News and Views Knuckle-walking hominid ancestors
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Richmond & Strait (2000) have attracted much attention with a recent morphometric analysis of distal radii of anthropoids and hominid fossils, suggesting some of the latter share knuckle-walking traits. Several aspects of their treatment deserve comment. These authors show A.L. 288-1q,v and the putative hominid fossil KNM-ER 20419 falling near chimpanzees and gorillas in a canonical analysis of four angles and indices [Richmond & Strait, 2000: Figure 2(b)], hence their conclusions. However those fossils are also clearly in the near morphometric vicinity of Pongo and A.L. 288-1q,v seems actually to fall in that suspensory ape’s statistical scatter. The orang-utan is not a knuckle-walker and should in many ways represent the opposite morphological extreme, but Richmond & Strait’s analysis does not afford much separation. On the other hand, two other (later) hominids, from Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, cluster far away from the previous taxa, near modern Homo sapiens, and these hominids/humans are well separated from the great apes. In fact Richmond’s & Strait’s analysis seems to function more to cluster nonhuman hominoids in distinction to humans (and quadrupedal monkeys), rather than reflecting knuckle-walking function. We question the knuckle-walking functional significance of morphometric results that, after clustering some (but not all) hominids with African apes, next join those with the suspensory Asian apes, the orang-utan and gibbon,
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تاریخ انتشار 2001