Why isn't their more fossil evidence of pre-human hominids?

Question

I am not a religious nut trying to down the theory of Evolution.

I am a firm believer.

I am just curious as to why there are not hundreds of thousands of skeletons of these other species in the Homo genus. Can they be destroyed through erosion or some other means?

Answer 1

Different environments can affect the preservation of human bone. I've excavated and supervised the excavation of nearly 1000 human burials from all time periods. I've seen burials that are only 150 years old look far worse than burials that are 2000 years old. I've seen burials that were merely feet away from one another but one exhibited excellent preservation while the other was a poorly preserved. Soil chemistry plays a big role. Too alkaline or acidic and you have nothing but teeth left. If you have fluctuating water tables, the constant dampening and drying can fragment and dissolve bone. Animals and plants work to further scatter and destroy bone. Erosion can uncover bone so that they suffer the elements (wind, rain, sun). Older individuals with osteoporosis and younger individuals with small, undeveloped bone are even more susceptible. If a hundred years can give bad preservation, imagine what 1 million would do.

Answer 2

Unless there are special circumstances, bones don't last forever. Besides, other things destroy bones. Rain washes them away. Animals eat them.

Besides, what makes you think that all of them have been found.

Answer 3

Try this experiment:

Put something that is good condition somewhere on your property where it will not be in the way, and moved around, take a good close up photo and put it in a safe place.

Forget about it. In a year or so, get the photo and go find the object, if it still exists, and consider the condition. Imagine that you left it out for, oh, say, 2.5 million years. In what condition do you think it would be?

Now you have some idea how difficult it is to find evidence of our ancestors.

Jim D

Answer 4

They don't exist.  Man did not evolve from apes.

Answer 5

This is a very good question as it tells us that science has not fully explained the processes to the masses under which a fossil is formed.  Here is an excerpt from the PBS web site that explains how a fossil is formed.

Becoming a Fossil:

  



The study of how life evolved would be impossible if not for the history that is told in the fossilized remains going back billions of years. Scientists have described about 250,000 different fossil species, yet that is a small fraction of those that lived in the past.

The oldest fossils are remains of marine organisms that populated the planet's oceans. When they died, the plants and animals were buried by mud, sand, or silt on the sea floor. Land animals and plants usually decomposed or were eaten, and mainly the hard parts -- teeth, bones, shells, or wood -- were preserved.

Fossils can be formed in several ways. Buried bone and shell contain tiny air spaces into which water can seep, depositing minerals. Reinforced by these mineral deposits, bone and shell can survive for millions of years. Even if the bone or shell dissolves, the mineral deposits in the shape of the body structure remain.

Besides rock, fossils may be found as the result of an organism being entombed in ice, tar (like the famous La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles), or amber, in which ancient insects have been found, wonderfully preserved. Rare but highly informative are fossils created by a sudden event, like a volcanic eruption, that traps living things or, in the famous case in Laetoli, Ethiopia, footprints of human ancestors millions of years old.

Fossil remains come to the attention of scientists when they are exposed at Earth's surface. Erosion, land movements, or excavations often have revealed important fossil finds.

Answer 6

only a small fraction of skeletal material will fossilize, and of those fossils only a small fraction will stay intact, and only a smal l amount of those will eventually be found. although you don't see fossils under every rock, there is a great amount of hominid fossils on record of many different species and time periods.

Answer 7

You've hit on it.  Bone is incredibly fragile.  It needs a special set of circumstances in order to last for very long.  It can be destroyed by wet conditions, animals, bacteria, weather, and the chemicals in a soil.  We find so many more dinosaur skeletons than hominid because dinosaurs were around for a h**l of a lot longer than hominids have been: over 160 million years versus 1.5 or 2.5 million years.  We probably have absolutely no evidence of most of the species of dinosaurs that existed.

I work as an archaeologist in the US, and, while we do find plenty of bone, both animal and human, most of it isn't in great condition.  Particularly in the places I've worked, mostly the northeast and the midwest, the wet soil makes it just crumble.  It might've lasted a thousand or two years, but it really wasn't going to make it another millennium, let alone the hundreds of thousands of years that we're talking about for prehuman hominids.

