TOC - Fossil Cousins

Home
Fossil Cousins is for information about other primates living at the time but are not thought to be in the Homo line of descent.  

For all who believe in the literal reading of the Christian Bible, the passage "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" 2 Peter 3:8), is my basis to believe that even though God made all living things on earth (In 7 days per the text) there is no fixed time limit for having done so, since God is eternity itself,  the passage might just as well have read "a million years".   

As an example, for 400 years (1604-1611) we were taught; in the truest sincerity, the story of Moses parting the "RED SEA" - it turns out that this was translated from the Greek which was translated from Hebrew, but a re-translation of the original Hebrew and we get the correct translation of "REED SEA".   The Reed Sea is/was a tidal marsh near the head of the Nile, and when the tide is out it can be walked across.  Pharaoh's forces were probably crossing when the tide came in and Moses no doubt knew this all along, setting a trap for Pharaoh's troops.   Did you know there is no description of Moses - no one knows his actual likeness.

Therefore, there is reason why both the Bible and the archeologist are correct.
 
Glossary of Epochs

The Lower Paleolithic lasted between 2.5 million-200,000 years ago (or at least according to one permutation), and it was when the Hominin ancestors of human beings, including Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, roamed most of the earth and began making the first stone tools.

The Middle Paleolithic (ca 200,000 to 45,000 years ago) witnessed the evolution of Neanderthals and the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens, and some of the first glimmers of modern behaviors: sophisticated stone tools, caring for the elderly, hunting and gathering and some amount of symbolic or ritual behavior.

By the Upper Paleolithic (45,000-10,000 years ago), the Neanderthals were in decline, and by 30,000 BC, they were gone. Modern humans spread all over the planet. The LSA is characterized by fully modern behaviors such as cave art, hunting, and making a wide range of tools in stone, bone, ivory and antler.

The Mesolithic (or "middle stone") period (12,000-7000 years ago) is traditionally that time period in the Old World between the last glaciation at the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic, when farming communities began to be established. During the first three thousand years of what scholars recognize as the Mesolithic, a period of climatic instability made life very interesting in Europe, with gradual warming abruptly switching to 1200 years of very cold dry weather called the Younger Dryas. By 9000 BC, the climate had stabilized to close to what it is today.

The Neolithic period as a notion is based on an idea of an Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and New Stone Age (Neolithic).   The definition of Neolithic is now seen as a "package" of characteristics: groundstone tools, rectangular buildings, pottery, people living in settled villages and, most importantly, the production of food by developing a working relationship with animals and plants called domestication.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils  - This place will fill your brain.

http://www.revealingthelink.com/who-is-ida/from-ida-to-us  -  If that is not enough try here.  List from (Darwinius Masillae) Ida to us.   The oldest known primate ever found it is 45 million years old, found in Germany, even the imprint of the skin was preserved.
 

Check the opposing large toe in this illustration.
Some locations of Hominid finds
 Ardi, a 4.4 Million-Year-Old Fossil is Oldest Human Ancestor  This hominid walked the forest of Ethiopia.  The big news in the "Journal Science Tomorrow" is the discovery of  the oldest human skeleton -- a small-brained, 110-pound female of the species Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed "Ardi." She lived in what is now Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago, which makes her over a million years older than the famous "Lucy" fossil, found in the same region thirty-five years ago.   Conventional wisdom says our kind first stood up on two legs when they moved out of the forest and onto open savanna grasslands.   At the time Ardi lived, her environment was a woodland, much cooler and wetter than the desert there today.   One explanation for the origin of bipedal thus comes down to the monogamous pair bond. Far from being a recent evolutionary innovation, as many people assume, some believe the behavior goes back all the way to near the beginning of our hominid lineage some six million years ago.

