Op vrijdag 9 september 2022 om 11:43:56 UTC+2 schreef
[email protected]:
“After decades in which Dart, Broom, Sollas, Clark, Robinson, Schepers etc strove to show how human Australopithecus was, and ultimately were so successful that virtually everyone came to accept Australopithecus as a hominid,(today="hominin" --mv)
it may seem strange that in the final decade of the century we are bringing to light more & more apish features of this extraordinary species ...
- Falk (1989) & Tobias (1981) revealed how strikingly ape-like the brain of A.africanus was, in quantity & quality.
- Dean & Wood (1981) & Tobias (1967) showed how apish the base of the cranium was, with its ape-like petrous pyramids.
- Conroy & Kuykendall (1995) & Moggi-Cecchi (1997) laid bare the ape-like pattern of tooth formation — and so did Beynon & Dean (1988) for the rate of tooth fm.
- Benade (1990) demonstrated some curious ape-like features of the spinal column.
- Berger (1994) produced the same from the shoulder & the knee (Berger & Tobias 1996),
- Brauer cs inferred the ape-like great toe of “Little Foot”.
- McHenry & Berger found apish bodily proportions in A.africanus.
Everybody, everything, was crying Ape!
After long years of australopithecine anthropo-centrism, we have entered upon a period of rampant australopithecine apishness!
So much so that the custodian* of the largest collection of A.africanus spms could stand before the Royal Anthropological Institute, and feel justified in asking:
Was A.africanus a hominid? We should not be surprised to find many ape-like traits in the australopithecines.
From the beginning, Dart saw apish features: he called the species Australopithecus—the southern ape, not Australanthropus—the southern man.”
More specifically, detailed comparisons show Au.africanus-robustus were fossil species of Pan, whereas E.Afr.apiths afarensis-boisei were fossil Gorilla.
Apparently, late-Miocene "graciles" (afarensis//africanus) evoled in parallel to early-Pleistocene "robusts" (boisei//robustus).
But why?
What was the environmental change (ice ages = chanqing vegetation & diet??) that elicited the transition from gracile to robust?
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