Sorry if offended your sensibilities with my poor choice of descriptor.  I fully appreciate what Evolution is all about, I just don't quite understand the hyperbole that is surrounding the reports on this latest fossil record - as I said in my opening gambit.

Thanks at least for offering a reply of sorts, but it seems I will have to go elsewhere for an answer to resolve my puzzlement.

Welcome to the forums Philbee!

To answer your question:

It is an interesting find exactly because it doesn't appear to be chimp-like.  That is, it throws off suspicions that our most ancient ancestors used to walk like chimps and gorillas (knuckle walking) and then evolved out of that trait.  What I think is being suggested is that our most common ancestor might not have been chimp-like; that chimps and knuckle walking great apes evolved into knuckle walking, rather than us evolving out of it from the common ancestor.

I'm not done reading all the stories on it and haven't accessed the journals yet, so I could be getting that wrong.  In any case another thread was started on it with great links here.

I understood and gave credit to this in my response. I WAS WARNING that the Dumb and Dumber apologists would latch on to this and say "So you are saying there is a chance"

Much like the idiots who take "God does not play dice" to equate to magical births and deaths being real.

Evolution is not "half and half" it is a multiple blend out of common ancestors.

I just don't want people like Ray Comfort taking things out of context to support their absurdities.

It really was not meant as "fuck you newbie" BUT more along the lines of "watch out".

I cannot tell you the amount of times I have conversed with theists and they have taken things out of context to prop up their absurdities. That is all I was warning you about.

I didn't mean to come across as a know it all. I just get a lip twitch when I see something a theist will twist to suit themselves.

Debating a theist is a lot like the hormonal drive we have as teens when we hit on someone we like and they don't get a clue when you are not interested.

"IF I TRY HARDER MAYBE THEY WILL LIKE ME'

What they fail to see is that they have no evidence.

Then they react to your comments like, "But you didn't call the police, so that means you love me"

No, I didn't call the police because you weren't hurting me, that doesn't default to you having evidence.

Yeah, why didn't God create Crocoducks? Clearly, He was denying us Great Amusement!

Welcome to the forums. I can understand why you're nonplussed about the find, considering how inevitable it is that we'll keep discovering things that lead us to the conclusion "evolution". It's such a good explanation that it's almost boring to write articles about it. The journalists must have to really dig deep to make it exciting for the people who think that the evolutionary process has no relevance in their lives.

I'd recommend you listen to that Quirks and Quarks episode, you can listen online, they try to make things accessible to the layman.

Sorry if I may have sounded a little sharp in my last comment, but we get posters here trying to weasel some preconceived angle into references to things like evolutionary finds.

It's awesome isn't it? Human nature I mean. I have been lurking here in the shadows reading different posts and threads avidly for ages - laughing to myself at the indifference to evidence demonstrated by some, and nodding in agreement to the wisdom and calm patience many of you  show in the first instance with even the most testing enquiries. Then the one time I decide to put myself out there into the melting pot with what I felt was at least a reasonable query, I typed faster then I thought and well, the outcome can be read above!

I do appreciate all of you who took the time to respond, and I shall go and listen to the podcasts suggested.

Next time, I'll try to be less provocative in my use of phrases and descriptions.

Hello,

I haven't posted on the forums for a while but wouldn't you know it would be Ardi to drag me back.   I'm a big enthusiast about evolution and especially human evolution.

The shocking thing about Ardi is...well everything.

Hardly any sexual dimorphism.   Which...well is completely opposite from what we've seen in our fellow great apes (Chimps, Orangs, Gorillas).   This indicates pair bonding at a level we didn't anticipate.   Especially considering we are the only Great Apes alive that habitually pair bond.

The hands, now those are very interesting.   Yes Lucy came only a million years later, but we weren't able to recover enough of her hands and wrists really to make much of a discovery in this area.   But with Ardi we had a wonderful collection of the hand and wrist bones.

Ardi's wrists are very flexible.   Even more than human wrists.   The other great apes can't pull their hands up or back past their wrists like we or ardi can.   They had to stiffen their wrists in order to knucklewalk the way they do.  What makes this really surprising is not only that Ardi was not a knucklewalker (like has already been mentioned) but that obviously both Gorillas and Chimps independently evolved knucklewalking.

Well quite frankly this changes everything we thought we knew.   It stood to reason to believe that the last common ancestor of Chimps/Humans/Gorillas were knucklewalkers.   Which would explain why our close cousins the chimps and more distant cousins the gorillas both were and we were not.

But Ardi obviously was never, nor were her ancestors, knucklewalkers.   She also was clearly not built for vertical climbing like the chimps.

In most all regards, she's shockingly human in many aspects.

Now we already knew, for years, and years, that chimp DNA has evolved a lot more than human DNA since our last common ancestor.   But what we didn't realize were exactly what all those changed portions of the DNA coded for.   This much anatomical change in the chimps instead of us...well completely caught us off guard.

The feet too...wow.   Obviously made for pushing off on the toes like a true biped, but retaining an opposable thumb on them as well?

And to cap it all off, it was a woodland creature.   Well holy crap.   There goes one of our best guesses for the reason we started walking upright.  One main theory was it was to look over the tall grass of savanahs for predators and food.   But it evolved in woodlands?   Throw out this theory, that theory.   Shit, throw out the majority of a lot of ideas we had about recent human evolution.

The kicker though, and I LOVE this.

The next time some idiot says something like, "You think we came from apes?" or something along that line, you can honestly reply, "Well actually, it would be much closer to the truth to say apes came from us."