But there is one other essential piece to this puzzle that leaves no trace in the fossil record.  When certain primate females are ready to mate they send strong signals to the other males (a baboon shows a bright red bottom).  It is possible that our female hominid ancestors did not know when she was fertile.   Therefore, selecting a single male partner became the most viable human characteristic, ovulation that not only goes unannounced to the males of the group, but is concealed even from the female herself.   In this scenario regular meals took precedence over being part of a harem.  The Female's choice of male partners became the most brave and stealthy who could both kill game and scavenge well.  This trait may have resulted in corporation by the males to stay alive, which may also have generated the need for language.

So you thought women began manipulating men in just your life time didn't you, no, no, females figured it out looooooooooong ago - its in their DNA guys.  And you know that if you have ever crossed a willowy little fire-tongue.

"This may be the most important specimen in the history of evolutionary biology," said C. Owen Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Kent State University in Ohio, in an interview with ABCNews.com.
Lovejoy was one of more than 40 researchers from around the world who analyzed the Ardi fossils.
Ardipithecus is not the long-sought "missing link" -- the ancestor that scientists say humans and apes have in common -- but comes close. And it helps show that both human beings and apes have evolved from something, about six million years ago, that did not look much like either.
"Six months ago, we would have said our common ancestor looked something like a chimp," said Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley, a senior researcher on the project. "Now all that has changed.
"What we found in Ethiopia at 4.4 million years ago is the closest we've ever come to that ancestor along our own line," White said.
The most complete skeleton, out of more than 30 found, was female, about four feet tall. They discerned the sex from the shape of the pelvis, which was wide enough for her to have borne a baby in her womb.

J.H. Matternes/Science/ABC News Photo Illustration
Artist's conception of what Ardipithecus ramidus would have looked like 4.4 million years ago.
There are older specimens from other locations, but they are not complete enough for the analysis that has now been applied to Ardipithecus.
Walked Upright, but Feet Like a Chimp
The scientists said the fossils show that Ardipithecus walked upright, and that her teeth resemble modern human teeth more closely than they do those of a chimpanzee.
Curiously, though, her feet were capable of grasping, something chimps need in order to climb in trees. She would have been able to climb trees, but she probably did not swing from branches the way modern chimps do.
The back of her skull is small, indicating she had a small brain.
The Ardipithecus bone fragments came from a layer of rock beneath the Afar region of Ethiopia. Afar is now desert, but the scientists said it was woodland 4 million years ago. They found fossilized wood and seeds around the Afar bones.
The fossil hunters, from Ethiopia and the United States, sent the bone fragments they found to a team in Japan. There, 3-D computer models were made of each piece, and the pieces were digitally reassembled, a bit like a jigsaw puzzle.
'Missing Link'? African Fossil Brings Paleontologists Closer
The first fragments were found in 1992, and more in later years. It took this long, said Lovejoy, to put the pieces together so that a detailed description could be published. The results are online in this week's edition of the journal Science.
Ardipithecus is 1.2 million years older than Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), the famous pre-human fossil found in Africa in 1974. Lucy, like Ardi, walked upright and had a small brain, but was clearly closer to modern human beings -- probably not capable, for instance, of climbing routinely in trees.
So what would life have been like for a primitive being more than four million years ago? Scientists say they can deduce a fair amount from Ardi's skull, jaw, hands, legs and pelvis.
The teeth, for instance, suggest that Ardipithecus was probably an omnivore -- eating anything, plant or animal, that it could find. It did not have the pointed teeth found in modern chimpanzees, useful for eating fruit.

Darwin Would Be Pleased, the shape of the large canine teeth in the front of the jaw is important.  Male teeth were not larger than females'. It provides clues about social structure, suggesting that the males of the species did not fight each other for the females' attention.
 
Instead, said Lovejoy, "It is likely that the males went looking for food and brought it back to the females, possibly in return for sex, though that's another story."  He added, "This was probably a species for which male aggressiveness was not something that led to evolutionary success."   Scientists have believed since Charles Darwin's time that apes and human beings have common origins.   But they have been hampered by the lack of fossils to trace the evolutionary path.  White and Lovejoy said that is why Ardipithecus is so important.
"This," said Lovejoy, "fills a huge gap."
 

