BIOL 1108 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Foxp2, Neoteny, Genetic Diversity
Document Summary
The great apes: our place in the lineage. All questions of lineage for all organisms have three potential pools of information that will then inform the systematics: fossil record, the dna (molecules, the physical features (anatomy) Their skull is a blend of human and chimpanzee features so we know that, as of 7 million years ago, hominins had already begun the process of splitting off of the ancestral group they share with chimpanzees. That split created two branches: one from which we see the chimps arise and, one the human species. Modern humans evolved from the same common ancestor as chimps. Chimps and humans have never been the same" species with one branching off from another. Hominins have been walking upright for at least 3. 2 million years (as seen with the discovery of lucy) Ardipithecus ramidus (ardi) was bidpedal on land but quadrupedal in trees. Somewhere between ardi and lucy, hominins went fully bipedal.
