Philologos wrote:
The bonobo are very intriguing, but even combining chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orangutan traits you can't get to human. We have shown a pile of features that match this or that trait of the great apes - not quite chimp like aggression, not quite bonobo like sexuality, for some of us like me not quite orangutan like solitary tendencies, and so forth.
But you cannot put any of the anthropoids forward as a clear ancestor, and even if you go with the idea of a common ancestor for chimp- bonobo - homo, you would have to postulate personality traits that could mutate into the character of all three.
The proposalis a bit simplistic.
Thats true that you cant play the game that authors often play of claiming that "we are what we are because we are primates" because nonhuman primates differ marketidly from each other in behavior- and these differences increases the closer you get to man on the evolutionary scale.
And suggesting that we are "just like" any living nonhuman primate is simplistic.
Most like us are the baboons( they date and go steady and are serial monogamists).
But baboons are monkeys and thus are farther removed from us than are any ape.
Most like what humans ASPIRE TO BE are the gibbons ( lesser apes) who are lifelong monogamists and instinctive practitionars of family values,
Oranguatans ( asian great apes) are solitary. Then when you look at our closest cousins-our fellow African Great Apes, the picture just gets more complicated. Gorillas have harems, and both types of Chimpanzees are promsicuous but in different ways.
Anatomically bonobos are somewhat more human like than are common chimps but they are hardly the twins of Lucy nor of any other fossil hominid-much less of modern humans.
Common chimps engage in warfare-disturbingly similiar to human warfare which has not been observed in bonobos. But humans are more like bonobos in other behaviors. So its is not a simple puzzle.
Most likely there was a third species of chimpanzee that pushed elbows with both of its two cousins for a piece of Africa. Like the other two types of chimps it was up against unique local ecological challenges that forced it to evolve unique behaviors not quite like those of either modern common chimps, nor quite like modern bonobos. This third chimp became us.
14 Feb 2011, 9:13 am
