New Fossil Sheds Light On Lucy's Family Tree

I_am_sci_guy writes "A new fossil of an older, and presumably male, specimen of the same species as the famed Lucy indicates that A. afarensis may have walked and moved more like humans than was currently believed. The features of the unusually complete skeleton 'denote a nearly humanlike gait and ground-based lifestyle,' according to anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie and his team, who found the specimen they call 'Big Man' and published preliminary results online today at PNAS (abstract; full text requires subscription). The article includes plenty of viewpoints dissenting from the conclusion that A. afarensis walked, and possibly ran, like modern humans do."

Comments

No subscription required

[interactive_civilian]

Ummm... the full text of the PNAS article does NOT require a subscription. Just click the "Full Text (PDF)" link.

Or at least, I have access using no logins and accessing via a standard ISP in Thailand. :-/

They blew the nickname

[PapayaSF]

They find the male counterpart of Lucy, and nickname him "Big Man"? It would have been much more fun to name him "Ricky."

Biped

[fermion]

From the nature write up it appears that this, along with older fossils, seems to push back bipedal Hominini to about 3.5 millions year. Almost 2 meters tall, a pelvis that seems modern, and a long tibia. I am not so sure why the scientists are arguing about how these creatures walked, the agreement on a bipedal Lucy and relatives seems pretty impressive, and meant that our ancestors could run when they hunt the might dinosaur.

Re:Biped

[radtea]

I am not so sure why the scientists are arguing about how these creatures walked,

/. seems even more borken today than usual, but I'll try responding to this anyway (I'm assuming the dino joke was a joke...)

It's been pretty clear for quite a while now that upright bipedalism was an early feature in human evolution, where "quite a while" means "at least 20 years". But as the persistence of Creationism after a century of obvious falsity suggests, humans are deeply wedded to myths about our origins, and within the paleoanthropological community as well as popular culture there has been a big effort to build myths around human evolution.

Perhaps the largest of those myths is "man made tools and tools made man": the idea that once tool-use, including fire, became part of proto-human life we were on a slippery evolutionary slope to big brains. Upright bipedalism in this myth is necessary to free our hands to work with and carry tools.

This myth is comforting to the weak-minded because it seems to suggest that evolution "toward" modern humans was a quasi-purposive process driven by the reproductive benefits of improved tool-making and tool-use [*].

Early bipedalism blows this myth out of the water. If proto-humans were upright bipedal creatures so early on, those traits clearly had nothing much to do with tool use, and the certain fact that the evolution of our large, opera-writing, space-ship-building brains is nothing but the consequence of a huge series of unrelated accidents.

We happened to have a body plan that resulted in us being able to do something more useful than tell dirty jokes after run-away sexual selection blew our brain out into its current magnificent proportions. Once that entirely accidental potential was realized, about 50,000 years ago, there has likely been some evolutionary pressure toward more effective tool use and whatnot, up until the last 200 years, anyway.

But the process that got us here wasn't some million-year ramp we climbed. It was a fun-house ride that dumped us out at the end with a brain that could reflect on itself, and eventually ask how it got here, and learn by carefully examining the world what the answers were... all while some insane nutjobs were screaming nonsense and threatening violence if we instead didn't listen to their fantasic gibberish.

Early upright bipedalism challenges all the myths, and people hate that.

[*] Yeah, there's a joke in there, and since your brain was evolved specifically to entertain and be entertained by members of the opposite sex, it's one that pretty much everyone here is aware of since our brains were all the result of the same process.

Re:In a stunning announcement

[Hognoxious]

Creationism is science - deal with it!

How do they expect to fit creationism into the curriculum? My kids are already doing four hours of astrology and alchemy per week, and next semester the oldest starts graphology.