WHO PRUNED THE BUSH? :

Skulls Found in Africa and in Europe Challenge Theories of Human Origins (JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, August 6, 2002, NY Times)

At each turn, the family tree, once drawn straight as a ponderosa pine, has had to be reconfigured with more branches leading here and there and, in some cases, apparently nowhere.

"When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder," Dr. Wood said. The ladder, he explained, stepped from monkey to modern human through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less apelike than the previous one.

But the fact that modern Homo sapiens is the only hominid living today is quite misleading, an exception to the rule dating only since the demise of Neanderthals some 30,000 years ago. Fossil hunters keep finding multiple species of hominids that overlapped in time, reflecting evolutionary diversity in response to new or changed circumstances. Not all of them could be direct ancestors of Homo sapiens. Some presumably were dead-end side branches.

So a tangled bush has now replaced a tree as the ascendant imagery of human evolution. Most scientists studying the newfound African skull think it lends strong support to hominid bushiness almost from the beginning.

Okay, here's something I honestly just don't get. If we aren't the point of evolution then where are all the rest of the hominids who should be around now? Why is the bush all of a sudden a single stalk and why is the same true for every species we observe? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 6, 2002 8:13 PM