Were We Wrong About The Last Common Ancestor?
Vložit
- čas přidán 31. 05. 2024
- Did we evolve from a knuckle walking ape?
Huge thanks to Prof. DeSilva, check out his brilliant book here! www.amazon.com/dp/0062938495/...
Huge thanks as always to my patreons! You can chec out the full conversation with professor DeSilva there.
/ stefanmilo
Sources:
Brunet, Michel, et al. “A New Hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa.” Nature, vol. 418, no. 6894, 2002, pp. 145-151., doi.org/10.1038/nature00879.
Kivell, Tracy L., and Daniel Schmitt. “Independent Evolution of Knuckle-Walking in African Apes Shows That Humans Did Not Evolve from a Knuckle-Walking Ancestor.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106, no. 34, 2009, pp. 14241-14246., doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0901280106.
White, Tim D., et al. “Neither Chimpanzee nor Human, Ardipithecus Reveals the Surprising Ancestry of Both.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 112, no. 16, 2015, pp. 4877-4884., doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1403659111.
Prang, Thomas C., et al. “Ardipithecus Hand Provides Evidence That Humans and Chimpanzees Evolved from an Ancestor with Suspensory Adaptations.” Science Advances, vol. 7, no. 9, 2021, doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf2474.
Lovejoy, C. Owen, et al. “Careful Climbing in the Miocene: The Forelimbs of Ardipithecus Ramidus and Humans Are Primitive.” Science, vol. 326, no. 5949, 2009, p. 70., doi.org/10.1126/science.1175827.
Böhme, Madelaine, et al. “A New Miocene Ape and Locomotion in the Ancestor of Great Apes and Humans.” Nature, vol. 575, no. 7783, 2019, pp. 489-493., doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-17....
Macchiarelli, Roberto, et al. “Nature and Relationships of Sahelanthropus Tchadensis.” Journal of Human Evolution, vol. 149, 2020, p. 102898., doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2020....
Disclaimer: Use my videos as a rough guide to a topic. I am not an expert, I may get things wrong. This is why I always post my sources so you can critique my work and verify things for yourselves. Of course I aim to be as accurate as possible which is why you will only find reputable sources in my videos. Secondly, information is always subject to changes as new information is uncovered by archaeologists.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
www.stefanmilo.com
Historysmilo
historysmilo
Of course more fossils will change our ideas, just as we now look back on the book from 1965 with different opinions. But I do think this theory 'has legs' (badum tsss) What do you all think?
Huge thanks to Prof. DeSilva for his help! Check out his brilliant book here: www.amazon.com/dp/0062938495/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_MMN6K0SR2C9A98CCJ7BG
There may be a typo in the video title
@@sungodra1226 maybe ;)
@@CubeFlow_46 *insert rock eyebrow raise*
@@sungodra1226 lmao
When are you making the next video?!
Shoutout to those who were here when the title read We We Wrong
yessir
We we wrong gang 😎
Made it in time
We We Wrong Gang
Woohoo…still there
There seems to be a rule of human history, that "Everything Was Earlier" (than the classical account). The more we discover, the earlier everything gets: writing, domesticating animals, understanding the stars...
I think part of that is because there's this bias that early humans were dumb. They weren't. They're just as smart and observant as we are today. We just have a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips that they didn't.
How old is writing?
@@FlauFly At least, 6000 years. But it could easily 10.000, or more...
I mean the simple fact is that you rarely discover the absolute first of something just by statistical probability.
it’s not really a rule, and i think a distinction should be made. people like to signify the oldest stuff *known.* no one is saying we’ve found the oldest writing, but there is writing we have that is the oldest to us
This makes a very good point. Knuckle walking is not an obvious form of locomotion and would be more likely to be a specialist adaptation for a larger primate. The example of the gibbon shows very well how our distant ancestors may have walked and then as those which eventually became hominids chose bipedalism, others adopted a different method.
That is actually a very poor point. There is clear evidence in GENESIS that man has always walked on two arms! This directly refutes this video.
Found and skimmed some old history books from the 50s and 60s in the past. The differences a few decades make can be surprising. Makes me laugh when people say, "the science is settled". It's regularly changed and adjusted.
Certain things are settled, certain things are not. Common ancestry is not just settled, it’s a fact.
It has been changing and adjusting since the 19th century! Nothing will be settled for a long time!
Well the Earth adjusted from being flat to being round but now I think it is shaped more like an egg due to the ocean tides.
Omg. I was born in '62, and my mom brought me that Time-Life book on human evolution. Even though I was too young and the text of the book was beyond me, I was fascinated by the idea of evolution. I took the book with me the first time I went to summer camp, instead of a stuffed toy or security blanket.
