Neither chimpanzee nor human, Ardipithecus reveals the surprising ancestry of both.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: White TD
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4413341 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Apr
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Neither chimpanzee nor human, Ardipithecus reveals the surprising ancestry of both.
White Tim D TD Lovejoy C Owen CO Asfaw Berhane B Carlson Joshua P JP Suwa Gen G
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20150401 16
Australopithecus fossils were regularly interpreted during the late 20th century in a framework that used living African apes, especially chimpanzees, as proxies for the immediate ancestors of the human clade. Such projection is now largely nullified by the discovery of Ardipithecus. In the context of accumulating evidence from genetics, developmental biology, anatomy, ecology, biogeography, and geology, Ardipithecus alters perspectives on how our earliest hominid ancestors--and our closest livi ...[more]
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