dryopithecus molar pattern of
>the occlusal molar surface in contrast to the bilophodont pattern of
>cercopithecines is of crucial diagnostic value as a feature separation
>... the Hominoidea and the Cercopithecoidea?"
> from "Primate Anatomy: An Introduction" By Friderun Ankel-Simons
>
>No? Neither did I. So the thing may "look" like an ape but unless it
>has the critical identifying characters of an ape, then it is not one.
>
>For what it is worth, my opinion is that the last common ancestor of
>all modern great apes looked like a great ape. Period.
>
>Incidentally I did say I am not learned in primate comparative anatomy
>and then go on to cite very technical details precisely in primate
>comparative anatomy. That just means I google well and can understand
>what I find.

Excellent summation; thanks.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Tuesday, November 3, 2015 at 5:34:56 PM UTC-5, RSNorman wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Nov 2015 11:46:29 -0700, Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>
> wrote:
>
> >On Mon, 02 Nov 2015 19:22:11 -0500, the following appeared
> >in talk.origins, posted by RSNorman
> ><r_s_n...@comcast.net>:
> >
> >>The problem of what the ancestral ape looks like has been addressed
> >>here in, I believe, several venues and has raised the usual personal
> >>vendettas and virulent demands for pictures and published citations.

Are you relying on hearsay for that "virulent demands" bit? If you
were to peruse the thread on which this began, you will see that
the so-called "demands" were me politely wanting to see a better
picture of *Proconsul* than the pathetic artist's conception in
the Wikipedia entry, which makes it look like something in our
ancestry AFTER the human-CHIMP split, and not like AT the human-gibbon
split.

> >>Having found such I choose to start a new thread so that, for a short
> >>time at least, the discussion can remain on the actual subject of ape
> >>evolution.

That is something that I've been very much interested in since the
age of 12. Back then I was accused of being an atheist because I was
already convinced back then that we are descended from apes.
If I had been grilled further, my interrogator (the Franciscan Sister
who was the 7th grade teacher in the Catholic school I attended) would
have found out that I was also convinced that we are
descended from lower chordates, which is really about as far
back as we have any idea what our ancestors looked like.

> >>I did pose the subject line in the incendiary phrase of "the"
> >>ancestral ape knowing that there will be an immediate uproar (totally
> >>justified, of course) that we cannot know or even speculate on whether
> >>this fossil or that is an actual ancestor let alone "the" ancestor.

No such uproar was even contemplated by me. I would have been ecstatic
to find something that may still be decades in the future: a forensic
expert reproduction of an expert osteologist's conception of what
the bones of the LCA of modern apes looked like.

No fossil needed: just use the best idea of what those bones looked like,
taking oodles of characters in a very detailed cladogram into account.

> >>So let me just confess that this bluster was just to attract attention.

Yeah, it was "exorbitantly virulent" if we use the same degree of
hyperbole that you've used up to now. But what you wrote below
more than makes up for it.

> >>The real question is "what did a very early ape, perhaps at the origin
> >>of the line look like. You might want to consider all the apes, the
> >>hominidea,

You mean the hominOIdea.

> > or just the great apes, the hominids, or just the African
> >>great apes, the hominins.
> >>
> >>The information comes in an essay in the New York Review of Books by
> >>Steven Milthen titled "On Ancestor Apes in Europe".

Funny that it starts out with a forensically expert picture of Homo naledi,
endemic to South Africa!

But then, what do you expect from a lowbrow rag :-)
like the New York Review of Books?

> >>http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/nov/19/ancestor-apes-europe/
> >>Unfortunately the full article is available "free" only to
> >>subscribers, i.e. to those who already paid.
> >>
> >>This is a review of the book "The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story
> >>of Human Origin" by David R. Begun
> >> http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10552.html

<snip bit that takes us back to the beginning of Old World Monkeys>

> >>Bugun produces a new hypothesis: that although the earliest apes
> >>appeared and proliferated in Africa around 30 million years ago, by
> >>some 12 million years ago the climate changes caused African apes to
> >>go extinct while those who migrated to Europe perpetuated the line.
> >>"The first apes in Europe are grouped together as griphopiths,
> >>described by Begun as the first 'hominids' " This account differs
> >>from the classic descriptin of Griphopithecus in Wikipedia
> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griphopithecus
> >>where the group is ancestral to Hylobates, the gibbons, as well as the
> >>great apes. I don't know the reasons for the difference

Could it be that no one has tried to date the human-gibbon split
accurately?

