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New Geology study raises questions about long-held theories of human evolution
Date:1/31/2013

What came first: the bipedal human ancestor or the grassland encroaching on the forest?

A new analysis of the past 12 million years' of vegetation change in the cradle of humanity is challenging long-held beliefs about the world in which our ancestors took shape and, by extension, the impact it had on them.

The research combines sediment core studies of the waxy molecules from plant leaves with pollen analysis, yielding data of unprecedented scope and detail on what types of vegetation dominated the landscape surrounding the African Rift Valley (including present-day Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia), where early hominin fossils trace the history of human evolution.

"It is the combination of evidence both molecular and pollen evidence that allows us to say just how long we've seen Serengeti-type open grasslands," said Sarah J. Feakins, assistant professor of Earth sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and lead author of the study, which was published online in Geology on Jan. 17.

Feakins worked with USC graduate student Hannah M. Liddy, USC undergraduate student Alexa Sieracki, Naomi E. Levin of Johns Hopkins University, Timothy I. Eglinton of the Eidgenssische Technische Hochschule and Raymonde Bonnefille of the Universit d'Aix-Marseille.

The role that the environment played in the evolution of homininsthe tribe of human and ape ancestors whose family tree split from the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos about 6 million years agohas been the subject of a century-long debate.

Among other things, one theory dating back to 1925 posits that early human ancestors developed bipedalism as a response to savannas encroaching on shrinking forests in northeast Africa. With fewer trees to swing from, human ancestors began walking to get around.

While the shift to bipedalism appears to have occurred somewhere between 6 and 4 million years ago, Feakins' study finds that thick r
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Contact: Robert Perkins
perkinsr@usc.edu
213-740-9226
University of Southern California
Source:Eurekalert

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