John Hawks
Aug 24, 2017 · 1 min read

Hi, Victor —

Your comment is a common suggestion by those who don’t accept evolutionary biology. But there’s a problem with the idea that hundreds and hundreds of fossils of ancient hominins are really some kind of extinct ape or monkey. These fossils all share features that are only found in humans today, and have not been found in any living ape or monkey species. In particular, they all share a series of skeletal changes that make their bodies capable of upright walking, like humans. Many of them also share other changes, in their teeth and skulls, which are uniquely similar to humans.

What can we do with a fossil like the famous “Lucy” skeleton, which has a small, apelike skull, combined with a humanlike pelvis and knee joint. Lucy walked upright, it is clear, and her canine teeth were small like humans, not the large fangs that chimpanzees or gorillas have. But her brain was nothing like ours, it was less than a third the size of a human brain.

We do not know if any hominins of Lucy’s species were our ancestors. Lucy herself died as a relatively young adult, and may have had no children of her own. But their anatomy makes clear that Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, shares a closer ancestor with us than we do with chimpanzees and gorillas. This ancient species, which lived more than 3 million years ago, was one of many close relatives of ours which are now extinct.

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    John Hawks

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    Paleoanthropologist. I study human evolution and work to understand the fossil and genetic evidence of our hominin ancestors.