Scientists find 7.2M-year-old pre-human remains in the Balkans

Re:Scientists find 7.2M-year-old pre-human remains in the Ba... by davewasthere on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @02:03AM (#14399137)

We have chimps, and we have humans. But both of us share a common ancestor. At some point, we split into two different evolutionary lines. And it's _where_, geographically, we split that is under some investigation.

Current school of thought, we think that man originated in Africa. But this recent finding (based off of a partial skull fragment) shows that non-chimp pre-humans existed in Europe, possibly hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously theorised.

This means the split may have happened in Europe, as that is now the earliest evidence of pre-human remains.

(that's how I understand it, at least)

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Re:Scientists find 7.2M-year-old pre-human remains in the Ba... by nandemo on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @03:19AM (#14399454)

How do they know it's an ancestor instead of just a node that has a common ancestor with Homo sapiens?

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Re:Scientists find 7.2M-year-old pre-human remains in the Ba... by LyndsySimon on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @08:53AM (#14400716)

I don't think they do, and I didn't see a claim in the article that this species is a direct ancestor of homo sapiens - only that we are very closely related and that they were found where we didn't expect them to be.

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