Everything You Know About Human Evolution Is Wrong
Graeme McMillan, i09.com: Well, maybe not everything, but new research suggests that we’re not as closely related to apes as you may have thought. The giveaway? The way we climb trees, apparently.
According to Dr Jeremy DeSilva, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, our earliest ancestors may have liked to climb trees, but they didn’t have the skeletons to do it like our chimpanzee brethren. His recent study showed that chimpanzees’ ankles are much more flexible than humans’:
“Early hominins may have climbed trees like modern humans can and occasionally do today; however, this study suggests that vertical climbing and arboreality were not significant parts of their locomotor repertoire…”
Translated? The earliest humans weren’t quite as apelike as we may have previously thought. Which may be a sign that previous evolutionary theories were wrong… or just that our ankles have become less bendy over time.
