Drummond-Clarke Rhianna C
Department of Human Origins, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Institut für Zoologie und Evolutionsforschung, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena, Jena, Germany.
Commun Integr Biol. 2023 Mar 21;16(1):2193001. doi: 10.1080/19420889.2023.2193001. eCollection 2023.
Hypotheses have historically linked the emergence and evolution of defining human characteristics such as bipedal walking to ground-dwelling, envisioning our earliest ancestors as living in treeless savannahs (i.e. the traditional savannah hypothesis). However, over the last two decades, evidence from the fossil record combined with comparative studies of extant apes have challenged this hypothesis, instead favoring the importance of arboreality during key phases of hominin evolutionary history. Here we review some of these studies, including a recent study of savannah chimpanzees that provides the first model of how bipedalism could have been adaptive as an arboreal locomotor behavior in early hominins, even after the forests receded during the early Miocene-Pliocene transition. We suggest that whilst a shift to exploiting open habitats catalyzed hominin divergence from great apes, adaptations to arboreal living have been key in shaping what defines humans today, in counter to the traditional savannah hypothesis. Future comparative studies within and between great ape species will be instrumental to understanding variation in arboreality in extant apes, and thus the processes shaping human evolution over the last 3-7 million years.
从历史上看，各种假说将诸如双足行走等人类定义特征的出现和进化与地面生活联系起来，把我们最早的祖先设想为生活在没有树木的稀树草原上（即传统的稀树草原假说）。然而，在过去二十年里，来自化石记录的证据以及对现存猿类的比较研究对这一假说提出了挑战，转而支持在人类进化历史的关键阶段树栖生活的重要性。在这里，我们回顾其中一些研究，包括最近一项对稀树草原黑猩猩的研究，该研究提供了首个模型，说明即使在中新世早期到上新世过渡期间森林消退之后，双足行走作为早期人类的一种树栖运动行为是如何具有适应性的。我们认为，虽然向开放栖息地的转变催化了人类与大猩猩的分化，但与传统稀树草原假说相反，对树栖生活的适应一直是塑造当今人类特征的关键因素。未来对大猩猩物种内部和之间的比较研究将有助于理解现存猿类树栖性的差异，从而有助于理解过去300万至700万年塑造人类进化的过程。
