Modern ape? Do you call people modern apes even WHEN they disagree with you? Are you misspeieciating, in essence, insulting them? did you know EVOLution is/was a satanic lie/tool that has lead to self hate, division, hatred, etc...
@@KaiHenningsen How European, to always misunderstand Americans so badly. We Americans, like everyone else in the world, are fascinated by WHO our ancestors were. But as a nation of immigrants, in learning about WHO our ancestors were, we must perforce also learn about WHERE our ancestors came from. But, the WHO is always more important than the WHERE.
I'm a past member of the Cave Research Foundation, and the Gutsick Gibbon series reminds me of nothing so much as the actual physical and social scientists I supported while crawling around with survey instruments in Mammoth Cave. You could go on a fourteen hour trip with them, ask a scientific question at breakfast on the surface, and they'd still be going when you crawled out of the cave 14 hours later. A whole graduate seminar in a day -- it was heaven. Loving the ongoing seminar in the very latest finds, thank you.
I used to build and partially engineer custom lab equipment for physicists, biophysicists, biologists, chemists... (Wave tech) and got a free education from them too. I mean what does an electrical/mechanical engineer do with questions like: "Can it detect hyper-enzymatic bonds in mono-glyceric proteins"?🤔What am I to say? "I guess that depends on their mating habits?"😂😜
Evolution predicts that there will be species that are really hard to categorize. It is only easy to divide things when there are gaps. And the more fossils we find, the smaller the gaps.
I really like these. Do more. Also, don’t stop doing the debunking episodes. On a serious point, we need more of these informed literature reviews on UA-cam. They make an excellent step to counter the sensationalist nature of scientific journalism.
I only just barely understand the words coming out of her mouth, and yet by the end of the video I understand the overall message. The transition from Australopithecus to modern humans is overlapping and even smoother than I thought. Brilliant lesson. Amazing young lady.
do you think you are a victim of mind control? can you feel the earth's supposed tilt? can you feel/hear/see the supposed spin and velocity change when you travel? much love.. want to wake you from the matrix... you are the next neo.. if you chose.. your family is counting on you@@Scanner9631
Well @@SolracCAPno, it isn't really arbitrary, but there's definitely wiggle-room there. Take, for example, the hybrid progeny of a lion and a tiger. Or a horse and a donkey, or a horse and a zebra, for that matter. Different species aren't *supposed* to be able to breed, and yet those hybrids exist. Now, would the first cross, a lion and tiger, ever happen in the wild, should they cross paths at the right time? Nah, they're just not similar enough to be interested. So that division is a bit more logical. The horse with either the zebra or donkey, though? The first one I'm not sure about, but I do know the second cross has been done for hundreds, if not thousands of years, to get mules, which are very good beasts of burden. In fact, there arises - very rarely, yet still existent - Jennies, the female hybrids, CAN be FERTILE, which definitely shouldn't be, when it comes to species divisions. And yet, there are many differences between the horse and the donkey, physiologically - I couldn't list then, because I'm not even close to an expert. I have seen the successful birth of the Jenny's baby, and lived just down the road from the people that had her, and was friends with three of the children there. I also knew (the kids of) the farmer next door whose stallion broke down the fence to ... "woo" the Jenny. The colt seemed to be perfectly normal and healthy. The best part was that it and the Jenny earned that family a very nice chunk of money, which they badly needed! So is it arbitrary? No, but the lines do definitely blur in places.
I wish I could Like this an unlimited number of times. You always make high-level paleoanthropology exciting enough that I wish I had someone in my own life with whom I could talk about the topics and papers and academic hot takes highlighted in your videos. You're an intellectual oasis.
Even a certain fish uses a natural anvil as a tool to break shells by holding the shells in it's mouth and smashing them against the anvil... 45 minutes is indeed brief for Gutsick Gibbon video, always worth the time it takes to watch your videos though... even when they're 3 hours long.
I'm a recently retired pharmacist, with a lot of science education but no experience in palentology. I have an interest in this field & have learned lots from your videos! Thank you!
Commenting for the algorithm! Also: Erika is my hero. Has really helped in my understanding of my field as I approach getting my masters in a psychological field. It’s been really interesting to make the connections between the early human species and our modern day behavior. Keep on being the rockstar you are!
You may find an interest in the book "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow. Some provocative ideas of late prehistory adaptations and its implications for modern bipedal apes.
Agree, I'm interested in how Erica is going to assess sexual dimorphism in the fossil record. She touched a teeny bit on this in her discussion of H.habilis/rudolfensis. It also was a huge issue in the Ramapithecus/Sivapithecus debate. Were these two (or more) monomorphic taxa with little sexual dimorphism? Or was the population and each species sexually dimorphic with a wide range of individual variation (like orangutans). I think that the paired species case was challenge 44:37 d on the fact that Rama and Siva were typically found in the same sites, ecologies and over the same time range. Erica earlier mentioned that the recent paper by Begun et al on Miocene apes had a taxa Anodiluvius with reduced canines and canine dimorphism...how determined? Is this falling back into the Ramapithecus fallacy? Maybe Anodaluvius are two allometrically differentiated species but a female-female contrast. That would explain the small canines. They are just Ano. sp. A and Ano. sp. B both females. That would have a 50-50 change vs. getting a large male-small female pairing (the other possibility being a male-male pairing). It would also be cladistically more parsimonious with fewer lineages independently evolving small canines (generally attributed to tool-making/scavenging).
Just referred your channel to my daughter. I’ve been enjoying the quality and even the length of your excellent output, couldn’t bear thinking she might not know of you. Thanks, Erika.
One of the best science communicators on UA-cam. The way you bring your expertise via these in depth literature reviews, your examples and timely explanations of terms those outside the field will struggle with, and your clear passion and engaging style are fantastic to watch. Like (probably) most on the channel I came for the entertaining and informative YEC debunks but stayed for the incredible learning on these videos about the progress in your field. I cant wait for more.
Before I found this channel I had no idea that the minutiae of early homo morphology would be so fascinating. I suspect it helps that your ebullience can carry me through a lengthy exposition and still feel disappointed that it has come to a close. Thank you.
