https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakalipithecus

>>5062618
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakalipithecus

From that article:

"It is debated if great apes evolved in Africa or Eurasia given the abundance of early fossil apes species in the latter and the paucity in the former, despite all modern great apes except the orangutan being known from Africa. The first Miocene African ape, Samburupithecus, was discovered in 1982.[4] It is unclear how Nakalipithecus is related to other apes."

HMMMM....

>>5062615
mostly because jungles don't preserve fossils well. Though I'm pretty sure the most common opinion now is that apes actually evolved in the middle east or maybe southeast europe and spread out from there, no?

>>5062619
>>5062618
I would add that not only orangutans but the following are also endemic to Eurasia (often simply Asia):

Gibbons (lesser apes, the sister taxon to the homonids)
Macaques, langurs (simians, including species with demonstrate tool use, bathing, and some northerly ranges)
Tarsiers (most primitive extant haplorhine)
Some loris species (fossil lemurs have also been found on the Indian subcontinent, likely from when Madagascar was connected to it)
Colugos (closest extant mammalian relative to primates)
Treeshrews (second closest extant mammalian relative to primates)

So we can pretty much reconstruct the entire Eurarchont phylogenic tree leading up to the hominids (but not humans, allegedly!) with species endemic to Eurasia and we have a lot more fossil apes from Eurasia than we do from Africa and we also have increasing evidence that large-brained hominins populated Eurasia at a much earlier date than believed...

>>5062628
What does this mean for sasquatch? did they also originate in asia?

>>5062659
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeti#See_also

>>5062628
Give credence to calling Mesopotamia the cradle of civilization too

>>5062615
>why don’t rainforests that are famous for their acidic soil and high rainfall preserve bones made of calcium?

>>5062615
That's .. a good question. even accounting for poor fossilization conditions all of africa wasn't a jungle 10 million years ago and there's still fossils from those periods found

>>5062671
this. very little individuals that die are turned into a fossil

>>5062685
>even accounting for poor fossilization conditions all of africa wasn't a jungle 10 million years ago and there's still fossils from those periods found
This. Everyone else is just coping.

>>5062958
Gorillas are only found in jungles retard. All of Africa isn’t a jungle today either, but you won’t find any gorillas living in the serengeti

>>5062960
And what's the excuse for the lack of chimpanzees which, by a lucky coincidence, are found in the same range habitats that australopithecines inhabited?

>>5062965
Chimps occupying the same habitats as australopithecines represent a tiny sliver of the population on the absolute edge of their range. Chimps primarily inhabit the same rainforests as gorillas do

>>5062615
isnt it hard to get fossilized in the jungle?
maybe porcupines though

>>5063015
This isn't true at all. This is roughly the same habitat that chimpanzees are found in:

"Australopithecines appear to have lived in an area with a wide range of habitats. At Sterkfontein, fossil wood belonging to the liana Dichapetalum cf. mombuttense was recovered. The only living member of this tree genus in South Africa is Dichapetalum cymosum, which grows in dense, humid gallery forests. In modern day, D. mombuttense only grows in the Congolian rainforests, so its presence could potentially mean the area was an extension of this rainforest. The wildlife assemblages indicate a mix of habitats such as bush savanna, open woodland, or grassland. The shrub Anastrabe integerrima was also found, which today only grows on the wetter South African coastline. This could indicate the Cradle of Humankind received more rainfall in the Plio-Pleistocene. In total, the Cradle of Humankind may have featured gallery forests surrounded by grasslands.[56] Taung also appears to have featured a wet, closed environment.[57]"

>>5063029
Chimps are clearly eating their dead while the real homo was the only lineage with souls and buried them

File: natgeo map.jpg (172 KB, 1200x535)

172 KB JPG

>>5062615
You need to understand fossilization is very hard and some places are better than other to meet the requirements for the process (see the map) and less than 1/10 of 1 percent of all living species that have ever lived on Earth have become fossils.

