National Geographic: Mysteries of Mankind Page #2

Year:
1988
993 Views


a fossil tell little

about how the creature actually lived.

But perhaps the behavior

of living primates can.

Charles Darwin wrote that we are most

closely related to the African apes.

But at that time no one knew how

closely or to which species.

The answer would come from

a most unlikely source

the test tubes of molecular biologists.

Twenty years ago Dr. Vincent Sarich

and his colleagues at the University

of California

were among a small group of scientists

dating evolution with molecules

and test tubes instead of fossils.

Sarich's group compared a blood

protein in 13 species of primates,

including humans,

and charted when each had diverged

from a common ancestor.

The dates differed radically

from those obtained from fossils.

Among the great apes,

beginning millions of years ago,

the line that led to orangutans

was the first to split off

from a common ancestor.

The evidence suggests gorillas

were next.

According to Sarich,

chimpanzees and man

may have diverged as recently as four

to five million years ago.

Such a recent divergence

was almost impossible

for many scientists to accept.

Laymen were equally reluctant

to listen.

There is still a very strong

resistance to looking

at human beings in an evolutionary

context, especially behavioral.

Because we want to

retain a separateness.

We don't want to see ourselves

as having any non-human

in our ancestry.

There are significant differences

between us.

We are essentially hairless

Oh, he likes the beard.

We are habitually upright walkers,

we have a much larger brain,

and we have the gift

of spoken language.

But genetically humans and

chimpanzees are 99% identical.

Chimps may even be more closely related

to us than they are to gorillas.

In 1960 Louis Leakey,

with uncanny intuition,

sent a young woman into the field

to study chimpanzees.

Jane Goodall's 27-year old study has

become a classic

and confirms Leakey's conviction that

chimps have much to teach us

about the behavior of early humans.

Understanding of chimp behavior today

helps us to understand the way in which

our early ancestors may have lived.

Because I think it makes sense

to say any behavior shared

by the modern chimpanzee

and the modern human

was probably present

in the common ancestor.

And if it was present in the common

ancestor, therefore in early man.

A mechanical leopard was instrumental

in an experiment

with chimpanzees conducted

by scientists

from the University of Amsterdam.

Anthropologists have

long puzzled over how

our ancestors defended

themselves against predators.

How could such small creatures,

not yet intelligent enough to make

stone weapons, have possibly survived?

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Barbara Jampel

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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