Great video! Like these "short" ones.:) . More generally, your channel is allowing me to keep up with the latest research in the field, which means the world to me. I appreciate your laid-back approach. You don't talk down to us, yet also explain broad concepts that sometimes authors allude to in papers that may not be clear to lay people.
This discussion brings to mind the excellent video in which Erika explains what is politely referred to as "the species problem". The reality is that this problem in a broader sense, is not confined only to species. It extends to every level of Linnaean classification - that is to say, they are ALL inherently arbitrary groupings - as she mentions at the end of this video and alludes to in general within it, and which the paper acknowledges itself, the "genus" that a "species" is placed in simply boils down to how one chooses to define a particular genus, and this is by necessity an arbitrary exercise. I don't think it would be incorrect to say that the entire system of Linnaean taxonomy, as a method of discrete classification is unequivocally closer, both "genetically" and "morphologically" to the "created kinds" system of grouping organisms, than either are to a proper evolutionary tree. Both of these systems are deeply rooted in their creators' interpretations of Christian theology, and neither have any universally applicable objective basis, and worse yet, they imply inaccurate relationships and divisions among organisms that do not exist, yet discussions like the one GG has kindly looped us in on here continue to take place among professional researchers and scientists, despite being decidedly moot. This is not intended as a smear of Carl Linnaeus, or for that matter the academy, or any Young Earth Creationists arguing for discrete "kinds" of life today. But ideally, my hope would be that it should serve as a gentle reminder that professional academia (or "Science" itself with a capital S, as it tends to be equated with, when we reach for a convenient cudgel with which to dismiss dissenting views), from it's origins all the way to the present day and beyond, is far from infallible in it's ability to meaningfully and accurately conceptualize and describe the universe around us, and there is a real danger in outsourcing one's critical thinking faculties to the experts, as we are so often admonished to do, despite the more specialized knowledge they possess. We should always remember that science, like all methods of inquiry, still relies on human judgement when interpreting and describing data and relationships - what was good science yesterday can in many cases be considered pseudo-science today, and that extends to the fundamental ways in which we organize our descriptions of the world around us, lest we be tempted to think that "the scientific consensus" at any given point in time, namely the present, constitutes some sort of immutable line between respectable and nonsense beliefs. Linnaean taxonomy as a whole may well have been a great leap forward, but it's far past time to once and for all accept its irreconcilable faults in full, instead of clinging to its vestiges out of stubbornness. Objectively, there is no such thing as a phylum, family, genus, etc. There are only clades, and even clades are something of a simplification.
"Objectively, there is no such thing as a phylum, family, genus, etc. " humans are won't to classify things, and to make a distinction between a lion and a tiger, or a cat and a dog, you're gonna need a system akin t what we have now. you can tell folks all you want that alligators and snakes are not even remotely related to each other, but they do fit in the group 'reptiles' in a useful way. you have a better case for scientists discarding that than others, but still.
Thank you for treating your audience like intelligent modern apes! I think you pitch your videos just right, introducing or reconfirming technical terms, and working with them in a dynamic, rather than rote manner, which shows that you're all over your subject. Your passion for palaeoanthropology is infectious and your clear thinking and rationality make you easy to trust as a source of information, in a sometimes controversial field. You add to the world. Your channel is just a really cool contribution.
Watching these videos feels like I'm hanging out with an incredibly smart friend who loves to talk about their passions. Most other bio/paleo channels don't have this vibe, so glad to be here!
I remember reading (I think in one of the then-quarter-century-old Donald Johanson books my high school library had, and he had a bit of a beef with the Leakeys if memory serves) that the naming of H. habilis rested on the pretty humanish skull and everyone was pretty surprised to see the more basal postcranial skeleton. Taxonomy has always been weird as hell.
My undergraduate Mammalogy professor used to do work on Z. princeps, Mexican Jumping Mice. He needed thousands of specimens to work out a new species. He didn’t think much of the way anthropology was headed back then.
Thank you for your excellent videos, I really appreciate you taking us deep into the weeds on these research papers, and especially your explanations and insights. I see the same kind of issue with differentiating species also coming up when trying to differentiate animate matter from inanimate matter. Like you say in the video (paraphrasing), 'there's a spectrum, this is what we should expect from evolution, it was clear to Darwin'. What do you think about the animate/inanimate debate?
Am finding perusal of older skeletal finds difficult with Rising Star thought taking up so much real estate. We are the ones who seek to look at teenage bones and figure out how they must have behaved like in high school, are again left with more questions than answers. Good job as always to E the Homonid
I'm an elderly anthropoid with some time on his hands and I greatly enjoyed your excellent distillation of the rise of Homo. Harking back to my long-ago youth, I seem to recall that the prevailing view of the australopiths was that they were an evolutionary dead-end - a "primitive" side-branch of the line leading to Homo, but not directly ancestral to modern man. Even as a kid reading "Adam's Ancestors" in the 1960s (along with anything else I could get my hands on), I never really embraced the apparently outdated dichotomy divorcing early Homo from the australopithecines. Although natural selection is by its nature somewhat messy, it is all of a piece and the progression of one species adapting so successfully that it spawns a new genus is nothing new in the fossil record. I'm sure my understanding of your presentation is less than perfect, but I totally agree with it anyway. It seems that Darwin had a pretty good grasp of this evolution business after all.
If you notice they kind of guess about this stuff only to overturn their suppositions subsequent to some new discovery. Are the expert guesses any better than the common person, maybe or maybe not. I’d love to work in an industry where the stuff is made up, write your own history. We’re here, we came from the first cell that successfully reproduced, we ate & mated with whatever, DNA mixed around, we’re just a great ape species that runs our world for now, evolution chugs on until it doesn’t.
a friend in my archaeology class recommended this channel to me as i am interested in bioarchaeology (and just bones in general, paleoanthropology is super interesting to me!) and i loved this video! thank you for this, and i am definitely subscribing!