11-million-year-old primate discovered.
April 23, 2010

Scientists have discovered an eleven-million-year-old new primate in a garbage dump in Catalonia, Spain.
Named Pliopithecus canmatensis, after the site (Can Mata in the Valles-Penedes basin), the primate belonged to an extinct family of Old World monkeys, Catarrhini, which dispersed from Africa to Eurasia.
Scientists were able to ID the monkey from fragments of its jaw and molars.
The new species, according to the scientists, sheds light on the evolution of the superfamily Pliopithecoidea, primates that include animals that diverged before the separation of the two current superfamilies: the cercopithecoids (Old World monkeys) and the hominids (anthromorphs and humans). It thrived in Eurasia during the Early and Late Miocene, or between 23.5 and 5.3 million years ago.
“Based on the anatomical, palaeobiographical and biostratigraphic information available, the most probable evolutionary scenario for this group is that the Pliopithecoidea were the first Catarrhini to disperse from Africa to Eurasia, where they experienced an evolutionary radiation in a continent initially deserted of other anthropoids (apes),” David Alba, the project leader and a researcher at the Catalan Institute for Palaeontology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), aid.
According to the new study, the subfamily to which this particular species belonged originated from an ancestor called the dionsisopithecine in Asia. This ancestor led to animals that later moved into Europe around 15 million years ago.
Fifteen to eleven million years is somewhat a drop in the time bucket for primate evolution, however. One of the world’s oldest primate-like animals was Plesiadapis, which lived 58 to 55 million years ago. So primate history, our history, goes back a very long time.
The study has been published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
 
 Lucy (also given a second (Amharic) name: dinqineš, or Dinkenesh, meaning "you are amazing" is the common name of AL 288-1, several hundred pieces of bone representing about 40% of the skeleton of an individual Australopithecus afarensis.   The specimen was discovered in 1974 at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression.   Lucy is estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago.   The discovery of this hominid was significant as the skeleton shows evidence of small skull capacity akin to that of apes and of bipedal upright walk akin to that of humans, providing further evidence supporting the view that bipedalism preceded increase in brain size in human evolution, though other findings have been interpreted as suggesting that Australopithecus afarensis was not directly ancestral to humans.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus)
anthropologist are certain she was a biped, but without foot bones, they use the leg bone to hip bone connection, as well as the spinal connection at the skull.  Upright walkers spines are directly below the skull while apes and chimps spines enter the skull at an angle.   This Lucy skeleton reconstruction is by the Cleveland Natural History Museum and shows her with human feet, check the big toe.

The species A. afarensis is one of the better known australopithecines, merely with regard to the number of samples attributed to the species. The species was named by D. Johanson and T. White in 1978. This lead to a heated debate over the validity of the species (seen in a 1980 issue of Science), with the species eventually being accepted by most researchers as a new species of australopithecine and a likely candidate for a human ancestor.
pologist Zeresenay Alemseged, who led the scientific team credited with the discovery.


Described as the skull of an Australopithecus afarensis baby, this measures about 12 cm (5 inches) from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head vertically. (Courtesy Zeresenay Alemseged; © Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritages).

The find revived memories of “Lucy,” believed to be a female in her mid-20s and hailed, when discovered, as the most complete known skeleton of a pre-human hominid. A hominid is a species on the human branch of the evolutionary tree.

The new specimen, dubbed “Lucy’s baby” by some—though it’s actually thought to have lived a bit earlier than Lucy—is likewise causing a stir over its splendid condition.

That, scientists say, makes it a treasure trove of additional clues to human origins.

Years ago, Lucy, in many researchers’ view, overturned a widespread assumption: that our ancestors evolved intelligence first and upright walking later. She was seen to refute that because her bones suggested at least some upright-walking ability, yet a small, ape-like brain.

This helped revive a notion proposed by Charles Darwin: that upright movement spurred brain evolution by freeing hands for tool use. Henceforth, success in the battle for survival would depend on ever-better tool use, and the brains to enable it.