That’s brilliant! They’re cheap to buy, plenty of copies. Get one for your book shelf
I have the whole series of those books sitting the shelf right now in Australia 🇦🇺
@@StefanMilo Your videos are quite well done, brother, but I would not buy them because they are so directly derived from what I call the 'standard evolutionary textbook'' (SET) paradigm...which holds that 3.4 mya Lucy was our Pliocene ancestor, even after Ardi turned up.. it is a belief held only by the American Chicago-based paleo-theorists, not English people like the Leakeys, or the French paleo-anthropologists. I wish you would have a decent photographically based look at the 6 to 5.7 My footprints found on the seashore of Crete by Gierlinski et al 2017 (it took them 8 years to get their paper published), and cover Attenborough's treatment of the aquatic wading theory of how we became obligate bipeds. We did NOT come down out of the trees, no, our descendant lineages of orangutans, gorillas and chimps moved into the trees and became much more arboreal, frugivorous apes. It is actually far more logical to believe that some wading, sedgivorous australopiths became chimpanzees, and the larger paranthropus sedgivores became gorillas. That is why we have never found any old chimpanzee and gorilla fossils.
I just noticed that my phone spelled "bought," "brought" in my comment above!
Me Too...at 5 yrs old (1968), I read it from cover to cover for the first time.
The possibility that knuckle walking evolved 2 separate times was especially interesting to me. I love the content you are putting out. Thank you, Stefan!
It makes sense, when you think about it. Quadrapeds are more stable than bipeds. You'd only expect bipedalism to stick around if there was a good reason for it (maybe like increasingly heavy dependence on tool use).
They both live in similar enviroments so it isnt that unreasonable
If I think of it just as a method of locomotion, it reminds me of flight evolving differently in bats than in birds.
I would love to know more about this knuckle walking theory
"Evolution hasn't been observed while it's happening".
So it fails the scientific method.
“Why did nuckle walking evolve?” Damn, now I am interested. A follow up on this case would be awesome. Great stuff!
It's probably the link between palm walking and upright walking. Knuckle walking raises you up a little bit higher than palm walking.
@@SCORP1ONF1RE More robust posture is likely a reason as well.
It is probably a vast array of causes. The natural habitat for both apes is a heavily forested, as well as having small shrubbery. What do humans do when we're going through a low tree line? We squat lower to avoid from getting our faces hit by branches. The amount of times you squat low rises, might as well always walk in a lower posture permanently. If climbing, you want a stronger base of 4 limbs on the floor but be ready to grab onto something quickly. In that case you might adobt walking on knuckles instead of palms as your hands are in a much more natural position to grasp at trees, rocks, etc. Just my 2 cents.
@@maymunity7942 My thoughts as well.
I thought bipedalism evolved back with gibbons (lesser apes), but to avoid competition with bipedal apes the asian apes went arborea and the african apes adopted knuckle walking?
Actually, this has been the theory of a French paleoanthropologist for at least 10 years now: Pascal Picq. He wrote a few books about it. His theory is that the last common ancestor of human/chimps lived in Eurasia, which would account for the existence of orang-outangs and gibbons. When the forests started to recede in Europe, some of these primates moved back to Africa and other to Asia. There was also a documentary on this topics on Arte, based on the theories of Madelaine Böhme in 2020.
there are some indications there were fossils found of apes in Eurasia, but those was far more basale than the common ancesters of the chimps and humans and in fact far more primitive the the whole ape line, including the oldest African ape Ekembo. They are very hard to distinguish from monkeys.
When I was a kid, before I started first grade, my neighbor who had just returned from the Vietnam war handed me that book one summer afternoon and told me I could keep it and that I should read it someday when I am able to read. That was the summer before starting Catholic school, and I eventually took that book in for show & tell. I got sent home, with a beating from a horrible Nun who had a beef with Darwin. And that solidified my love of that book and everything in it.
My disillusionment with Catholicism started in the first grade. I had recently lost my dog and when we were being taught about heaven I asked the nun if I would see my dog again if I went to heaven. She said "no, dogs do not go to heaven". Not sure I was as interested in the whole thing after that.
Especially ridiculous since the catholic church has officially respected Darwin and the theory of evolution since like 1950
@@robertspies4695 Seriously, what a horrible thing to say to a child. And who wants to go to a place where there are no dogs?
@@JackMyersPhotography Not me. I could be become a believer again despite my life in science if I could have all my dogs back in heaven.
It's funny because I remember some creationists (both Christian and Muslim) who said apes evolved from sinful degenerate humans, so they should love this theory!
It's so refreshing to watch a well-researched scientific lesson. No ancient aliens, no bizarre theories - just science. Thank you! (Side note: I still have a copy of that Time-Life book!)
Its just as retarded and made up. They literally just dug up some chimpanzee bones and claimed their human with no evidence.
"Evolution hasn't been observed while it's happening.*
That means it is not scientific at all.
@@earlysda You can't "see" an atom but we know it is there. You can't see the wind and yet there it is. Since no one is around for a few million years to observe, we rely on a range of indirect proofs of evolution - bone fragments (and most recently, DNA analysis for a limited group of samples). We don't always know HOW evolutionary changes happened, but it's clear they're real.
@@rgnyc R G, You are years behind the times. Yes, we can see atoms.
.
Evolution has never been observed while it's happening.
.
That means Evolution fails the scientific method.
