More than 1 million years before the lesser known hominin known as Lucy walked throughout the Afar region of Ethiopia, the lesser known Ardipithecus ramidus moving around the same area. Now, a team of anthropologists has examined a 4.4 million-year-old fossil hand any sample (affectionately known as “Ardi”), arguing that the movement of the human ancestors may have involved more swimming through the trees than previously thought.
Published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, the team’s comparative analysis focuses on Ardi’s manual morphology in the context of extinct and abandoned relatives. In conversation with bones from elsewhere in our family tree, Ardi’s hand marks reveal when there came certain changes that are currently visible in various primates. In particular, getting to know how Ardi moved brings us closer to knowing how (Homo sapiens) became a ground, bipedal of primates.
The team of Thomas Cody Prang, a biological anthropologist at Texas A&M University and recent lead author of the paper, identified some key features of Ardi’s hand that identified how he could move. The phalanges of the sample were long compared to the approximate size of the body. T.hose bones as well bent inwards, suggesting that the hand was predicted for grip. “The fact that Ardipithecus engages in finger length and curvature with the most strongly adhered primeval means that Ardipithecus has been altered to put it off,” Prang said.
“Now, that doesn’t mean, you know, that humans evolved from an ancestor who looked just like a chimpanzee,” he said in a phone call. “That doesn’t mean that chimpanzees are fossils alive, or that chimpanzees themselves have not evolved. Instead, our study shows that Ardipithecusand, perhaps, the earliest fossils retain ancestral features that are more like chimpanzees and bonobos, than any other living primacy. ”
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It was first excavated and explained in the early 1990s with a team led by paleoanthropologist Tim White, Ardipithecus ramidus received more attention after 2009 description of partial skeleton (nicknamed Ardi) in the journal Science. White disagrees with the paper’s recent conclusions, on the basis of the specific bones and samples selected for analysis, and the exclusion of others.
“We do not contradict the established fact that human activity has evolved over time. However, there is no new data or explanation here, ”White wrote in an emailed statement. “We cannot take these authors seriously until they engage in the specific anatomy of Ardi’s hand, instead of using limited, selective measurements in a post hoc argument supporting the misconception. famous that our ancestors were particularly like chimpanzees. ”
If you are relatively new to the debate about the nature of human origins and how our ancestors may have walked the earth or swum through the trees, be prepared to hang out. Back in 2009, White’s team argued that Ardi lacked features that would make him fit for an ape-like life; these absent symptoms included a morphological condition for passing through and climbing trees, and walking on the worms. White’s team said that the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees may have been very different from any other ape.
Prang’s team argues the opposite in this paper, claiming that their ancestor (Ardi’s predecessor) was closer to chimpanzees than anything else. They go on to report that hands are more like people at first becoming more familiar Australopithecus afarensis, Gnè Lucy.
The lack of the fossil record will not help much, although Ardi’s hand is more complete than Lucy’s youngest. Prang said interpretations of Ardi’s hand are helpful in narrowing down the goal-posts about what might be in the situation of his evolution (and by a substitute, what happened before Ardi and beyond after that).
“It makes the point that we in science do not prove that something is true. Instead, we are discarding ideas and alternatives that are likely to be misleading, ”said Prang. “In this case, the idea is that humans evolved from an ancestor who did not have suspensory features, and an ancestor who was more like a monkey, I think that can be eradicated. Ardipithecus. ”