"But if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

First, I am not going to give you the common brush off to your question: "We didn't evolve from monkeys, monkeys and humans share a common ancestor". That's just avoiding the question, and frankly, I don't agree with it. I'm going to assume that when you say "monkey," you not only include those animals called monkeys that are alive today, but also animals that looked and behaved like monkeys that lived millions of years ago. An animal that lived about 40 million years ago, known as Aegyptopithecus, is believed by scientists to be a direct ancestor of humans. If I saw that animal swinging through the tree branches today, I'd certainly call it a monkey.

I'm going to go one step further and assume that you are using the term monkey even more colloquially, and include chimpanzees and gorillas under the general umbrella of monkeys. Technically those are apes, but since they are non-human primates that are indeed decended from monkeys, let's go ahead and let that one by. So below, I'm going to cover a scenario whereby humans might have evolved from apes, while leaving apes still existing.

Before I continue, though, let's clear one thing up. It is natural to think of humans as "more evolved" than other animals, but this isn't true in any scientific sense. We are differently evolved, simply adapted to a different environment. It so happens that our intelligence, and the culture and technology that it spawned, has turned out to allow us an unprecedented degree of success, and the ability to live in environments that our ancestors couldn't. But evolution didn't somehow anticipate this.

The point is, evolution is only "directed" in that it favors survival, it does not favor high intelligence or walking upright or use of tools, unless those features aid in the survival and passing on of genes to the next generation. Other animals, for instance mosquitos, don't seem to be suffering for lack of these human-like capabilities.

interfertile: two animals are interfertile if they would be able to produce an offspring, if they were allowed to mate or were artificially inseminated. If they are both the same sex, they are interfertile if each could produce an offspring with the appropriate sex parent of the other.

See this essay for an elaboration on the concept of interfertility, and why I use the word rather than the ambiguous expression "the same species."

Around 7-10 million years ago, there was a population of apes in the forests of Africa, all of which were interfertile with all the others. These apes probably roughly resembled modern day gorillas, chimpanzees or bonobos ("pygmy champanzees"), but were not identical to any of them. Nor were they interfertile with any ape or human alive today.

The forests eventually reached the maximum capacity of these apes per square mile as it could support. Like modern chimpanzees, it is likely that various bands of the apes fought with and killed members of adjacent bands, with winners taking over the territory from losers. Even in the absense of fighting, there is a limit as to how many animals an environment can support, so the number of apes stabilized at this number.

Some of the apes lived near the edge of the forest, where the thick trees give way to the drier grasslands, or savanna. There were still trees, but they were much less dense than in the forests. While these apes were less adapted to this environment than they were to the forest, at least there was less competition from the other apes. The apes who lived in this transitional area gradually adapted to the different environment. Tree climbing ability and upper body strength was less important than ability to move about on the ground, and capabilities like carrying things long distances and throwing rocks at prey or predators were valuable. The savannah-compatible attributes and skills increased in number and degree among the populations living in the transition area between forest and savannah.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, more and more of the apes spread out farther and farther into the savanna. They continued to adapt to the savanna, becoming different in appearance and behaviour from those in the forests, much as coyotes differ from gray wolves today. The apes that lived near the border of forest and savanna looked and behaved like a cross between those living deep in the forest or far into the savanna, much as red wolves look and behave like a cross between coyotes and gray wolves. Like coyotes, gray wolves and red wolves, all of the apes -- whether living in the forest or the savannah -- were interfertile with all the others, as they were still fairly close relatives and therefore genetically similar.

A million or so years later, some of the apes were living over one thousand miles apart, and were separated by more than 10,000 generations -- 10,000th cousins, so to speak. Some were so distantly related that they were no longer interfertile with one another. Had they somehow been put together and tried to breed, they would not have produced offspring. However, they remained interfertile with the apes closer to them.

Typically, those less than 6000 generations apart remained interfertile. So they all were still "connected" by a chain of interfertile pairs. While it might be impossible for two apes that were 10,000 generations apart to have children together, they could have still theoretically shared grandchildren or great-grandchildren, by mating with apes that were only 5000 generations apart, which in turn mated with ones 5000 generations apart. Keep in mind, though, that in reality the degree of interfertility was rarely if ever tested: apes interbred only with apes that lived nearby, which were rarely separated by more than a dozen or so generations.

