I've been trying to learn French, and I know you vet your sponsors pretty well, so I think I'll try this out. (Going to wait until tomorrow before I open my wallet though, I tend to be too spendthrift before bed)
Yes evolution seems to be very messy business indeed and the elusive missing link is becoming a lengthy piece of chain thanks to so much ongoing work. Truth is also very elusive but it matters so its important to keep the focus...great presentation here in this video i found it very clear and concise as can be all things considered...good work folks 👍
This reminds me of a joke in Futurama where the scientist is debating a creationist orangutan (don’t ask), who asks “what is the missing link between humans and chimps”, to which he retorts “homo erectus”. The question is repeated and he says “homo habilis”, “homo heidelbergensis”, etc. time skips forward and dozens of intermediate species have been added to the list and when the question is asked again he says “my god, you’re right!” and proceeds to hunt for the next missing link. Pokes fun at the entire concept in a way, as you can always break down an intermediate between any two related species in more granular ways as infinitum
TBH, it's more of a "but wouldn't it be cool if we found it?" thing at this point. We have plenty enough evidence to know what happened in general, but learning more specific evidence is always welcome!
There enough missing links to debunk evolution all together lol! Yall can believe a lie told a million times if ya want ...or you can look deep and hard enough to discover evolution is riddled with hoaxes and pseudoscience for obvious reason...it's fake!
@@standingbear998 Remember, if you make claims you need to back them up. Outside politics opinions are useless. But yes, if they think there is a missing link, they don’t understand how evolution works.
On potential knuckle walking ancestry: gorrillas and the chimp/bonobo lineage each have a very different way of knuckle walking, which indicates that each lineage adapted for knuckle walking independently
@@williamraleigh7546 exactly! Which means that their -- and by extension ours and chimps' -- common ancestor at least didn't knuckle walk the way modern gorillas, chimps and bonobos do
i take evolution as a fluid, all animals are transitional species in the most tiniest mutations ever. The differences between individuals provides ample opportunities to go whichever direction the whole could go in times of survival. These mutations would be reinforced with successful breeding, spreading these beneficial mutations wide across those that survived. We're a transitional species ourselves to a future species.
Technically, we're still in the most recent Ice Age. It's just been thousands of years since the last glacial maximum. However, because there are still polar ice caps, and because we still have glaciers, we're still in an Ice Age by definition. Once the ice caps melt and the glaciers melt, we'll no longer be in an Ice Age.
When I was a kid, they still pushed _Rampithecus_ as an early Hominid some 14 million years ago. That's since been discredited. It was, however, a primate.
You’re guys piano melody slaps that starts right around 5min mark. You use it in so many of your videos and it goes so well in this series and history of universe!
Interesting. I watched it all in one sitting. Learned a few new terms but not sure that I’ll remember them. Fascinated by how much things have changed since I was in school 50 years ago.
Another great presentation - so much information crammed into this. Congratulations to the researchers for collecting the information and the writer for making it comprehensible and others who no doubt were involved. And let's not forget all those scientists who have beavered away over years to make sense of the fossil records and other evidence.
I imagine that human evolution is tangled. It would be like taking every breed of wolf , coyote, and dogs Inter-breeding them all on a island then after hundres of generations you release them into isolated areas all over the world....then after thousands of generations after the canines had time to differentiate from each other and adapt to their local environments they expand , run into each other and interbreed all over again.
As far as we know, boas didnt re-acquire their spurs, rather the spurs are vestigial hind legs that were never evolved away because they increase mating success, and so have been preserved in modern species. These little spurs dont funtion as hind legs any more, but at no point in the evolution of boas did they have no hind legs at all. They just started using the same steuctures to do different things.
@@NicholsonNeisler-fz3gican we just stop and think how often could that driven key traits for some species? Like I'm thinking how the monkeys are effectively able to communicate literal ideas and concepts with other monkeys just with face expressions. Most probably brains evolved to understand and eventually be able to make faces at will; years later it means us humans developing higher cooperation, understanding and language. What if all this was because it attracted the ladies? I can totally see this coming
There simply is not enough time for tens. You have a half a billion years and it ain't enough time. That's generally. You don't have enough time for most species. The rate of observed mutation is too slow.
Quoting Clint Ladlaw from Clints Reptile's "Snakes have legs unless they don't" Meaning you are more likely to find the vestigial legs on snakes than not. There are only a few lineages that don't have them. And as a ball python owner, the spurs are fascinating.
Are you suggesting Boa Constrictors are evolving into limbed creatures again? You said "have developed" not "have retained" suggesting this has occurred after they lost their limbs.
I'm sure they just mean it changed to suit their used purpose more. Tickling the ladies to get them in the mood. Because you pass on more genes that way. 😂
I'm not sure what he has suggested, but the spurs on boas are retained, not redeveloped. They do use them for mating. Actually more snakes have legs than do not have legs, there are only a few lineages that lost them completely.
Dawkins had that cool thought experiment where you take photos of your dad, his dad, etc going back 125 million generations until the first photo is a ...fish. i explained that to a nurse here at the rehab center where I'm recuperating from an operation and she was surprised then thought about it and she found it plausible. Telling folks about that thought experiment is a good way to test someone's IQ.
The expensive tissue hypothesis has mostly been disproven via Herman Pontzer's metabolic studies. Energy use in organisms just isnt that straightforward
I'd say it's the other way around: the concept of 'evolution' is a very basic concept for many to understand - humans all over the world had been taking advantage of that process (with plants and animals) for millennia, via SELECTIVE breeding. Where Dawkin set the proverbial 'cat amongst the pigeons' was by claiming that a similiar process also took place natural, hence his 'Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection'. This didn't sit well with all religiuos types, who had a tacit feeling that all was created as indetended, later aka 'Creationalism' But those ancients didn't know HOW it happened, i.e. they didn't understand the "mechanism of life". We have a much better understanding of that today, what with geneology et al. But it's still not 'nailed down' completely, especially in the 'natural world' (i,e, not in labaratory conditions) simply because the natural world is a chaotic place, with many different things going on all over the Earth, at different times and different places.... Think of the Earth as many, many, huge natural experimental 'laboratories', running for 4.5 BILLION years, where the conditions are always changing, at diiferent places all the time... then try and pick the bones out of that. It's amazing we know so much for sure as we do... but so much is still unknown for sure, and probably never will be. But Creationism is bunk, imo.