> >> but the
> >>Begun's full book being reviewed seems to go into great details about
> >>some 50 genera of apes.
> >>
> >>"Critical to Begun痴 thesis is that between 12.5 and 9.5 million years
> >>ago Africa was effectively devoid of apes."

Any mention of the ancestors of the orangutans? Wikipedia has
them being found on the Indian subcontinent at 12.5 mya.

I'm now speaking of Ramapithecus/Sivapithecus, believed by some to be
female and male, respectively, of one orangutan precursor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sivapithecus

I haven't had the time to check, but I'm curious to know whether
the Indian subcontinent was by that time securely attached to Asia.
I do believe Africa was.

> >> And then "It was from
> >>Dryopithecus that genera of apes evolved in Europe with distinctively
> >>African ape characteristic" Dryopithecus, itself, was known to
> >>Darwin. Pictures at
> >>
> >>http://faculty.cascadia.edu/tsaneda/anth205/lectures/unit2/primate_evol4.html

Well, that's a much better artist's conception of *Proconsul* but
still nothing like forensic grade quality, despite the fact that there
are pretty complete skulls available.

But the one of Dryopithecus makes it look very much like a chimp,
contradicting what Wikipedia writes about it:

Dryopithecus was about 4 feet long and more closely resembled
a monkey than a modern ape.

> >>From there we get "It is the descendants of apes such as
> >>Hispanopithecus and Rudapithecus that唯egun argues妖ispersed into
> >>Africa around nine million years ago, providing the evolutionary
> >>foundation for the present-day African apes and the species that
> >>became the global ape, Homo sapiens.

<snip>

> >Good refs; thanks! I skimmed them rather than reading them
> >closely, but in addition to some issues I was unaware of,
> >such as the postulated European genesis of apes before they
> >migrated to Africa, I noted the following:
> >
> >Despite almost certain objections from a least two specific
> >individuals, while Aegyptopithecus, which predates the
> >monkey/ape split, looks like a monkey, all the others in the
> >purported "ape" line look, at least to me, like apes.
>
> The "what did an ancestor look like?" is a question filled with hidden
> potholes.
>
> I wrote primarily to defuse the ignorant and the idiots who demanded
> names of specific organisms along with detailed photographic images.

Only one, and [s]he should have let well enough alone after
the third person involved in that drawn out debate was exposed
as having acted like an idiot, albeit in the opposite direction.

> However there are two serious technical questions that quickly raise
> their ugly heads; the notion of ancestor and the notion of "look
> like".

<snip things to be replied to separately, if appropriate>

> For what it is worth, my opinion is that the last common ancestor of
> all modern great apes looked like a great ape. Period.

Would you guess that it looked like an old male orangutan? or a female?
or one of the Hominini?

The third person of which I spoke above did NOT make it clear
that orangutans looked like apes to him. In fact there was
a badly garbled paragraph by him which created the opposite impression.

But you'd never accuse him of being virulent, would you?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/
nyikos "at" math.sc.edu

[RSNorman]

