You’ve probably heard of Afrotheria. A line of placental mammals expanded into all kinds of niches, back when Africa was an island continent. Elephants, hyraxes, manatees, tenrecs, aardvarks, elephant shrews, and golden moles are the existing members of Afrotheria. There used to be more: things that looked like a rhino (Arsenoitherium), for example. The thing is, they had diverged very far. Biologists had realized that there was a relationship between elephants, hyraxes, and manatees, but they didn’t know that aardvarks, tenrecs and golden moles were in that same clade. Without genetic analysis, it’s not easy to see that an apparent mole is really more closely relayed to an elephant. They’ve simply gotten too far into the part.
South America was also an island continent with its own placental mammalian lineages, and some of them filled many different niches. One, Xenarthra, has survivors: anteaters, tree sloths, and armadillos. The other, Meridiungulata, had members that looked like horses, camels, rhinos, hippos, rabbits, even chalicotheres. Most lost out after the formation of the isthmus of Panama let in North American competitors, and Amerindians finished off the the last survivors ( like Maucrauchenia and Toxodons) By the way, you will see South American paleontologists defending the competence of their extinct fauna, making excuses for their defeat by invaders from the North: it doesn’t get much stupider than that.
I’m wondering of any of the Meridiungulata lineages did survive, unnoticed because they’re passing for insectivores or rats or whatever, just as tenrecs and golden moles did. . Obviously the big ones are extinct, probably the others as well, but until we’ve looked at the DNA of every little mammal in South America, the possibility exists.
West Hunter 
I remember a theory that big bears and no trees to hide up kept humans from colonising North America for a long time.
The giant sloths ect were dispossessed and condemned by the system as losers. Until the revolution the wretched of the earth are always assumed to have not got their just desserts from the powers that be.
If a unknown species converged enough with another species it could be hiding among the other known species. Like that new species of frog just found in New Jersey (of all places). The call was groaning instead of croaking. It looked identical.
Continental converging on a ‘form’ for a ‘mole existence’ ect ect makes me wonder if aliens could be extremely human-like.
We are.
Only your alien race, ours look like pine trees.
“no trees to hide up”: but bears can outclimb you.
Too big to climb far, as is even the modern grizzly; they’ll try and shake you out the tree though. A woman was killed that way a few years ago
I was trying to picture that scene of a bear climbing up a tree after me head-first using its claws to hold on to the trunk and me with a stone ax of some kind and my first thought was “here comes dinner.”
“By the way, you will see South American paleontologists defending the competence of their extinct fauna, making excuses for their defeat by invaders from the North”
The same thing happened in Anthropology, with American anthropologists insisting that there was no, NO, NO! contact between the Old World and the New, and that the Indians had achieved their high civilizations totally on their own. As it turns out, they were probably mostly right, but the dogmatism was still remarkable. The tendency to choose a side and defend it is really strong in some people, maybe all people.
Pinker describes an experiment where subjects were divided into something like ‘Kandinsky admirers’ versus ‘Pollock admirers’, leading to serious animosity – and similar conditions with young adolescent boys were well on the way to Lord of the Flies before the experiment was stopped.
Now with the SA paleontologists, part of their identity really is at stake, despite that the connections are ridiculous, as Greg points out. First, the animals they’re defending are extinct, second they were non-human and third – well third is – anyone wanna guess the Amerindian component in the collective genome of SA paleontologists? It wouldn’t surprise me if it were lower than their NA colleagues (not that it would be any more logical if they were pure Incan, but it would be more understandable).
Australian biologists sometimes have similar patriotic emotional attachments to their field of study.
On the subject of Whites misidentifying as Amerindians, George Lopez has some great ‘mystified’ moments involving DNA testing on his Lopez Tonight show, including this one with Jessica Alba:
Jess, your first clue might’ve been the mirror. Then there’s your name….
Just think, when it comes to the continental races, we’re at least half a century into the new Dark Age. Back then, everyone knew the mirror test for the major races.
God, Alba’s reaction is priceless.Then there’s her remarkable lack of basic geographical knowledge (Yes, Jessica, Spain is in Europe and Spaniards are Europeans).
As to her thinking that she would be mostly Amerind, that’s possibly even weirder.She knows that her mother is Danish and French, so that’s 50% of her ancestry . For her to be even 50% Amerind, her father would have to be 100%, and even a quick visual survey of her father would indicate that that is simply not possible.