@@earlysda we have definitely observed accelerated (macro) evolution in a multitude of animals. And what you said isnt true whatsoever, definitionally we cannot observe blackholes or the big bang but via indirect evidence and inference we can gather an understanding of these things. Under your view electrons, black holes, the big bang, gravity and virtual particles arent scientific concepts. We cannot directly observe any of these phenomena but can see their existence through their effect on things around them.
That book,"Early Man",was one of the joys of my life around age 10 to 17. Stunning artwork in there. The whole 'Time/Life' series was awesome. My concurrent budding interest in Comparative Religion made for a vibrant,if confusing, intellectual life. My youthful passion for dinosaurs and anthropology makes me fully appreciate what we've learned in just a few decades. Questions remain,but so many have been answered. This is a great channel!
Humans and dinosaurs lived together at least until the worldwide flood, and perhaps even after.
@@earlysdadinosaurs is feak
The ape-men were not human ancestors. They were the result of human-ape hybridization, probably in Genesis 6 : 12.
The DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans was 15-16ths human and 1-16th chimpanzee.
I recognized that book instantly and then had the jarring experience of it being called a textbook? I LOVED the time/life books, the Universe and Mathematics were my favorties.
the quality of your videos has been amazing recently, this was straight up a mini documentary. really well done stefan!
We We Wrong baby, Stefan's putting out such fire content that it has began to melt his brain! :D
Lol woops my bad
@@StefanMilo Don't worry man! And thanks for the awesome video. I have learned so much from your content and also challenged a few things I previously believed :).
Every time you’ve even pondered calling a modern black person a n*gg*r, you were insulting your ancestors. Just a thought, my friend.
@@ryanmillichap8327 yeah, except its not true.
He’s starting a movement “we we”
Your videos were always among the best, but you've transcended that over the last year. These are in a league of their own and I'm so thankful you're making this content.
My next video briefly mentions this same thing as it is going to be a dissection of a recent "out of africa debunk" video that brought up Ardi and Lucy- I'll have to mention this video for further learning!
Nice plug
Damn it, you got my attention.
1:35 Wow, straight up racism. But then, Evolution has been based on racism ever since Darwin's famous book - "Favored Races". Time to return to God.
Zeke,I hope you’re in agreement with debunking the “out-of-africa” theory. The 1990s study that blew the theory up was intentionally misinterpreted, twisting the researchers’ words/research. It was done by the media et al to give the “out-of-africa” theory legitimacy, in order to make the study fit in with the Afro-Centric movement that was being pushed.
The researchers themselves have written about it, and what their research/paper _ACTUALLY_ says, but the damage had already been done.
Anyways, I agree with Red Riding Hood here - nice plug lol. At least it’s good to see that your two video titles reflect you know humans origins consisted of multiple species (but only the brave scientists will admit that there are still more differences in human groups today than what is needed as requirements to prove an animal group is a sub-species).
@@anti-ethniccleansing465 you’ll be very disappointed. :)
I still have that book on Early Man from 1965. It was my favorite book my collection of the Life Nature Library books. I studied that thing over and over. I love that the video opened with it.
Stefan, I'd known that the famous art at the beginning of the video had fallen into disfavor among the paleo cognoscenti, but this video is the first to fully explain to me why that is so. Thank you.
Well one thing that I didn’t mention is that many blame this image for the misconception “if we evolved from apes, then why are there still apes”.
They blame this linear representation of evolution for that misconception because it doesn’t accurately portray the fact that we didn’t evolve from chimps, but we share a common ancestor.
Also it implies a single linear “progression” from ape to man, rather than the highly branched tree that has now emerged.
@@StefanMilo all people has to do is read Darwin's books or read alfred r. Wallace (the pete best of biology). But they won't read them, they just follow. Darwin didn't replace al but the impact and news coverage was the same. Darwin had his evolutionary theory first but took forever to get the book going, i believe if alfred hadn't contacted Darwin, Darwin may have died before he published origins. I wish you could do a video explaining a scientific theory, the non evolutionary believers always say " it's a theory so it's not true". Please explain why it's called theory. I get tired of trying to explain to people posting that, I'm glad you covered " we didn't evolve from apes". They would know if they just read the books. Anyhoo, very good videos. 👍
@@adamrodaway9116 It's neither progressive, nor linear. The figure excludes all the lineages that ended extinct since our split from chimpanzee's ancestors
I dont know why, but i'm blown away by the notion that there were apes essentially all over Europe. I had just just always assumed apes = jungles = equator = Africa.
Apes are also in Asia. There are lots of jungles outside of Africa.
Apes have to be around fruit trees And away from humans to survive and grow.. they have had millions of years to grow in this Darwin theory and they never have proportionately they are stuck on that little piece of land that God put them on as primates he did not put them in the North Pole with polar bears or in the desert with camels supposed to evolution theory is false and fake on the climatic environmental theory alone
I was the same. Then I searched up climate during the Miocene and it all made sense.
Later, when homo erectus left Africa and went to what’s now Georgia 1.8 million years ago (and to China even earlier), Georgia had a Mediterranean climate.
