{"id":18,"date":"2007-08-17T16:00:24","date_gmt":"2007-08-17T04:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2007\/08\/extending_our_family_tree\/"},"modified":"2007-08-17T16:00:24","modified_gmt":"2007-08-17T04:00:24","slug":"extending-our-family-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2007\/08\/extending-our-family-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"Extending our family tree?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span><font size=\"+0\">You may have read the recent press coverage about the discovery of <em>Homo erectus<\/em> and <em>habilis <\/em>remains that suggest that these species coexisted for much longer than scientists had previously thought. The coverage was accompanied by&nbsp;headlines&nbsp;implying that the new finds&nbsp;overturned our current understanding of human evolution. But just how accurate is this?<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial\"><font>Combined with&nbsp;other material, the&nbsp;new fossils &#8211; a <em>habilis <\/em>upper jaw from around 1.44mya, and an older <em>erectus <\/em>skull cap &#8211; suggest that the two species coexisted&nbsp;for&nbsp;up&nbsp;to half a million years. The team that made the discoveries have interpreted this to mean that <em>erectus<\/em>&nbsp;could not have descended from <em>habilis<\/em>, but that the two species share&nbsp;an earlier, undiscovered common ancestor (Ann Gibbons (2007) &quot;New fossils challenge line of descent in human family tree&quot; <em>Science<\/em> <strong>317<\/strong>: 733). Not all scientists agree with this interpretation, with some commenting that having two species overlap in time&nbsp;does not mean that&nbsp;one couldn&#039;t evolve from the other.&nbsp;<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<p><font><span style=\"font-family: Arial\">So there&nbsp;seem to be two possible scenarios. Either <em>Homo&nbsp;habilis<\/em> is ancestral to <em>erectus<\/em>, but the two species diverged much earlier than previously thought.&nbsp;Or <em>erectus<\/em>&nbsp;did not&nbsp;evolve from <em>habilis<\/em> and&nbsp;instead the two share a common ancestor. But this second possibility&nbsp;does not overturn our current model of human evolution &#8211; it simply adds another branch to&nbsp;an already bushy family tree.<\/span><\/font><font><span style=\"font-family: Arial\">&nbsp;<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial\">&nbsp;<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You may have read the recent press coverage about the discovery of Homo erectus and habilis remains that suggest that these species coexisted for much longer than scientists had previously thought. The coverage was accompanied by&nbsp;headlines&nbsp;implying that the new finds&nbsp;overturned our current understanding of human evolution. But just how accurate is this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5,2],"tags":[3,12,4],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Extending our family tree? : BioBlog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2007\/08\/extending-our-family-tree\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Extending our family tree? : BioBlog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"You may have read the recent press coverage about the discovery of Homo erectus and habilis remains that suggest that these species coexisted for much longer than scientists had previously thought. 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