>> >>"Critical to Begun? thesis is that between 12.5 and 9.5 million years

>> >>ago Africa was effectively devoid of apes."
>
>Any mention of the ancestors of the orangutans? Wikipedia has
>them being found on the Indian subcontinent at 12.5 mya.
>
>I'm now speaking of Ramapithecus/Sivapithecus, believed by some to be
>female and male, respectively, of one orangutan precursor.
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sivapithecus
>
>I haven't had the time to check, but I'm curious to know whether
>the Indian subcontinent was by that time securely attached to Asia.
>I do believe Africa was.
>
> > >> And then "It was from
>> >>Dryopithecus that genera of apes evolved in Europe with distinctively
>> >>African ape characteristic" Dryopithecus, itself, was known to
>> >>Darwin. Pictures at
>> >>
>> >>http://faculty.cascadia.edu/tsaneda/anth205/lectures/unit2/primate_evol4.html
>
>Well, that's a much better artist's conception of *Proconsul* but
>still nothing like forensic grade quality, despite the fact that there
>are pretty complete skulls available.
>
>But the one of Dryopithecus makes it look very much like a chimp,
>contradicting what Wikipedia writes about it:
>
> Dryopithecus was about 4 feet long and more closely resembled
> a monkey than a modern ape.
>
>> >>From there we get "It is the descendants of apes such as

>> >>Hispanopithecus and Rudapithecus that?egun argues?ispersed into

I deliberately avoided naming any names. There were enough people
divided among, I recall, several threads, dealing with the notion of
identying ancestors and questions about what ape ancestors looked like
to pick and choose among themselves who might be culpable of what.
Please leave me out of all that.

I gave specific arguments dealing with identying "an" ancestor or
"the" ancestor or ancestral "group'. I also gave specific arguments
about what "appears like" might mean to different people. That is
what I considered important in my posts.

The references I gave for the NY Review of Books article and the
original book do go into asiatic apes a bit that that was not the
subject of the review nor of my piece. So you are on your own for
orangs.

Also I don't know what you mean by the "gibbon-human" split given that
at the time the gibbon-likes and the great-ape-likes split there was
nothing like "human".

As to my impression as to the appearance of a more recent ancestral
great ape, I believe the fossil evidence is so fragmentary that
drawing a "forensic" picture like what you would like is difficult if
not impossible. And to say that the ancestor would strike me as
"apish" means I certainly could not say it looked more like a juvenile
male gorilla or a middle-aged female chimp or a senior-citizen male
orang which seems to be the level of appearance you would like. To me
it is just plain "apish." Given that I reported that the book
described some 50 genera of apes, picking one of the very few that
happened to survive today for comparison seems pointless.

[Ernest Major]

New evidence, for those people who can penetrate the pay wall

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6260/aab2625

--
alias Ernest Major

[Peter Nyikos]

On Sunday, November 8, 2015 at 8:39:42 AM UTC-5, Ernest Major wrote:
> On 03/11/2015 00:22, RSNorman wrote:

> > The problem of what the ancestral ape looks like has been addressed
> > here in, I believe, several venues and has raised the usual personal
> > vendettas and virulent demands for pictures and published citations.

Evidently there were others besides the thread in which I have been
intensely participating this week,

Subject: Re: Did we come from monkeys?

I would certainly like to know what the others were. As I
told Richard, his description certainly does not fit the
thread I was and still am involved in.

<big snip>

> New evidence, for those people who can penetrate the pay wall
>
> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6260/aab2625
>
> --
> alias Ernest Major

Just the abstract is telling me a great deal that, if
true, puts paid to a lot of claims that have been made
about *Proconsul* off the top of someone's head.
[That "someone" has participated on this thread, by the way.]

It says near the end:

Our cladistic results, coupled with the chronology
and location of the new genus, suggest that it
represents a late-surviving offshoot of a small
African stem hominoid that is more closely related
to crown hominoids than *Proconsul* is.

In other words, *Proconsul* branched off from the line
leading to modern apes (and humans, but Harshman, who
is unaccountably missing from this thread, would consider
that redundant) BEFORE this little critter did. It was
at least two steps back, and probably more, than the
last common ancestor (LCA) of modern apes.

What shall we call *Proconsul* in this light? a tailless monkey?
or an ape, on the grounds that it MAY have been close to
the ancestry of everything we've come to regard as apes,
and MAY have looked like an ape to laymen on the same
level of sophistication as, say, Glenn or Casanova.

As Richard Norman wrote,

The "what did an ancestor look like?" is a question
filled with hidden potholes.