As time went on, the apes living in the forest became separated by more and more generations from the apes in the savanna. No longer were any of the apes interfertile with all of the others, not even the ones living in the transition territories. As populations ebbed and flowed, various bands moved about, took over territory of others, suffered from diseases and starvation and predation and changing climates -- eventually there became a day that the last "interfertility link" between the forest apes and savanna apes died. This day came and went without fanfare, as interfertility is a hypothetical concept: it is unlikely that any of forest apes had even tried to breed with any of the savanna apes for thousands of years prior to the point it became theoretically impossible.

From this point on, the two lines were completely diverged. There was no turning back, as it was now impossible for any of the forest apes to mix their genetic code with the savanna dwellers. The apes living in the forest continued to thrive in the forest, and were the ancestors of modern chimpanzees and bonobos. The apes in the savanna were our ancestors, and by this point, there is a good chance they looked a lot like primitive humans. They were far more intelligent than the apes in the forest, since intelligence had an especially high value in the savanna. Being able to accurately throw a rock, sharpen a stick to use as a weapon, make a fence or other structure to protect themselves from predators, and make use of animal furs were all extremely valuable skills here, and those that more readily acquired these skills tended to be the ones that produced the most surviving children.

One final point I'll make to avoid upsetting the scientists: the more we learn about the path from ape to human, the more we know just how messy the process really was. I described it as a fairly neat process, one group evenly and gradually splitting into two over the course of a couple million years or so. In reality, there appear to have been numerous partial splits, and numerous different fluctuating populations with various degrees of interfertility (and actual interbreeding) between them. Most splits led to eventual extinction, Neanderthal man being a well known (and relatively recent) example. Certain chance events happened along the way, for instance there is evidence a jaw mutation that reduced biting power allowed the brain to grow bigger. In the forest that mutation was a disadvantage, but in the savanna the additional cognitive power given by the larger brain outweighed the loss of bite strength.

It hasn't even been conclusively proven that we are not still interfertile with chimpanzees: some people speculate that a hybrid may be possible, although personally I would bet against it. It is very likely we would be interfertile with Neanderthals. Likewise, modern chimpanzees are interfertile with bonobos, although there is no interbreeding in the wild between the two species as they are separated by the immense Congo River.

http://karmatics.com/docs/evolution-still-...re-monkeys.html

It's official: There's water ice on the moon, and lots of it. When melted, the water could potentially be used to drink or to extract hydrogen for rocket fuel.

NASA's LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced today. The findings confirm suspicions announced previously, and in a big way.

"Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount," Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

SLIDESHOW: The Top 10 Moon Crashes

SLIDESHOW: NASA's LCROSS Satellite

The LCROSS probe impacted the lunar south pole at a crater called Cabeus on Oct. 9. The $79 million spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket stage, hit the lunar surface in an effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs of water ice.

Those signs were visible in the data from spectrographic measurements (which measure light absorbed at different wavelengths, revealing different compounds) of the Centaur stage crater and the two-part debris plume the impact created. The signature of water was seen in both infrared and ultraviolet spectroscopic measurements.

"We see evidence for the water in two instruments," Colaprete said. "And that's what makes us really confident in our findings right now."

How much?

Based on the measurements, the team estimated about 100 kilograms of water in the view of their instruments — the equivalent of about a dozen 2-gallon buckets — in the area of the impact crater (about 80 feet, or 20 meters across) and the ejecta blanket (about 60 to 80 meters across), Colaprete said.
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"I'm pretty impressed by the amount of water we saw in our little 20-meter crater," Colaprete said.

"What's really exciting is we've only hit one spot. It's kind of like when you're drilling for oil. Once you find it one place, there's a greater chance you'll find more nearby," said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.

This water finding doesn't mean that the moon is wet by Earth's standards, but is likely wetter than some of the driest deserts on Earth, Colaprete said. And even this small amount is valuable to possible future missions, said Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA Headquarters.

Scientists have suspected that permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon could be cold enough to keep water frozen at the surface based on detections of hydrogen by previous moon missions. Water has already been detected on the moon by a NASA-built instrument on board India's now defunct Chandrayaan-1 probe and other spacecraft, though it was in very small amounts and bound to the dirt and dust of the lunar surface.

Water wasn't the only compound seen in the debris plumes of the LCROSS impact.

