http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/nst/Sun...icle/index_html

:popcorn2:

Not me. I could not be more weary of this story. Show us the monkey already. :new_tiredsmiley:

Interesting site. I liked this:

"The Evidence

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Tuesday, 13 June 2006

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An unknown species of Homo erectus is the Johor Bigfoot? Now, just how do they know that?

Show me the monkey!...Show me the monkey!...Show me the Monkey!...Show me the monkey!... :bf:

hey tugboatwa & everyone good late afternoon wow thanks for posting this new article about the johor sasquatch-hominids. i realy liked the johor researchers website it was definetly very informative. im looking forward to those 2 new books about the johor hominids to come out this year or next year. please keep me informed definetly. im sure more new articles will be seen on the net this week only time will tell. also be wonderful if one of the johor researchers would come to this great forum to make great comments about their research etc. thank you bill

Whatever it is, it ain't no monkey.

...an unknown species of Homo erectus...
What the %$%*!!! does that even mean?!
H. erectus is a species.

Even if you restrict the term Homo erectus to only Asian Homo erectus, nobody knows how many actual species that includes. If you expand that to the present, it becomes even more likely that other species would form. I am using the definition of species as group of actually or potentially interbreeding populations. Wasn't it you who speculated that Eskimos might not be genetically compatible with some other isolated group (I don't recall which)? Homo erectus is a just a label to classify a group of animals that have certain characteristics, brain size, saggital keel, upright.... Without DNA it is pretty much impossible to say how closely related the different groups are to each other. The term Homo erectus implies a single species but it ranges over such a vast time and includes such great variability of individuals that a single species in the biological sense seems unlikely to me.

I really hate to back up the authors of these Johor stories because they sound to me like they are not serious.

I am not surprised that they think it was some species of Homo erectus. What other animal would they think it was? Aren't all the known fossil hominids in South East Asia called erectus?

If erectus did split from ergaster at the time when erectus first left Africa as the "Out of Africa" theory implies, wouldn't you likely get multiple species forming over ~2 million years that are not closely related to humans. If rudolfensis is our ancestor and not habilis, then the erectus found at Georgia would not even be close to humans since they are said to be very similar to habilis. They are also theorized to be the ancestors of the Asian erectus. Is it not possible that many species did form from the original migrations and other species could have also migrated later.

If only one group or a small minority of hominids made tools and they represented only a tiny fraction of the total population of hominids, how many tools would be left by each tool user compared to the number of fossils? Maybe about 1 million tools to each fossil formed? How could you attribute any tool to any fossil with any degree of certainty? You don't know if he made it or was killed by it or he just happened to die next to it 1000 years later. I see the vast time involved, the thousands of miles, and isolating effects of multiple Ice Ages as likely increasing the number of species of ancient hominids. They could all be the same species too. I am sure a scientist 1,000,000 years from now that found the bones of a chiguagua and a Great Dane would not think they were the same species.

My point is that calling something a species of H. erectus is like calling something a species of H. sapiens. It makes absolutley no biological or phylogenetic sense. It means absolutely nothing. Better to say a species closely related to H. erectus. That's essentially what anthropologists are doing with H. ergaster, H. floresensis, and H. georgicus.

As for the eskimos, yeah, I mentioned a paper I've got somewhere that argues the genetic distance between eskimos and Australian aboriginies is so great that there might be species-level distinction. In other words, they supposedly can't interbreed. The question opens up a huge can of worms and frankly I don't know what to make out of it, but at least one geneticist out there is suggesting that Homo sapiens is in fact composed of two distinct species. So a different speies name would have to be assigned to whichever group is decided to fall outside the range of H. sapiens as genetically defined.

God this stuff gives me a headache!!

I'm not up on all this genetic mumbo jumbo but if what you say is true that eskimos and aboriginies couldn't reproduce because they are genetically too different, how come someone of, say, european descent can breed with both?

That just doesn't make sense to me.

Are there any other cases in the animal kingdom where the same holds true?

The theory is that the genetic distance is too great between abos and eskimos:

_________Aboriginies
:
:_________Africans
: ________Caucasians
:______Asians
:____Eskimos

Something like this where abos have been isolated from the ancestors of Eskimos for at least 40,000 years.
But Caucasians, Africans, and Asians share a more recent common ancestor with each other and abos as well as eskimos. Like I said, I don't know if I agree, but the theory is based on the same DNA data used to diagnose species among other mammals...so...for what it's worth.

Well...the tree doesn't work when I post, so it's hard to see what I was trying to show, but hey...whatever

I was wondering where does a monkies uncle fit in at? Anyway... if this Chow dudes does happen to have something, its going to cause an uproar! You know everyone will run to the woods to see one or try catch one. You think the Spotted Owl cause some logging issues just wait...
My bet is on a scam of some kind.

i see the johor hominids ie sasquatch are still makeing the headlines all over the net, i hope the johor researchers show those possible photos soon, and im realy looking forward on seeing those new books in near future. the johor researchers have a great website i hope they put more info in it. im sure we all here will see more great articles about johor hominids. i wish the johor researchers would come to this great bigfoot forum to make a statement but im very patient. good evening bill green. at least cryptomundo is keeping us all informed about johor hominids includeing tugboatwa and other researchers here as well

I see they have a drawing of a pair of eye's now.!

There do seem to be cases in the animal kingdom where this is true.

When this occurs, it is referred to as a "ring" species.

A quote from an external site:

"Ring species show the process of speciation in action. In ring species, the species is distributed more or less in a line, such as around the base of a mountain range. Each population is able to breed with its neighboring population, but the populations at the two ends are not able to interbreed. (In a true ring species, those two end populations are adjacent to each other, completing the ring.) Examples of ring species are:

- the salamander Ensatina, with seven different subspecies on the west coast of the United States. They form a ring around California's central valley. At the south end, adjacent subspecies klauberi and eschscholtzi do not interbreed (Brown n.d.; Wake 1997).
- greenish warblers (Phylloscopus trochiloides), around the Himalayas. Their behavioral and genetic characteristics change gradually, starting from central Siberia, extending around the Himalayas, and back again, so two forms of the songbird coexist but do not interbreed in that part of their range (Irwin et al. 2001; Whitehouse 2001).
- the deer mouse (Peromyces maniculatus), with over fifty subspecies in North America.
- many species of birds, including Parus major and P. minor, Halcyon chloris, Zosterops, Lalage, Pernis, the Larus argentatus group, and Phylloscopus trochiloides (Mayr 1942, 182-183).
- the American bee Hoplitis (Alcidamea) producta (Mayr 1963, 510).
- the subterranean mole rat, Spalax ehrenbergi (Nevo 1999)."

The above was quoted from: Talk Origins.org

See also: "Ring Species" - Evolution Library - PBS.org

EZ Chair