Evidence of a chimpanzee-sized ancestor of humans but a gibbon-sized ancestor of apes
Mark Grabowski & William L. Jungers
Nature Communications 8, Article number: 880 (2017)
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Biological anthropology Phylogenetics
Received: 23 September 2016 Accepted: 09 August 2017
Published online: 12 October 2017
Source/Fonte: Cosmos
Abstract
Body mass directly affects how an animal relates to its environment and has a wide range of biological implications. However, little is known about the mass of the last common ancestor (LCA) of humans and chimpanzees, hominids (great apes and humans), or hominoids (all apes and humans), which is needed to evaluate numerous paleobiological hypotheses at and prior to the root of our lineage. Here we use phylogenetic comparative methods and data from primates including humans, fossil hominins, and a wide sample of fossil primates including Miocene apes from Africa, Europe, and Asia to test alternative hypotheses of body mass evolution. Our results suggest, contrary to previous suggestions, that the LCA of all hominoids lived in an environment that favored a gibbon-like size, but a series of selective regime shifts, possibly due to resource availability, led to a decrease and then increase in body mass in early hominins from a chimpanzee-sized LCA.
Acknowledgements
We are extremely grateful to Mana Dembo and Mark Collard for their hominin phylogenetic tree. Thanks to Neil Roach, Kjetil Voje, and Scott Williams for comments that greatly enhanced our manuscript, Travis Ingram for questions regarding SURFACE, and Thomas Hansen for continuous and welcome advice on OU modeling. Funding for this research was provided by the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program to M.G.
Author information
Affiliations
Paleoanthropology, Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP), Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Mark Grabowski
Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, NY, 10024, USA
Mark Grabowski
Department of Biosciences, Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), University of Oslo, Oslo, 0316, Norway
Mark Grabowski
Department of Anthropology, Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, 20052, USA
Mark Grabowski
Association Vahatra, Antananarivo 101, BP, 3972, Madagascar
William L. Jungers
Department of Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA
William L. Jungers
Contributions
M.G. designed the study; M.G. and W.L.J. collected the data; M.G. performed the analyses; M.G. and W.L.J. discussed the results and wrote the paper.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Corresponding author
Correspondence to Mark Grabowski.
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