Evolution is messy, indeed. Thankyou so much for providing this knowledge in a properly detailed & nuanced form, and not dumbing it down. This is a complex subject that requires effort to properly comprehend, so having the wonderful evolutionary history of hominids detailed in such a concise manner (especially clarifying its non-linearity, or fractile branching nature) is both essential to fully grasp it all & deeply fascinating. The development of language, culture & consciousness used to be thought of as uniquely human qualities (associated with the growth in size & complexity of our brain), but as we've learned more of the ancient history of our lineage, we've come to realise that it may have even predated the homo clade - stretching back further than we can imagine. I look forward to a future episode that discusses the evolution of both Language & Consciousness in depth
i like to think of it more like open fluid. Genetically similar creatures who had the chance to mate and produced fertile offspring, in the eyes of nature, that was good enough if they could survive as well I dont think its enough to imagine rivers crossing, think of the instances where species could've mated with another species that was technically ancestral, the river of genetics very well couldve looped back on itself several times over throughout our genetic history to keep going down the hill of survival
imagine a clump of clay, you take away .0002% of it, to the human eye its exactly the same as before, for there to be a noticable difference youd have to take away full percentages like 1%, basically there was always a change, just in prospective its unnoticable unless in large amounts
Very nice documentary 👍😀... Only sad thing is that so many the same pictures are used.... There are so many beautiful fossils and it would be nice if we could see more of these
We want vids on 1. Taming of fire 2. Invention of the bow 3. Invention of the wheel 4. Taming of horses, dogs 5. Beginning of agriculture 6. Social life before and after language use
Theres an assumption that evolution has a tree structure. That's helpful because, computationally, tree structures are easy to deal with. Directed, acyclic graphs. But, as we are discovering, evolution is not a tree structure, in fact from a computational perspective, its the worst case; it has cycles and back-links.
I think all we'll know is bipedalism favored our ancestors and if you favored walking/running upright, you were more likely to survive in those places where the oldest remains are found. Pretty general, really but there's not much fossils to get the whole picture.
An interesting thought is how Humanity became acutely individualized, dogs and cats of the same species look very much alike, where we are far more "customized" in relation to each other even siblings. All animals of a breed are identical twins, were with us identical twins is quite rare. This point were we "individualized" is where the missing link is hiding IMO.
Is that just because we're social creatures who are better at distinguishing the features of other members of our species though? The fact that there are people with face blindness makes me suspect our brains are specifically fine-tuned to recognize other humans.
To my understanding, the term "The missing link" is a bit of an archaic term. Early on it was supposed to be a man with ape traits. We found that. Then they wanted to find an ape that was just starting to become a man. They found that too. And they found many thing in between the two. So what precisely is the missing link supposed to be? And of course I'm speaking casually because, strictly speaking, men are apes. So what's between an ape and an ape? What's halfway between San Francisco and California?
Connecting links are still overwhelmingly more than missing links anyway. Missing data doesn't change anything, and each year more finds and all the work to go through them sometimes decades fills more gaps.
"I Taught an Ape how to Play Minecraft". The video is showing Kanzi, a 42-year-old bonobo with developed cognitive abilities, able to play Minecraft. Kanzi's ability to learn and play Minecraft is part of his daily enrichment activities at the facility. He can choose when to start and stop playing.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode where Professor Farnsworth argues evolution with Doctor Banjo (an intelligent ape creature). The episode gave us the memorable line "I don't want to live on this planet anymore".
What's also probably missing from those evolutionary trees are the branches that contribute back into a different branch, due to potential inter species hybridization which we do know happened to a significant extent at least in the case of neanderthals
Here’s the thing, I can’t think of a good comment that contributes to the video. So here, this is the lyrics for the song “banana man” by tally hall. Ladies and gentlemen, Colonel PT Chester Whitmore is proud to present Bung Vulchungo and the Zimbabwe Songbirds Do you see banana man Hopping over on the white hot sand Here he come with some for me Freshly taken from banana tree (one, two, three, four) Banana man me want a ton Give me double and a bonus one Give me more for all me friends This banana flow never end Do you want a banana? Peel it down and go mm mm mm mm Do you want a banana? This banana for you Tonight we dance around the flame Then we get to play the spirit game Spirit names we shout out loud Shake the thunder from the spirit cloud All the songbirds in the tree Chant a tune to let the spirits free Then we see them in the night Spirits jumpin' by the fire light Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana) Peel it down and go mm mm mm mm Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana) This banana for you Look you, you're too uptight you know You can laugh and kick it back and go (we) But without a rhythm or a rhyme You do not banana all the time Fly away from city on the run Try to make a little fun Look you come to the bungalow African't you tell me don't you so Don't you love the bumping of the drum Make you shake until the bum go numb Let the bongo play until you drop This banana never stop (never stop, never stop) Forget all your troubles and go with the flow Forget about whatever you may never know Like whether whatever you are doing is whatever you should And whether anything you do is every really any good And then forget about banana when it sticks in your throat And when they make you want to bellow but you're stuck in a choke And you forget about the yellow from the beckoning man He'll make you take another and make a mock of your plan Bungalay bungalo make up your mind and tell me no umm shh Well it's nine o'clock and it's getting dark And the sun is falling from the sky I've never left so early and you may wonder why Tomorrow morning on the plane No banana make you go insane Floating back to busy town No banana make you want to frown Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana?) Peel it down and go mm mm mm mm Do you want a banana? This banana for you Thank you very much.
