Talk:Timeline of human evolution

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1 Issues
2 Move
3 human evolution
4 This is deceptive and artificial.
5 Images are traced from other websites
6 Homo floresiensis
7 Difficulty in parsing a sentence
8 Nonsense
9 Some quite major concerns...
10 videos
11 Cro Magnon
12 Date of entering america?
13 images of animals related to commons ancestors
14 Linking

[edit] Issues

65MYA - Archonta branches, including primates.... 55MYA the first true primates appear. This is a contradiction. Either Archonta branched, creating the primates, or they branched later, when the first true primates appeared.
64MYA - Lemurs crossed into Madagascar ..... 40 MYA Primates split into Prosimians & Anthropoids. Again, a contradiction. Lemurs are prosimians. The Suborders Prosimiia and Anthropoidea are no longer used by primatologists.

I stopped looking after those two sets of contradictions. Please go to Primate and look at the information there and on other pages in WP:PRIM, as they are all built together. - UtherSRG (talk) 11:23, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Move

I notice Mateuszica commented that technology/cultural were dropped. They now exist at the Timeline of evolution but they make even less sense there. I just posted this there:

Moving all key human landmarks from 10kya onward to Timeline of human evolution and leaving (or adding where missing) broad ecosphere, evolutionary changes.
Start the Timeline of extinctions and move what I removed (a series of specific extinctions) there. Marskell 13:19, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Alternatively, we could have a "timeline of human cultural and technological landmarks" or some such thing. Nice job on the pics incidentally--it looks good. Marskell 13:26, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] human evolution

when i created the article , i think a lot of names for the article, i think in "Timeline of human evolution"too . but i tried to afoid put the "human evolution" on the name of the article , because its deeply associated with just the homo (genus) evolution.

UtherSRG changed the name Timeline of evolution of our species to the actuall name.

of course the actuall name of the article is a good name...not a long name.. and i really agreed to let this one

but if someone has a name that disassociate with human evolution , and that would fit well with this timeline , would be very nice . your ideas are very welcome.

Mateus Zica 14:41, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

But we already have Timeline of Evolution as a seperate article. This needs to be specified to humans or its purpose isn't apparent. In fact, I'd specify it further as suggested above. Marskell 13:11, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] This is deceptive and artificial.

I believe this species-based approach to evolutionary timelines is highly artificial and fundamentally flawed:-

1) Each component in the biosphere is intimately inter-connected. For eg Human domestication and hunting of animals has affected the evolution of many non-human species. Having a separate timeline for each species is highly impractical, and ignore this inter-connections, interactions and causal relationships. It also lead to replication of materials.

2) Taking humans away from other organism seems to be very human-centric and seems to imply that humans are somehow special and no longer subjected to the laws of evolution any more, and also can live independently of other living things, which is wrong.

I think it is better to seperate the timeline of evolution into various chronological stages like:-

1) Chemical Evolution (4BYA) 2) Beginning of bacteria life (3.8BYA) 3) Multicellularism begins (1.2BYA) 4) After Cambrian explosion (543 BYA) 5) After the extinction of dinosaurs (65 MYA) 6) Era of the apes (25 MYA) 7) Beginning of Hominid evolution (8 MYA) 8) Rise of anatomically modern human (200KYA) 9) Rise of human with high cognitive powers(40KYA) 10) After the agricultural revolution (11KYA) 11) After the invention of writing (5KYA)

How is it "artificial" when multicellular organisms DO separate into non-interbreeding species which undergo descent with modification? That species interact is a given (if we were going to trace someone's ancestry, it would not really be necessary to mention that his grandfather liked to buy bread from someone else's bakery unless its very significant to the story) but add to that our extreme ignorance of what those other species were and what we have is really a sketch of the timeline of the evolution of humans as best as we can determine it. With regard to your timeline suggestion, it seems to me that THAT is a "very human-centric" view of things; is each stage of equal importance? Stage 4 covers the entire history of vertebrates; is that really only as important as stage 6? Stages 10 and 11 don't even involve evolution in the classical sense since they're cultural evolution. -- Limulus 05:25, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I have solved this dilemma, I think; the complaint is valid in the sense that these evolutionary processes, while involving species as stages, do not involve species as "goals" toward which there is any particular teleology. In other words, this is a succession of species states, not a progression of species states. In my new introduction, readers are implicitly cautioned not to see the "timeline" as a directed phenomenon, but rather an analytical and selective view of something much wider and more chaotic. (BC)

Frustrating. Someone destroyed my introduction without reading this discussion page or commenting on why. (BC)