I really really like these literature overview type videos. I mainly know about dinosaur paleontology, but it's always interesting to see the parallels, especially when it comes to mosaic evolution and where to draw the line. Also fun that hominin evolution is used as a primary example to explain the concept!
Really interesting educational video. Classifications are all arbitrary and should be changed if they're confusing or not useful. This is the "is Pluto a planet?" discussion for our human ancestors.
It's really a quite common issue in science, we have to try to categorize the universe because otherwise it is impossible to talk about, literally since we attach names to the categories. However the universe of course does not have any clear boundaries so our categories can present problems, which raises the question of whether changing them is worth the inevitable confusion the change will cause.
I’m sorry I took four days to click this. I know it’s worse for the algorithm, but I really value the information and needed to make sure I could pay attention. Thanks, Erika.
I think that one problem is that as valuable as it is, the Linnaean taxonomic system was developed in a world of idealism...species were "created kinds with variation encompassed only within that kind". So because it was a system that failed to deal with the transformation of characteristics between species...that was doubly true of series of species between higher taxes (genera, families, etc). Cladistics are useful to distinguishing between taxa that have shared or derived features vs. retaining the older plesiomorphic traits. But minor traits (or even neutral traits) can differentiate a clade. Grade classifications (based upon traits we, post hoc define as the adaptive shift (that may be features that we only recognize as important in subsequent groups) will thus exclude cladistically linked groups and put them in a grade-based adaptive group. Another issue is that all these classifications are based upon our alpha taxonomies. I have lost my maxillary lateral incisors. It runs in half my peers and some of my nieces and nephews exhibit this. This might be used as a sufficient synapomorphy to characterise an extinct species. Many orangutans have supernumerary M4's. It's clear that these derive from the same populations as those with M3's. It's just an individual variant. Throw in the debate over whether the traits are allometric or sexually dimorphic (as in the discussion of whether H. habilis or H. rudolfensis are female-male) makes it very critical to compare appropriate pairings. One should compare the female A. africanus with those we assign to female H. habilis and male A. africanus with male H. habilis. And all these with appropriately early (contemporary) H.erectus. It doesn't surprise me that H.habilis will demonstrate a bevy of intermediate derived traits but not in all characteristics. This is simply "mosaic evolution". I did find it interesting that specimens of H. habilis show molar crown morphology that have some uniquely derived features (autapomorphies). BTW isn't KNM-ER 1470 edentulous..so no EDJ? For me, we should simply recognize that the Idealist-based Linnaean taxonomy is not always useful in discussing evolutionary change. Species and Genera didn't simply explode in being. And traits that once "defined" an extent taxon will need revision and should not be expected to be emergent all at once. With an increasing number of fossil representatives that approach the morphotype/common ancestor placement within one or other group will become increasingly arbitrary. Much like trying to define where a ring-species "transitions" or trying to define how much interhybridity is definitive of two populations being worthy of being defined as distinct species this is as much a pre-existant philosophical issue (lumper, splitter) or based on the feature or characters we are using to make our assessments. Does the classification obscure the reality or does it exaggerate it...or do the authors acknowledge that there is transition? That's all that really matters.
You make me want to go back to grad school. I say this as a person who was an abject failure and had to run away with my head on fire and reputation demolished. But your zeal for exploring and discussing findings in your field reminds me of the best parts of graduate school and you have me pining for them. Maybe this time I'll go into anthropology instead of birds...
The discussion is more important in getting the boundaries "right" the actual line in the end becomes somewhat arbitrary, The discussion leads to a review of the facts. The lines are drawn for convenience of understanding those facts. Keep up the good work !!!
The thing I take from this for my self is simply. What we call something and where we categorize it might be useful to us. But it is still just a useful tool that does not in any way represent how evolution works. If evolution were an entity to be asked, she would just laugh and say it's just change all the way down. And any distinct categories are imposed by you humans and reflective of nothing but your own needs and ambitions. So enjoy them, but don't take yourselves too seriously.
Funny enough I had a whole TikTok Debate with my friend who is an anthropology major on this topic. I took the position that homo habilis should be apart of the genus Australopithecus due to the great number of basal skull morphology. While my friend argued for the standard notion of homo Habilis as its own unique homo species. Anthropology is a fun field of study but a nightmare sometimes.
As a complete outsider, I find it kinda funny. The whole point of it is that there is not a line between humans and apes, yet the debate over whether to place a species in Homo rages. I get the importance, but does it really matter if shade of yellow-orange #15 is put in the more-orange-yet-still-yellow category or the more-yellow-yet-still-orange category?
I get you there, it was a great little bit. I suspect it was taken out because long intros often don't do very well in terms of engagement, or there was some sort of licensing issue, or she just got tired of it. By the way, the song is The Mind Electric by Miracle Musical (tally hall), slowed down by about 20% or so
A lot of creators have started phasing out the intros in the past couple of years or so, because I suspect too many people skip past it to be worth it.
Another problem that this "adaptive strategy" or "gradistics" system has is that it's biased to the fact that we're the only members of our clade (or grade) that is still extant! Imagine if descendants more closely related to habilis, descendants more closely related to floresiensis, descendants to ergaster, and descendants to antecessor were all extant along side us. They were all also in our lineage that led to our increased brain case size, so what about them developing the same cultures as us as we both exist simultaneously together, each creating influences on the other? And what about convergent evolution or even convergent cultural practices? If a descendant of chimpanzee, gorilla, cercopithecid, or other organism eventually develops larger or more complex brains capable of the behaviors we're capable of, do they suddenly get classified as the same grade? Grades seem to ignore ancestry, not unlike polyphyly, which means otherwise drastically different organisms are now classified closer to one another than their genetic relatives!
A while back you did a video about how "species don't exist." This video sounded to me like 45 minutes of exactly that same notion, especially around the 30-minute mark. Nice work. Thanks for your efforts.
As Richard Dawkins puts it, if you lined up every ancestor up back to the ancestral ape it would be completely impossible to draw a line between any two of them in order to delineate a species or a genus. It is possible, of course, that evolution "jerked" so that an environmental change created a stronger than average selection pressure resulting in a temporary speeding up of evolution - a kind of punctuated equilibria effect - and the bushiness of phylogenetic relationships in the hominin line make it even more complicated, but Dawkins' interpretation must ultimately be right, so I agree with all you say. Well done.