So what if she finds out? If you want to be an evolutionary anthropologist, then that's your choice, and you should go for it. That's her problem if she doesn't agree with your field of study, not yours.
What most people don't realize is that the fossil record doesn't just "have" missing links, it's _all_ missing links. To be more precise, there aren't "gaps" in the fossil record, there are "dots" that make up the fossil record. We draw the lines, it's _all_ gaps; such as between the Big-eared hopping mouse, Short-tailed hopping mouse, Great hopping mouse, and the Fawn hopping mouse. So how many missing links are there? Well, either there are infinitely many, or you need to reword your question. Of course, in a roundabout way, this is kind of what he says in the video; which means he was 100% aware, and this title was clickbait the whole time. Can you believe it? Someone online, who wants you to click on their videos? What is the world coming to... -that is sarcasm, BTW.-
The problem being where you have lots of dots in a cluster, then lots of other dots in another- and nothing in between. Darwin recognized that problem from the get go, that there SHOULD be a practically infinite number of intermediate fossils- and that if they were not found it would prove fatal to the theory. They were never found.
@@SteveLomas-k6k I mean, if intermediate fossil x is never found, it doesn't mean the animal never existed. It could mean that it either didn't fossilize, or it did, but the jerk who found it, destroyed it through negligence or something.
@@Wendy_O._Koopa I take your point. But cryptozoologists say the same thing about Bigfoot- they're certain he exists, he's just really hard to find.. And maybe that's true, but an excuse for lack of evidence, is not equal to finding the evidence.
The true missing link is the first of our ancestors to have 23 pairs of chromosomes instead of 24. That was the true link. Who made them, and for what purpose?
Is this series going to go into the future of humankind as well? Like Kardashev level 1, 2, and 3 civilizations, oh and level 4. Civilizations at the end of time orbiting the last red dwarves. Boltzmann brains, Type 1, 2, 3, and 4 universes. If this is a simulation inside a type 4 universe etc. I think that's the scale Max Tegmark uses. Dyson spheres, Matrioshka brains, star lifting etc.
Respectfully, I think Dyson spheres are just rather silly concepts. Our star contains more than 90% of the total mass in our solar system. Even if you used up the WHOLE of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars’ resources we wouldn’t even come close to building ANY kind of structure that could surround the Sun to harvest its energy. How has no one figured that out? Dyson spheres cannot be made. There’s not enough matter in any star system to build one. By definition, stars will have most of the mass in their systems. Thanks
@@ivanfranco2363 You’re talking about a Dyson sphere. The plan was to create a Dyson SWARM, a bunch of solar-paneled orbs that collect the sun’s energy and orbit it.
@@Samanimates292 I still think it's a horrible Idea. Right up there with "Kardashev" levels, grading us based on our energy consumption. We should be focussing on increasing our intelligence, not our energy use. If we were smarter, we wouldn't need so much energy.
@@theobserver9131 Firstly, kardashev scale was not made for humans. It was made to describe alien intelligence. Well, intelligence is hard to explain. Kardashev scales erased that problem by explaining a civilization’s advanced-ness by use of energy.
@@theobserver9131 oh and also, the whole “If we were smarter we would use less energy” Thing? Yeah, thats just false. The more advanced our society gets, the more energy we use. No way around it. If we make more efficient means of getting energy, then we use more energy, because we can’t let it go to waste. The only way we can use less energy is by becoming less advanced, and therefore, possibly less intelligent.
There are no such things as missing links. Evolution occurs at the molecular level through thousands/millions of generations. Therefore every species - each generation is a missing link between itself and the predecessor generation or a transitional form.
Great documentary but having thought about the story I'm a little surprised that the subject of 'tails' didn't come up. At some point our ancestors lost theirs and the same goes for all the other partial or fully bipedal primates and of course the tail is critical for tree climbing; therefore the very long period when primates gradually lost their tail was surely when they stopped climbing trees.
My biggest issue with the aquatic ape hypothesis is that humans are one of the only (or maybe the only, but I'm not sure about that) living mammal which cannot naturally swim from birth. Sure, we are more than capable of learning how to swim from each other, but we have to learn. Mot other mammals can swim just by instinct, even if some of them can dtill learn from others how to swim better
Actually, babies are born with the swimming reflex (if you place a baby stomach side down in water it will make swimming motions). They can’t hold their heads above the water, but our giant heads evolved later. That said, like the grasping instinct, also an evolutionary leftover, which fades at around 3 months, the swimming instinct fades around 6 months.
Oranopithicus Macedoniansis is predating many of these forms, as well as graecopithicus freybergyi… 😮 which ruins the OOA theory & shows that the “ diversification “ came well before anyone would consider any of these as “human”… 😮
Answer: ZERO. Its an unscientific term. The term "missing link" has been supported by geneticists since evolutionary trees only have data at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference and not evidence of fossils.[citation needed] However, it has fallen out of favor with anthropologists because it implies the evolutionary process is a linear phenomenon and that forms originate consecutively in a chain. Instead, last common ancestor is preferred since this does not have the connotation of linear evolution, as evolution is a branching process.. There is no singular missing link. The scarcity of transitional fossils can be attributed to the incompleteness of the fossil record.
Early in his life, when he studied for the ministry, certainly. But by the end of his life he positively disbelieved in a loving God. He was agnostic about the general possibility of an ultimate creator. So he made no statement about where the universe came from, nor about how the first life originated. But once it had been created, he was confident it had evolved, and that no deity supervises the world on a daily basis. By the time he wrote Origin of Species Darwin was no longer Christian.
An actual link is just a frozen moment in the flow of history. You can continue breaking history down into an infinite number of links. Evolution is more of a flow, gradual and progressive than a clean jump from one species to another. The more we learn and discover, the more fine tuned and numerous the number of links that will be explained.
I really love these videos, but is it just me or is the narration getting faster and faster? I now watch them at 0.75x, 0.8x would be ideal if it was available.