Like Lucy, the newfound child shows the marks of a species able to walk upright, researchers said; it also offers more clues to the evolution of that skill, and of the brain and speech. It’s a “mine of information about a crucial stage in human evolutionary history,” wrote paleobiologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in a commentary in the Sept. 21 issue of the research journal Nature.

The scientists credited with the find described it in another paper in the same issue. They estimated that the infant died at age three, possibly in a flood that also buried it in pebbles and sand, helping preserve it.


Artist's conception of a mother and child Australopithecus afarensis. Adult females of the species were some 3½ feet tall, judging from the "Lucy" specimen.

Lucy and the baby, which date to slightly more than three million years ago, are far from the oldest known members of the human family.

That distinction belongs to the chimp-sized Sahelanthropus tchadensis or “Toumai Man,” estimated as seven million years old and found in Central Africa four years ago.

But Lucy and the tot—said to represent a later species, Australopithecus afarensis—would be part of a burst of hominid diversity noted in the fossil record from four to two million years ago.

This is thought to reflect some of the rich evolutionary experimentation that nature tossed up on the way to producing our species, Homo sapiens. Hominids of that period are collectively called Australopiths. Which lineage led to us is unknown, though.

The newfound bundle of bones, found like Lucy in the Ethiopian desert, was also a female, and lived about 3.3 million years ago, its discoverers said. Lucy is thought to have lived 3.2 million years ago.

“The most impressive difference between them is that this baby has a face,” said team leader Zeresenay (Ethiopians’ first names are their formal names.) This face gave away the species, added Zeresenay, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Also unlike Lucy—nicknamed after a Beatles song—the baby has fingers, a foot and a torso. Tooth structures clued researchers in to its rough age and its sex, they said, while the sediments that had trapped it revealed its time period.


Australopiths in Eastern Africa fight off hyenas over a chunk of meat in an image by paleo-artist Stefano Ricci (Courtesy S. Ricci and Archaeological Museum of Camaiore).



The tot helps explain how A. afarensis blurred ape-human boundaries, Zeresenay said: her shoulder blades resemble a young gorilla’s, suggesting she could climb trees, but her thigh bone is angled like humans’, implying good upright walking ability.

Members of the species seem to have been foraging, upright walkers, capable of “climbing trees when necessary, especially when they were little,” he said.

Zeresenay first led a band of fossil hunters into Ethiopia’s Dikika region in 1999, researchers recounted. Punishing heat, flash floods, malaria, wild beasts and occasional shootouts between rival ethnic groups plague the zone.

On a shadeless December day the next year, the scientists recalled, they hunted under a pounding sun for the prize that had eluded them—our ape-like forebears. Team member Tilahun Gebreselassie then spotted the tot’s face, no bigger than a monkey’s, peering out from a dusty slope.

Tucked beneath it in hard sandstone were more bones, the whole bundle of them no bigger than a canteloupe, one finger still curled in a tiny grasp, researchers said. Zeresenay found a rare example of a hyoid bone, a throat structure later crucial to human speech, he said. This offers a glimpse of the evolution of the voice box, which under some theories is interwoven with that of speech.

Zeresenay spent the next five years scratching away rock from the skeleton with a dentist’s drill, according to members of his team.

What killed the baby is unclear. But it seems the ancient Awash River rapidly buried the body in a flood, the scientists said, preserving rare details such as a full set of both milk teeth and unerupted adult teeth. The brain cast will help reveal “whether our earliest ancestors grew their brains in the uniquely human way,” said a member of the research group, Fred Spoor of University College London.

One of her humanlike knees was complete with a kneecap no bigger than a dried pea, researchers said. But her upper body, like Lucy’s, had many apelike features: small brain, nose flat like a chimp’s, face projecting forward. Her two complete shoulder blades are the first found from an Australopith, Zeresenay said; analyzing their function “will be among the exciting challenges that we will face.”



