The dating of human origins seems, at times, to be all over the place. However, the one constant appears to be an increasingly older dating of the split between humans and apes.
This is bad for Darinian theory since the incredible differences between humans and chimpanzees, i.e., our consciousness, not to mention just the physiological differences, have less and less time to arise via ‘gradualism.’ E.g., some date the divergence between chimps and gorillas at only 8 1/2 million years ago (mya), while the split between chimps and humans had to have occurred, according to this new finding, at least 7 1/2 mya. One million years to bring about the immense differences between chimps and humans? Quite a problem.
And a couple of quotes:
Put simply, the study argues there was another — previously unidentified — human-like creature walking the Earth long before we believed it was possible.
Yes, it’s all about ‘belief,’ isn’t it?
The footprints’ discovery also comes shortly after the fragmentary fossils of a 7.2 million-year-old primate Graecopithecus, discovered in Greece and Bulgaria, were reclassified as belonging to the human ancestral tree.