Suederwind wrote:Well, thats what my questions is leading up to: are those Loroi skulls? Or am I just a bit overreacting?
Tempest is treading on Loroi skulls there. How would you expect a Loroi skull to look different from a Human skull? The major difference in in the ears, and I wouldn't expect any noticeable skull features there.
As has been mentioned, the "tree" of hominid evolution has had anthropologists confused for a long time, and that's understandable if what you're looking for is a clear tree of species, because I don't think there is one. Anatomically modern
homo sapiens date back at least 200,000 years, but earlier
homo erectus have existed in Africa, Europe and Asia for more than a million years, and they had very distinctive regional features that modern humans share today. The conclusion (which seemed obvious to me, but was resisted for a long time) that the various early hominids constantly moved and interbred with each other over millions of years is now being confirmed by DNA analysis. In the various migration events (such as "Out of Africa"), newer hominid strains moved to new regions but found older populations already living there, and they interbred extensively. The hominid "tree" is more of a trellis, and there's no clear dividing line of speciation between
h. erectus and
h. sapiens, or any of the subgroups such as
neanderthalensis.
Victor_D wrote:I'd also point out that what we consider "racial" features (skin colour, hair, facial features) are all in fact pretty recent changes in human appearance. For instance the East Asian subtype is what, 10-15,000 years old?
I don't believe that this is correct. My understanding is that earlier hominids such as
homo erectus pekinensis from 750,000+ years ago had distinctive, recognizably Asian skull features.
Victor_D wrote:Or, the Soia could extrapolate the rough course of human evolution*, and made Loroi not in the image of what humans looked then, but in the one of what they would become.
But would such extrapolation be necessary? If humans have changed in 200,000+ years, would not the Loroi have done so also? And is it unreasonable to assume that given similar environment, such evolutionary paths might be similar?