Goat wrote:you have to show that ERV is in other great apes but not in chimps.. that has not been shown to be true.
Even if it is shown, it would be simply explained as a deletion in the chimp line.
At the risk of repeating ad infinitum, here are the list of homo sapien predecessors
Australopithecus robustus
Australopithecus boisei
Homo habilis
Homo georgicus
Homo erectus
Homo ergaster
Homo antecessor
Homo heidelbergensis
Homo sapiens sapiensWhat exactly are you claiming with this list of hominids?
You made a claim ‘We don’t know what the human ancestors were’, I just gave you the list of the human ancestors. That is the human LINEAGE. You said we don’t know, I just showed we do.
OK, let’s look at the list of supposed human ancestors…
Australopithecus (Paranthropus) robustus
Not a human ancestor.
The pair, named Orpheus and Eurydice after the Greek mythological lovers, are 1.5 million to 2 million years old and have been identified as Paranthropus robustus, a hominid line that went extinct about 1 million years ago.
“They are not direct ancestors of modern humans but are more like ‘kissing cousins’ of our ancestors,” Lee Berger said after a news conference, where the pair — discovered in 1994 but revealed only now — were put on public display for the first time.
http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news195.htm
This species, Paranthropus robustus, seems to have died out leaving no descendants.
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permane … umans6.php
Australopithecus boisei
Not a human ancestor.
Australopithecus aethiopicus, robustus and boisei are known as robust australopithecines, because their skulls in particular are more heavily built. They have never been serious candidates for being direct human ancestors.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/sp … tml#boisei
Homo habilis
Not a human ancestor.
Debates continue over whether H. habilis is a direct human ancestor, and whether all of the known fossils are properly attributed to the species. However, in 2007, new findings suggest that the two species coexisted and may be separate lineages from a common ancestor instead of H. erectus being descended from H. habilis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis
Meave Leakey, of the Koobi Fora Research Project, who led the discovery team with her daughter, Louise Leakey, said: “Their co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis. The fact that they stayed separate as individual species for a long time suggests that they had their own ecological niche, thus avoiding direct competition.�
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/s … 224912.ece
The dates for erectus have become earlier and earlier, while habilis remains have been found in later and later deposits, making a lineage involving habilis ancestral to erectus increasingly unlikely.
http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/homoerectus.htm
Homo georgicus
Dubious if a human ancestor.
it has been suggested that Homo georgicus represents a link between the two (with an age of about 1.8 million years, the remains of H. georgicus date to a period when H. habilis and H. erectus overlapped in time). However, this proposal has not gained acceptance.
For the present, it’s fair to say only that H. georgicus represents a new and perplexing twig on the hominid bush.
http://www.macroevolution.net/homo-georgicus.html
Homo erectus
No consensus on classification, ancestry, and progeny.
There is still disagreement on the subject of the classification, ancestry, and progeny of H. erectus, with two major alternative hypotheses: erectus may be another name for Homo ergaster, and therefore the direct ancestor of later hominids such as Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens; or it may be an Asian species distinct from African ergaster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus
Accordingly, erectus is one of the better-known members of genus Homo, especially in terms of its well-established place in paleoanthropology. This has begun to change, however, and now some question its place in human evolution.
http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/homoerectus.htm
Is possible that it is human.
Those who see erectus as a modern human ancestor, either see the Asian specimens as a dead-end side branch, or see all the ergaster, heidelbergensis, and erectus specimens as belonging to Homo sapiens.
http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/homoerectus.htm
This further implies that H. sapiens and H. erectus are one and the same species which is changing gradually with time, and any species disctinctions made in it are entirely arbitrary and have no biological meaning.
Homo ergaster
Unsure if it is a human ancestor.