Loved this, Erika! I learned more from you in your lightning review of habilis's intermediate characteristics than in a year of looking for information. Can you recommend a book or review paper that covers this, especially post-cranial morphology?
As a human primate living in the 21st century it makes me happy learning about our non human primate ancestors and relatives. Makes me feel like i have a bigger branch in the family tree of life.
EDJ is where dentin and enamel meet. I didn't catch that at first because it is such a dense [to me] paper. Initialisms take time for me to incorporate it I guess. Keep up the great analyses.
At one point you alluded to the idea that we humans seem to have a distinct predilection for placing a line between "apes" and "humans". I would absolutely agree... and I think that there are actually several good reasons (for this desire... not for assuming it to be a fact). Basically, a huge part of the world view of our modern society is based on the idea that "humans" are DIFFERENT than "non-humans". 1. For religious believers that difference is often the equivalence of "having a soul". 2. For many others, it's simply a matter of the difference between "human rights" and "animal rights", which is more comfortable when we have a bright line. (If a male homo habilis were to step out of a time portal tomorrow would we put him or her in a cage or find them a good human rights lawyer?) I also have little doubt that questioning that bright line in evolutionary history tends to make us uneasy about the current question of animal rights. (If one of our ancestors who was "less human than a chimp" is granted the official status of "human" then how can we reasonably deny that to a modern chimp?)
It strikes me that if our fossil record was entirely complete with every transitional imaginable found and described, the field of phylogeny as we know it today would kinda collapse. Genus and species are our constructs, we like to sort things. They are helpful to facilitate discussion, but dont mean anything outside of our minds. We could talk about degrees of relatedness, but you would never be able to build a tree structure because it would be near infinite in complexity. That way of visualising connections is almost more useful the less complete it is. It works as a model entirely because of the gaps in our record
Excellent summary of the genus Homo debate. Have you read Villmoare's follow up paper from 2018? I found it quite interesting because he essentially reinvents for paleoanthropology the way taxa are defined in paleontology without seeming to realize that the paleontological literature exists--that because (as you say in the video) traits are evolutionarily labile, only shared ancestry can represent a true definition (as opposed to diagnosis/description) of a fossil taxon. See for example, Rowe 1987 from 30 years prior: "Characters may be assembled to diagnose a taxon once it has been defined, but ancestry alone is both necessary and sufficient for taxon membership in the phylogenetic system." Villmoare (2018) gives the only true definition (in this sense) of the genus Homo that I'm aware of, defining it as 'Homo consists of all species (and unnamed specimens) subsequent to the divergence from Paranthropus'. I think this also goes a long way toward indicating why he was confident in assigning the Ledi Geraru mandible to the genus Homo but not to Homo habilis. Rowe, T., 1987. Definition and diagnosis in the phylogenetic system. Systematic Zoology. 36, 208-211. Villmoare, B., 2018. Early Homo and the role of the genus in paleoanthropology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 165, 72-89.
As a modern ape interested in modern apes and their ancestors, I appreciate that you provide this free educational service. Thank you.
I have learned SO much from her channel!
How American, always interested in where their ancestors came from ... 😇
Modern ape? Do you call people modern apes even WHEN they disagree with you? Are you misspeieciating, in essence, insulting them? did you know EVOLution is/was a satanic lie/tool that has lead to self hate, division, hatred, etc...
@@KaiHenningsen How European, to always misunderstand Americans so badly. We Americans, like everyone else in the world, are fascinated by WHO our ancestors were. But as a nation of immigrants, in learning about WHO our ancestors were, we must perforce also learn about WHERE our ancestors came from. But, the WHO is always more important than the WHERE.
@@KaiHenningsen How trolly, to twist a statement and insert meaning into it that wasn't there in the first place.
I'm a past member of the Cave Research Foundation, and the Gutsick Gibbon series reminds me of nothing so much as the actual physical and social scientists I supported while crawling around with survey instruments in Mammoth Cave. You could go on a fourteen hour trip with them, ask a scientific question at breakfast on the surface, and they'd still be going when you crawled out of the cave 14 hours later. A whole graduate seminar in a day -- it was heaven. Loving the ongoing seminar in the very latest finds, thank you.
I used to build and partially engineer custom lab equipment for physicists, biophysicists, biologists, chemists... (Wave tech) and got a free education from them too. I mean what does an electrical/mechanical engineer do with questions like: "Can it detect hyper-enzymatic bonds in mono-glyceric proteins"?🤔What am I to say? "I guess that depends on their mating habits?"😂😜
Evolution predicts that there will be species that are really hard to categorize.
It is only easy to divide things when there are gaps.
And the more fossils we find, the smaller the gaps.
What is the common ancestor of the Platypus and Echidna since they are both Monotremes?
@@hwd71as of yet unknown
Time of the Gaps theory
@@hwd71 You want to know the exact common ancestor? Or you're asking for some other reason?
Just like modern humans and the modern budding subspecies
last time i was this early, the pilthdown man was just ken ham in a gorilla suit
😂
Isn't he still in a gorilla suit 🦍
I would pay to see that 😂
@@SaltySeattleCyclist I don’t really believe you are a danger to society
@@joejiggity6075He looks far more primitive than a gorilla
You're the best kind of gatekeeper, the kind that helps people through the gate.
I really like these. Do more. Also, don’t stop doing the debunking episodes. On a serious point, we need more of these informed literature reviews on UA-cam. They make an excellent step to counter the sensationalist nature of scientific journalism.
This video should be worth a couple credits in any university.
How different my life would be if I had Gutsick Gibbon videos as part of my high school curriculum... the path, sadly, not travelled.
@@Where_is_Waldo - I agree. B^(
I only just barely understand the words coming out of her mouth, and yet by the end of the video I understand the overall message. The transition from Australopithecus to modern humans is overlapping and even smoother than I thought. Brilliant lesson. Amazing young lady.
earth is flat..