@@aleanbh3808 old HEBREW documents Suggested Africa was batren of western mankind until Hebrews punished a wrongdoer by banishing him to the humanless African jungles, where he mated with now extinct 6 foot wallkings apes, this hints at Africans being the missing or lost tribe descendants of the original tribe member banished to humanless documented jungles south of the Middle East,, Over centuries Evolution of this inbreeding has populated the Continent,. or are we to Believe Africans here as long as non Africans and they wouldn't civilize as population to the north and or other continents & people's?
Bananas don't grow in Europe.
I wonder if any of this has to do with arm and leg length ratios. Figure some early tree dwelling primates had long legs and short arms, and others has shorter legs and longer arms. Start taking away the trees and short leg, long arm primates would be forced to knuckle walk and long leg primates would be better balanced at walking upright.
Wowww, that is a very observant theory. You should discuss that with the creator of this channel
No, gibbons have a long arm but they are partially bipedal than the rest great apes.
Loved that 1965 Time-Life book. It was one of the things that set me on the path to understanding human evolution, and getting a degree in Anthropology. I now have a pdf copy of the book.
Stefan, you are an extraordinary science communicator! Your ability to handle both complex scientific topics and to humanize even our most distant ancestors is singular. Love what you are doing and am excited every time I get a notification that a new video is up.
Edit: The quality of your videos has improved so much in the last year or so. Have you approached Nebula? Hell, I think your recent videos are matching the quality you see on Curiosity Stream. Would love to see you on additional platforms.
But please keep giving us free access youtube videos.
@@Where_is_Waldo Most Nebula creators still do CZcams (to the best of my knowledge) and either release early on Nebula or include less algorithmically successful pieces exclusively on Nebula. But Nebula and Curiosity Stream are like $13.00 (both) yearly! It's the best value paid media out there.
Wish I would have had professors like him, who really stir up a young mind’s curiosity.
Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups.
@@earlysda Thanks for defining projection.
I loved your videos from the start, but I have to say you keep improving them by leaps and bounds every time. This was fascinating and brilliant, and I have to say Prof DeSilva is an excellent science communicator, too!
Yeah, but I miss the spoon...
I enjoy your lighthearted approach to what can be a dry subject.
Good work Mr Stefan
Awesome! Subscribed. You've just become my goto on this subject due to the quality of your research and presentation. Thank you.
We we love this channel.
oui j'aime aussi beaucoup
"Evolution hasn't been observed while it's happening."
Ok, now I'm really curious about all the advantages of knuckle walking since it may have appeared two times independently :)
I heard it can support higher weights and possibly allows for stronger arms wich would be useful in interspecific competition i guess ,
But to be honest i don't know
Stronger arms would also support a better ability to climb.
We have problems giving birth by being upright, we may have stayed/ been chased to stay on the plains .
Allows faster running.
@@AK-ks1kq It's the advent of using fire for cooking that made our brains larger, not walking on two feet.
Another great and very interesting video. The ability for different ideas to come to the surface, and the quest to test those hypothesis is so engaging..
Hats down Stefan! I haven't seen any of your videos for a while now, and see insane progress in the quality of the production! ;)
Honestly this and crocodiles having warm blooded metabolisms are two of the biggest paradime shifts in the field of paleontology :
They basically flip the whole idea of what an advanced animal should look like , we assumed us and birds where evolved and advanced because of our bipedalism and higher metabolism so obiusly chimps and crocs are the lower step the less advanced creatures ,
Then we realize crocodiles where also warmblooded long ago and they became cold blooded because they didn't start as ambush hunters ,
And chimps evolved knucle walking while we where on our march around the world making turtles extinct ,
So yeah there is really no up or down in classifying species only left and right , r and K strategists ,
High metabolism or low metabolism ,
I type survival curve or
III type survival curve
Neither one is superior to the other , both are better in certain situations
Very astute, well done.
Evolution is a fairy tale.
@@earlysda Tell that to Australian aboriginals..
@@botezsimp5808 Botez - WOW! Your comment is the worst racist comment I've seen on the net in quite a while.
@@earlysda OK troll bot. 👌
Incredibly interesting! The thirst for the true history of things is sometimes a curse. All we can do is take our best guess on what little we are given. Thanks so much for a very entertaining video.
But think about it... Just in my lifetime we've gone from this march of progress idea to this theory that we were already somewhat bipedal. We've discovered so much and developed new technology at such a fast rate in a relatively short amount of time. Who knows what we'll find out next?
I’ve been fascinated by ancient hominids etc since reading Richard Leakeys book Origins.. he described finding “The Turkana Boy “ about 2 million years old and postulated how he might’ve lived and more importantly to me, died. I was hooked, and hence why I’m delighted to have found this series… nice one ☝️🏴
Thanks! That's the first paradigm shift I've experienced in a long time. I love it when the universe flips the script on human understanding
I find the hand bones interesting, because I broke my hand recently. They said my hand bones were significantly thicker than most people they had seen. (Citation below)
Probably not surprising, since I climb trees for living and have for quite some time now.