 
  Paranthropus robustus lived in the Cradle of mankind from about 2.5-million to 1-million years ago. It had huge jaws for chewing tough vegetation like roots and tubers. It was not a direct ancestor of mankind, but an ancient cousin.

Fossils of the same Paranthropus genus, but of several species other than robustus, have been discovered in East Africa since Broom’s groundbreaking find. Paranthropus aethiopicus, discovered and named by Camille Arambourg and Yves Coppens in 1967, lived in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia 2.5-million years ago. The first specimen of another species, Paranthropus boisei, was found by Mary Leakey in 1959 at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Additional Paranthropus boisei fossils have been found in Peninj, Tanzania, and at Chesowanja and Lake Turkana in Kenya.

Paranthropus was well adapted to a specialized, mainly vegetarian, diet. As environmental conditions changed it therefore may have been unable to adapt to changes in the available food.
Handier than Homo habilis    http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Handier_than_Homo_habilis_999.html

Sep 16, 2011    by Staff Writers    Terra Daily    Credit: Peter Schmid.
Munich, Germany (SPX)

  The fossil remains of an adult female right hand bones of Australopithecus sediba rearticulated.    From Malapa, South Africa, include an almost complete right hand in association with the right forelimb bones, in addition to several bones from the left hand.  Hand bones from a single individual with a clear taxonomic affiliation are scarce in the hominin fossil record, which has hampered understanding of the evolution of manipulative abilities in hominins.   An international team of researchers including Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany has now published a study that describes the earliest, most complete fossil hominin hand post-dating the appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record, the hand of a 1.98-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba from Malapa, South Africa.

The researchers found that Au. sediba used its hand for arboreal locomotion but was also capable of human-like precision grips, a prerequisite for tool-making.

Furthermore, the Au. sediba hand makes a better candidate for an early tool-making hominin hand than the Homo habilis hand, and may well have been a predecessor from which the later Homo hand evolved.

The extraordinary manipulative skills of the human hand are viewed as a hallmark of humanity. Over the course of human evolution, the hand was freed from the constraints of locomotion and has evolved primarily for manipulation, including tool-use and eventually tool-production.

Understanding this functional evolution has been hindered by the rarity of relatively complete hand skeletons that can be reliably assigned to a given taxon based on a clear association with craniodental fossils.

Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and colleagues from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, Duke University in Durham, USA and the University of Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland, now describe the earliest, most complete fossil hominin hand post-dating the appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record around 2.6 million years ago.

"Almost all other fossil hominin hand bones prior to Neanderthals are isolated bones that are not anatomically associated (i.e., do not belong to the same individual) and are not clearly attributed to a specific hominin species", says Kivell: "The Australopithecus sediba hand thus allows us for the first time prior to Neanderthals to evaluate the functional morphology of the hand overall, rather than just from isolated bones."

The researchers reconstructed the Au. sediba hand, then compared it with other hominin fossils and investigated the presence of several features that have been associated with human-like precision grip and the ability to make stone tools.   They found that Au. sediba has many of these features, including a relatively long thumb compared to the fingers - longer than even that of modern humans - that would facilitate thumb-to-finger precision grips.

Importantly, Au. sediba has more features related to tool-making than the 1.75-million-year-old "OH 7 hand" that was used to originally define the "handy man" species, Homo habilis.

However, Au. sediba also retains morphology that suggests the hand was still capable of powerful flexion needed for climbing in trees.

"Taken together, we conclude that mosaic morphology of Au. sediba had a hand still used for arboreal locomotion but was also capable of human-like precision grips", says Kivell and adds: "In comparison with the hand of Homo habilis, Au. sediba makes a better candidate for an early tool-making hominin hand and the condition from which the later Homo hand evolved."
 
New pre-human species offers evolutionary clues
 

Apr 8, 2010   Science   By Kate Kelland    LONDON
Artist rendition of New pre-human

(Reuters) - Two partial skeletons unearthed in a South African cave belong to a previously unclassified species of pre-human dating back almost 2 million years and may shed new light on human evolution, scientists said on Thursday.

