Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-25wd4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T01:07:10.290Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - How can we recognize common ancestors?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2016

Peter Andrews
Peter Andrews
Affiliation:
Natural History Museum, London
Get access

Summary

There are many issues that challenge us today in our investigations of the natural world. One that has always fascinated me is the structure of the universe and our position in it; and in a way following on from this, we can ask what is the nature of life and in particular how did humans evolve. The first is the stuff of astronomy, and with advancing technology we see many things today that we could not even have begun to predict in the past. The second is driven by our fascination with the world around us and in particular with ourselves, our origins and our place in the world.

It used to be thought that all we need to know about our evolutionary history will be resolved by finding more and better fossils, in the same way as it used to be thought that to understand the universe all we need is bigger and better telescopes. For both lines of inquiry, however, it is increasingly being recognized that what we really need are new ways of looking at things, at stars and cosmic rays in the case of astronomy, and at our genetic history and fossil environments in the case of human evolution. It is not enough now to find earlier and better fossils of ancestral humans; we should rather be seeking to understand their place in the web of life and their interactions with the ecosystems in which they once lived. This can be followed throughout human evolution, but of particular importance is the time when the human lineage first appeared. Can we identify our common ancestor with our closest primate relatives, or as some put it, the missing link in human evolution?

There are in fact many ‘missing links’ in human evolution, and Charles Darwin devoted two chapters of his book The Origin of Species to the problems in identifying them. Missing links are transitional forms between species, and Darwin was concerned with their apparent absence, both in living species, which he discussed at length in Chapter VI, and between related fossil species, discussed in Chapter X.

Type
Chapter
Information
An Ape's View of Human Evolution , pp. 1 - 18
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andrews, P. 1973. The vegetation of Rusinga Island. Journal of the East African Natural History Society 142, 1–8.Google Scholar
Andrews, P., Groves, C.P. & Horne, J.F.M. 1975. The ecology of the Lower Tana River Flood Plain. Journal of the East African Natural History Society 151, 1–31.Google Scholar
Andrews, P. & Harrison, T. 2005. The last common ancestor of apes and humans. In Lieberman, D.E., Smith, R.J. & Kelley, J., Editors, Interpreting the Past: Essays on Human, Primate, and Mammal Evolution in Honor of David Pilbeam, 103–121. Boston, Brill Academic Publishers, Inc.Google Scholar
Broom, R. 1950. Finding the Missing Link. London, Watts & Co.Google Scholar
Broom, R. & Schepers, G.W.H. 1946. The South African fossil ape-men. The Australopithecinae. Transvaal Museum Memoir, Pretoria 2.Google Scholar
Dart, R.A. with Craig, D. 1959. Adventures with the Missing Link. London, Hamish Hamilton.Google Scholar
Darwin, C. 1859. The Origin of Species. London, John Murray.Google Scholar
Darwin, C. 1872. Descent of Man. London, John Murray.Google Scholar
Dawkins, R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. London, Longman.Google Scholar
Gregory, W.K. 1916. Studies on the evolution of the primates, Part II – phylogeny of recent and extinct anthropoids with special reference to the origin of man. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 35, 239–355.Google Scholar
Grehan, J.R. 2006. Mona Lisa smile: the morphological enigma of human and great ape evolution. The Anatomical Record 289B, 139–157.Google Scholar
Haeckel, E. 1876. The History of Creation. London, D. Appleton & Co.Google Scholar
Haeckel, E. 1903. The Evolution of Man. London, Watts & Co.Google Scholar
Harrison, T. 2012. Apes among the tangled branches of human origins. Science 327, 532–534.Google Scholar
Huxley, T.H. 1863. Man's Place in Nature. Reprinted in 1906 in the Eversley Series. London, MacMillan and Co.Google Scholar
Jones, S. 2008. Darwin's Island. London, Little Brown.Google Scholar
King, W. 1863. On the Neanderthal skull. Proceedings of the British 33rd Meeting of the British Association, page 81.
King, W. 1864 The reputed fossil man of the Neanderthal. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 1, 88–97.Google Scholar
Kingdon, J. 2002. Lowly Origin. Princeton, Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kurten, B. 1972. Not from the Apes. London, Victor Gollancz.Google Scholar
Lartet, E. 1856. Note sur un grand singe fossile qui se rattache au groupe des singes superieur. Compte Rendu de l'Academie de Science, Paris 43, 210–223.Google Scholar
Leakey, L.S.B. 1953. Adam's Ancestors, an Up-to-date Outline of the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic) and What is Known about Man's Origin and Evolution. London, Methuen.Google Scholar
Mayr, E. 1969. Principles of Systematic Zoology. New York, McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Oakley, K. 1957. Tools makyth man. Antiquity 31, 199–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, M.D. 1997. Functional and phylogenetic features of the forelimb in Miocene hominoids. In Begun, D.R., Ward, C.V. & Rose, M.D., Editors, Function, Phylogeny and Fossils: Miocene Hominoid Evolution and Adaptations, 79–100. New York, Plenum Press.Google Scholar
Schwartz, J. 1987. The Red Ape. London, Elm Tree Books.Google Scholar
Schwartz, J. & Maresca, B. 2006. Do molecular clocks run at all? A critique of molecular systematics. Biological Theory 1, 357–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shipman, P. 2001. The Man Who Found the Missing Link: The Extraordinary Life of Eugene Dubois. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Google Scholar
Simpson, G.G. 1961. Principles of Animal Taxonomy. New York, Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Tudge, C. 2005. The Secret Life of Trees. London, Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Von Koenigswald, G.H.R. 1956. Meeting Prehistoric Man. London, Thames and Hudson.Google Scholar
Wood, B. & Harrison, T. 2011. The evolutionary context of the first hominins. Nature 470, 347–352.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wrangham, R. & Peterson, D. 1997. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. London, Bloomsbury Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×