Edit: to clarify one issue in physical anthropology is often differences that often are assumed to be genetic, might be developmental
“Prior exercise significantly correlated to cortical thickness (r = 0.13; p < 0.002) and periosteal circumference (r = 0.18; p < 0.005). Cadets in the highest exercise group had 5.8% higher cortical thickness compared to those in the lowest exercise group (p < 0.04; Figure 1).”
Determinants of bone mass and bone size in a large cohort of physically active young adult men
Nutrition and Metabolism 3, article 14
JA Ruffing et al
Feb 15
I was going to say something similar. My mom was born with one leg substantially longer than the other. As a result her big toe on the short leg side is three times the size of the long leg side. This is because she is always supporting that side with only her big toe while being flat foot on the other.
You climb trees for a living? Dude, that's awesome. Did your bigger hand bones make it easier for you or did you develop them from climbing.?
@@frankconley7630 well I don’t have any real data to back it up. But, my hands and certainly my knuckles seem to have gotten significantly thicker, while the rest of me hasn’t.
That said people in my industry tend to get retired from the field due to shoulder, and elbow overuse injuries. So while we might be able to adapt to some degree, we obviously are limited genetically
How did you break your hand with really thick bones?
@@mushmush4980 pretty good sized chunk(1000ish pounds) of Doug fir rolled across it.
The science of paleo is in constant change. Which makes it very exciting as well as very confusing. With many having their own interpretations. It is one of the fields we may never know the full truth about. I found this piece informative. Thank for putting it together.
Love your videos Stefan. I always rewatch a few older videos after you upload - I love the way you tell a story and produce your videos. A true gem on CZcams.
This channel really is one of the hidden treasures of CZcams.
Man you did such a great job with this video! Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge & documentary skills!
Thank you Stefan for this video and the many videos you’ve released before. I’m having a ball watching them. Your videos are so stimulating and fascinating, and entertaining too. I’m learning so much with you. Thank you very much.
Love your videos!! You put so much research in & are fun/enjoyable to listen to :)
Appreciate the exceptional quality of your videos. Well researched and thoughtfully presented.
Great video. Bipedalism is rare in mammals, but so is knuckle walking. What would the selective presssures be to evolve knuckle walking? Maybe it helped chimps become more arboreal, but just how arboreal are gorillas? The male gorilla is huge, and I don't know how arboreal they actually are.
Last year I heard that the ancestors of chimpanzees had hands more like our hands. It is good to see more openness to data rather than sticking to a narrative based largely on supposition.
@@kmadge9820 Remember gorillas split off from the common ancestor of humans and chimps. So either the similarities between chimps and gorillas is the result of common ancetry or convergent evolion. If it is convergent evolution, what were the selective forces driving this? If these similarities are due to an arboreal lifestyle, then what drove gorillas to become to large?
@@davidwood8730 I didn't mention gorillas. I pointed out that the common ancestor had hands like ours, not chimps, and chimpanzees' hands are a refinement consequent on arboreal life. Most likely reason for chimpanzees being relatively small and light is that it's advantageous in climbing tree tops and escaping predators. Gorillas live mainly on the ground and their advantage is in fighting predators.
@@kmadge9820 Curious which animals prey on gorillas (Other than humans). And why they benefitted from coming down from the trees, but chimps didn't.
@@GhostScout42 Yes, it doesn't seem likelly our common ancestor was that large. What selective forces caused them to grow and abandon an arboreal lifestyle? They can't have left the trees that long ago because they retain so many arboreal adaptations.
It might be unrelated at all, but one of the things that came to my mind as you were discussing feet shape, was leg disorders in babies, where most common is curled in feet (resembling our tree climbing relatives imo) - can/does this tell us anything about our evolution?
Interesting. Developmental disorders in modern humans may follow an evolutionary path.
@@62Cristoforo ya, i know it's hypothesized in embrio, at the same time we human love finding connections ;)
Looking farther at this, i found two different phenomena in babies: first is Toes Curling - which is part of normal development (looks to me like "grasp mom/tree" reflex hh). second is Pediatric Bowlegs, which usually is also considered normal in infancy (and usually fixes itself when infant starts walking and putting upward/standing weight on their legs).
Interesting stuff.
@@MI-wc6nk interestingly enough "swimmer babies" can occur in dogs, cats, and even birds.
just wanted to come back and watch this amazing video again after reading about Anadoluvius turkae. the level of research and the amount of effort you put into these videos is greatly appreciated
Always enjoy your videos Stefan informative thought provoking and not at all dry - keep doing it man!
wow your production quality really is amazing stefan, big props
Really outstanding work! Such an interesting subject. Professor DeSilva is such a great speaker!
You just get better and better. My thanks for your work.
That book at the beginning - I had that book as a kid! Still fascinated by this topic.
Wonderful video … tons to think about and as always so well presented. Thank you
Thanks, Stefan, for this and your many other fascinating and well produced videos. Possibly relevant to your theory about knuckle walking emerging after the divergence of the hominin lineage is that orangutans were muscle walkers, as well. However, their antecedents theoretically branched off millions of years earlier.
