What was that common ancestor? I know they’ve found evidence of a bunch of hominid branches like Australopithecus and Homo (stop that snickering back there!) but I’m not up to date on discoveries re “the missing link”. Has anthropology got any theories? Was it a proto-ape? What?
This was supposed to be fun, now got me researching stuff.
Talk origins’ search function is down, or I would have linked to the relevant articles Orlentz. Just browse around, very interesting.
http://www.talkorigins.org
- Douglas Adams is dead and I’m not feeling so well myself.
"Man did not evolve from apes!
Man and apes evolved from a common ancestor.
What was that common ancestor?"
—It was my great-uncle Sol, from Philadelphia.
You mean 42, right? 
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Biggirl *
[ol]
[li]A surprising number of people believe man evolved from apes.[/ol][/li][/QUOTE]
A planet where apes evolved from man!?
Here’s my list of why another dark ages is falling upon us:
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Overpopulation. The world population has doubled every thirty-five years since the last dark ages (that bubonic plague put a minor damper on things). We’re currently at six billion people and our planet can conceivably support 10-15 billion. Just as many of us will be entering retirement, the price of clean water and food will be too expensive to afford for the bottom classes.
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Stupidity. We’ve been dumbing down our citizens for years, our commercials are dumbed down, our schools are dumbed down, and our entertainment is dumbed down. Because we don’t have to ever think, we’re collectively idiots. Go to Las Vegas, you’ll see what I mean.
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People don’t have a sense for the sacred anymore. (I’m going to take a lot of crap for this one.) Religion has provided a lot of hope for a lot of people over the ages. But religion’s hold has been dissipating for a long, long time. Technology, intellectualism, and Paxil has replaced it as our new religion. And our way of looking at things have changed for the worse.
We don’t feel a connection with the land anymore.
Today, instead of seeing a beautiful sunset, we see light filtered through smog. It’s not that a sunset looks so different from how it did so many years ago, it’s the way we look at it that is different. We’re intellectualising and sterilising it to death. It’s ugly. Well, no it isn’t, it’s our view of it that’s ugly.
(Disclaimer: I don’t buy into religion myself, but you have to respect it for the hope it’s provided for people. If any major religion was adopted, wouldn’t the world undeniably be a better place?)
- Greed Never before has a single man (or woman) held enough power to rape an entire world. Suddenly the world’s grown smaller because people have grown bigger. http://www.zdnet.com says that Bill Gates has enough money to alleviate world hunger for two full years. That’s too much money (and power) for any single person to hold responsibly. That’s a dozen king’s ransoms, isn’t it? And he’s not even a political giant, just a financial one. (He couldn’t declare war on another country, for instance.)
(shrugs) That’s my two cents. Spend them foolishly. I’m probably wrong about the last three (and certainly over-emotional about them), but overpopulation is certainly going to be the next big disaster, certainly worse than global warming and vanishing ozone layers ever will be. We can ignore those, but we can’t ignore our thirsty throats.