>>5063029
Way to disprove your own argument retard. Gallery forests in a savannah mosaic aren’t the same thing as the fucking Congo

>>5063126
Can you just not read?

>Australopithecines appear to have lived in an area with a wide range of habitats. At Sterkfontein, fossil wood belonging to the liana Dichapetalum cf. mombuttense was recovered. The only living member of this tree genus in South Africa is Dichapetalum cymosum, which grows in dense, humid gallery forests. In modern day, D. mombuttense only grows in the Congolian rainforests, so its presence could potentially mean the area was an extension of this rainforest.

Plus chimps are also found in savanna-mosiac forests and woodland-mosiacs

>>5063133
>Can you just not read?
Can you? The modern day equivalent is not the same thing as the extinct ones, which should be obvious to you when they say one is only found in the Congo and one was found in gallery rainforest
>Plus chimps are also found in savanna-mosiac forests and woodland-mosiacs
They do. Guess what? That’s where the only chimp fossils we have ever found came from. And again, that represents the very edge of their distribution and a tiny proportion of their range

>>5063136
Here's a story about the "chimp fossils" (which are nothing more than a few teeth)

"The first-ever chimpanzee fossils were recently discovered in an area previously thought to be unsuitable for chimps. Fossils from human ancestors were also found nearby.

Although researchers have only found a few chimp teeth, the discovery could cause a shake-up in the theories of human evolution.

“We know today if you go to western and central Africa that humans and chimps live in similar and neighboring environments,” said Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences. “This is the first evidence in the fossil record that they coexisted in the same place in the past.”

It had previously been thought that chimps never lived in the arid Rift Valley — they prefer more lush environments like the Congo and jungles of western Africa. For years, scientists believed that early human ancestors left the jungles and moved east to the less wooded grasslands, and that this move caused the evolutionary split between the human and chimp lines."

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9145721

So why would the (allegedly) proto-human fossils be preserved but not the chimp fossils when they coexisted with each other at the time? There's a parsimonious evolutionary answer for this, but I wonder if you'll reach it.

>>5062685
>even accounting for poor fossilization conditions all of africa wasn't a jungle 10 million years ago
funny enough MORE of africa was jungle then than now

>>5063140
>So why would the (allegedly) proto-human fossils be preserved but not the chimp fossils when they coexisted with each other at the time?
It’s almost like chimps aren’t abundant in mosaic forest habitats like australopithecines were

>>5063162
Chimps do just fine a mosaic forest habitat. What are you talking about? Surely we should've found more than a few teeth by now since they shared habitats with those "proto-humans"?

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add9752

"Bipedalism, a defining feature of the human lineage, is thought to have evolved as forests retreated in the late Miocene-Pliocene. Chimpanzees living in analogous habitats to early hominins offer a unique opportunity to investigate the ecological drivers of bipedalism that cannot be addressed via the fossil record alone. We investigated positional behavior and terrestriality in a savanna-mosaic community of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in the Issa Valley, Tanzania as the first test in a living ape of the hypothesis that wooded, savanna habitats were a catalyst for terrestrial bipedalism. Contrary to widely accepted hypotheses of increased terrestriality selecting for habitual bipedalism, results indicate that trees remained an essential component of the hominin adaptive niche, with bipedalism evolving in an arboreal context, likely driven by foraging strategy."

>>5062928
How little do individuals have to be to turn into fossils?

>>5063182
>Chimps do just fine a mosaic forest habitat. What are you talking about?
Nobody said they didn’t. The point is that it’s the edge of their range, so there aren’t many living in such habitats in the first place. They largely live in rainforests. I’m not sure how you’re so confused about why we don’t find more chimp fossils in mosaic habitats when that represents a tiny portion of chimp habitat
>Surely we should've found more than a few teeth by now since they shared habitats with those "proto-humans"?
Many of the hominins you’re referring to are also known from fragmentary remains and they lived primarily on savannahs and floodplains unlike chimps. Fossilisation is a rare occurrence, especially for an animal that lives in rainforests

>lived primarily on savannahs and floodplains unlike chimps

No, they didn't. Those assumptions have long been discarded. Even the linked studies above don't say that. They lived in gallery forests or mosaic forests, not open savannahs or floodplains.