I can't explain it, but seeing Dr. DeSilva holding Sahelanthropus makes my chest ache. I don't know how to describe it. Curiosity? A connection? Some weird, misplaced sense of nostalgia? I can't fully put it into words, but I think it feels... right.
I appreciate the summary at the end! Thank you for your content.
Always love the updated education I get & share w/others, from your well-produced videos/site. So glad you mentioned that we will change our ideas, as more fossil evidence is found. The Key is that scientists now know we can not be inflexible in holding on to our favorite hypotheses. One thing, as a (citizen scientist, sometimes out in the 'jungle') I am looking forward to being placed on the evolutionary tree...is the unknown primate, I've mentioned before...that we are getting hints of thru eDNA, which isn't conclusive as we have no base DNA, but field samples come back sometimes as Pan, then another time as Pongo, previously before eDNA, results were as 'unknown primate'...here in North America.
That makes sense. I've always despised recreations of our ancestors showing them as clumsy, hunched over bipedalists. They were as upright and graceful at it as we are today.
Well, somebody wasn't.
Presumably the first bipedalist wasn't entirely adapted to that method of walking.
Your vids are a nice "over view" of archeology. Good for understanding what questions are being asked than for setting the "truth" (a seemingly hopeless task). Thanks - keep going!
Happy feeling every time a new Stefan drops. Thanks so much.
I just came to this channel and I'm so incredibly in love with it. The sense of humor, the content, the video style. Ugh I'm subbing!!
I'm so happy I found this channel!
I loved this Time-Life science series that included "Early Man." I read them all religiously when I was 11 and was particularly fond of "Early Man", "the Universe" and "the Mind". In a different time when knowledge was cloistered, it was an introduction and a keyhole into a dozen different scientific domains.
I grew up with those Time Life books; I remember the one called The Mind in particular. I don’t think we had them at home but we would often get them from the library. We were Catholics but my parents had no quarrel with anything to do with science. We kids had a subscription to a children’s version of the Time Life series; they were wonderful books too. All kinds of topics, from dinosaurs to shipwrecks to one on spiders with huge closeup pictures that we would dare each other to look at. I kind of wish we’d kept them all.
@@KathyPrendergast-cu5ci A lady at my Mom's church gave her many boxes filled with this series of books. For an average curious 10/11 year old child, it was a solid introduction to life sciences, physics, astronomy, social sciences, archaeology, the history of math and philosophy in broad strokes.
That was quality Udo Lindenberg footage you chose there. Thumbs up from Germany!
Love the visual effects! Subtle, creative, elegant!
Good video. The idea that knuckle walking is the new adaptation seems reasonable. What I've noticed when I've been on crutches, when I use my hiking poles, or when I climb up rocks or a stair, engaging four 'limb' movement is faster, more secure, more versatile. In Japan those really steep traditional home stairs? If there's anything at all I can grab on to with my hands (and I only need 2-3 points to go up a full story) then I'm rapid (I think it's the fastest way for a human to climb. Ladders and regular stairs are slow in comparison) and it's secure; same going down. So knuckle walking has a lot going for it, unless.... you live on a open savanna for a million or 150,000 years or need to cross distances on reasonably flat ground, and somewhere along the way you start using a lot of hand tools.
Great points to add on to this video
Using knuckle-walker as a slur now
I guess Haeckel was on to something. Not that we're most closely related to gibbons of course, but that gibbon locomotion is more reminiscent of our last common ancestor with apes than the knuckle-walking of gorillas and chimps is.
Fascinating. Thank you for what you do Stefan.
I recall reading that knuckle-walking was a derived trait that the common ancestor didn't exhibit.
"There are no other mammals, in the forest today, walking around on two legs, like me."
Sasquatch would like a word with the producer, please.
Except it doesn't exist
I had that book when I was a child back in the 1960's. Though the evidence we have now makes it clear that much of what was in that book was incorrect, it did get my interest in paleoanthropology going, and at the time, it was right up to date with what the thinking was. It is really amazing to see how far our knowledge has progressed in just in one lifetime. There can be no doubt that there will be further changes to our knowledge, and more fleshing out of the whole picture as time goes on, and I envy the currently young people who will be around to witness it. The world is a fascinating place, and for the curious, ten thousand years would not be enough to learn/see it all, yet on average, we are granted only seventy-five years enjoy it and drink in as much of it as we can. Such a precious gift we have. Do not waste it.
Great vids lately - I especially like the “these say and they say” analysis. Pro and cons good stuff!🤠
Dude, we had that Early Man book in our house when I was a kid! Ever since, I've been fascinated by what we (incorrectly!) called "ape men" or "cave men", and wondered what their day was like when they woke up each morning. I knew they were biologically close to us, and that their brains must have been much like ours, but I knew that their bones told of often horribly injured, broken bodies, and incredibly tough lives. That contrast between intellectual consciousness and physical brutality was just mind bending to think about.
I’m thinking that so-called “cavemen” didn’t live in caves. They just liked to explore them and leave art on the walls. Their lifestyle may not have as brutal as you suggest- think of tribes of Native Americans. Some of the early European settlers left their settlements to join those tribes.