But I've avoided those potholes by holding out for a
really accurate representation of *Proconsul*, and
I have yet to see an example approved by a researcher
in fossil anthropoids. The ones I recall from my boyhood
made it look too much like a generic great ape; the one
in Wikipedia is even worse; and even the one in a link
Norman provided us with, though much better, does not
inspire confidence, because it also makes *Dryopithecus*
look almost exactly like a chimp.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina

http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/

[RSNorman]

Why, instead of looking at the Wikipedia picture, don't you attend to
the last paragraph of the Proconsul piece that says:
"The history of hominoid classification in the second half of the 20th
century is sufficiently complex to warrant a few books itself. Most of
the palaeoanthropologists have changed their minds at least once as
new fossils have come to light and new observations have been made,
and will probably continue to do so. The classifications found in the
literature of one decade are not generally the same as those of
another."

[Peter Nyikos]

Why bring this up? it is perfectly consistent with everything I wrote.
The Wiki entry is in a state of "the right hand not knowing what the
left hand is doing," because we now have a fairly decent fossil
of *Proconsul* illustrated there, along with a reconstruction
of the whole skeleton [in arboreal pose, no less!]. Anyone looking
at the fossil or that reconstruction can immediately see that there
is something amiss with that chimp-with-legs-longer-than-arms
artist's impression that is visible on the same screen as the fossil.

By the way, you did not address my question of what those other
threads were. I must confess that I would like to know whether your
talk about "personal vendettas and virulent demands" is any less
far-out than it is when applied to my behavior.

And so, you are allowed to "plead the Fifth" on this one. Is
the allusion to the USA Bill of Rights intelligible to you?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Math -- standard disclaimer--
U. of South Carolina

[RSNorman]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2015 07:02:53 -0800 (PST), Peter Nyikos

I brought up the lack of agreement on the status of Proconsul because
that is the state of the world. And this has nothing whatsoever to do
with cladism -- there have always been strong disagreements and
arguments about just how to organize extant and fossil species. What
you write suggests that you think that getting a good picture will
clarify relationships. It is not that the "right hand no knowing what
the left hand is doing." Rather it is that the "right hand strongly
disagrees with what the left hand is doing." As to the reconstruction
pictures you should note that the photograph of the fossil bones from
the Paris museum has incomplete leg bones but the arms are not
noticeable longer than the legs. If you look at the photograph of the
skeletal reconstruction, the legs are indeed longer than the arms.
Yes, the forearm (radius/ulna) is long but the whole arm length is
less than the leg length. The restoration photo, fleshed and furred
out, is from an entirely different source but does not seem totally
out of line with the skeleton. And, most important, both the skeleton
and the final illustration are "reconstructions", that is, guesses. Is
there any particular reason you think that the picture looks like a
chimp instead of some generic ape-like thing? Is there any reason you
should think that the arms must necessarily be longer than the legs?

As to the subject I am avoiding -- I addressed the obvious fact that
there is personal acrimony on this group and that you are involved in
it. Whether you are victim or perpetrator or both is something I do
not care to consider. And I was not thinking of you when I referred
to the demand for the illustration. I do not choose to bring up old
and dead issues. I do not "take the fifth" on the issue. I simply
pick and choose what posts and what subjects to respond to. Whether I
do so for good reason or for personal whim or for sheer cowardice is
irrelevant; I just do so.

[Burkhard]

I was more worried by "the name, Proconsul, was devised by Arthur
Hopwood in 1933 and means "before Consul""

A pro-consul is someone who acts in the place of the real consul.
"Before" should be pre-, or maybe prae-

[James Beck]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2015 22:24:52 +0000, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
wrote:

I thought it referred to she who must be obeyed. In the context of the
original question, evolution says she was sufficiently hot and
fertile, and man, could she move her tail fin.

[Glenn]

"Burkhard" <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote in message news:n233fc$1ee$1...@dont-email.me...

So it isn't all Greek to you.

[jillery]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2015 16:06:38 -0700, James Beck <jdbec...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

Some say that's the oldest profession.
--
This space is intentionally not blank.