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RE: Biggest misconceptions of human evolution

in #science • 8 years ago (edited)

Really great post! What irritates me most about the classical depiction of human evolution is that the diagram has us evolving from what looks to be a modern day chimpanzee, when in reality the evolution from our LUCA with the chimpanzee resulted in two different evolutionary lineages, one which became us, and the other which eventually became the modern day chimpanzee. We didn't evolve from the chimp, both we and the chimp coevolved from the same organism at some point back far enough in the tree.

8 years ago in #science by
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     8 years ago (edited)

    on the nose @justtryme90! recent findings might show that our ancestor could have looked more like a bonobo than a chimp, even!

    Bonobo anatomy reveals stasis and mosaicism in chimpanzee evolution, and supports bonobos as the most appropriate extant model for the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans

    tl;dr (though I'm no anatomist): neck/shoulder muscles in bonobos look different those from chimpanzees and have some things in common with humans, which hints that chimpanzees have evolved off in a different direction while bonobos look more like our last common ancestor

    *edit = fixing link

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     8 years ago 

    I did not know about this research pointing to the bonobo. Thanks for the info!