Australopithecines: Ancestors of the African Apes?

Verhaegen, Marc

doi:10.1007/bf02437259

Cited by 6 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Johanson and Edey [59] considered the composite skull, reconstructed mostly from A.L.333 specimens (A. afarensis), to look very much like a small female gorilla. An extensive and detailed review of the literature concerning comparative skull morphology was provided by Verhaegen [29,30], supporting the morphological similarities between australopithecines and the African apes.…”

Section: Indications That Australopithecines Are Not Hominins But Rat...mentioning

confidence: 69%

“…Ever since they were first described, it has been clear that australopithecines have more in common with African apes than with humans. This is also the case for several late australopithecines, some of which are contemporary with early Homo, e.g., [29,82,83]. It has even been suggested that the late australopithecines are the most ape-like: "The evolution of the australopithecine crania was the antithesis of the Homo line.…”

Section: Indications That Australopithecines Are Not Hominins But Rat...mentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Even before the discoveries of the abovementioned fossils, it had been suggested that the African ape ancestors were already partially orthograde and/or bipedal [22,28,29,74]. Moreover, orthogrady was present in numerous still older hominoids.…”

Section: The Homo/panmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, we reconsider several of the previously formulated arguments that australopithecines are not hominins [10,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] and propose that it is just as likely and even more probable that they are more closely related to Pan and/or Gorilla [10,24,26,[28][29][30][31] or represent an extinct branch of hominids [25,32].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Have We Been Barking up the Wrong Ancestral Tree? Australopithecines Are Probably Not Our Ancestors

Vaneechoutte,

Mansfield,

Munro

et al. 2024

Nature Anthropology

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The dominant paradigm regarding human evolution since the split with Pan considers australopithecines as hominins, i.e., the closest relatives and/or direct ancestors of Homo. Historically, this paradigm started from the assumption that the Homo/Pan/Gorilla last common ancestor was a knuckle-walking ape that evolved into the fully upright (orthograde), obligate bipedal genus Homo, whereas Pan and Gorilla remained knuckle-walkers. Obligate terrestrial upright bipedalism, unique for our species, is an odd locomotor behaviour for a primate. Therefore, it had become generally accepted that a cooler and drier African climate had caused deforestation, which had forced our ancestors to develop upright bipedalism as an adaptation to living on open grassland savannah. This view, already held by Lamarck and Darwin, appeared most parsimonious in the almost complete absence of fossils. The discovery in the 20th century of australopithecine fossils, bipedal apes with small brains, in open country in southern and eastern Africa corroborated the savannah paradigm. Therefore, australopithecines are considered hominins. However, it is now recognized that most australopithecines instead lived in a mosaic of forests, grasslands and wetlands, and better knowledge of their fossils clearly indicates that they possessed several climbing adaptations. Moreover, none of the extinct ape species older than Australopithecus and Paranthropus for which postcranial remains have been described (e.g., Morotopithecus, Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, Ardipithecus) were knuckle-walking. On the other hand, upright posture/gait is already present to different degrees even in Miocene apes. Moreover, the notion that hominoid orthogrady is a primitive characteristic is corroborated by the growing consensus that knuckle-walking is not a primitive trait but has evolved in parallel, independently in both Pan and Gorilla. Consequently, it is possible that australopithecines are not transitional between a semi-erect ancestor and upright bipedal humans, but to the contrary, are intermediate between a more upright ancestor and extant semi-erect African apes. In summary, hypotheses that attempt to explain how a semi-erect Homo/Pan last common ancestor transitioned into the bipedal australopithecines as an adaptation to life on the savannah appear to be ill-conceived and moreover seem to have been superfluous from the very start. We review the numerous similarities between australopithecines and extant African apes, suggesting that they are possibly not hominins and therefore not our direct ancestors. We suggest that we may have been barking up the wrong ancestral tree, for almost a century.

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Section: Indications That Australopithecines Are Not Hominins But Rat...mentioning

confidence: 69%

Section: Indications That Australopithecines Are Not Hominins But Rat...mentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: The Homo/panmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Have We Been Barking up the Wrong Ancestral Tree? Australopithecines Are Probably Not Our Ancestors

Vaneechoutte,

Mansfield,

Munro

et al. 2024

Nature Anthropology

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show abstract

“…A. ramidus, for instance, has been considered by some authors as a different branch of the evolutionary tree, leading on, perhaps, to chimpanzees (Fischman, 1994). Verhaegen (1994) holds that australopithecines form a polyphyletic group. He points out the possibility that some of them (such as, P. boisei, WT-17000, the specimen of Laetoli attributed to A. afarensis and A.L.…”

Section: In Search For a Plausible Taxonomy For Hominoidea ~mentioning

confidence: 98%

The meaning of Hominidae

Cela‐Conde

1998

Hum. Evol.

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Report of the Symposium ‘Water and Human Evolution’,

Vaneechoutte¹

2000

Hum. Evol.

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In an Out There article in December last year, Professor emeritus Phillip V. Tobias (Johannesburg, South-Africa) asked for a renewed interest in the importance of water in human evolution, referring to the work of Elaine Morgan and Marc Verhaegen, who have been inspired by the ideas of marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy (Hardy, 1960). Tobias did not espouse the aquatic ape hypothesis as a primary cause for for instance our bipedalism, since there are other theories, but to his knowledge no other hypothesis could explain those several physiological and biochemical characteristics which seem to ally us to aquatic mammals.

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Australopithecines: Ancestors of the African Apes?

Cited by 6 publications

References 95 publications

Have We Been Barking up the Wrong Ancestral Tree? Australopithecines Are Probably Not Our Ancestors

Have We Been Barking up the Wrong Ancestral Tree? Australopithecines Are Probably Not Our Ancestors

The meaning of Hominidae

Report of the Symposium ‘Water and Human Evolution’,

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