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.

该项目是在巴基斯坦中新世Siwalik序列中挖掘最有效的人类轴承位置。 在最高的纳格里（Nagri）组（大约900万年）中，这个地方已经产生了从西瓦利克斯（Siwaliks）回收的西瓦普迪库斯（Sivapithecus）的所有后颅后遗体中的一半。 与颅骨遗骸不同，这些显示现存的猩猩Pongo的衍生特征很少。 最近回收的标本，一种肱骨肌椎干，最类似于可以假定是cantarhines的原始状况。 Sivapithecus很可能缺乏一种普遍认为是现存的伟大猿人和人类的共同派生特征，这是一个内侧扭转的肱骨头。 由于Sivapithecus是唯一可以合理地置于现有猿类的谱系上的化石类人类样式，因此对其颅后形态的了解对于测试有关人类类似物的最后一个共同祖先的形态和推断的位置行为的假设至关重要。 以前从该地区的回收率表明，Sivapithecus的进一步发掘，相对完整的颅后元素的概率很好。