Man descended from a monkey. Who decided this? Charles Darwin, you say. And you will be wrong. The creator of the theory of natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution never claimed this. He only tried to substantiate the proposition that there was a kind of connecting link between man and ape - a common ancient ancestor, from which they both originate. But who was this common ancestor?
And how old was it? On this occasion, fierce disputes are still going on between scientists, during which the most crazy hypotheses are put forward, which no one is yet able to prove or refute. And a chain of traces discovered in 1978 near the Tanzanian village of Laetoli added fuel to the fire.
Volcanic ash trail
In 1978, Mary Leakey, a member of a family of paleoanthropologists and writers who played a key role in the search for the remains of the earliest man in East Africa, excavated at Laetoli. The now extinct volcano Sadiman is located 20 kilometers from this village. It was active about four million years ago. Once he threw out a cloud of carbonatite ash, which in its consistency resembled very fine river sand. This eruption probably lasted no more than a day.
But as a result, all the surroundings were covered with an even layer of ash a centimeter thick. And immediately after the end of the eruption, it began to rain. The ashes got wet, and on it, as on just laid asphalt, the traces of everyone who walked on it began to be imprinted: elephants, giraffes, antelopes, rhinos, pigs … And then the tropical sun dried them.
Digging down to this layer of ash, members of Mary Leakey's group found several huge elephant tracks, and next to them a chain of tracks that strikingly resemble human footprints. It was an incredible discovery: after all, according to the theory of the origin of man, accepted in official science, it was believed that hominids (human ancestors) switched to upright posture only in the Tertiary period, that is, not earlier than 1.8 million years ago. And scientists have discovered traces left 3.7 million years ago. This radically changed the scientific understanding of the timeline of human evolution.
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Even some of the expedition members found it difficult to believe that the traces could have survived for such a long time. One can imagine what a storm of disputes and objections this find aroused among venerable scientists! However, Mary was sure that the dating was done correctly, and these ancient traces were left by upright human ancestors. With her confidence and enthusiasm, she infected all her associates, and the work began to boil.
Through the joint efforts of paleontologists, a chain of fifty footprints 23 meters long was discovered. To protect the tracks from destruction, Tim White used a special hardener, filling it inside the prints in very small portions.
American Louise Robbins, examining the tracks, expressed the point of view that the footprints really belonged to two hominids. Probably, two individuals walked together, one of them (with larger feet) was male, and the other was female, possibly pregnant. According to the footprints, hominids of this type have walked on two legs for at least a million years.
Tree or tree?
In the same year, Mary Leakey went to the United States and told reporters about the find. Its discovery shocked the scientific world. Darwinists even tried to accuse Mary of falsification. According to Darwin, the fossil monkey Dryopithecus, who lived in the Tertiary period, got off the tree and became upright. Engels developed this assertion by adding his labor theory to Darwinism. The development of the hand and labor, according to Engels, turned the monkey into a man.
But there is a serious circumstance that makes many scientists doubt that the monkey is the ancestor of man. In monkeys, the lower limbs perform a grasping function, have a well-opposed thumb, which allows them to deftly cling to branches and vines and quickly move from tree to tree.
And in humans, the feet serve for support and are not capable of grasping movements. Soviet anthropologist V. V. Bunack, English anatomist Frederick Wood Jones, American paleontologist G. Osbori, anthropologist G. A. Bonch-Osmolovsky believed that a monkey is not suitable for human ancestors precisely because it has a grasping foot, and it is impossible to convert such a foot into a supporting one.
And now there is a widespread hypothesis that it was not a monkey who climbed down from a tree to become a man, but, most likely, the opposite process was observed: an ape-like man for some reason climbed a tree and became a monkey. True, the question arises: how did these "degenerates" manage to turn their supporting foot into a grasping limb?
To do this, they would have to "tear" the metatarsal ligament, which unites all five toes, and turn the straight joint of the big toe, located between the first metatarsal and sphenoid bones, into a spherical joint. And if they succeeded, why then could the monkey limbs in the process of evolution not become human feet?
Are we out of the napithecs?
According to the theory of the Russian scientist L. I. Ibraeva, man descended from the coastal semi-aquatic Nayapitheks. They lived 2-3 million years ago, in the Pliocene, along the banks of rivers, streams and lakes in a semi-savory foothill area, wandered in shallow water, often dived and swam, caught crayfish, frogs, mollusks, stranded fish, turtles, insects, collected bird eggs, coastal berries, fruits and other fruits and roots. Nayapitheks were used to catch and open shells and shells, chopped pebbles, sticks and bones.
L. I. Ibraev believes that the preoccupation of the forepaws with obtaining food forced the Nayapitecs to upright posture. And the shallow bottom, often soft, required large flat feet. The same semi-aquatic existence led to the loss of their wool cover, with the exception of the cap of hair on the head, which protects from the scorching rays of the tropical sun, and hair between the body and limbs, which prevents sticking and chafing of the skin.
The structure of human teeth is also a heritage of the Nayapitheks. The most important difference between the teeth of hominids and monkeys is the absence of canines sticking out above the rest of the teeth. Obviously, for eating soft and slippery mollusks or even fish, such fangs were useless for the nayapitecs. Worse, the protruding fangs would clearly interfere with scrubbing the contents of the shell. That is why, in the ancestors of humans, the canines were shortened and took a scapular shape.
For the same reason, unlike a gorilla or an orangutan, the rest of the front teeth in hominids are also not chewing, and the scrapers and incisors are straight flat spatulas necessary for scraping the shell, biting off and holding the bitten off. Moreover, the difficulty in chewing a springy mollusk or fish led to the addition of up-and-down jaw movements with rotational ones, as well as to an increase in the number of tubercles on the molars from four to five, and to the replacement of the cutting first lower premolars with two-tuberous ones.
L. I. Ibraev gives many other rather convincing arguments in favor of his hypothesis. And his theory of human origins has the same right to life as the rest.
Phaethon's great-grandchildren
But according to the absolute majority of theories, man appeared in the process of evolution, the main mechanism of which is natural selection. And this process is ongoing and consistent. That is, people are a product of evolution, so to speak, children of the Earth.
In this case, how to explain that a person is one of the most unfit for life on Earth? There are more types of diseases alone in humans than in all terrestrial organisms combined. We look like aliens here.
Or maybe we really are aliens? For example, the Russian science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev, developing the hypothesis of the alien origin of mankind that exists in scientific circles, in his works ("Faetias" and others) wrote that on the planet Phaeton, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, there was once a mighty a civilization that died as a result of the war, in which super-powerful weapons were used that split the planet (now there is an asteroid belt). And the surviving Faetians flew to Mars, and then, with the gradual cooling of the Sun, to Earth.
And who said that our civilization is the one and only? Perhaps humanity has perished more than once as a result of planetary wars and natural disasters (such as the fall of asteroids). But it was revived again, starting the ascent from primitiveness to the heights of civilization.
By the way about Laetoli. In 2011, a group of researchers led by Professor A. N. Zaitsev (St. Petersburg University), it was proved that the Sadiman volcano is not a source of volcanic ash, in which footprints were found. This conclusion was made on the basis of the absence of the mineral melilite in them, as well as differences in the chemical composition of nepheline and pyroxenes. Where did this ash come from then? There is something to think about.
Mikhail YURIEV