Was it Wednesday we ran that story about the baffling (Nature, ScienceDaily) perplexing (BBC) 400k-year-old human DNA, that is hard to make sense of (The Scientist , New Scientist) and creates new mysteries (New York Times) instead of neatly clarifying human evolution?
That’s what happens when they forget to run the script for human evolution by the Darwin lobby first.
At this point, it probably hardly matters that a new study of a human thigh bone “could impact scientists’ understanding of the origins of human bipedalism,” but here it is anyway, courtesy The Scientist:
“Living apes—chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans—have long and independent evolutionary histories of their own, and their modern anatomies should not be assumed to represent the ancestral condition for our human lineage,” study coauthor Sergio Almécija told the Agence France-Presse (AFP). “To understand the origins of human bipedalism, scientists should stop assuming a ‘chimpanzee starting point,’” he added.
That is radical. Hope the guy has fire insurance.
Theories about why humans are bipedal include to travel rough terrain. Or to hit each other. Or carry infants. Or scarce resources. Or save energy. Or cool down.