Urantia Book Commentary and Articles

By Eric Young
Christian Post Reporter
Fri, Oct. 02 2009

A team of researchers unveiled Thursday research findings on the skeleton of a hominid who is now being touted by some as the earliest known human ancestor of modern-day man.

The multinational team of 47 researchers, who have been studying the bones of "Ardi" since they were discovered in 1994, presented the oldest known skeleton of the "potential human ancestor," calling it by far the most complete among those of the earliest specimens found.

The skeleton, found in Ethiopia and thought to be 4.4-million years old, includes most of the skull and teeth, as well as the pelvis, hands, and feet - parts that the researchers say reveal an "intermediate" form of upright walking, considered a hallmark of hominids.

"This species...resolves many uncertainties about early human evolution, including the nature of the last common ancestor that we shared with the line leading to living chimpanzees and bonobos," commented team member , director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

"The most popular reconstructions of human evolution during the past century rested on the presumption that the behaviors of the earliest hominids were related to [or even natural amplifications of] behaviors observed in these living great apes (Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas...our closest living relatives)," added anthropologist C. O. Lovejoy of Kent State University. "Ardipithecus ramidus nullifies these presumptions, as it shows that the anatomy of living African apes is not primitive but instead has evolved specifically within extant ape lineages."

Simply put, this means the new skeleton reverses the common understanding of human evolution. Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, "Ardi" provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor - but each evolved and changed separately along the way.

"This is not that common ancestor, but it's the closest we have ever been able to come," White told The Associated Press.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article...and below are some Urantia Book quotes that seem to corroborate the finding of the article, although the time-line is off by a couple million years. Please click on the reference links to open the text.

61:6.1 The great event of this glacial period was the evolution of primitive man. Slightly to the west of India, on land now under water and among the offspring of Asiatic migrants of the older North American lemur types, the dawn mammals suddenly appeared. These small animals walked mostly on their hind legs, and they possessed large brains in proportion to their size and in comparison with the brains of other animals. In the seventieth generation of this order of life a new and higher group of animals suddenly differentiated. These new mid-mammalsâ€”almost twice the size and height of their ancestors and possessing proportionately increased brain powerâ€”had only well established themselves when the Primates, the third vital mutation, suddenly appeared. (At this same time, a retrograde development within the mid-mammal stock gave origin to the simian ancestry; and from that day to this the human branch has gone forward by progressive evolution, while the simian tribes have remained stationary or have actually retrogressed.)

62.3.12 ...man and the ape are related only in that they sprang from the mid-mammals, a tribe in which there occurred the contemporaneous birth and subsequent segregation of two pairs of twins: the inferior pair destined to produce the modern types of monkey, baboon, chimpanzee, and gorilla; the superior pair destined to continue the line of ascent which evolved into man himself.

62.3.13 Modern man and the simians did spring from the same tribe and species but not from the same parents. Manâ€™s ancestors are descended from the superior strains of the selected remnant of this mid-mammal tribe, whereas the modern simians (excepting certain pre-existent types of lemurs, gibbons, apes, and other monkeylike creatures) are the descendants of the most inferior couple of this mid-mammal group, a couple who only survived by hiding themselves in a subterranean food-storage retreat for more than two weeks during the last fierce battle of their tribe, emerging only after the hostilities were well over.

Labels: Ardipithecus ramidus, Eric Young, evolution, hominids, The Urantia Book, Tim D. White