In news that we’re sure will absolutely not be showing up on Fox News at all, Meave Leakey and her colleagues have found more evidence of homo rudolfensis: a lower jaw, jaw fragments, and best of all a complete skull with rudolfensis‘ signature flat face.
Some back story: home rudolfensis has largely been a theoretical early hominid until now. An upper skull was discovered in 1972 near Lake Rudolf. And… well… that was it. Few other fossils had been found.
Now, of course, the story is a lot different. With the jaws we can start working on what kind of hominid rudolfensis actually was. It’s also an important find because it demonstrates there was more than one early hominid wandering the plains of Africa: homo habilis and homo erectus were also there, meaning human evolution likely came from a mix of these three species getting it on.
In short, a pretty major piece of our past just fell into place. Now let’s hear Fox News insist it’s just a bunch of glued-together rocks!
image courtesy Durova and Wikimedia Commons
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1) you misspelled homo rudolfensis at least once
2) Check you college biology book again, homo sapiens, neanderthal, and homo hobbitus walked the earth at the same time, 2 of those where evolutionary dead ends; so most of what we discover about homo rudolfensis is as relivent to our history as finding another skeletal remains at Pompeii of a guy taking a dump.
3) Check you college biology book again in regards to hybrids. Not all similar species can produce hybrid offspring, and some hybrid offspring species are sterile.
4) Your Fox news joke is just stupid, mixing science with politics is as terrible as mixing science and religion. You need to either go to college, or go back to college and take English 101, English 102, biology 101, and political science 101; because in 4 short paragraphs you have failed to apply knowledge of any of those subjects.
Wrong about Neanderthals being a dead end. Recent research shows that most living humans have some small percentage of Neandertal DNA (the exception being some Africans). My own genome is ~3.0% Neandertal.
Homo rudolfensis lived much earlier than Neandertals or the “hobbits” (actual scientific name: Homo floresiensis), so this isn’t just more of the same.
As for hybrids, while the original post is wrong that the new evidence is definite proof of hybridization, neither is it entirely out of the question. We simply don’t have enough data either way right now.
1) Follow your own advice.
2) Check your spelling
3) Quit being a dick.