"There's a lot of stuff in there," Colaprete said. What exactly those other compounds are hasn't yet been determined, but could include organic materials that would hint at comet impacts in the past.

More questions

The findings show that "the lunar poles are sort of record keepers" of lunar history and solar system history because these permanently-shadowed regions are very cold "and that means that they tend to trap and keep things that encounter them," said Greg Delory, a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. "So they have a story to tell about the history of the moon and the solar system climate."

"This is ice that's potentially been there for billions of years," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator at Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The confirmation that water exists on the moon isn't the end of the story though. One key question to answer is where the water came from. Several theories have been put forward to explain the origin of the water, including debris from comet impacts, interaction of the lunar surface with the solar wind, and even giant molecular clouds passing through the solar system, Delory said.

Scientists also want to examine the data further to figure out what state the water is in. Colaprete said that based on initial observations, it is likely water ice is interspersed between dirt particles on the lunar surface.

Some other questions scientists want to answer are what kinds of processes move, destroy and create the water on the surface and how long the water has been there, Delory said.

Link to Chandrayaan?

Scientists also are looking to see if there is any link between the water observed by LCROSS and that discovered by Chandrayaan-1.

"Their observation is entirely unique and complementary to what we did," Colaprete said. Scientists still need to work out whether the water observed by Chandrayaan-1 might be slowly migrating to the poles, or if it is unrelated.

Bottom line, the discovery completely changes scientists' view of the moon, Wargo said.

The discovery gives "a much bigger, potentially complicated picture for water on the moon" than what was thought even just a few months ago, he said. "This is not your father's moon; this is not a dead planetary body."

Let's go?

NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 for extended missions on the lunar surface. Finding usable amounts of ice on the moon would be a boon for that effort since it could be a vital local resource to support a lunar base.

"Water really is one of the constituents of one of the most powerful rocket fuels, oxygen and hydrogen," Wargo said.

The water LCROSS detected "would be water you could drink, water like any other water," Colaprete said. "If you could clean it, it would be drinkable water."

The impact was observed by LCROSS's sister spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other space and ground-based telescopes.

The debris plume from the impacts was not seen right away and was only revealed a week after the impact, when mission scientists had had time to comb through the probe's data.

NASA launched LCROSS — short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — and LRO in June.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,575012,00.html

The Moon is not the only body in the solar system that is wetter than we thought: scientists have also discovered this week that Mars has much more water beneath its surface than was previously known.

Observations of five new Martian craters carved by meteorites have revealed large quantities of water ice, exposed when soil and rock were blown away by the impacts.

While underground Martian ice has been detected before, the new craters where the latest deposits have been found lie roughly midway between the planet’s north pole and its equator, at easily the lowest latitude where it has so far been discovered.

This suggests that the ice sheet beneath the Martian surface may be much more extensive than had been suspected. The ice in the craters also appears to be very pure, containing 99 per cent water.
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The discoveries, published in the journal Science, come from an instrument called the the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), which is fitted to Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Research showing that the Moon holds small amounts of water at the surface was also published this week by the same journal.

Shane Byrne, of the University of Arizona, a member of the HiRISE team, said of the Mars findings: “This ice is a relic of a more humid climate from perhaps just several thousand years ago. We knew there was ice below the surface at high latitudes of Mars, but we find that it extends far closer to the equator than you would think, based on Mars’s climate today.

“The other surprising discovery is that ice exposed at the bottom of these meteorite impact craters is so pure. The thinking before was that ice accumulates below the surface between soil grains, so there would be a 50-50 mix of dirt and ice. We were able to figure out, given how long it took that ice to fade from view, that the mixture is 1 per cent dirt and 99 per cent ice.” The new craters were detected on August 10 last year, and studied in detail with the HiRISE instrument a month later. “We saw something very unusual ... this bright blue material poking up from the bottom of the crater,” Dr Byrne said. “It looked a lot like water ice. It faded away like you’d expect water ice to fade, because water ice is unstable on Mars’s surface and turns into water vapour in the atmosphere.”

A few days later the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars picked up the chemical signature of water ice. “All of this had to happen very quickly because 200 days after we first saw the ice, it was gone — it was the colour of dirt,” Dr Byrne said. “If we had taken HiRISE images just a few months later, we wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual. This discovery would have passed us by.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/scie...icle6849802.ece