BC, I liked most of your rewording of the intro. I suggest you get yourself a user name and put it back in. Some users (I think) tend to revert the edits of anonymous IP addresses on principle, if their merits were not immediately clear. If that's too much commitment to Wikipedia for you, perhaps you can leave a note at the user page of the person who reverted your edits, asking for discussion. TriNotch (talk) 02:57, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Images are traced from other websites

Whoever submitted the images has traced them from other images, personally i would find it much easier if the original images were posted instead, unless that would cause a copyright issue, but i would think that tracing the image would too

example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PlesiadapisZICA.png http://www-personal.umich.edu/~carpo/CV_files/image008.gif

I am currently doing a 3D animation on the subject of evolution, and find it a lot easier to draw an animal if it is shaded (the shading has been ommitted in the tracings)

this is the first reference to human evolution (from bacteria to homo sapien)that i have been able to find, so i would find it very useful if someone could find the original images or direct me to another site (i can't find anything in external links)

[edit] Homo floresiensis

I removed entries for Homo floresiensis; as per its main article, "Whether the specimens represent a new species is a controversial issue within the scientific community." -- Limulus 21:59, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Difficulty in parsing a sentence

I have difficulties in parsing the third sentence in the "850 MYA" entry of the timeline. I really don't know anything about the subject involved to fix it myself, but in the spirit of trying to narrow down what my difficulty is I would have thought that instead of the current

"Proterospongia is not the direct ancestor of sponges, but it looked like what the ancestor of sponges all multicellular animals may have looked like. (the connecting link between protozoa and metazoans.)"

one could have something akin to

"Proterospongia is not the direct ancestor of sponges, but it looked like what the ancestor of sponges and all multicellular animals may have looked like. (the connecting link between protozoa and metazoans.)" -- 24.149.52.94 02:37, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

You're right, it does need work; I'll try to fix it. -- Limulus 15:47, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nonsense

"13 MYA Human ancestors speciate from the ancestors of the great apes." We are great apes. What did the author mean? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.7.20.133 (talk) 00:24, 2 March 2007 (UTC).

I'm guess they mean from other great apes, but for Pongo that happen much eariler and Pan happen at most 8Mya. 131.91.92.184 (talk) 20:32, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Some quite major concerns...

Just a few concerns about the wording of this article. It gives the impression of a linear "ladder" approach to evolution, with other species rungs en route to humanity. Whilst I appreciate that this is to a degree the point of the article, I feel it ought to be done more carefully. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there are lots of statements that give a misleading picture of the process of evolution, making it sound as if it's directed, or at least leads somewhere.

For example, at a first glance, I'm left with the impression that humans evolved from Choanoflagellates, not that we are sister crown groups. Further, the word "lead" is over-used. I can't work out what Eomaia scansoria, a eutherian mammal, leads to the formation of modern placental mammals is meant to imply in the slightest, and many other quotes give a misleading impression...

Further, the graphical timeline does not display properly in Mozilla Firefox. Perhaps consider replacing with a template-based {{Graphical timeline}}?

Verisimilus T 20:54, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

I really don't like the graphics at the bottom of the page. First, I agree with Verisimilus in that it appears that evolution is not a branching process, which we know it is. Secondly, it renders horribly in Apple's Safari. I think it should be deleted, and we go with the written format. Orangemarlin 17:33, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

I also think the grephical timeline should be moved or deleted, because it dont display properly in some browser, and because the article is very large, and the graphical timeline makes the article become even larger.

I have reverted the move of the graphical timeline to a separate article. Please adhere the results of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Graphical timeline of human evolution, in which consensus agreed the addition of a separate graphical timeline is a content fork. Michaelas¹⁰ 15:38, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

I have changed the introduction in a manner that I think cautions readers implicitly against viewing species ladders as teleological. Does that help? (BC)

What would god say? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.178.30.55 (talk) 07:46, August 27, 2007 (UTC)

[edit] videos

should one of these videos be included on the links of timeline of evolution?

Rafaelamonteiro80 16:31, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cro Magnon

Why is cro magnon not listed on the timeline?

Cro-Magnon is an archaic, obsolete term, they are just referred to as early humans or anatomically modern humans. 131.91.92.184 (talk) 20:35, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Date of entering america?

In the timeline humans are mentioned entering North America at 31 ka. AFAIK, this is about 20.000 years too early, or at least everything I've read suggests than man found America around 12.000 yrs ago. --80.222.32.123 16:37, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

31Ka does seem to be a bit early for most, some researchers are willing to push it back that far but around 20Ka is more accepted as the first migration and about 12Ka for the second migration. 131.91.92.184 (talk) 20:39, 29 February 2008 (UTC)