Furthermore, we're not just talking about modern chimps and their current range, which has been greatly reduced by human development over the last century or two. We're talking about chimps throughout the millennia as well as any of their recent ancestors stretching back five million years or more. Not only is this is a vast stretch a time without any fossils, but there's no reason to believe that the range of chimps and chimp ancestors would've been much larger than it is now. It's already been confirmed that they occupied the same habitats as australopithecines, so there's no reason to think they wouldn't have more fossils than are currently found.

Of course, the acceptance of australopithecines as "proto-humans" was heavily tied to the now discredited savanna hypothesis and the equally discredited assumption that early apes weren't bipedal...

>>5063223
>No, they didn't. Those assumptions have long been discarded
They haven’t though. The formation in question also yields fossils of animals like zebras, lions and rhinos. The theory has always been that early hominins occupied the margins of forests in a grassland mosaic, you are just confirming that
>They lived in gallery forests or mosaic forests, not open savannahs or floodplains
A gallery forest is a forest corridor in a grassland. It’s in a savannah, floodplain, etc
>Furthermore, we're not just talking about modern chimps and their current range, which has been greatly reduced by human development over the last century or two
That doesn’t really change much. These open savannah areas in places like Senegal have always been the edge of chimpanzee ranges
>Not only is this is a vast stretch a time without any fossils
There are fossils though. We just talked about them
>It's already been confirmed that they occupied the same habitats as australopithecines, so there's no reason to think they wouldn't have more fossils than are currently found
Why is there no reason to think that? When you are describing chimps and australopithecines in the same habitat you’re talking about the limit of chimpanzee distribution vs primary australopithecine habitat. If anything it makes perfect sense that there are so few chimp fossils compared to australopithecines

>>5063267
>The theory has always been that early hominins occupied the margins of forests in a grassland mosaic, you are just confirming that

You're full of shit. The prevailing theory until the late 1990s was that hominins evolved in the open savanna after their erstwhile tropical forest habitat receded as a result of climate change. That was discarded once evidence surfaced that the claimed shift in climate didn't happen. Now the current claim is a gallery forest or mosaic habitat, but the hypotheses are far less convincing. For example, the paper linked above from 2022 tries to argue that prote-human bipedalism evolved in an arboreal environment when that makes no fucking sense given how many primate species are arboreal without evolving more human-like traits. It's also much less parsimonious in light of recent fossil apes discovered in Eurasia, such as Danuvius, which refuted the assumption that last common ancestor of humans and chimps walked on its knuckles (chimps and gorillas evolved knuckle-walking after their split with the human lineage), or Rudapithecus, which had a much more human-like pelvis than any African ape, living or extinct.

The much more parsimonious answer in light of all of the above is that the australopithecines are the real ancestors of chimps and gorillas, or at least a related lineage, rather than being proto-humans. This would also explain why the later species such as Australopithecus africanus show more "ape-like" features than the earlier species like Australopithecus anamensis.