Fun fact, The scientific name for Chimpanzees is Pan troglodytes. The word troglodytes literally means "cave dwellers". Guess where no chimpanzee lives
Humans are basically cave apes. We modern humans even build our own 'caves'.
@@darko714 which is exactly why hearths are excavated in caves and the remains of cooked flesh dating back to the, you guessed it, STONE AGE and Cave Men and Cave Women.
God made humans on day 6, and he made them perfect. They were taller, stronger, bigger, and smarter than we are today.
Missing a _"_ *re* _"_ in the title?
Go on though Stefan, love the video.
Thanks Stefan .. always a pleasure to watch and be informed
Well done! This is my first viewing of your channel, and I will view more.
If the quality is consistent, you'll have another subscriber.
I just read his back a couple weeks ago. I really enjoyed this point on knuckle walking. I found the second half of the book as being the type of pedantic stuff I got from the anatomists and physiologists in med school. I felt like it was filler, but the first half more than made up for it
This is just going to be my interpretation of things, even though I do not focus on it. We have known about S. tchadensis for a while though, most of the people in my paleoanthropology courses have argued it is out common ancestor with chimps, or at least close to it. I agree that it is likely that ancestor. The foramen magnum does suggest some bipedal locomotion, but to my knowlege it is still being argued as to whether or not it was a habitual biped. We don't really have enough evidence yet. The paper mentioned here is certainly interesting and I look forward to reading it as the legs would give us a better idea.
Now, if I remember right (I don't actually have a bonobo skull and can't find a great photo) they seem to have a foramen magnum closer to ours than chimps do. Theirs is ever slightly more forward and similar to S. tchadensis. That would make it absolutely a facultative biped, but not fully habitual. I would imagine they favored bipedalism and in trees WOULD have been upright most of the time balancing on branches. It would make sence that if that was our last common ancestor, it broke off into one group who further specialized at jungle movement by reverting more towards strictly facultative bipedalism, and another group who further specialized into our line of habitual bipedalism.
I love you so much for that little Henry the Eighth you used In that one quick little graph. So perfect lol 😅
I really love this video, keep this up! I love the theory that the CHLCA was not knuckle walking and the way you presented it!
I've been saying this for several years now, for many of the exact same reasons. Everyone should read the paper called _The arboreal origins of human bipedalism_ for a better understanding of this. They talk not only about the fossils discussed here, but the fossils of even earlier hominoids, so-called "crown" hominoids that lived with an upright posture in the canopy of the trees as long as 20 million years ago, and which are the ancestors of all living apes.
*_«By the early 2000s the fossil record of the Eurasian and East African Miocene (23-5 million years ago (Ma)) was burgeoning and revealing the body form of early ‘crown’ hominoids ('crown’ hominoids being the direct ancestors of all living apes, including humans). These included fossils of species such as Morotopithecus bishopi (from approximately 18-22 Ma), Pierolapithecus catalaunicus (c. 12 Ma), Hispanopithecus (Dryopithecus) laietanus (c. 10 Ma) and Orrorin tugenensis (6 Ma). These fossils suggested that, contrary to expectations and fossil evidence from Proconsul hesoloni and associated species, the early crown hominoids stood and moved with an orthograde (upright) posture._*
*_[...]_*
*_The fact that orthograde (upright) body postures had been evolving and diversifying in our hominoid ancestry for in excess of 15 million years pushed study of the origins of bipedalism back from the Pliocene into the early Miocene. It also challenged the commonly held concept that the acquisition of habitual bipedalism is an appropriate marker of the separation of the hominins from the panins (bonobos and chimpanzees), a separation that is estimated to have occurred only 5-8 million years ago. It pushed the context of bipedal origins back into the forest canopy from the ground (Senut 2011) where it had spent some considerable time as a result of the knuckle-walking hypothesis._*
*_[...]_*
*_Not only did they find clear evidence that modes of knuckle-walking in Pan and Gorilla were fundamentally different (Figure 3), they also found what had been claimed to be knucklewalking adaptations in the carpal morphology of a range of non-knuckle-walking monkeys. Of course it is theoretically possible that knuckle-walking did evolve only once in the common ancestor of the African ape and human clade and that these differences evolved after the Gorilla and Pan lineages split (Kivell & Schmitt 2009). The broad consensus that there is a clear lack of any convincing fossil evidence for knuckle-walking in crown hominoids or early hominins, however, would render it unlikely._*
*_[...]_*
*_Despite the longevity of the paradigm that derived human bipedalism from chimpanzeelike knuckle-walking, we conclude that the arboreal origin of bipedalism is now overwhelmingly supported by the fossil, biomechanical and ecological evidence. The 50-year reign of the knuckle-walking paradigm must be declared over.»_*
amazing. thanks for the text
@@nmarbletoe8210:
You're welcome. Be sure to make fun of the next person you see with a t-shirt depicting a knuckle-walking chimpanzee progressing to an upright man.
