Following my previous post about an Eurasian origin of hominins, I stumbled upon a paper by Vaneechoutte, Mansfeld, Munro and Verhaegen (2024), that proposes a radical idea, that knuckle-walking chimpancees are not the ancestors of the upright-biped homo grop (that encompasses humans). It argues that chimps are the ancestors of australopithecines but not ours. Instead, they suggest that an older (6-9 million years ago) upright walking Eurasian Graecopithecus-like ape, like the one that left its footprints in Crete 6 Ma, split into two groups, one that entered Africa forming an ardipithecus-like species some 4.3-6 Ma, which led to Australopithecines, who were more hunched, and these in turn led to gorillas and pan (chimpancees) that are knuckle walkers. In the meantime, in Eurasia, through a yet unknown missing-link, Homo erectus appeared 2 Ma, later some migrated back into Africa, originating Homo sapiens there.
Homo, as a group originated in Eurasia.
This is the article: Mario Vaneechoutte, Frances Mansfield, Stephen Munro, and Marc Verhaegen. (2024), Have We Been Barking up the Wrong Ancestral Tree? Australopithecines Are Probably Not Our Ancestors. Nat. Anthropol. 2024, 2(1), 10007; DOI: 10.35534/natanthropol.2023.10007 🔓
The paper is lenghty and juicy, it refutes the savannah adaptation of Australopiths (standing on two feet let them see predators from afar), and uses bones, skulls and footprint shapes to attack the chimp → Australopithecus → Homo evolution.
Bipedalism existed before Australopithecus appeared, by the way these creatures were arboreal (according to the authors), and the environment didn't pressure them to stand on two feet: "grassland savannahs had not been expanding in Africa at the time of the first australopithecines (approx. 4 Ma)... australopithecines were shown to have clear climbing adaptations, and to have lived in wetland, woodland or forest margins, they did not run long distances over open plains to chase prey or to scavenge carcasses because they were poor runners and because they were largely vegetarian"
Below is the "tree" suggested by the authors. Notice how the Australopiths evolve into chimps and gorillas.
Figure 3. Possible evolutionary tree of Homo, Pan and Gorilla with australopithecines as putative panin and gorillin ancestors. Legend: dotted black arrows and lines: possible phylogenetic relatedness; thick blue arrows: migration directions. Time scale at bottom (Ma: million years ago) is not linear. From the paper
Eurasian Evolution
It suggests that homo evolved in Asia! "Australopithecines Are Possibly Not Hominins Because Our Ancestors May Not Have Been Present in Africa in between 4 and 3 Ma... The earliest genuine indications of the existence of Homo are found almost simultaneously in Eurasia and Africa (early-Pleistocene, approx. 2.0–1.7 Ma), which leaves open the possibility that the genus Homo originated outside of Africa (not further discussed here, but presented in Figure 3). The very recent description of Anadoluvius turkae in Anatolia 8.7 Ma and the suggestion of the authors that hominines may have originated in Eurasia during the late Miocene certainly do not contradict the possibility that our direct ancestors were absent from Africa before 2.0 Ma..."
The authors reject the two-century-old "hypothesis that the hominin lineage alone became bipedal, as an adaptation by a semi-erect chimpanzee-like ancestor to deforestation and thus to living on the ground... In the meantime, other studies indicated that knuckle-walking was not an ancestral characteristic of the hominids, but had been derived independently in Pan and Gorilla. In other words, there had never been a knuckle-walking Homo/Pan ancestor from which australopithecine bipedalism had to evolve...
Instead of viewing the australopithecines as transitional between a quadrupedal, knuckle-walking Homo/Pan ancestor on the road to fully bipedal humans, we have here presented several arguments to view them as transitional between an already predominantly orthograde ancestor, with bipedal posture/gait, and the extant knuckle-walking African apes. We state that it cannot be excluded that australopithecines evolved from Miocene and Pliocene apes that were already orthograde, as represented by fossils such as Sahelanthropus, Orrorin and/or Ardipithecus, and that they gave rise to the extant semi-erect chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas "
It is a radical departure from the accepted story of an African origin of the homo group, and the linear evolution of a common chimp-human ancestor →chimps on one side and → australopithecines and homo on the other branch, leading to Homo habilis and H. erectus inside Africa, and a first migration (Dmanisi, Georgia) around 1.9 Ma.
As mentioned in previous posts, Asia is turning up more interesting sites than ever before. This is a dynamic period, where we will probably learn much more about our species origin, and the course taken by our ancestors from apes to humans.
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