Great video! Though I'd like to help you with a pronunciation error that is quite common on TH-cam. Taung Man is not pronounced "Tong Man," but rather "Ta-oo-ng Man." "Tau-" means "lion", "-ng" means "land of" in this context. Its a Sotho-Tswana word.
Wouldn't the last common ancestor of chimps and humans necessarily *not* have any 'human' characteristics? Humans are the ones with unusual traits compared to chimps and other great apes, all of which we developed after diverging. The human-chimp link would have zero human traits, and since it's several million years before any chimps (which diverged from gorillas), it might actually still have gorilla-like traits.
What's the timestamp? For now, you need to be more accurate in your wording, if you mean human-specific traits, that's different from what your comment states.
@@Dr.Ian-Plect I think there's some confounding of the terms "missing link" and "last common ancestor". The pop science frenzy of the late 19th century was about the former, which is a transitional creature *between* chimps and humans. The "missing link" is expected to have traits of both chimp and human. But this video seems to be speaking mostly about the "last common ancestor", which is a precursor to both species and *not* an intermediate between them. I think that may be the confusion. I'm not re-watching to find timestamps, but I'm pretty sure the two terms were used interchangeably at least some of the time, at least at the beginning. If the common ancestor of both humans and chimps had any characteristics that currently only humans have, that means chimps would have *lost* those characteristics. Most obvious examples are walking upright and having larger brains. Any fossil that shows signs of upright walking could *not* be the common ancestor of chimps and humans, because that would mean that the chimp lineage first evolved upright locomotion (because it's not found in any older great apes, but found in an *ancestor* of chimps), then evolved to lose it (because current chimps don't walk upright, like their ancestor did.) While that may be possible, I don't think it's the case here. The same argument holds for any other characteristic like increased brain size, less robust jaws, changes to wrist and fingers, etc.
Richard Dawkins puts it nicely in one of his excellent books - basically you could look at each generation going back in time, and not tell the difference between them. You could even jump back a 100 generations at a time, and still not tell the difference, but jump in 1000 generation leaps, and then you could start to see differences. There is no such thing as a "missing link" - the concept is meaningless.
I've heard, in very uneducated groups, some people believe we (and other life) popped into existence ready made! The name we provided is Creationists, certainly a dying breed.
Tiktaalik did not have hands with fingers in the way we think of them in modern tetrapods. However, it did possess important transitional features in its fins that were precursors to tetrapod limbs.
Go to mondly.app/hoh to get 96% off lifetime access to 41 languages and start learning today.
nuh uh
Have you forgotten bih foot
Big foot
I've been trying to learn French, and I know you vet your sponsors pretty well, so I think I'll try this out. (Going to wait until tomorrow before I open my wallet though, I tend to be too spendthrift before bed)
🤓
Yes evolution seems to be very messy business indeed and the elusive missing link is becoming a lengthy piece of chain thanks to so much ongoing work. Truth is also very elusive but it matters so its important to keep the focus...great presentation here in this video i found it very clear and concise as can be all things considered...good work folks 👍
This reminds me of a joke in Futurama where the scientist is debating a creationist orangutan (don’t ask), who asks “what is the missing link between humans and chimps”, to which he retorts “homo erectus”. The question is repeated and he says “homo habilis”, “homo heidelbergensis”, etc. time skips forward and dozens of intermediate species have been added to the list and when the question is asked again he says “my god, you’re right!” and proceeds to hunt for the next missing link.
Pokes fun at the entire concept in a way, as you can always break down an intermediate between any two related species in more granular ways as infinitum
Futurama reference for the win! That brilliant scene highlighted how sad it is that fossilization is a rare event.
After all, one could twain in half any distance between two points in space infinite number of times. It's a real miracle anyone ever got anywhere.😂
TBH, it's more of a "but wouldn't it be cool if we found it?" thing at this point. We have plenty enough evidence to know what happened in general, but learning more specific evidence is always welcome!
@@McSenkelthe planck lenght disagrees with you.
There enough missing links to debunk evolution all together lol! Yall can believe a lie told a million times if ya want ...or you can look deep and hard enough to discover evolution is riddled with hoaxes and pseudoscience for obvious reason...it's fake!
F that fish that evolved and made me go to work millions of years later. But thanks for life i guess
The fish didn't that was capitalism 😂
fish isn't life?
Oh look! You found a couple of the missing link right here! ^
If I absolutely MUST experience life, I wish I had been a hawk or a big cat, or even a tree. This human crap is just stupid and I hate it.
You can change your life. Our ancestors had to evolve for hundreds of millions of years to create your consciousness.
Excellent video, in all respects. But extra special appreciation for Lucy Timbrell, for writing the actual script - outstanding work. 👏
thanks lucy!
After all, the missing link is the friends we lost along the way.
Quite literally.
I used to feel bad for people in history until I realized….it was us all along. ❤
And we keep all the memories of those friends within our hearts.
They are never really lost, they live in all of us.
no there are no links cause the story is wrong.
@@standingbear998 Remember, if you make claims you need to back them up. Outside politics opinions are useless. But yes, if they think there is a missing link, they don’t understand how evolution works.
On potential knuckle walking ancestry: gorrillas and the chimp/bonobo lineage each have a very different way of knuckle walking, which indicates that each lineage adapted for knuckle walking independently
Even monkeys use the palm of their hands, so we know apes couldn't have just evolved knuckle walking as a default.
Convergent evolution, possibly
@@williamraleigh7546 exactly! Which means that their -- and by extension ours and chimps' -- common ancestor at least didn't knuckle walk the way modern gorillas, chimps and bonobos do
Ha ha. Knuckle dragging continues here and there still.......
Aquatic ape is my favourite "99% wrong" hypothesis.
While the aerial apes filling up the rest .05%
mine too
Mermaids were actually half fish half ape
@@simracingchannel7691Apefish
I am the aquatic ape.
Last time I was this early I watched the episode with neopithecus
Thank you for all the hard work and effort that goes into producing these wonderful videos we get to watch for free. I'm so grateful.
