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2016 ; 371
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From Australopithecus to Homo: the transition that wasn t
#MMPMID27298460
Kimbel WH
; Villmoare B
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
2016[Jul]; 371
(1698
): ä PMID27298460
show ga
Although the transition from Australopithecus to Homo is usually thought of as a
momentous transformation, the fossil record bearing on the origin and earliest
evolution of Homo is virtually undocumented. As a result, the poles of the
transition are frequently attached to taxa (e.g. A. afarensis, at ca 3.0 Ma
versus H. habilis or H. erectus, at ca 2.0-1.7 Ma) in which substantial adaptive
differences have accumulated over significant spans of independent evolution.
Such comparisons, in which temporally remote and adaptively divergent species are
used to identify a 'transition', lend credence to the idea that genera should be
conceived at once as monophyletic clades and adaptively unified grades. However,
when the problem is recast in terms of lineages, rather than taxa per se, the
adaptive criterion becomes a problem of subjectively privileging 'key'
characteristics from what is typically a stepwise pattern of acquisition of novel
characters beginning in the basal representatives of a clade. This is the pattern
inferred for species usually included in early Homo, including H. erectus, which
has often been cast in the role as earliest humanlike hominin. A fresh look at
brain size, hand morphology and earliest technology suggests that a number of key
Homo attributes may already be present in generalized species of
Australopithecus, and that adaptive distinctions in Homo are simply
amplifications or extensions of ancient hominin trends.This article is part of
the themed issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'.