I am fascinated to learn from this article that there is a gap preventing us from pinpointing our origin. Having said that, as I continued through the article, I began to wonder why this information could be so important besides the thirst of our curiosity to know. Is there a disease of some sort we could cure if we knew of our origin? I continued throughout the reading in hopes of a mention of an outcome that could take place once this puzzle of our "evolutionary" line could be complete. This is what I ended up on:
“At a basic level, one wants to know when and where transformations occurred so one can put them into their appropriate evolutionary context,” Dr. Lieberman said.
I respect the idea behind knowing your past and history in order to learn from what has already taken place and in order to avoid repeating the same mistake again; it is crucial to know the past to advance into the future. However, as important as the beginning is to any story, how useful would this information really come out to be? References to the question we seem to be stuck on include "modern humans with the ambition to find their origins", "the redrawing of the human family tree", and most importantly, "our big question". When it comes down to it, is it just that? A big question that we are extremely curious about? Before the previously mentioned reference ("At a basic level..."), "Daniel E. Lieberman, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard, said that filling in the tree matters to scientists, and not only out of innate curiosity about human ancestry." Then he continues to refer to filling in the missing pieces into the "appropriate evolutionary context". So because these "experts" we call scientists want the information to fill in gaps of the human evolution it is much more important? In the end, isn't the completion of this line of human evolution to be a reference and a guide for anyone curious about that subject? In the end, I feel that it is another one of our results derived from a curiosity to know and collect.
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After reading this article, I realized that it is very important to note the changes that have occurred in our species over time. We cannot know where we are headed until we learn where we have been. While unlocking all of the secrets of our past will most likely not give us the answers we want, is is an important search none the less. Research has long been the source of creativity and may lead to astonishing breakthroughs.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the most apparent issue with this scenario is that scientists are missing a lot of pieces to the puzzle. Even with the information presented in this article, I feel that they may have made more assumptions than they lead us to believe. This goes back to our discussion of how much we simple accept as truth from those in scientific occupations without question. Like the dinosaur bones, these examples were incomplete and have been reassembled. I'm also quite convinced that our most primitive ancestors were not concerned with the preservation of their remains, but merely of survival. Therefore, we may never know exactly how we evolved or from which of these examples we descended.