Walk like a man: Fossil raises puzzling questions...

Harvard Gazette ^ | February 3, 2015 | Peter Reuell

[SunkenCiv]

For decades, scientists have recognized the upright posture exhibited by chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans as a key feature separating the "great apes" from other primates, but a host of questions about the evolution of that posture -- particularly how and when it emerged -- have long gone unanswered.

For more than a century, the belief was that the posture, known as the orthograde body plan, evolved only once, as part of a suite of features, including broad torsos and mobile forelimbs, in an early ancestor of modern apes.

But a fossilized hipbone of an ape called Sivapithecus is challenging that belief... The finding has raised a host of new questions about whether that upright body plan may have evolved multiple times...

Where modern apes have large, broad chests, Sivapithecus is believed to have had a relatively narrow, monkey-like torso, but facial features that closely resemble modern orangutans. That mixture, showing some ape- and monkey-like features, has left researchers scratching their heads about the arrangement of the primate tree, and raises questions about how the stereotypically ape-like body plan evolved.

"Today, all the living great apes -- gorillas, orangutans, chimps -- have very broad torsos … and people had commonly thought that this torso shape was shared among all the great apes, meaning it must have evolved in a common ancestor... We initially believed that Sivapithecus, with a narrow torso, was on the orangutan line, but if that is the case, then the great ape body shape would have had to evolve at least twice... There are a lot of questions that this fossil raises, and we don't have good answers for them yet. What we do know is that the evolution of the orthograde body plan in apes is not a simple story."

[null and void]

I’m in shape. Round is a shape.

Indeed!

The ancient Greeks thought of the sphere as the perfect shape.

I'm not just in shape, I'm in perfect shape!

[TruthWillWin]

Walk like a man, talk like a man......but sing like a girl? Strange song.

[gasport]

Yup!
I was too lazy to develop the theme.

[mikrofon]

The Ilium & The Oddity

[Dutchboy88]

But, but, but all of the Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan, Dawkins, Hawking truths that we are just randomly up from the slime are slipping away...oh, the huge manitee! This is series.

[FBD]

Bookmarking this post. Bump^

[tophat9000]

form follows function... if a particular body plan gives an advantage you shouldn’t be surprised to see it multiple times

[bgill]

It came about when the females kept asking the males to get something off the top of the trees.

[Verginius Rufus]

I had never realized that Homer had written a poem about a hipbone.

Guess I need to go back and re-read the Iliad.

[MV=PY]

Of course, they’ll only be 24 inches tall, and when they see those extinct jokers on the screen, they’ll say, “wow, they look like giants”.>

I believe they will reconstruct our civilization from hostess twinkies and butane lighters.

Hard to know what they'll think...

[SunkenCiv]

Best explanation yet!

[SunkenCiv]

Hey, as long as the wrapper isn’t broken, those Twinkies will still be edible.

[MV=PY]

"Hey, as long as the wrapper isn’t broken, those Twinkies will still be edible."

I know! I'm going to eat mine before I die.

You can't take it with you.