@@TakingBackEdenFE
Ever seen a mountain?
do you think you are a victim of mind control? can you feel the earth's supposed tilt? can you feel/hear/see the supposed spin and velocity change when you travel? much love.. want to wake you from the matrix... you are the next neo.. if you chose.. your family is counting on you@@Scanner9631
Hey Erika, thanks for creating more educational content. it really brings me joy to have such great information and analysis for free.
This seems like further illustration of how nature doesn’t give a fig about our efforts to classify it.
"The Mysteries"!
The real question is “if H. Habilis were alive today, would it care?
Nature doesn't care about anything. Only the one who created nature cares.
It really does seem arbitrary the way we go about it lol
Well @@SolracCAPno, it isn't really arbitrary, but there's definitely wiggle-room there. Take, for example, the hybrid progeny of a lion and a tiger. Or a horse and a donkey, or a horse and a zebra, for that matter. Different species aren't *supposed* to be able to breed, and yet those hybrids exist.
Now, would the first cross, a lion and tiger, ever happen in the wild, should they cross paths at the right time? Nah, they're just not similar enough to be interested. So that division is a bit more logical.
The horse with either the zebra or donkey, though? The first one I'm not sure about, but I do know the second cross has been done for hundreds, if not thousands of years, to get mules, which are very good beasts of burden. In fact, there arises - very rarely, yet still existent - Jennies, the female hybrids, CAN be FERTILE, which definitely shouldn't be, when it comes to species divisions.
And yet, there are many differences between the horse and the donkey, physiologically - I couldn't list then, because I'm not even close to an expert. I have seen the successful birth of the Jenny's baby, and lived just down the road from the people that had her, and was friends with three of the children there.
I also knew (the kids of) the farmer next door whose stallion broke down the fence to ... "woo" the Jenny. The colt seemed to be perfectly normal and healthy. The best part was that it and the Jenny earned that family a very nice chunk of money, which they badly needed!
So is it arbitrary? No, but the lines do definitely blur in places.
I wish I could Like this an unlimited number of times. You always make high-level paleoanthropology exciting enough that I wish I had someone in my own life with whom I could talk about the topics and papers and academic hot takes highlighted in your videos. You're an intellectual oasis.
earth is flat
the earth is flat@@TheMcspreader
To paraphrase Gandalf, "a GutsickGibon video is never short, nor is it long, it is the exact length it needs to be."
Even a certain fish uses a natural anvil as a tool to break shells by holding the shells in it's mouth and smashing them against the anvil... 45 minutes is indeed brief for Gutsick Gibbon video, always worth the time it takes to watch your videos though... even when they're 3 hours long.
I'm a recently retired pharmacist, with a lot of science education but no experience in palentology. I have an interest in this field & have learned lots from your videos! Thank you!
I do miss the old intro. Great vid as always and a good talk about the gaps narrowing and cladistics.
Commenting for the algorithm!
Also: Erika is my hero. Has really helped in my understanding of my field as I approach getting my masters in a psychological field. It’s been really interesting to make the connections between the early human species and our modern day behavior. Keep on being the rockstar you are!
You may find an interest in the book "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow. Some provocative ideas of late prehistory adaptations and its implications for modern bipedal apes.
I really enjoyed this video; one of the best dissertations addressing the fallacious "missing link" argument.
Love it when we get educational content! University has started again and I'm stressed, so this will help me relax.
Agree, I'm interested in how Erica is going to assess sexual dimorphism in the fossil record. She touched a teeny bit on this in her discussion of H.habilis/rudolfensis. It also was a huge issue in the Ramapithecus/Sivapithecus debate. Were these two (or more) monomorphic taxa with little sexual dimorphism? Or was the population and each species sexually dimorphic with a wide range of individual variation (like orangutans).
I think that the paired species case was challenge 44:37 d on the fact that Rama and Siva were typically found in the same sites, ecologies and over the same time range.
Erica earlier mentioned that the recent paper by Begun et al on Miocene apes had a taxa Anodiluvius with reduced canines and canine dimorphism...how determined? Is this falling back into the Ramapithecus fallacy? Maybe Anodaluvius are two allometrically differentiated species but a female-female contrast. That would explain the small canines. They are just Ano. sp. A and Ano. sp. B both females. That would have a 50-50 change vs. getting a large male-small female pairing (the other possibility being a male-male pairing). It would also be cladistically more parsimonious with fewer lineages independently evolving small canines (generally attributed to tool-making/scavenging).
@@gerrelldrawhorn8975 Ditto
Thank you Erika for sharing your wealth of knowledge with us. History of humanity's roots is fascinating and complicated.
Just referred your channel to my daughter. I’ve been enjoying the quality and even the length of your excellent output, couldn’t bear thinking she might not know of you. Thanks, Erika.
earth is flat
@mwflanagan1 - Nice!
Being allowed to sit in on one of your classes for a bit is a real treat, like the Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Yale Open Courses or a good TED talk.
I understood very little of this, but I still enjoyed listening to you explaining it. This channel never fails to teach me something.
One of the best science communicators on UA-cam. The way you bring your expertise via these in depth literature reviews, your examples and timely explanations of terms those outside the field will struggle with, and your clear passion and engaging style are fantastic to watch.
Like (probably) most on the channel I came for the entertaining and informative YEC debunks but stayed for the incredible learning on these videos about the progress in your field. I cant wait for more.
I love these short, bite-sized videos. The epitome of brevity.
Nice coming off watching thirty-second tiktok videos titled "watch till the end"
I don't know if I'd call a 45 minute talk short and bite sized though.
I blinked and I misses it. Had to rewatch.
@@whatabouttheearth I don't know if I'd call a 45 minute talk short and bite sized though.
For a big topic this is a small talk.
@@whatabouttheearth - Compare this length to some of her others at 3+ hours! Its whiplash size.
Marvelous lecture, affably enlightening, deepening my understanding that evolution is a long, very protracted process..
Before I found this channel I had no idea that the minutiae of early homo morphology would be so fascinating. I suspect it helps that your ebullience can carry me through a lengthy exposition and still feel disappointed that it has come to a close. Thank you.
