Re: AAT and the bones
Thomas Clarke (clarke@acme.ucf.edu)
13 Aug 1995 14:10:48 GMT
In article <Pine.SUN.3.91.950808230815.12169F-100000-100000@merhaba.cc.columbia.edu> Ralph L Holloway <rlh2@columbia.edu> writes:
>On Tue, 8 Aug 1995, Elaine Morgan wrote:
>> I predict that you will find nothing more surprising in the skeleton of
>> ramidus than you found on the dark side of the moon. His fingers will
>> be like Lucy's. Pelvis and feet will be much more hominid-like than
>> ape-like. They may be slightly less adapted for bipedalism but not
>> very much.
>Perhaps I have misread Elaine's post here, but it essentially means to me
>that
><she is > claiming that there will be no aquatic-like skeletal
>adaptations to be found in hominoid/hominid evolution that are
>distinguishable from those explained by standard hypotheses of developing
>bipedalism
>to a gradual dissication and loss of primary forest environments, and an
>expanding mixed savannah riverine gallery forest environment.
It seems to me that Lucy and other like-aged bipedal fossils have put
the nail in the savannah hypothesis already. At the time of lucy,
the savannah environments were only beginning to develop, hence it is
hard to account for evolution of bidpedalism as a response to the
change from forest to savannah when bipedalism predates this change.
Bipedalism must have evolved in response to changes in the environment
other than the forest/savannah transition.
To my way of thinking, isolation on islands fills the bill nicely.
Tom Clarke
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