 |
|
New findings solve human origins mystery
October 10, 2007Los Angeles, California - An extraordinary advance in human origins research reveals evidence of the emergence of the upright human body plan over 15 million years earlier than most experts have believed. More dramatically, the study confirms preliminary evidence that many early hominoid apes were most likely upright bipedal walkers sharing the basic body form of modern humans. On October 10th, online, open-access journal PLoS ONE will publish the report based on research from Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology and from the Cedars Sinai Institute for Spinal Disorders that connects several recent fossil discoveries to older fossils finds that have eluded adequate explanation in the past.
Recent advances in the field of homeotic genetics together with a series of discoveries of hominoid fossils vertebrae now strongly suggest that a specific genetic change that generated the upright bipedal human body form may soon be identified. The various upright "hominiform" hominoids appear to share this morphogenetic innovation with modern humans. Homeotics concerns the embryological assembly program for midline repeating structures such as the human vertebral column and the insect body segments.
The report analyses changes in homeotic embryological assembly of the spine in more than 200 mammalian species across a 250 million year time scale. It identifies a series of modular changes in genetic assembly program that have taken place at the origin point of several major groups of mammals including the newly designated 'hominiform' hominoids that share the modern human body plan.
The critical event involves a dramatic embryological change unique to the human lineage that was not previously understood because the unusual human condition was viewed as "normal."
"From an embryological point of view, what took place is literally breathtaking," says Dr. Aaron Filler, a Harvard trained evolutionary biologist and a medical director at Cedars Sinai Medical Center's Institute for Spinal Disorders. Dr. Filler is an expert in spinal biology and the author of three books about the spine - "Axial Character Seriation in Mammals" (BrownWalker 2007), "The Upright Ape" (New Page Books 2007), and "Do You Really Need Back Surgery" (Oxford University Press 2007).
In most vertebrates (including most mammals), he explains, the dividing plane between the front (ventral) part of the body and the back (dorsal) part is a "horizontal septum" that runs in front of the spinal canal. This is a fundamental aspect of animal architecture. A bizarre birth defect in what may have been the first direct human ancestor led to the "transposition" of the septum to a position behind the spinal cord in the lumbar region. Oddly enough, this configuration is more typical of invertebrates.
The mechanical effect of the transposition was to make horizontal or quadrupedal stance inefficient. "Any mammal with this set of changes would only be comfortable standing upright. I would envision this malformed young hominiform - the first true ancestral human - as standing upright from a young age while its siblings walked around on all fours."
The earliest example of the transformed hominiform type of lumbar spine is found in Morotopithecus bishopi an extinct hominoid species that lived in Uganda more than 21 million years ago. "From a number of points of view," Filler says, "humanity can be redefined as having its origin with Morotopithecus. This greatly demotes the importance of the bipedalism of Australopithecus species such as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) since we now know of four upright bipedal species that precede her, found from various time periods on out to Morotopithecus in the Early Miocene."
Public Library of Science
The critical event involves a dramatic embryological change unique to the human lineage that was not previously understood because the unusual human condition was viewed as "normal."
"From an embryological point of view, what took place is literally breathtaking," says Dr. Aaron Filler, a Harvard trained evolutionary biologist and a medical director at Cedars Sinai Medical Center's Institute for Spinal Disorders. Dr. Filler is an expert in spinal biology and the author of three books about the spine - "Axial Character Seriation in Mammals" (BrownWalker 2007), "The Upright Ape" (New Page Books 2007), and "Do You Really Need Back Surgery" (Oxford University Press 2007).
In most vertebrates (including most mammals), he explains, the dividing plane between the front (ventral) part of the body and the back (dorsal) part is a "horizontal septum" that runs in front of the spinal canal. This is a fundamental aspect of animal architecture. A bizarre birth defect in what may have been the first direct human ancestor led to the "transposition" of the septum to a position behind the spinal cord in the lumbar region. Oddly enough, this configuration is more typical of invertebrates.
The mechanical effect of the transposition was to make horizontal or quadrupedal stance inefficient. "Any mammal with this set of changes would only be comfortable standing upright. I would envision this malformed young hominiform - the first true ancestral human - as standing upright from a young age while its siblings walked around on all fours."