Couldn't agree more 👏
i take evolution as a fluid, all animals are transitional species in the most tiniest mutations ever. The differences between individuals provides ample opportunities to go whichever direction the whole could go in times of survival. These mutations would be reinforced with successful breeding, spreading these beneficial mutations wide across those that survived.
We're a transitional species ourselves to a future species.
yup, we're the ever changing average
Thank's Captain Obvious
@@FoulOwl2112 many people still consider evolution to be linear progress
@@itsClaptrap I guess l keep forgetting how cognitively challenged the general population has become.
Evolution only exists in the deranged mind of modern man, that’s why
Technically, we're still in the most recent Ice Age. It's just been thousands of years since the last glacial maximum. However, because there are still polar ice caps, and because we still have glaciers, we're still in an Ice Age by definition. Once the ice caps melt and the glaciers melt, we'll no longer be in an Ice Age.
Yeah glacial period and ice age are often mixed
wait so the ice caps melting and stuff would have happend anyway?
@@Viperpro140yes but still some of us would be affected so we must “try and preserve” and that the earth need help goofy ahh bullshit
@@Viperpro140 Yes, we've just accelerated the rate. However, it is inevitable all ice melts on the planet. Once that occurs, we enter a new Epoch.
@@dedsussybaka4619"some of us" yes, 2.75 billion of us.
When I was a kid, they still pushed _Rampithecus_ as an early Hominid some 14 million years ago. That's since been discredited. It was, however, a primate.
This channel literally said: QUALITY OVER QUANTITY
cool
Except the videos are 40+ minutes, I guess you meant how frequent they post
Literally love them they’re like proper documentaries. Puts a lot of channels to shame including mine
@@StudioNamePendingdon't beat yourself up I'm sure you have a very nice channel.
You should check out his other channels too, history of the earth and history of the universe!
You’re guys piano melody slaps that starts right around 5min mark. You use it in so many of your videos and it goes so well in this series and history of universe!
I love it when you post on all your channels. They are amazing!!
There's more
@@Akren905
The others are listed in the descriptions 🙂
As always, a video full of information, a relaxing soundtrack, and stunning images. Thank you so much for uploading.
Interesting. I watched it all in one sitting. Learned a few new terms but not sure that I’ll remember them. Fascinated by how much things have changed since I was in school 50 years ago.
Another great presentation - so much information crammed into this. Congratulations to the researchers for collecting the information and the writer for making it comprehensible and others who no doubt were involved. And let's not forget all those scientists who have beavered away over years to make sense of the fossil records and other evidence.
These videos take tons of research, time & resources… and it shows! The quality is beyond amazing!! 🤩 Thanks so much!
I imagine that human evolution is tangled.
It would be like taking every breed of wolf , coyote, and dogs
Inter-breeding them all on a island then after hundres of generations you release them into isolated areas all over the world....then after thousands of generations after the canines had time to differentiate from each other and adapt to their local environments they expand , run into each other and interbreed all over again.
Dingoes: "Sounds like fun."
Australia: "Stop it."
😅
Chimps are also known to go to war against other troops who encroach on their territory. It's very human-like in execution.
I am so glad you have decided to revisit the channel and bless us with another video! Keep up the good work!
As far as we know, boas didnt re-acquire their spurs, rather the spurs are vestigial hind legs that were never evolved away because they increase mating success, and so have been preserved in modern species. These little spurs dont funtion as hind legs any more, but at no point in the evolution of boas did they have no hind legs at all. They just started using the same steuctures to do different things.
“I’ll keep these for the ladies”
@@NicholsonNeisler-fz3gican we just stop and think how often could that driven key traits for some species? Like I'm thinking how the monkeys are effectively able to communicate literal ideas and concepts with other monkeys just with face expressions. Most probably brains evolved to understand and eventually be able to make faces at will; years later it means us humans developing higher cooperation, understanding and language. What if all this was because it attracted the ladies? I can totally see this coming
There simply is not enough time for tens. You have a half a billion years and it ain't enough time. That's generally. You don't have enough time for most species. The rate of observed mutation is too slow.
Quoting Clint Ladlaw from Clints Reptile's "Snakes have legs unless they don't"
Meaning you are more likely to find the vestigial legs on snakes than not. There are only a few lineages that don't have them. And as a ball python owner, the spurs are fascinating.
Are you suggesting Boa Constrictors are evolving into limbed creatures again? You said "have developed" not "have retained" suggesting this has occurred after they lost their limbs.
I'm sure they just mean it changed to suit their used purpose more. Tickling the ladies to get them in the mood.
Because you pass on more genes that way. 😂
I'm not sure what he has suggested, but the spurs on boas are retained, not redeveloped. They do use them for mating.
Actually more snakes have legs than do not have legs, there are only a few lineages that lost them completely.
Dawkins had that cool thought experiment where you take photos of your dad, his dad, etc going back 125 million generations until the first photo is a ...fish. i explained that to a nurse here at the rehab center where I'm recuperating from an operation and she was surprised then thought about it and she found it plausible. Telling folks about that thought experiment is a good way to test someone's IQ.
The expensive tissue hypothesis has mostly been disproven via Herman Pontzer's metabolic studies. Energy use in organisms just isnt that straightforward
I recently heard someone describe human evolution more like a river delta than the branches of a tree. It seems quite apt.
Evolution is quite difficult thing for many to wrap their heads around, but it's a basic mechanism of life.
I'd say it's the other way around: the concept of 'evolution' is a very basic concept for many to understand - humans all over the world had been taking advantage of that process (with plants and animals) for millennia, via SELECTIVE breeding. Where Dawkin set the proverbial 'cat amongst the pigeons' was by claiming that a similiar process also took place natural, hence his 'Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection'. This didn't sit well with all religiuos types, who had a tacit feeling that all was created as indetended, later aka 'Creationalism'
But those ancients didn't know HOW it happened, i.e. they didn't understand the "mechanism of life". We have a much better understanding of that today, what with geneology et al.
