Australopithecus comprised different species of small-brained but bipedal Pliocene primates. Both were rejected as hominids by eminent authorities, but two grades of human evolution were eventually recognized. Homo erectus was found in the 1890s, and Australopithecus in the 1920s. It easily fit the fossil record of his day, when only a few Neanderthals were known.
These fossils have begun to rectify the mistaken notion that contemporary apes, in particular common chimpanzees, can serve as adequate representations of the ancestral past.ĭarwin's human evolution scenario attempted to explain hominid tool use, bipedality, enlarged brains, and reduced canine teeth ( 2). However, they substantially reveal the early evolution of the hominid clade (the term “hominid” denoting all species on the human side of the human/chimpanzee phylogenetic split). These paleontological discoveries do not yet include the common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees (the CLCA). Now, however, long sought and recently discovered African fossils provide escape from such persistent but inaccurate projection. The notion that modern great apes are little changed from the last common ancestors we shared with them promoted the assumption that hominid fossils anatomically intermediate between living apes and ourselves would eventually be found. Nevertheless, Darwin and his less cautious contemporaries and intellectual descendants used humans and modern apes to triangulate ancestral anatomy and behaviors, which promulgated the erroneous metaphor of a hominid “missing link.” Even today, despite thousands of available fossils, this deeply embedded metaphor reinforces the misconceptions that extant apes-particularly chimpanzees-can be viewed as “living missing links,” or that that modern African apes combined can be used to represent the past “as time machines” ( 3). Press, Tokyo.“.the stock whence two or more species have sprung, need in no respect be intermediate between those species.”Ĭharles Darwin famously suggested that Africa was humanity’s most probable birth continent, but warned that without fossils, it was “…useless to speculate on this subject” ( 2). Spline Function Method for Personal Computers. Postnatal growth of nonhuman primates: the problem of the adolescent spurt. In Nonhuman Primate Models for Human Growth, Watts, E. Adolescent growth and development of monkeys, apes and humans. A comparative study of skeletal maturation in the chimpanzee and rhesus monkey and its relationship to growth and sexual maturity. Body weights of wild chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) of the Mahale Mountains National Park, Tanzania. Breeding of the chimpanzee in Sanwakagaku Kenkyusho Reichourui Center, Co. Age related change in haematological and serum biochemical values in the chimpanzee. Assessment of Skeletal Maturity and Prediction of Adult Height (TW2 method). Centre International de l'Enfance, Paris. A New System for Estimating Skeletal Maturity from the Hand and Wrist, with Standards Derived from a Study of 2,600 Healthy British Children. Chimpanzee microsatellite PCR primers applied to paternity testing in a captive colony. Weight growth of colony-reared chimpanzees.
Assessing the Skeletal Maturity of the Hand-wrist: Fels Method.
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