Excavation of a Hominoid Locality in the Miocene Siwalik Sequence of Pakistan

巴基斯坦中新世西瓦利克序列中一处类人猿地点的发掘

• 批准号: 9012449
• 负责人: John Kelley
• 金额: $ 0.3万
• 依托单位: Brown University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1990
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1990-09-01 至 1991-07-01
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9012449&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Excavation; Hominoid; Locality; Miocene; Siwalik

This project is to excavate the most productive hominoid- bearing locality in the Miocene Siwalik sequence of Pakistan. This locality, in the uppermost Nagri Formation (ca. 9 million years old), has produced almost half of all the postcranial remains of Sivapithecus recovered from the Siwaliks. Unlike the cranial remains, these show few if any of the derived features of the extant orang-utan, Pongo. The most recently recovered specimen, a humeral diaphysis, is most similar to what can be presumed to be the primitive condition for catarrhines. It may well be that Sivapithecus lacked a feature that is universally considered to be a shared derived feature of the extant great apes and humans, a medially torsioned humeral head. As Sivapithecus is the only fossil hominoid that can plausibly be placed on the lineage of one of the extant apes, knowledge of its postcranial morphology is critical for testing assumptions about the morphology and inferred positional behaviors of the last common ancestor of the hominoid clade. Previous recoveries from this locality indicate that the probability of excavating further, relatively complete postcranial elements of Sivapithecus is good.

本项目旨在挖掘巴基斯坦中新世Siwalik层序中最具生产力的类人猿所在地。这一地点位于Nagri地层的最上层（约90万年前），从siwalik人那里发现的Sivapithecus头骨后遗骸几乎有一半是在这里出土的。与头骨遗骸不同，这些遗骸几乎没有显示出现存猩猩庞戈的衍生特征。最近发现的一个肱骨骨干标本，与被认为是卡他鼻炎的原始状态最为相似。很可能是Sivapithecus缺乏一个普遍认为是现存的类人猿和人类共同的特征，即内侧弯曲的肱骨头。由于Sivapithecus是唯一一种可以被合理地置于现存类人猿谱系上的化石，因此对其后颅形态的了解对于检验关于类人猿进化分支的最后共同祖先的形态和推断位置行为的假设至关重要。先前在该地区的恢复表明，进一步挖掘相对完整的Sivapithecus颅后元素的可能性很大。