But it's still not 'nailed down' completely, especially in the 'natural world' (i,e, not in labaratory conditions) simply because the natural world is a chaotic place, with many different things going on all over the Earth, at different times and different places....
Think of the Earth as many, many, huge natural experimental 'laboratories', running for 4.5 BILLION years, where the conditions are always changing, at diiferent places all the time... then try and pick the bones out of that. It's amazing we know so much for sure as we do... but so much is still unknown for sure, and probably never will be. But Creationism is bunk, imo.
@@sunnyjim1355 "We have basically no idea but the other idea is bunk, imo.". Dumbest comment here.
@@gravelkid9136 they didn't say we have NO idea. we can observe the process of evolution. we just don't know everything about evolution.
I detest doing this to a clearly well-informed and intelligent video, but my one comment is that hippos are not predators.
Evolution is messy, indeed. Thankyou so much for providing this knowledge in a properly detailed & nuanced form, and not dumbing it down. This is a complex subject that requires effort to properly comprehend, so having the wonderful evolutionary history of hominids detailed in such a concise manner (especially clarifying its non-linearity, or fractile branching nature) is both essential to fully grasp it all & deeply fascinating.
The development of language, culture & consciousness used to be thought of as uniquely human qualities (associated with the growth in size & complexity of our brain), but as we've learned more of the ancient history of our lineage, we've come to realise that it may have even predated the homo clade - stretching back further than we can imagine. I look forward to a future episode that discusses the evolution of both Language & Consciousness in depth
So gonna fall asleep to this video for the next week :) love this channel
I imagine evolution more like a winding river, with some species branching out but other similar species mating with eachother, or crossing paths.
i like to think of it more like open fluid. Genetically similar creatures who had the chance to mate and produced fertile offspring, in the eyes of nature, that was good enough if they could survive as well
I dont think its enough to imagine rivers crossing, think of the instances where species could've mated with another species that was technically ancestral, the river of genetics very well couldve looped back on itself several times over throughout our genetic history to keep going down the hill of survival
imagine a clump of clay, you take away .0002% of it, to the human eye its exactly the same as before, for there to be a noticable difference youd have to take away full percentages like 1%, basically there was always a change, just in prospective its unnoticable unless in large amounts
Somewhere a creationist is plugging their ears saying...
"Lalalala I don't hear you lalalalala" 😂
Very nice documentary 👍😀...
Only sad thing is that so many the same pictures are used....
There are so many beautiful fossils and it would be nice if we could see more of these
Anything with this guy's voice on it is gold
We want vids on
1. Taming of fire
2. Invention of the bow
3. Invention of the wheel
4. Taming of horses, dogs
5. Beginning of agriculture
6. Social life before and after language use
clicked the video because i like the looks of the lil dude on the thumbnail... he seems hella chill
Theres an assumption that evolution has a tree structure. That's helpful because, computationally, tree structures are easy to deal with. Directed, acyclic graphs.
But, as we are discovering, evolution is not a tree structure, in fact from a computational perspective, its the worst case; it has cycles and back-links.
Evolution ist eben nicht zielgerichtet, sondern dss Zusammenspiel zwischen Zufall und Notwendigkeit.
brilliant compaction.
I wish we had a time machine that could take your genetic code and show you your lineage dating back millennia.
Well I wish I had a million dollars
Astronomy and evolution are my two favorite topics, yet strangely enough I prefer their History of the Earth channel way more than the others!
Really well done vid. Super interesting, thabks so much for sharing!
I think all we'll know is bipedalism favored our ancestors and if you favored walking/running upright, you were more likely to survive in those places where the oldest remains are found. Pretty general, really but there's not much fossils to get the whole picture.
Any day you drop a new vid is a good day, love all your channels.
An interesting thought is how Humanity became acutely individualized, dogs and cats of the same species look very much alike, where we are far more "customized" in relation to each other even siblings.
All animals of a breed are identical twins, were with us identical twins is quite rare.
This point were we "individualized" is where the missing link is hiding IMO.
Is that just because we're social creatures who are better at distinguishing the features of other members of our species though? The fact that there are people with face blindness makes me suspect our brains are specifically fine-tuned to recognize other humans.
@@garbagefreak Yes our sensitivity to the details and nuances of life is a biggy.
Wonderful work! Just the video I've been waiting for, thank you!
Excellent storytelling as always
To my understanding, the term "The missing link" is a bit of an archaic term. Early on it was supposed to be a man with ape traits. We found that. Then they wanted to find an ape that was just starting to become a man. They found that too. And they found many thing in between the two. So what precisely is the missing link supposed to be? And of course I'm speaking casually because, strictly speaking, men are apes. So what's between an ape and an ape? What's halfway between San Francisco and California?
Connecting links are still overwhelmingly more than missing links anyway. Missing data doesn't change anything, and each year more finds and all the work to go through them sometimes decades fills more gaps.
Millions of years of feed-breed-bleed.
Evolution is the horrifying mother of all madness, suffering, and death.
No way let's go I'm hyped to fall asleep rn
"I Taught an Ape how to Play Minecraft". The video is showing Kanzi, a 42-year-old bonobo with developed cognitive abilities, able to play Minecraft.
Kanzi's ability to learn and play Minecraft is part of his daily enrichment activities at the facility. He can choose when to start and stop playing.
I saw missing links walking around today.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode where Professor Farnsworth argues evolution with Doctor Banjo (an intelligent ape creature). The episode gave us the memorable line "I don't want to live on this planet anymore".
What's also probably missing from those evolutionary trees are the branches that contribute back into a different branch, due to potential inter species hybridization which we do know happened to a significant extent at least in the case of neanderthals
Another great video!
Here’s the thing, I can’t think of a good comment that contributes to the video. So here, this is the lyrics for the song “banana man” by tally hall.