Holy crap I was just talking about this topic with a buddy! Interested to hear what you have to say
Great video! Like these "short" ones.:) . More generally, your channel is allowing me to keep up with the latest research in the field, which means the world to me. I appreciate your laid-back approach. You don't talk down to us, yet also explain broad concepts that sometimes authors allude to in papers that may not be clear to lay people.
Thanks for continuing to make these non-creationist related videos, I'm sure they don't perform as well, but I like them
New Gibbon drop to eat dinner to? Don't mind if I do!
This discussion brings to mind the excellent video in which Erika explains what is politely referred to as "the species problem". The reality is that this problem in a broader sense, is not confined only to species. It extends to every level of Linnaean classification - that is to say, they are ALL inherently arbitrary groupings - as she mentions at the end of this video and alludes to in general within it, and which the paper acknowledges itself, the "genus" that a "species" is placed in simply boils down to how one chooses to define a particular genus, and this is by necessity an arbitrary exercise.
I don't think it would be incorrect to say that the entire system of Linnaean taxonomy, as a method of discrete classification is unequivocally closer, both "genetically" and "morphologically" to the "created kinds" system of grouping organisms, than either are to a proper evolutionary tree. Both of these systems are deeply rooted in their creators' interpretations of Christian theology, and neither have any universally applicable objective basis, and worse yet, they imply inaccurate relationships and divisions among organisms that do not exist, yet discussions like the one GG has kindly looped us in on here continue to take place among professional researchers and scientists, despite being decidedly moot.
This is not intended as a smear of Carl Linnaeus, or for that matter the academy, or any Young Earth Creationists arguing for discrete "kinds" of life today. But ideally, my hope would be that it should serve as a gentle reminder that professional academia (or "Science" itself with a capital S, as it tends to be equated with, when we reach for a convenient cudgel with which to dismiss dissenting views), from it's origins all the way to the present day and beyond, is far from infallible in it's ability to meaningfully and accurately conceptualize and describe the universe around us, and there is a real danger in outsourcing one's critical thinking faculties to the experts, as we are so often admonished to do, despite the more specialized knowledge they possess. We should always remember that science, like all methods of inquiry, still relies on human judgement when interpreting and describing data and relationships - what was good science yesterday can in many cases be considered pseudo-science today, and that extends to the fundamental ways in which we organize our descriptions of the world around us, lest we be tempted to think that "the scientific consensus" at any given point in time, namely the present, constitutes some sort of immutable line between respectable and nonsense beliefs.
Linnaean taxonomy as a whole may well have been a great leap forward, but it's far past time to once and for all accept its irreconcilable faults in full, instead of clinging to its vestiges out of stubbornness.
Objectively, there is no such thing as a phylum, family, genus, etc. There are only clades, and even clades are something of a simplification.
"Objectively, there is no such thing as a phylum, family, genus, etc. "
humans are won't to classify things, and to make a distinction between a lion and a tiger, or a cat and a dog, you're gonna need a system akin t what we have now.
you can tell folks all you want that alligators and snakes are not even remotely related to each other, but they do fit in the group 'reptiles' in a useful way.
you have a better case for scientists discarding that than others, but still.
Keep it up, great work
Thank you for treating your audience like intelligent modern apes! I think you pitch your videos just right, introducing or reconfirming technical terms, and working with them in a dynamic, rather than rote manner, which shows that you're all over your subject.
Your passion for palaeoanthropology is infectious and your clear thinking and rationality make you easy to trust as a source of information, in a sometimes controversial field. You add to the world. Your channel is just a really cool contribution.
Watching these videos feels like I'm hanging out with an incredibly smart friend who loves to talk about their passions. Most other bio/paleo channels don't have this vibe, so glad to be here!
I remember reading (I think in one of the then-quarter-century-old Donald Johanson books my high school library had, and he had a bit of a beef with the Leakeys if memory serves) that the naming of H. habilis rested on the pretty humanish skull and everyone was pretty surprised to see the more basal postcranial skeleton. Taxonomy has always been weird as hell.
My undergraduate Mammalogy professor used to do work on Z. princeps, Mexican Jumping Mice. He needed thousands of specimens to work out a new species. He didn’t think much of the way anthropology was headed back then.
Always great to hear you explain things. Very easy to follow.
The speed with which I smashed this video when I saw it
earth is flat
Thank you for your excellent videos, I really appreciate you taking us deep into the weeds on these research papers, and especially your explanations and insights.
I see the same kind of issue with differentiating species also coming up when trying to differentiate animate matter from inanimate matter.
Like you say in the video (paraphrasing), 'there's a spectrum, this is what we should expect from evolution, it was clear to Darwin'.
What do you think about the animate/inanimate debate?
Listening to smart people share about their specialties is among my favorite pastimes! Fascinating video!
Fascinating stuff as always!
Am finding perusal of older skeletal finds difficult with Rising Star thought taking up so much real estate. We are the ones who seek to look at teenage bones and figure out how they must have behaved like in high school, are again left with more questions than answers. Good job as always to E the Homonid
I absolutely love the circle and arrow in the tumbnail.
Your videos are the perfect amount of informative and entertaining
I enjoy your video's, very educational stuff.
@Gutsick Gibbon Another great analysis drawing upon relevant research, Erika! Thanks yet again!
I'm an elderly anthropoid with some time on his hands and I greatly enjoyed your excellent distillation of the rise of Homo. Harking back to my long-ago youth, I seem to recall that the prevailing view of the australopiths was that they were an evolutionary dead-end - a "primitive" side-branch of the line leading to Homo, but not directly ancestral to modern man. Even as a kid reading "Adam's Ancestors" in the 1960s (along with anything else I could get my hands on), I never really embraced the apparently outdated dichotomy divorcing early Homo from the australopithecines. Although natural selection is by its nature somewhat messy, it is all of a piece and the progression of one species adapting so successfully that it spawns a new genus is nothing new in the fossil record. I'm sure my understanding of your presentation is less than perfect, but I totally agree with it anyway. It seems that Darwin had a pretty good grasp of this evolution business after all.
