----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Menegay" 
Newsgroups: sci.bio.evolution
Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: Chimp-Bonobo-Human genetics


RKS:
Interesting thoughts.  I would add that there are possibly two evolutionary
strategies for the same environment, and these are currently represented by
the chimp (Pan troglodyte) and bonobo (Pan paniscus).

If the bonobo is the bud that branched off the chimp lineage, then a similar
budding may have occurred in the last common ancestor of the
pre-chimp/bonobo split ancestor.  If that were so, then should the bonobo
suddenly disappear, and given enough habitat and time, another branching
would occur at sometime giving rise to another Bonobo/Australopithecine-like
line.

In other words, the Bonobo may be more human-like because it budded off from
the hominid-chimp line in the same way that Australopithecines did, but at a
much later time, so they have not evolved as much in the human-like
direction as humans have, perhaps also because there is no selection
pressure for them to change further.

This idea says that if the (human lineage)-(chimp lineage) can split once,
it can do so again given a similar environment, and the bonobo-chimp split
is the evidence for that idea.

So, after the space probes have infected mars with the life so desperately
sought there and the planet greens up a bit, we can run an experiment and
see if I'm right - shouldn't take more than a few hundred thousand years to
run the experiment, once the billion years for life to re-establish on the
windy ol' planet has passed :)

Kind Regards,
Robert Karl Stonjek.
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