This channel is like Veritasium, but for anthropology
Just subbed. Good reasoned delivery. Great voice. Looking forward to your other videos.
Love your videos. I'm not a contributor, but I did buy your book. I'm going to read it with my 8 year old this summer.
Super interesting. We had that Time-Life book in the house when I was growing up as well as many others they published on ancient history, natural history, archeology & anthropology (long before wikipedia & the internet we had these things called encycopedias.) It's been fascinating to see how much the natural sciences have grown & changed & advanced technologically. Are these new discoveries adding to the Out Of Africa theory or are they starting to cast doubt on its validity?
Between the Time-Life books, World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, I had a great time growing up.
Eventually we will all evolve into crabs.
Larry the lobster approves this message
Amen
VERY interesting. Thank you for helping to make a very complex subject understandable to a layman.
Once again (like I'm surprised? !) another informative, well sourced and engagingly presented explanation. (I'm gonna need a bigger Thesaurus!) Thanks, Stefan.
My reaction to new content: ‘Weeee!’ I mean I always enjoy the videos
"Were We Wrong" always strikes me as click-baity when it comes science news story headlines. New data generates new hypotheses or eliminates old ones. That is what the modern scientific process is all about - figuring out how we got things wrong previously.
And yet, that doesn't eliminate the need for channels to bait users into clicking
Brilliant video, I learnt so much about a subject I am totally fascinated by - ie human evolution from apes. Keep it up Stefan and thanks
I love these videos. I really love learning and hearing other opinions. Keep it up. ❤️
To informal students of primate evolution such as myself, this is a fascinating video. To me the most potentially interesting point in the video is the journal quote "During the Miocene epoch, as many as 100 species of apes roamed throughout the Old World" ! (my exclamation) Sounds like this level of species radiation in the middle to late Miocene was a true evolutionary laboratory where everything gets thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Indeed, this is a very different narrative of where humanity came from.
BTW, those old, stereotyped images of human ascendency tell us more about human prejudice and arrogance than they do about how well the people who used them understood the process. They are barely one step removed from The Great Chain of Being and considering man The Crown of Creation. They are repugnant to me and their continuation in popular culture only fosters mistaken thinking.
richard
--
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
- George Bernard Shaw (through Inspector Javert)
I was thinking when I made this video that something about the Miocene would be great, a real planet of the apes. I’ll have to add it to the list.
I wrote my MPhil dissertation on this topic last year and came to the same conclusion. I also came up with an explanation for why knuckle-walking evolved independently in our closest living relatives. If anyone wants to read it, let me know! (Especially if your name is Stefan and you have a blue shirt? It’s really interesting, I promise!)
Soooo why did knuckle walking evolve twice? Why was it so advantageous to our ancestors?
@@ewetn1 It sort of evolved 3 times if you include orangutans, but the short answer is bipedal European common ancestor. Climatic changes forced it south into Africa during Green Sahara periods, where some found patches of remaining rainforest and adapted to vertical climbing, and others found nothing but ever-expanding savannah and evolved into us. Just my theory though. It also explains our monogamy, altruism, and ultimately big brains.
@@AlexSalikan Kind of heading down the right trail, there, i think....just add omnivory and wading in water all the time
@@kimshaw-williams Our early ancestors almost certainly ate both plants and meat and spent a lot of time in the water. Modern savannah chimpanzees do, and they live in a very similar environment to our ape-like ancestors.
@@AlexSalikanOrangutans are not true knuckle walker
just got Prof. DeSilva's book on audible, cant wait to listen to it
Congratulations on another great explanatory video.
Milo minor point but that Time Life book you talked about at the beginning of your video is not a text book it’s a book meant for home library’s and was sold mostly by subscription in the USA, these books were very popular in the 60’ and 70’s and Time Life Books covered many topics from History to Science anyway before the internet it was one way people could familiarize themselves with different subjects. Each book had plenty of eye catching illustrations and brief vignettes compiled on the books subject chapter by chapter all in an easy to read format.
I know, a slip of the tongue. My bad
And this way, science is leading us to refine more and more the knowledge of the world. The orthogenetic model is clearly badly outdated and the signal of what happened is so strong that even with fragments of [once] biological material we manage to accurately predict, correlate and articulate this fascinating story. This video is specially well-crafted and of highly educational value.
Liked and subscribed! Learning lots on your channel. Thank you!
I am a 1961 vintage human, this book blew my mind at around 1967. A bit dated but I still have it and a few more from that series.
I discovered science
Lovely stuff as always! Also, Henry the VIII was a great choice to represent humans ... Quite a specimen! Those calves ... That patchy beard ... That double chin ... That's a human right there!
We we wrong the whole time.
Thanks for the update!
Fascinating revelations and implications in this video - bipedalism vs knuckle-walking. Stefan, I must commend you on te overall composition and execution of this episode. It was truly a "professional" product. Camera angles, lighting, audio quality, and especially the balance between interview, discussion, and musical elements. Right on!
*OnLy EviLViLeDeMonics actuaLLy BeLive that MaryAnn Mutated from someChimp!!!*