Ladies and gentlemen, Colonel PT Chester Whitmore is proud to present
Bung Vulchungo and the Zimbabwe Songbirds
Do you see banana man
Hopping over on the white hot sand
Here he come with some for me
Freshly taken from banana tree (one, two, three, four)
Banana man me want a ton
Give me double and a bonus one
Give me more for all me friends
This banana flow never end
Do you want a banana?
Peel it down and go mm mm mm mm
Do you want a banana?
This banana for you
Tonight we dance around the flame
Then we get to play the spirit game
Spirit names we shout out loud
Shake the thunder from the spirit cloud
All the songbirds in the tree
Chant a tune to let the spirits free
Then we see them in the night
Spirits jumpin' by the fire light
Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana)
Peel it down and go mm mm mm mm
Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana)
This banana for you
Look you, you're too uptight you know
You can laugh and kick it back and go (we)
But without a rhythm or a rhyme
You do not banana all the time
Fly away from city on the run
Try to make a little fun
Look you come to the bungalow
African't you tell me don't you so
Don't you love the bumping of the drum
Make you shake until the bum go numb
Let the bongo play until you drop
This banana never stop (never stop, never stop)
Forget all your troubles and go with the flow
Forget about whatever you may never know
Like whether whatever you are doing is whatever you should
And whether anything you do is every really any good
And then forget about banana when it sticks in your throat
And when they make you want to bellow but you're stuck in a choke
And you forget about the yellow from the beckoning man
He'll make you take another and make a mock of your plan
Bungalay bungalo make up your mind and tell me no umm shh
Well it's nine o'clock and it's getting dark
And the sun is falling from the sky
I've never left so early and you may wonder why
Tomorrow morning on the plane
No banana make you go insane
Floating back to busy town
No banana make you want to frown
Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana?)
Peel it down and go mm mm mm mm
Do you want a banana?
This banana for you
Thank you very much.
Bruh
people who like this comment are idiots
Maybe the real missing links were the friends we made along the way
Another one! Thank you
I love this channel ❤️
Such a quality video!!! Your channel never fails to disappoint.
I’m my grandmothers favorite grandchild but she is a creationist and GOD FORBID she finds out I want to get a phD in evolutionary anthropology.
So what if she finds out? If you want to be an evolutionary anthropologist, then that's your choice, and you should go for it. That's her problem if she doesn't agree with your field of study, not yours.
What most people don't realize is that the fossil record doesn't just "have" missing links, it's _all_ missing links. To be more precise, there aren't "gaps" in the fossil record, there are "dots" that make up the fossil record. We draw the lines, it's _all_ gaps; such as between the Big-eared hopping mouse, Short-tailed hopping mouse, Great hopping mouse, and the Fawn hopping mouse. So how many missing links are there? Well, either there are infinitely many, or you need to reword your question. Of course, in a roundabout way, this is kind of what he says in the video; which means he was 100% aware, and this title was clickbait the whole time. Can you believe it? Someone online, who wants you to click on their videos? What is the world coming to... -that is sarcasm, BTW.-
The problem being where you have lots of dots in a cluster, then lots of other dots in another- and nothing in between. Darwin recognized that problem from the get go, that there SHOULD be a practically infinite number of intermediate fossils- and that if they were not found it would prove fatal to the theory. They were never found.
@@SteveLomas-k6k I mean, if intermediate fossil x is never found, it doesn't mean the animal never existed. It could mean that it either didn't fossilize, or it did, but the jerk who found it, destroyed it through negligence or something.
@@Wendy_O._Koopa I take your point. But cryptozoologists say the same thing about Bigfoot- they're certain he exists, he's just really hard to find.. And maybe that's true, but an excuse for lack of evidence, is not equal to finding the evidence.
The true missing link is the first of our ancestors to have 23 pairs of chromosomes instead of 24.
That was the true link.
Who made them, and for what purpose?
> *Walks out of the water*
Why did he do it bros?
Is this series going to go into the future of humankind as well? Like Kardashev level 1, 2, and 3 civilizations, oh and level 4. Civilizations at the end of time orbiting the last red dwarves. Boltzmann brains, Type 1, 2, 3, and 4 universes. If this is a simulation inside a type 4 universe etc. I think that's the scale Max Tegmark uses. Dyson spheres, Matrioshka brains, star lifting etc.
Respectfully, I think Dyson spheres are just rather silly concepts. Our star contains more than 90% of the total mass in our solar system. Even if you used up the WHOLE of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars’ resources we wouldn’t even come close to building ANY kind of structure that could surround the Sun to harvest its energy. How has no one figured that out? Dyson spheres cannot be made. There’s not enough matter in any star system to build one. By definition, stars will have most of the mass in their systems. Thanks
@@ivanfranco2363 You’re talking about a Dyson sphere. The plan was to create a Dyson SWARM, a bunch of solar-paneled orbs that collect the sun’s energy and orbit it.
@@Samanimates292 I still think it's a horrible Idea. Right up there with "Kardashev" levels, grading us based on our energy consumption. We should be focussing on increasing our intelligence, not our energy use. If we were smarter, we wouldn't need so much energy.
@@theobserver9131 Firstly, kardashev scale was not made for humans. It was made to describe alien intelligence. Well, intelligence is hard to explain. Kardashev scales erased that problem by explaining a civilization’s advanced-ness by use of energy.
@@theobserver9131 oh and also, the whole “If we were smarter we would use less energy” Thing? Yeah, thats just false. The more advanced our society gets, the more energy we use. No way around it. If we make more efficient means of getting energy, then we use more energy, because we can’t let it go to waste. The only way we can use less energy is by becoming less advanced, and therefore, possibly less intelligent.
There are no such things as missing links. Evolution occurs at the molecular level through thousands/millions of generations. Therefore every species - each generation is a missing link between itself and the predecessor generation or a transitional form.
Great documentary but having thought about the story I'm a little surprised that the subject of 'tails' didn't come up. At some point our ancestors lost theirs and the same goes for all the other partial or fully bipedal primates and of course the tail is critical for tree climbing; therefore the very long period when primates gradually lost their tail was surely when they stopped climbing trees.
