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5 - From hominoid arboreality to hominid bipedalism

from Part I - In search of origins: evolutionary theory, new species and paths into the past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2012

Sally C. Reynolds
Affiliation:
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Andrew Gallagher
Affiliation:
University of Johannesburg
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Summary

Abstract

During the 2000s, several new taxa of putative hominids have been described from the Upper Miocene of Africa: Orrorin tugenensis from the Tugen Hills, Kenya (6.1 to 5.7 Ma), Ardipithecus kadabba from the Middle Awash, Ethiopia (5.7 to 5.2 Ma) and Sahelanthropus tchadensis from Toros-Menalla, Chad (7 to 6 Ma). Bipedal locomotion has been claimed for all these taxa, but only Orrorin exhibits clear features of bipedalism. One drawback to the study of human origins is that scholars usually tend to compare the fossils only with modern apes (usually chimpanzees) and with modern humans; the modern apes often erroneously being considered as primitive and humans as derived. Miocene apes possess a higher diversity of locomotor repertoires than modern ones and it appears reductionist to focus only on modern hominoids to understand how bipedalism emerged. It is crucial to take into consideration the locomotion of Miocene apes knowing that even if these hominoids could occasionally walk bipedally, their bones did not exhibit the morphology of later bipedal hominids. Miocene large hominoids were arboreal animals adapted to climbing. The locomotor repertoire of early hominids was a mixture of bipedal locomotion and climbing, as indicated by the morphology of the limbs of Orrorin and Australopithecus. The study of locomotion must be carried out in an environmental context. When we consider the Miocene apes, it appears that they inhabited forest (dry or humid) or wooded environments; arboreal life was a survival strategy, for feeding and escaping from predators. Palaeontological and depositional data from the Lukeino Formation, Kenya, indicate that Late Miocene hominids lived in forested environments. Despite the usual belief, prevalent since Darwin, that humans and thus bipedalism emerged in a savanna environment, it appears that the emergence of hominids took place in a closed habitat and that bipedalism might have had its origins in an arboreal way of life.

Type
Chapter
Information
African Genesis
Perspectives on Hominin Evolution
, pp. 77 - 98
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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