Fossils of the bones of a young male and an adult female suggest the newly documented species, called Australopithecus sediba, walked upright and shared many physical traits with the earliest known human Homo species.

The finding of the pre-human, or hominid, fossils -- which scientists say are between 1.78 and 1.95 million years old -- was published in the journal Science and may answer some key questions about where humans came from.

Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, who led the team that found the fossils in August 2008, told a news conference held near the cave outside Johannesburg the discovery was "unprecedented."

"I am struck by the exceptional nature of something right on our doorstep ... there are more hominid fossils than I have ever discovered in my entire career," he said.

"When we found it we never imagined that we were looking at a new species."

Berger earlier told reporters by telephone the team were hoping to reveal a possible two further skeletons from the same site.

He was reluctant to define the new species as a "missing link" in human evolutionary history, but said it would "contribute enormously to our understanding of what was going on at that moment where the early members of the genus Homo emerged."

POWERFUL HANDS

South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe told the news conference: "As any parent knows, one of the most common questions a child asks is, 'where do I come from?' It has become clear the answer is 'Africa'.

"With the World Cup in 63 days, we will now be able to welcome people from the world with fresh news of our past."

Many experts believe the human genus Homo evolved from the Australopithecus genus about 2 million years ago. One of the best-known pre-humans is "Lucy," the skeleton of a species called Australopithecus afarensis, and this new species is about 1 million years younger than "Lucy," the scientists said.

The fossils, a juvenile male and an adult female, were found in the Malapa caves in the "Cradle of Mankind" World Heritage Site, 40 km (25 miles) outside Johannesburg.

The species had long arms, like an ape, short powerful hands, a very advanced pelvis and long legs capable of striding and possibly running like a human, the researchers said.

The scientists estimate both hominids were about 1.27 meters, although the child would have grown taller.

The brain size of the younger one was probably between 420 and 450 cubic centimeters, which is small when compared with the human brain of about 1200 to 1600 cubic centimeters, they said.

"These fossils give us an extraordinarily detailed look into a new chapter of human evolution ... when hominids made the committed change from dependency on life in the trees to life on the ground," said Berger.

Paul Dirks of James Cook University in Australia, who also worked on the study, said he and a team of researchers from around the world identified the fossils of at least 25 other species of animals in the cave, including saber-toothed cats, a wildcat, a brown hyena, a wild dog, antelopes and a horse.

(Additional reporting by Diana Neille, editing by Alison Williams)
 
The Lower Paleolithic lasted between 2.5 million-200,000 years ago (or at least according to one permutation), and it was when the Hominin ancestors of human beings, including Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, roamed most of the earth and began making the first stone tools.

The Middle Paleolithic (ca 200,000 to 45,000 years ago) witnessed the evolution of Neanderthals and the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens, and some of the first glimmers of modern behaviors: sophisticated stone tools, caring for the elderly, hunting and gathering and some amount of symbolic or ritual behavior.

By the Upper Paleolithic (45,000-10,000 years ago), the Neanderthals were in decline, and by 30,000 BC, they were gone. Modern humans spread all over the planet. The LSA is characterized by fully modern behaviors such as cave art, hunting, and making a wide range of tools in stone, bone, ivory and antler.

The Mesolithic (or "middle stone") period (12,000-7000 years ago) is traditionally that time period in the Old World between the last glaciation at the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic, when farming communities began to be established. During the first three thousand years of what scholars recognize as the Mesolithic, a period of climatic instability made life very interesting in Europe, with gradual warming abruptly switching to 1200 years of very cold dry weather called the Younger Dryas. By 9000 BC, the climate had stabilized to close to what it is today.

The Neolithic period as a notion is based on an idea of an Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and New Stone Age (Neolithic).   The definition of Neolithic is now seen as a "package" of characteristics: groundstone tools, rectangular buildings, pottery, people living in settled villages and, most importantly, the production of food by developing a working relationship with animals and plants called domestication.
 
 
Home     Top