>>5063268
>The prevailing theory until the late 1990s was that hominins evolved in the open savanna after their erstwhile tropical forest habitat receded as a result of climate change
>Now the current claim is a gallery forest or mosaic habitat
Why do you think these are mutually exclusive? Mosaic rainforest often exists as a result of savannah replacing more closed habitat
>That was discarded once evidence surfaced that the claimed shift in climate didn't happen
What are you talking about? Nobody has ever said that the climate in Africa didn’t change. You literally just quoted an article talking about Sterkfontein where rainforest lianas were present even though today the surrounding area is a grassland
>For example, the paper linked above from 2022 tries to argue that prote-human bipedalism evolved in an arboreal environment when that makes no fucking sense given how many primate species are arboreal without evolving more human-like traits
Didn’t you just say they lived in forests and not savannahs?
>The much more parsimonious answer in light of all of the above is that the australopithecines are the real ancestors of chimps and gorillas
This is probably the most retarded thing you’ve said so far. Gorillas and chimps split before Australopithecines even existed. They split before Orrorin tugenensis appeared let alone Australopithecus and co. Also if chimps and gorillas are the descendants of these Australopithecines and we are not then why are chimps and humans more closely related to each other than gorillas are? That makes no sense
>This would also explain why the later species such as Australopithecus africanus show more "ape-like" features than the earlier species like Australopithecus anamensis
Or it’s just a divergent lineage

>>5062615
Me on the right

>>5063279
>Why do you think these are mutually exclusive?

Because most mainstream scientists now admit the Savanna hypothesis was wrong? Even Philip Tobias, who was defended it, admitted it was dead wrong back in the 1990s. This is not even controversial and by defending it you're just revealing you don't know anything about the latest research or state of the field.

The fact that you didn't even bother addressing the Danuvius or Rudapithecus fossils discovered within the last decade (which upended lots of old assumptions!) likewise demonstrates you have no clue what you're talking about and you're not qualified to have this discussion.

>Didn’t you just say they lived in forests and not savannahs?

I said that australopithecines did, and that the forested environment does not present any clear pressures to evolve in a human-life because it's too similar to the environments of many other primates. The open savanna hypothesis was falsified by later evidence, but at the time it at least could explain why humans were unique in comparison to other primates. A mosaic forest doesn't have that kind of explanatory power.

>Gorillas and chimps split before Australopithecines even existed

How are you so sure of this when there's hardly any gorilla/chimp fossils? If you're going to cite genomic studies, well, those studies give a more complex picture. A major one that has never been adequately explained is the PTERV1 imprint found on the genome of African apes, but not on the genome of humans or orangutans (the TRIM5α hypothesis has already been refuted). Recent endocasts have also shown that the australopithecus brain was entirely ape-like, showing know evolution towards a more human-like brain, contrary to the premature and mistaken claims of Raymond Dart.

Are you familiar AT ALL with the latest research? Here's David Reich last year trying to tell people like you that you're wrong:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SbyMBvJzkE

>>5063627
>showing know evolution towards a more human-like brain
showing NO evolution towards a more human-like brain* obviously

And here are the studies in question:

"Based on analysis of finished BAC chimpanzee genome sequence, we characterize a retroviral element (Pan troglodytes endogenous retrovirus 1 [PTERV1]) that has become integrated in the germline of African great ape and Old World monkey species but is absent from humans and Asian ape genomes. Phylogenetic analysis of the endogenous retrovirus reveals that the gorilla and chimpanzee elements share a monophyletic origin with a subset of the Old World monkey retroviral elements, but that the average sequence divergence exceeds neutral expectation for a strictly nuclear inherited DNA molecule...Our data are consistent with a retroviral infection that bombarded the genomes of chimpanzees and gorillas independently and concurrently, 3–4 million years ago.

First, there is virtually no overlap (less than 4%) between the location of insertions among chimpanzee, gorilla, macaque, and baboon, making it unlikely that endogenous copies existed in a common ancestor and then became subsequently deleted in the human lineage and orangutan lineage. Second, the PTERV1 phylogenetic tree is inconsistent with the generally accepted species tree for primates, suggesting a horizontal transmission as opposed to a vertical transmission from a common ape ancestor. An alternative explanation may be that the primate phylogeny is grossly incorrect, as has been proposed by a minority of anthropologists.