Poor dear, she will have to struggle through life knowing that she is 87% White and only 13% Amerind
“Is Spain an…. “Ohhh my gawd.”
(Yes, Jessica, all your friends of color will now think you soooo uncool. OMG!)
Well, it does show being white doesn’t keep you from being a dumb shyt, Ms. Alba. (And no, your name doesn’t protect you, cuzzz ya know?)
Whatever her race she’s not a credit to it. At least not in relation to intellectuality.
She didn’t look very white when she first came on the scene in the TV show Dark Angel. I assumed she was Hispanic or Middle Eastern or some sort of hybrid.
“She didn’t look very white when she first came on the scene in the TV show Dark Angel. I assumed she was Hispanic or Middle Eastern or some sort of hybrid.”
She looks like a Southern European White woman
With a little bit of Amerindian.
She seemed to look a lot more ethnic on Dark Angel and early in her career. She looked less white than most Southern European women. She looked less white than Rashida Jones, Quincy Jones’s daughter.
Josh: “With a little bit of Amerindian.”
Very little (13%)
Aaron:”She seemed to look a lot more ethnic on Dark Angel and early in her career.”
By ethnic I assume that you mean she didn’t look Northern European?
“She looked less white than most Southern European women.”
Since Southern European women are White, I’m not sure what you mean
“She looked less white than Rashida Jones, Quincy Jones’s daughter.”
Not to my eyes; of course, I’ve traveled in Southern Europe, so I’m well acquainted with the range of phenotypes in the region
By ethnic I mean Hispanic or Middle Eastern or something.
FWIW she looks whiter now with straighter, lighter hair and smaller lips.
I’ve visited Italy and Spain.
Aaron:”By ethnic I mean Hispanic or Middle Eastern or something.”
Hispanic is a meaningless category, seeing as how it includes people like Lynda Carter, Cameron Diaz, and Alberto Fujimori
Aaron:”FWIW she looks whiter now with straighter,”
This might come as a shock, but lots of Europeans have curly hair……
Aaron:” lighter hair”
Again, this might come as a shock, but lots of Europeans have dark hair
Aaron:”and smaller lips.”
Does this mean that you think that big-lipped Angelina Jolie does not look European?
Aaron:”I’ve visited Italy and Spain.”
Then you must have seen quite a few women with Alba’s phenotype
Unlikely. North American whites tend to be whiter than Latin American whites.
Just my way of saying ‘approaching zero for both.’
But technically, I’m sure you’re right.
It’s pretty much zero in North America, but it seems to be pretty non-trivial in Latin America.
The thing is, it likely approaches trivial for PhD’s from the right side of the academic bell curve (Physics to the right, Indigenous Studies to the left) – Paleontology is center-right.
That old test wasn’t all that accurate or detailed and the various tests have gotten more accurate now. Jessica Alba was in fact retested very recently and the result was shown in the documentary “Finding your roots”. She’s obviously still far more Euro than NA, but according to that test she was around 22½% NA of her genetic ancestry.
Source:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/jessica-albas-mexican-roots/12760/
“That old test wasn’t all that accurate or detailed and the various tests have gotten more accurate now. Jessica Alba was in fact retested very recently and the result was shown in the documentary “Finding your roots”. She’s obviously still far more Euro than NA, but according to that test she was around 22½% NA of her genetic ancestry.”
Alba’s glee at finding out that she was 22 and a half percent Amerind was priceless.Also loved how her mother’s Euro ancestry was sidelined.Some genes are more equal than others, it seems.
Yes, she looked really excited about the idea that her paternal ancestors were Native Americans, but in reality she kind of misunderstood the results. It’s her paternal lineage which is from some Indigenous Mexican at some point, it doesn’t mean that her immediate paternal ancestors were “Native Americans”.
I also don’t understand how she could think that she was “more Native American” on the Lopez show, considering it’s her paternal grandfather who “looks Native American”, according to herself. She must obviously be at least half Euro based on her mother and her dad obviously doesn’t look like a pure Indigenous Mexican – the new show showed that he was just a little less than half. Actually even that new test isn’t exact, and the guy who examined her dad’s indigenous ancestry had a different percentage, namely 39.5 % Indigenous Mexican.
Anyway, it’s not that on topic. The genetics of species relation is often just MtDNA analysis, and it’s somewhat reliable for the purposes as mentioned in the article.