Homo ergaster is one of the more problematic of somewhat accepted species designations currently tossed around in anthropological literature. Each individual researcher that sees ergaster as a valid taxon sees different specimens as belonging or not belonging to the taxon. Many researchers deny any validity to the species at all. On the whole though, most researchers see too little difference between ergaster and erectus to form the basis of a species of the former, separated from the latter. As a general rule of thumb, one can consider most attributed ergaster specimens to be early erectus geographically confined to Africa (however, this is not a hard and fast rule).
http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/homoergaster.htm
Erectus and ergaster cannot both be human ancestors.
Those who accept the validity of ergaster usually consider erectus an evolutionary dead-end that went from Africa into Asia, and went extinct there.
http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/homoerectus.htm
Homo antecessor
There is conflicting views on homo antecessor.
Some sources say that it is not an ancestor of humans.
She has been tentatively identified as a member of a species called Homo antecessor, or “pioneer man�, and lived 300,000 to 400,000 years before any other early humans — or hominins — are known to have reached Western Europe.
These first Europeans, however, are unlikely to have been direct ancestors of Homo sapiens.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/s … 626645.ece
Neither this view nor Homo antecessor as a species is widely accepted. Many believe that H. antecessor is an ofshoot of Homo ergaster and that it died off without issue, possibly during the glacial periods of 800,000-600,000 years ago.
http://www.christopherseddon.com/2008/1 … essor.html
Another says that it is actually human.
Homo antecessor is an extinct human species (or subspecies) dating from 1.2 million to 800,000 years ago, that was discovered by Eudald Carbonell, J. L. Arsuaga and J. M. Bermúdez de Castro. H. antecessor is one of the earliest known human varieties in Europe. Various archaeologists and anthropologists have debated how H. antecessor related to other Homo species in Europe, with suggestions that it was an evolutionary link between H. ergaster and H. heidelbergensis, although Richard Klein believes that it was instead a separate species that evolved from H. ergaster.[1] Others[who?] believe that H. antecessor is in fact the same species as H. heidelbergensis, who inhabited Europe from 600,000 to 250,000 years ago in the Pleistocene.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_antecessor
Also, Homo antecessor and Home erectus cannot both be in the human linage:
If the Gran Dolina (Homo antecessor) fossils do represent a new species, the human family tree must be revised. … In this scenario both Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis are off the line leading to modern humans.
http://www.archaeology.org/online/news/gran.dolina.html
http://100falcons.wordpress.com/2009/06 … ntecessor/
Homo heidelbergensis
There is also conflicting views on Homo heidelbergensis.
There is not a general agreement at this time as to how Homo heidelbergensis fossils should be classified. Some paleoanthropologists prefer to classify the more recent ones as archaic humans or archaic Homo Sapiens. Likewise, some of the earliest Homo heidelbergensis are classified as Homo antecessor or even late transitional Homo erectus.
http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_1.htm
The status of Homo heidelbergensis as a distinct type of hominid is controversial. Many researchers maintain the facts disallow any clear distinction between Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens. They say that heidelbergensis is simply a name imposed by humans on fossils that should be regarded as transitional and that specimens assigned this name should in fact be regarded as either “late Homo erectus” or “archaic Homo sapiens.”
http://www.macroevolution.net/homo-heidelbergensis.html
It could be that Homo heidelbergensis was actually human. And it’s interesting that Homo heidelbergensis was actually larger than modern humans.
But because H. heidelbergensis had a larger brain-case — with a typical cranial volume of 1100–1400 cm³ overlapping the 1350 cm³ average of modern humans — and had more advanced tools and behavior, it has been given a separate species classification. The species was tall, 1.8 m (6 ft) on average, and more muscular than modern humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis
These digs have uncovered large numbers of tools, along with the evidence of hunting, the use of fire, and burial practices. Homo heidelbergensis may have been one of the first hominids to bury the dead, and archaeologists have also found evidence of other cultural rituals.
Homo heidelbergensis had a larger brain when compared to other hominid species, and a body type which appears to be very similar to that of modern humans, although Homo heidelbergensis was somewhat taller.
https://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=315829#p315829