Another scenario may be that the lineage that ultimately gave rise to humans did not occupy the same habitat as the ancestral chimpanzee and gorilla lineages. An excursion by early hominids to Eurasia during the time that PTERV1 infected African great apes and then a return to Africa would explain this phylogenetic inconsistency."

>>5063630
"Phylogenetic analysis of the LTRs from full-length elements of CERV 1/PTERV1 members indicated that this family of LTRs can be grouped into at least two subfamilies (bootstrap value of 99; Figure 3). The age of each subfamily was estimated by calculating the average of the pairwise distances between all sequences in a given subfamily. The estimated ages of the two subfamilies are 5 MY and 7.8 MY, respectively, suggesting that at least one subfamily was present in the lineage prior to the time chimpanzees and humans diverged from a common ancestor (about 6 MYA). This conclusion, however, is inconsistent with the fact that no CERV 1/PTERV1 orthologues were detected in the sequenced human genome. Moreover, we were able to detect pre-integration sites at those regions in the human genome orthologous to the CERV 1/PTERV1 insertion sites in chimpanzees, effectively eliminating the possibility that the elements were once present in humans but subsequently excised. Consistent with our findings, the results of a previously published Southern hybridization survey indicated that sequences orthologous to CERV 1/PTERV1 elements are present in the African great apes and old world monkeys but not in Asian apes or humans."

"To study brain growth and organization in the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis more than 3 million years ago, we scanned eight fossil crania using conventional and synchrotron computed tomography. We inferred key features of brain organization from endocranial imprints and explored the pattern of brain growth by combining new endocranial volume estimates with narrow age at death estimates for two infants. Contrary to previous claims, sulcal imprints reveal an ape-like brain organization and no features derived toward humans."

>>5063627
>>5063630
>>5063632
>>5063630
"Paleoneurologists rely heavily on published descriptions of sulci on brains of great apes, especially chimpanzees (humans’ phylogenetically closest living relatives), to guide their identifications of sulci on ape-sized hominin endocasts. However, the few comprehensive descriptions of cortical sulci published for chimpanzees usually relied on post mortem brains, (now) antiquated terminology for some sulci, and photographs or line drawings from limited perspectives (typically right or left lateral views). The shortage of adequate descriptions of chimpanzee sulcal patterns partly explains why the identities of certain sulci on australopithecine endocasts (e.g., the inferior frontal and middle frontal sulci) have been controversial.

Here, we provide images of lateral and dorsal surfaces of 16 hemispheres from 4 male and 4 female adult chimpanzee brains that were obtained using in vivo magnetic resonance imaging. Sulci on the exposed surfaces of the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes are identified on the images based on their locations, positions relative to each other, and homologies known from comparative studies of cytoarchitecture in primates. These images and sulcal identifications exceed the quantity and quality of previously published illustrations of chimpanzee brains with comprehensively labeled sulci and, thus, provide a larger number of examples for identifying sulci on hominin endocasts than hitherto available. Our findings, even in a small sample like the present one, overturn published claims that australopithecine endocasts reproduce derived configurations of certain sulci in their frontal lobes that never appear on chimpanzee brains."

>>5063627
>you're just revealing you don't know anything about the latest research or state of the field
I’m not sure you’re in a position to say this when you think gorillas and chimps are sister lineages
>The fact that you didn't even bother addressing the Danuvius or Rudapithecus fossils
What is there to address?
>A mosaic forest doesn't have that kind of explanatory power
It does though. Animals that live in mosaic forests don’t spend all their time there, they must cross open savannah all the time if they’re to make it between forest patches. This is even true of modern chimps in savannah areas
>How are you so sure of this when there's hardly any gorilla/chimp fossils?
Genetics
>A major one that has never been adequately explained is the PTERV1 imprint found on the genome of African apes, but not on the genome of humans or orangutans (the TRIM5α hypothesis has already been refuted)
It is a question, but it doesn’t upend the rest of the evidence placing chimps as closer to humans than gorillas. It’s one gene. Gorillas share 15% of their genome with chimps that isn’t shared with humans, and 15% of their genome with humans that they don’t share with chimps. They are an out group
>Recent endocasts have also shown that the australopithecus brain was entirely ape-like, showing know evolution towards a more human-like brain
Why would it? The oldest Homo species are also small brained. The increase in brain size occurred after Australopithecus. We already knew that
>Here's David Reich last year trying to tell people like you that you're wrong:
This video has literally nothing to do with early hominins. He’s talking about genus Homo leading to modern humans, not Australopithecus and older
>>5063630
>Another scenario may be that the lineage that ultimately gave rise to humans did not occupy the same habitat as the ancestral chimpanzee and gorilla lineages
Strange
>>5063632
>>5063634
Australopithecus having an ape like brain is nothing new

