In article <3748ecb9.20255900 at news.zedat.fu-berlin.de>,
cijadra at zedat.fu-berlin.de (Cijadrachon) wrote:
>(snip)
>> >That "animal" is human's predecessor.
> Which animal when exactly at what brain areas development stage
> maybe possible to be compared to which in a human embryo?
>
Injecting my 2 cents: Chimps aren't the linear predecessors of humans, of
course, but when considering the branching diagram (or cladogram) human and
chimps are quite close within the phylogenetic spectrum. I would assume that
humans and chimps have fairly comparable brain anatomies, since they share
relatively recent common ancestry.
I've read of the controversy over how to classify humans, whether we belong
in a separate family or in the same family as chimps and some other apes.
Jared Diamond (in _The Third Chimpanzee_) even discusses humans and chimps as
members of genus *Homo*, which is probably a radical view. Ernst Mayr (in
_This is Biology_) discusses some reasons why humans have diverged enough
phenotypically from chimps to be considered as members of separate genera.
Nonetheless, chimps and humans are fairly tight, I guess.
Although there is some molecular closeness, how comparable are humans and
chimps neuroanatomically speaking? Is there enough divergence to warrant a
taxonomic wedge being driven between us and our hairy relatives? Food for
thought...
--
Scott Chase
~the gecko has spoken~
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