If you notice they kind of guess about this stuff only to overturn their suppositions subsequent to some new discovery. Are the expert guesses any better than the common person, maybe or maybe not. I’d love to work in an industry where the stuff is made up, write your own history. We’re here, we came from the first cell that successfully reproduced, we ate & mated with whatever, DNA mixed around, we’re just a great ape species that runs our world for now, evolution chugs on until it doesn’t.
A big thanks.
Keep up the good work Dr.
👏
one of the best educational content creators.
a friend in my archaeology class recommended this channel to me as i am interested in bioarchaeology (and just bones in general, paleoanthropology is super interesting to me!) and i loved this video! thank you for this, and i am definitely subscribing!
I really really like these literature overview type videos. I mainly know about dinosaur paleontology, but it's always interesting to see the parallels, especially when it comes to mosaic evolution and where to draw the line. Also fun that hominin evolution is used as a primary example to explain the concept!
This was an informative presentation/discussion. Thank you.
Really interesting educational video. Classifications are all arbitrary and should be changed if they're confusing or not useful. This is the "is Pluto a planet?" discussion for our human ancestors.
@AnexoRialto - Regarding Pluto - YES! Astonishingly, it has an atmosphere.
It's really a quite common issue in science, we have to try to categorize the universe because otherwise it is impossible to talk about, literally since we attach names to the categories. However the universe of course does not have any clear boundaries so our categories can present problems, which raises the question of whether changing them is worth the inevitable confusion the change will cause.
I’m sorry I took four days to click this. I know it’s worse for the algorithm, but I really value the information and needed to make sure I could pay attention.
Thanks, Erika.
I think that one problem is that as valuable as it is, the Linnaean taxonomic system was developed in a world of idealism...species were "created kinds with variation encompassed only within that kind". So because it was a system that failed to deal with the transformation of characteristics between species...that was doubly true of series of species between higher taxes (genera, families, etc).
Cladistics are useful to distinguishing between taxa that have shared or derived features vs. retaining the older plesiomorphic traits. But minor traits (or even neutral traits) can differentiate a clade. Grade classifications (based upon traits we, post hoc define as the adaptive shift (that may be features that we only recognize as important in subsequent groups) will thus exclude cladistically linked groups and put them in a grade-based adaptive group.
Another issue is that all these classifications are based upon our alpha taxonomies. I have lost my maxillary lateral incisors. It runs in half my peers and some of my nieces and nephews exhibit this. This might be used as a sufficient synapomorphy to characterise an extinct species. Many orangutans have supernumerary M4's. It's clear that these derive from the same populations as those with M3's. It's just an individual variant.
Throw in the debate over whether the traits are allometric or sexually dimorphic (as in the discussion of whether H. habilis or H. rudolfensis are female-male) makes it very critical to compare appropriate pairings. One should compare the female A. africanus with those we assign to female H. habilis and male A. africanus with male H. habilis. And all these with appropriately early (contemporary) H.erectus.
It doesn't surprise me that H.habilis will demonstrate a bevy of intermediate derived traits but not in all characteristics. This is simply "mosaic evolution".
I did find it interesting that specimens of H. habilis show molar crown morphology that have some uniquely derived features (autapomorphies).
BTW isn't KNM-ER 1470 edentulous..so no EDJ?
For me, we should simply recognize that the Idealist-based Linnaean taxonomy is not always useful in discussing evolutionary change. Species and Genera didn't simply explode in being. And traits that once "defined" an extent taxon will need revision and should not be expected to be emergent all at once. With an increasing number of fossil representatives that approach the morphotype/common ancestor placement within one or other group will become increasingly arbitrary.
Much like trying to define where a ring-species "transitions" or trying to define how much interhybridity is definitive of two populations being worthy of being defined as distinct species this is as much a pre-existant philosophical issue (lumper, splitter) or based on the feature or characters we are using to make our assessments.
Does the classification obscure the reality or does it exaggerate it...or do the authors acknowledge that there is transition? That's all that really matters.
You have amazing enthusiasm! I just found your channel recently and love your content.
Wonderful presentation. Thank you
I was wondering about habilis. Thanks for the clarification.
Absolutely fascinating. Thanks for the info
You light up my life professor
You make me want to go back to grad school. I say this as a person who was an abject failure and had to run away with my head on fire and reputation demolished. But your zeal for exploring and discussing findings in your field reminds me of the best parts of graduate school and you have me pining for them. Maybe this time I'll go into anthropology instead of birds...
I've been looking for this for a few years, thanks for making it.
If one genus is truly ancestral to another, there simply must be transitional forms that existed.
Great subject and coverage.
I love the educational videos….actually I love all your videos, but I so enjoy learning more about our ‘family tree’!
You the best! Thank you for your hard work
The discussion is more important in getting the boundaries "right" the actual line in the end becomes somewhat arbitrary, The discussion leads to a review of the facts. The lines are drawn for convenience of understanding those facts. Keep up the good work !!!
Great video and I appreciate very much the work you are presenting. Greetings
I didn't come here to debate where to draw an arbitrary line. I CAME HERE FOR ALL OF THESE FASCINATING FACTS AND FINDINGS!!
The thing I take from this for my self is simply. What we call something and where we categorize it might be useful to us. But it is still just a useful tool that does not in any way represent how evolution works. If evolution were an entity to be asked, she would just laugh and say it's just change all the way down. And any distinct categories are imposed by you humans and reflective of nothing but your own needs and ambitions. So enjoy them, but don't take yourselves too seriously.
I really miss the animated intro. 😂
Me too!!!
Funny enough I had a whole TikTok Debate with my friend who is an anthropology major on this topic. I took the position that homo habilis should be apart of the genus Australopithecus due to the great number of basal skull morphology. While my friend argued for the standard notion of homo Habilis as its own unique homo species. Anthropology is a fun field of study but a nightmare sometimes.
anthropology vs cladistics, fight!
