Ardipithecus and Early Human Evolution in Light of Twenty-First-Century Developmental Biology
Ardipithecus and Early Human Evolution in Light of Twenty-First-Century Developmental Biology
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从二十一世纪发育生物学角度看地猿与早期人类进化
DOI：
10.3998/jar.0521004.0070.301
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发表时间：
2014
影响因子：
0.7
通讯作者：
C. Lovejoy
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
C. Lovejoy
其中一个名为Ardipithecus ramidus的标本ARA-VP-6/500，是迄今发现的最早也是最完整的原始人化石。虽然它花了十多年的时间来提取，准备和分析（沿着其他一些不太完整的标本），但它的恢复和准备工作的彻底性已经产生了关于其环境的令人惊讶的启示，以及关于我们最早的人类祖先与他们与黑猩猩共享的最后一个共同祖先的分歧的新知识。几十年来，发育生物学的突破性发现也改变了我们对进化过程本身的理解，特别是需要从整体上看待成人解剖结构的意义。今天，如果不直接参考其可能的形态发生模式，就不能合理地理解这种结构。世纪，这两种特殊信息来源的融合，要求我们对早期原始人类祖先如何为我们后来的进化奠定基础进行彻底的修正。尽管我们通常将复杂的社会结构归因于我们巨大的大脑，但目前的证据表明，几乎早在我们的进化支最初出现时，情况可能恰恰相反。
One specimen of Ardipithecus ramidus, ARA-VP-6/500, is the earliest and also among the most complete fossil hominids ever recovered. Although it took more than a decade to extract, prepare, and analyze (along with a number of other less-complete specimens), the thoroughness of its recovery and preparation has yielded surprising revelations about its environment as well as new knowledge about the divergence of our earliest human ancestors from the last common ancestor they shared with chimpanzees. Decades of groundbreaking discoveries in developmental biology have also transformed our understanding of the evolutionary process itself, especially the need to view the significance of adult anatomical structures holistically. Today, no such structure can be reasonably understood without direct reference to its likely mode of morphogenesis. The twenty-first-century convergence of these two special sources of information requires a radical revision of how our early hominid forebears set the stage for our own subsequent evolution. Although we usually attribute our complex social structure to our massive brain, current evidence suggests that the reverse might have been true almost as far back as the original emergence of our clade.