Op donderdag 23 juni 2022 om 14:03:10 UTC+2 schreef Pandora:
Co-discoverer of "Lucy" and proponent of the "East Side Story" dies at 87. https://phys.org/news/2022-06-french-co-discoverer-lucy-dies.html https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Story
I'm sorry to hear.
Lucy was no human ancestor, of course, but probably a late-Pliocene relative of gorillas:
Gorilla (fossil subgenus Praeanthropus) afarensis.
MORPHOLOGICAL DISTANCE BETWEEN AUSTRALOPITHECINE, HUMAN AND APE SKULLS
Human Evolution 11: 35-41, 1996
This paper attempts to quantify the morphological difference between fossil & living spp of hominoids.
The comparison is based upon a balanced list of cranio-dental characters, corrected for size (Wood & Chamberlain 1986).
The conclusions are:
cranio-dentally, the australopithecine spp are a unique & rather uniform group, much nearer to the great apes than to humans;
overall, their skull & dentition do not resemble the human more than the chimpanzee’s do.
... Conclusions
This comparison of 37 cranio-dental characters of fossil & living apes & humans yields no indication that any of the australopithecine spp has evolved in the human direction.
- South-African australopithecine skulls (africanus & robustus --mv) are morphologically closest to the chimpanzee among the living hominoids,
- boisei is closest to the gorilla among the living hominoids.
Human cranio-dental evolution appears to have been very fast the last 1 or 2 mill.yrs.
These conclusions could be verified & extended when more (incl. postcranial) data on living (e.g. P.paniscus) & fossil hominoids (adult & premature) will become available.
Apparently, as expected, E & S.African apiths evolved in parallel
-from late-Pliocene "gracile" afarensis // africanus
-to early-Pleistocene "robust" boisei // robustus.
If we call the S.Afr.apiths "Australopithecus", the E.Afr.apiths could be called "Praeanthropus" or perhaps "Zinjanthropus".
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