As a complete outsider, I find it kinda funny. The whole point of it is that there is not a line between humans and apes, yet the debate over whether to place a species in Homo rages. I get the importance, but does it really matter if shade of yellow-orange #15 is put in the more-orange-yet-still-yellow category or the more-yellow-yet-still-orange category?
@@pufffincrazy5275 to cladistics, yes.
Erica, I love your videos but I really miss that intro song you used to use. Why did you get rid of it?
I get you there, it was a great little bit. I suspect it was taken out because long intros often don't do very well in terms of engagement, or there was some sort of licensing issue, or she just got tired of it. By the way, the song is The Mind Electric by Miracle Musical (tally hall), slowed down by about 20% or so
A lot of creators have started phasing out the intros in the past couple of years or so, because I suspect too many people skip past it to be worth it.
Very good topic. Thank you.
Thank you!! So fascinating.
Another problem that this "adaptive strategy" or "gradistics" system has is that it's biased to the fact that we're the only members of our clade (or grade) that is still extant! Imagine if descendants more closely related to habilis, descendants more closely related to floresiensis, descendants to ergaster, and descendants to antecessor were all extant along side us. They were all also in our lineage that led to our increased brain case size, so what about them developing the same cultures as us as we both exist simultaneously together, each creating influences on the other? And what about convergent evolution or even convergent cultural practices? If a descendant of chimpanzee, gorilla, cercopithecid, or other organism eventually develops larger or more complex brains capable of the behaviors we're capable of, do they suddenly get classified as the same grade? Grades seem to ignore ancestry, not unlike polyphyly, which means otherwise drastically different organisms are now classified closer to one another than their genetic relatives!
A while back you did a video about how "species don't exist." This video sounded to me like 45 minutes of exactly that same notion, especially around the 30-minute mark.
Nice work. Thanks for your efforts.
As Richard Dawkins puts it, if you lined up every ancestor up back to the ancestral ape it would be completely impossible to draw a line between any two of them in order to delineate a species or a genus. It is possible, of course, that evolution "jerked" so that an environmental change created a stronger than average selection pressure resulting in a temporary speeding up of evolution - a kind of punctuated equilibria effect - and the bushiness of phylogenetic relationships in the hominin line make it even more complicated, but Dawkins' interpretation must ultimately be right, so I agree with all you say. Well done.
You had me at habilis.
you're a sucker for a good habilis huh?
Always glad to see a new varticle (video article - trying to invent a new word. :) ) from Gutsick Gibbon!
Erika, note the difference between 'using tools' and 'making tools', where modification of found objects is vital.
Loved this, Erika! I learned more from you in your lightning review of habilis's intermediate characteristics than in a year of looking for information. Can you recommend a book or review paper that covers this, especially post-cranial morphology?
Keep talking woman, just keep talking sense..Thank you
This video underlines just how fast moving the field is.
I was happy you made this so close to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth!
I love your videos. A lot of stuff goes over my head but that’s okay i feel like it’s making me smarter
As a human primate living in the 21st century it makes me happy learning about our non human primate ancestors and relatives. Makes me feel like i have a bigger branch in the family tree of life.
EDJ is where dentin and enamel meet. I didn't catch that at first because it is such a dense [to me] paper. Initialisms take time for me to incorporate it I guess.
Keep up the great analyses.
Thanks for this video
I’m predicting that you’ll be using clips of this video if someone at answer in genesis finds out people are arguing to remove species from homo
I've wondered about this for awhile.
wonderful presentation. How do you remember all this stuff????
Either most animals are fish or fish isn't a real clade, and that delights me!
Perfect break from politics, thank you.
Yay! Better internet content!!!
I just love listening to smart people talking about something they are passionate about. I also appreciate that it isn't too dumbed-down. Subscribed
At one point you alluded to the idea that we humans seem to have a distinct predilection for placing a line between "apes" and "humans".
I would absolutely agree... and I think that there are actually several good reasons (for this desire... not for assuming it to be a fact).
Basically, a huge part of the world view of our modern society is based on the idea that "humans" are DIFFERENT than "non-humans".
1. For religious believers that difference is often the equivalence of "having a soul".
2. For many others, it's simply a matter of the difference between "human rights" and "animal rights", which is more comfortable when we have a bright line.
(If a male homo habilis were to step out of a time portal tomorrow would we put him or her in a cage or find them a good human rights lawyer?)
I also have little doubt that questioning that bright line in evolutionary history tends to make us uneasy about the current question of animal rights.
(If one of our ancestors who was "less human than a chimp" is granted the official status of "human" then how can we reasonably deny that to a modern chimp?)
Thanks Erica
Great and informative video!
It strikes me that if our fossil record was entirely complete with every transitional imaginable found and described, the field of phylogeny as we know it today would kinda collapse. Genus and species are our constructs, we like to sort things. They are helpful to facilitate discussion, but dont mean anything outside of our minds.
We could talk about degrees of relatedness, but you would never be able to build a tree structure because it would be near infinite in complexity. That way of visualising connections is almost more useful the less complete it is. It works as a model entirely because of the gaps in our record
W comment.
Excellent summary of the genus Homo debate. Have you read Villmoare's follow up paper from 2018? I found it quite interesting because he essentially reinvents for paleoanthropology the way taxa are defined in paleontology without seeming to realize that the paleontological literature exists--that because (as you say in the video) traits are evolutionarily labile, only shared ancestry can represent a true definition (as opposed to diagnosis/description) of a fossil taxon. See for example, Rowe 1987 from 30 years prior: "Characters may be assembled to diagnose a taxon once it has been defined, but ancestry alone is both necessary and sufficient for taxon membership in the phylogenetic system." Villmoare (2018) gives the only true definition (in this sense) of the genus Homo that I'm aware of, defining it as 'Homo consists of all species (and unnamed specimens) subsequent to the divergence from Paranthropus'. I think this also goes a long way toward indicating why he was confident in assigning the Ledi Geraru mandible to the genus Homo but not to Homo habilis.
Rowe, T., 1987. Definition and diagnosis in the phylogenetic system. Systematic Zoology. 36, 208-211.
Villmoare, B., 2018. Early Homo and the role of the genus in paleoanthropology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 165, 72-89.