“By the way, you will see South American paleontologists defending the competence of their extinct fauna, making excuses for their defeat by invaders from the North”
It’s weird to see the patriotic attachment some people have for their nation’s animals. I remember seeing some guy on Reddit freak out because someone suggested that pandas aren’t the best-adapted creatures on God’s green earth.
You are twice hyraxed.
And therefore blessed among men.
And therefore blessed among men.
========
Hahahaha! Excellent
Dunno if you saw the early version of the post. I was relating a typo. Nice comeback. Does he have another one in him?
When I was young, the Top Science was physics – and, boy, were physicists arrogant about it! Now it’s molecular biology. Are molecular biologists now as arrogant as physicists used to be?
I think phyics is still indusptably top, it’s just so far beyond the ken of your average pundit that it escapes their notice, let alone heir understanding!
Ye cannae be top, Captain, if ye’re entirely stuck.
To physicists, molecular biology just looks like another field of engineering …
“To physicists, molecular biology just looks like another field of engineering …”: to molecular biologists, the Large Hadron Collider just looks like another piece of engineering. Or so I assume.
Very very expensive engineering that didn’t produce a lot…..
Physics may have lost some shine by recent stagnation (or the perception of stagnation), and physicists may no longer quite believe everything else is just stamp collecting, but they still think they are the top dogs. However, as Erdös once said: “Why are you a physicist? Why aren’t you a mathematician?”
Speaking of arrogance among mathematicians the Erdoes story reminds me of a story I once heard about Fubini. Supposedly at some faculty dinner a graduate student asked Fubini who was the greatest mathematician in the world. Fubinin gave the student a look of astonishment as if he had never heard such a stupid question and then replied. “I am.”
When Feynman was asked if he was the greatest physicist in the world, he responded “of course”. But then he laughed and said: “How can I say that? Let me put it this way, not the greatest, but pretty good.”
No false modesty on Fubini’s part.
Not much wit though. Brian Clough, an outrageously successful English football manager, was once asked whether he was the best manager in the country. He replied something like “I don’t know about that but I’m in the top one.”
“they still think they are the top dogs”: delusional. What matters is whether everyone else thinks they are.
No.
http://infoproc.blogspot.fr/2005/12/physics-still-pulls-them-in.html
Would you presume any sort of environment would be most likely to host rodent-like Meridiungulata lineages? For instance, the Paramo ecosystem is unique to the Andes, high tropical and cold. Perhaps this area could have some unique little rodent-like things which are in the Meridiungalata clade.
“By the way, you will see South American paleontologists defending the competence of their extinct fauna, making excuses for their defeat by invaders from the North: it doesn’t get much stupider than that.”
I just want to say that this is a very funny and very true observation.
Perhaps the SA mammals lived in a utopia where there was no prehistoric conflict to ratchet up their evolution.
Personally, I think that it’s all a result of placental privilege.
By the way, you will see South American paleontologists defending the competence of their extinct fauna, making excuses for their defeat by invaders from the North: it doesn’t get much stupider than that.
===================
This sort of biological chauvinism goes way back. In the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson was infuriated by the French philosopher Buffon’s theory that New World animals were all just weak and degenerate versions of larger, stronger, better European animals. Actually, Buffon extended this theory to apply to New World humans as well.
Jefferson later sent Buffon a stuffed large bull moose to convince him how wrong he was. Jefferson claimed that Buffon admitted to him his theory was incorrect but Buffon never published a retraction.
Jefferson also told Lewis & Clark on their expedition to be on the lookout for mammoths, ground sloths and other megafauna that he suspected might still be at large out in the West somewhere.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/jeffersons-moose-thomass-fauna-figh-11-01-26/
Anti-Marsupialist prejudice.
Anti-Marsupialist hate speech, even.
I don’t know if this is true, but if so, we’ve kept it hidden for a long time:
Human lineage may have evolve ethanol tolerance 10M years ago
Given the closet relations of Meridiungulata remain a bit of a mystery, I’m still rather shocked that no one has attempted to sequence Toxodon and/or Macrauchenia DNA yet. They’re both known by subfossils, and the latter in particular seems to have been common in Patagonia, where the cold, dry climate should have helped with DNA preservation.
Hell, maybe someone is working on this right now though. If you have some idea, I’m all ears.