>>5063646
Just admit you have no fucking clue what you're talking about and you're unqualified to discuss this topic. You've ignored the Danuvius and Rudapithecus fossils, the study showing that chimps in a mosaic-forest don't display any shifts towards more human-like bipedalism, you shrugged at he PTERV1 studies because you're not qualified to assess them, you are seemingly unaware that the Savanna hypothesis was abandoned some time ago, you're unaware that the early claims of Australopithecine proto-human status by Raymond Dart were based on now discredited claims about human-like sulci in their brain, you're unaware that early Homos species like Homo habilus had a MUCH larger brain size than chimps. What are you even doing? You're wasting my time.

Here, I'll even spoonfeed you the relevant part of the David Reich video even though you'll ignore this too:
"The evidence that our lineage was mostly in Africa is based on an idea I think an assumption, a kind of inertial idea, that our lineage must have always been in Africa, but if you look at the archaeological evidence, it's not incredibly clear and if you look at the genetic evidence we have many early branches from Eurasia and only one from Africa and complexity and branching in Eurasia that's sampled in the DNA record, DNA from Denisovans, DNA from unknown archaic lineages that contributed to Denisovans, Neanderthals, and all of those are
represented in the Eurasian record not
in the African record. Part of that is the fact that an DNA is preserved in Eurasia but maybe actually what there's a period when our lineage resides in Eurasia it's not obviously wrong so I
think that hypothesis is out there as a possibility."

I HATE that the only fossil of Gigantopithecus is a jawbone and some teeth. We’ll never get a good recreation of it and can only imagine.

>>5063677
>You've ignored the Danuvius and Rudapithecus fossils
Because I’m not even sure what you’re getting at with them. They far predate any human/chimp split
>you shrugged at he PTERV1 studies because you're not qualified to assess them
You can’t make a claim like that based on one gene from one study as if it discounts the rest of the body of evidence
>you are seemingly unaware that the Savanna hypothesis was abandoned some time ago
You are seemingly unaware that a mosaic forest doesn’t exist without a savannah. You said that there was no shift from rainforest to savannah when you had previously linked a source that says the exact opposite
>you're unaware that early Homos species like Homo habilus had a MUCH larger brain size than chimps
When did I say they had brains the size of a chimp? I said that they were small brained and the increase in brain size occurred after Australopithecus which is true, not that they are equally as small brained as chimps
>Here, I'll even spoonfeed you the relevant part of the David Reich video even though you'll ignore this too
And he’s talking about late Homo you fucking retard. Right before that paragraph you quoted he says he’s referring to the common ancestor of H. sapiens and Neanderthals going back to H. habilis and erectus. Maybe try watching the video. He even states at the very start of the video
>“Certainly our main lineage was in Africa probably 3 million, 5 million, 7 million years ago”
3-7 mya is the period that we are talking about you dribbling retard. Australopithecus afarensis was around 3-4 mya. A. anamensis 3.9-4.3 mya. Fossils at Sterkfontein are around 3.5 million years old. Danuvius and Rudapithecus were around 10 mya or more

>>5063627
Did we watch different videos?