Answer 8

for millions of years in your back yard there has been many different types of animals that lived and died.where are the bones? do you see them?dig. do you find them.there used to be dinosaurs and camels. horses.and Buffalo and moose and deer and rabbits and many other creatures that lived where you do,if you live in America. for millions of years But .they decomposed ,it takes special conditions for bones to stay intact.they find a lot of bones in caves, though.are if there was a flood and it covered them immediately and preserved them.if you let an animal decompose in your back yard it will be completely gone in a few years.take some dead animal and do that and you will see.animals will eat on it. flys eat up the carcass.weather will wash It away.it will simply be gone in a few years.dust to dust ashes to ashes.

Answer 9

yes, they decompose unless kept in very specific ranges.  ashes to ashes dust to dust.  also many civilizations burned the dead to avoid disease.

Answer 10

If you want to find a fossils that are 2 million years old, just to make a point, several things have to happen.  You need to have a bones or skeleton buried in a place where it will be quickly covered by sediment to keep other animals or bacteria from eating or decomposing it.  If it manages to be buried in a place then it must stay buried for 2 million years.  

Then it needs to be exposed by erosion.  Areas that are suitable for fossils that were deposited 2 million years ago are rare.  You have to search these very limited areas to find exceedingly rare fossils.

Answer 11

yes they cona be very easily destroyed and are hard to find because they were very localised

Answer 12

Those of us who look for material remains are aware of the fact that we are uncovering a very small portion of what once existed. I could go on for a long time about this, but the short answer is that pre-hominids either died in the jungle, where things don't last, or they got eaten. In general, we only find creatures that died in favorable conditions for preservation. Which is unfortunate for the diggers.

Answer 13

Because thousands, if not millions, of years have passed between today and when older hominids were around. That is enough time for fossilization to occur but not all dead ancient hominids become fossilized. So not everything that died millions of years ago will become fossilized in stone. Fossilization is not common place and happens very infrequently which is why there are very few, by comparison, hominid fossils and even fewer complete fossils.

Answer 14

There are LOTS of precursors out there.  The "missing link" is basically would cover a gap between two different fossiles that we haven't found (and may never find).

Thing is, the farther you go back, the fewer samples you have (yes, due to erosion, re-use, etc.) and the less obvious what they are is.

Answer 15

They didn't bury their dead, they just left them where they fell and animals ate them.

Answer 16

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust! Yes, they can be destroyed through natural conditions, especially since so much time has passed. That's why the ancient Egyptians devised mummification......to try to keep that from happening.

Answer 17

As has been covered by others answering this question, and as cited in your question, various conditions mitigate against  fossilization and the consequent potential for preservation, in ways that are easy to discover with current technology.

As technology advances and as more scientists enter the field, it is entirely possible that 'hundreds of thousands" of comparatively intact early hominid remains or other evidence of their existence will be found.

At present there exists enough circumstantial evidence to describe the evolution of man in the ways with which we are familiar. The circumstantial evidence supporting the theory meets generally accepted criteria with respect to scientific methodology, and the conclusions are generally accepted by experts as consistent with observable data.

That does not mean that future findings will not knock today's ideas about evolution into a cocked hat. But that's the beauty of science. It is based on what is known rather than what is believed. The nature of science is plastic, and desirous of conforming to hard data.

Will science fine stronger links between early hominids and ourselves? if the history of science is any guide, the answer is yes. But it is possible that data evidence will not be found and interpreted in our lifetime.

Answer 18

Because they do not exist.

Answer 19

I have wondered about this myself and yes I believe in evolution. It's strange how there is thousands of skeletons found of dinosaurs but we only found a few of pre-human hominids. I wished I would have asked my anthropology teacher but i'm guessing it is because hominids walking upright were a new species and not as widespread as other animals were. Also, humans bones are fragile and not as durable as the bones of dinosaurs or other animals so they wouldnt have been preserved easily. This would be even more so for early bipeds such as australopithecus that were much smaller than today's humans.

Answer 20

its just time and erosion I think

also, the fossils are sometime burried

3 million year old bones are probably brittle

osteoporosis and all

Answer 21

Its a d**n good question..........

Answer 22

If you have ever hiked through the forest, you will find few, if any, skeletons of the dead animals.  Why?  Because they are eaten!  Even beavers gnaw on bones for the life-giving nutrients.  Only homo sapiens and the Neanderthals buried their dead; hence, natural forces, including animals, would have removed any skeletons.  From far back in time, the only skeletons in evidence are from people/animals caught in quick sand, floods, volcanic eruptions, etc.; something that would preserve the body/skeleton.

Answer 23

We may not have had large numbers to begin with, plus we were not always a global species. So Pre-human hominid remains may only be found in specific areas. & don't forget it takes a certian kind of process to perserve fossils over millions of years