I love your videos.
Aardi is also the root word of Aardvark and Aardwolf, who do indeed enjoy dirt and the ground!
My biggest issue with the aquatic ape hypothesis is that humans are one of the only (or maybe the only, but I'm not sure about that) living mammal which cannot naturally swim from birth. Sure, we are more than capable of learning how to swim from each other, but we have to learn. Mot other mammals can swim just by instinct, even if some of them can dtill learn from others how to swim better
Actually, babies are born with the swimming reflex (if you place a baby stomach side down in water it will make swimming motions). They can’t hold their heads above the water, but our giant heads evolved later.
That said, like the grasping instinct, also an evolutionary leftover, which fades at around 3 months, the swimming instinct fades around 6 months.
40:45 Or ..why many of us, have just become tools. 😜
I wonder if there's an OK Ape.
Here we gooooooooooo!!!
First comment
Perhaps you should view particular deformaties also as a form of "Evolution trying new things".. Like a 6th digit on your hands/feet
Really Interesting program, Thanks.
The thumbnail for this one is kinda trippy, lol. Thank you as always for another excellent video!
God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
Oranopithicus Macedoniansis is predating many of these forms, as well as graecopithicus freybergyi… 😮 which ruins the OOA theory & shows that the “ diversification “ came well before anyone would consider any of these as “human”… 😮
Awesome channel
Answer: ZERO. Its an unscientific term. The term "missing link" has been supported by geneticists since evolutionary trees only have data at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference and not evidence of fossils.[citation needed] However, it has fallen out of favor with anthropologists because it implies the evolutionary process is a linear phenomenon and that forms originate consecutively in a chain. Instead, last common ancestor is preferred since this does not have the connotation of linear evolution, as evolution is a branching process..
There is no singular missing link. The scarcity of transitional fossils can be attributed to the incompleteness of the fossil record.
I really enjoyed this video!!
Tictac was more a prey item that had to move to niche the big hunter fish couldn't get to
We don't know how many missing links there are because they're missing.
But we have a lot of found links.
Science communication at it's finest!
love the effort
Why do people assume Owen represents all of Christianity’s views when Darwin was also a Christian?
Early in his life, when he studied for the ministry, certainly. But by the end of his life he positively disbelieved in a loving God. He was agnostic about the general possibility of an ultimate creator. So he made no statement about where the universe came from, nor about how the first life originated. But once it had been created, he was confident it had evolved, and that no deity supervises the world on a daily basis. By the time he wrote Origin of Species Darwin was no longer Christian.
An actual link is just a frozen moment in the flow of history. You can continue breaking history down into an infinite number of links. Evolution is more of a flow, gradual and progressive than a clean jump from one species to another. The more we learn and discover, the more fine tuned and numerous the number of links that will be explained.
I really love these videos, but is it just me or is the narration getting faster and faster? I now watch them at 0.75x, 0.8x would be ideal if it was available.
I'm still bothered by the oldest starts being called population 3 stars. Start at 1, they're the first generation!
Lol
Great video! Though I'd like to help you with a pronunciation error that is quite common on TH-cam.
Taung Man is not pronounced "Tong Man," but rather "Ta-oo-ng Man."
"Tau-" means "lion", "-ng" means "land of" in this context. Its a Sotho-Tswana word.
Damn, earliest I've ever caught a video, lol
Wouldn't the last common ancestor of chimps and humans necessarily *not* have any 'human' characteristics? Humans are the ones with unusual traits compared to chimps and other great apes, all of which we developed after diverging. The human-chimp link would have zero human traits, and since it's several million years before any chimps (which diverged from gorillas), it might actually still have gorilla-like traits.
What's the timestamp? For now, you need to be more accurate in your wording, if you mean human-specific traits, that's different from what your comment states.
@@Dr.Ian-Plect I think there's some confounding of the terms "missing link" and "last common ancestor". The pop science frenzy of the late 19th century was about the former, which is a transitional creature *between* chimps and humans. The "missing link" is expected to have traits of both chimp and human. But this video seems to be speaking mostly about the "last common ancestor", which is a precursor to both species and *not* an intermediate between them. I think that may be the confusion. I'm not re-watching to find timestamps, but I'm pretty sure the two terms were used interchangeably at least some of the time, at least at the beginning.
If the common ancestor of both humans and chimps had any characteristics that currently only humans have, that means chimps would have *lost* those characteristics. Most obvious examples are walking upright and having larger brains. Any fossil that shows signs of upright walking could *not* be the common ancestor of chimps and humans, because that would mean that the chimp lineage first evolved upright locomotion (because it's not found in any older great apes, but found in an *ancestor* of chimps), then evolved to lose it (because current chimps don't walk upright, like their ancestor did.) While that may be possible, I don't think it's the case here. The same argument holds for any other characteristic like increased brain size, less robust jaws, changes to wrist and fingers, etc.
@@davidkulmaczewski4911 ok
it s weird how many dead branches in so little time are, is like nature got really experimental here
How many sides does a circle have?
Excellent, thx
This stuff seems more convoluted than the timeline of Zelda games, and that is an achievement.
Truth is always stranger than fiction; that's not an "achievement", it's just reality.
Richard Dawkins puts it nicely in one of his excellent books - basically you could look at each generation going back in time, and not tell the difference between them. You could even jump back a 100 generations at a time, and still not tell the difference, but jump in 1000 generation leaps, and then you could start to see differences. There is no such thing as a "missing link" - the concept is meaningless.
Exactly.
thanks again
I've heard, in very uneducated groups, some people believe we (and other life) popped into existence ready made! The name we provided is Creationists, certainly a dying breed.
Tiktalik: “hands… I need fucking hands… WHERE ARE HANDS?”
Tiktaalik did not have hands with fingers in the way we think of them in modern tetrapods. However, it did possess important transitional features in its fins that were precursors to tetrapod limbs.