• naledi anthropocentric fantasies

    From littoral.homo@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Sat Apr 14 02:08:40 2018
    For an update, google:
    "not Homo but Pan naledi 2018"




    This is a great discovery & fantastic excavation, but professor Berger's interpretations (deliberate burial, human ancestor, distance running, tool making) are anthropocentric fantasies: from a comparative viewpoint, Homo or Australopithecus naledi is
    not unexpected (in fact predicted, e.g. Trends Ecol Evol 17, 212, 2002, google: aquarboreal).
    Obviously, naledi were bonobo-like forest-swamp or wetland waders - like bonobos or lowland gorillas but much more frequently - feeding on aquatic herbaceous vegetation (AHV): papyrus sedges, frogbit, waterlilies etc., google: bonobo wading.
    - They fossilised in stagnant water (mud-stone).
    - The curved hand-bones are for vertical climbing in the branches (above the swamp).
    - The long thumbs were not for tool-making, but for collecting floating AHV & surface-swimming.
    - The broad pelvises (iliac flaring & long femoral necks) were for sideward movements of the legs (femoral abduction): for climbing or swimming, not for running.
    - The flat humanlike forefeet are more flamingo- than ostrich-like: for wading or swimming, not for running.
    - The small front teeth & large cheekteeth can be expected with a wetland diet of AHV (+ hard-shelled invertebrates?).

    Lowland gorillas often wade on 2 legs in forest swamps for AHV, but naledi apparently exploited this special niche habitually: no wonder there were no other macro-fauna near the naledi fossils, google illustrations: gorilla bai.

    It was no deliberate burial of course (ape-sized brains!), but natural processes: the remarkably complete skeletons show that when they died they got almost immediately covered by (oxygen-poor) mud. Afterwards the mudstone slid side- & downwards as the
    underground eroded away (cave formation), a few cms every 1000 years.
    The more humanlike forefeet are no argument for placing naledi within Homo: S.Coon already noticed that prenatal chimps have more humanlike feet + longer & more adducted big toes, which later become chimp-like, and A.Schultz noticed that female lowland
    gorillas keep these into adulthood: the early hominids (Pan-Homo-Gorilla + fosil relatives) were parttime bipedal swamp waders with flat feet & non- or poorly opposable big toes. The African apes Pan // Gorilla evolved knuckle-walking in parallel (google:
    researchGate marc verhaegen), whereas Homo went a very different way: Pleistocene archaic Homo spread intercontinentally along the African & Eurasian coasts & rivers, beach-combing, diving & wading bipedally for littoral, shallow-aquatic & waterside
    foods, esp.cray+shellfish (which are very rich in brain-specific nutrients, e.g. DHA).

    Concl.:
    A.naledi - in spite of some primitive-hominid Homo-like features in hands, feet & dentition - was one of the many species of australopiths (= fossil relatives of Pan & Gorilla), and remarkably bonobo-like in nearly all the rest of its anatomy: more
    likely a close relative of Pan than of Homo.
    There's no need for anthropocentric fantasies of deliberate burial etc.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)