The earliest example of the transformed hominiform type of lumbar spine is found in Morotopithecus bishopi an extinct hominoid species that lived in Uganda more than 21 million years ago. "From a number of points of view," Filler says, "humanity can be redefined as having its origin with Morotopithecus. This greatly demotes the importance of the bipedalism of Australopithecus species such as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) since we now know of four upright bipedal species that precede her, found from various time periods on out to Morotopithecus in the Early Miocene."
Public Library of Science
Human Origin Current Events and Human Origin News RSSA potential therapeutic agent for hepatic fibrosis
Accumulating evidence suggests that connective tissue growth factor (CCN2) plays a central role in fibrotic conditions in many organ systems.
Humans related to orangutans, not chimps, says new Pitt, Buffalo Museum of Science study
New evidence underscores the theory of human origin that suggests humans most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans, according to research from the University of Pittsburgh and the Buffalo Museum of Science.
Adalimumab may reduce health-care costs for Crohn's disease patients
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a term that refers to both ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD). IBD occurs most frequently in people in their late teens and twenties. There have been cases in children as young as two years old and in older adults in their seventies and eighties; men and women have an equal chance of getting the disease.
New study shows health benefits of probiotic could extend to the entire body
Data from a recent study demonstrate the anti-inflammatory and pathogen protection benefits of Bifidobacterium infantis 35624 a probiotic bacterial strain of human origin.
New Cancer Treatment Targets Both Tumor Cells and Blood Vessels
It takes more than one punch to fight tumors. Often, tumors have more than one way of surviving, and attacking the tumor alone is not enough.
New therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases
The focus of work in the Neurosciences Department's Neurobiology Laboratory at the University of the Basque Country's Faculty of Medicine and Odontology is the investigation of the molecular and cellular bases of neurodegenerative illnesses - those that affect the brain and the spinal cord.
Stem cells act through multiple mechanisms to benefit mice with neurodegenerative disease
Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) hold great promise for benefiting degenerative diseases, and do so by invoking multiple mechanisms. Such cells can be grown in a manner compatible with clinical use (i.e., without animal feeder layers) and even without the need for immunosuppression.
Therapeutic peptide frees the protein p73 to kill tumor cells
The protein p53 suppresses tumor development by potently inducing tumor cell death, making it an obvious target for anticancer therapeutics.
A year on from the Asian tsunami, satellites are aiding regional rebuilding
The deadly Indian Ocean tsunami that swept across coastlines on 26 December 2004 took the lives of more than 200 000 people.
Scripps-led Global Ocean Warming Research Paper Published in Science
Research led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, that describes the first clear evidence of human-produced warming in the world's oceans will be published June 2, 2005, in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
More Human Origin Current Events and Human Origin News Articles
 |
Human Origins: What Bones and Genomes Tell Us about Ourselves by Rob Desalle (Author), Ian Tattersall (Author) Ever since the recognition of the Neanderthals as an archaic form of human in the mid-nineteenth century, the fossilized bones of extinct humans have been used by paleoanthropologists to explore human origins. These bones told the story of how the earliest humans—bipedal apes, actually—first emerged in Africa some 6 to 7 million years ago. Starting about 2 million years ago, the bones reveal that as humans became anatomically and behaviorally more modern, they swept out of Africa in waves into Asia, Europe, and finally into the New World. Even as paleoanthropologists continued to make important discoveries—Mary Leakey’s Nutcracker Man in 1959, Don Johanson’s Lucy in 1974, and most recently Martin Pickford’s Millennium Man, to name just a few—experts in genetics were... |
 |
Origins of Human Communication (Bradford Books) by Michael Tomasello (Author) Winner, 2009 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, presented by the American Psychological Association. and Honorable Mention, Literature, Language & Linguistics category, 2008 PROSE Awards presented by the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperative... |
 |
Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins by Carl Zimmer (Author) From the savannas of Africa to modern-day labs for biomechanical analysis and molecular genetics, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins reveals how anthropologists are furiously redrawing the human family tree. Their discoveries have spawned a host of new questions: Should chimpanzees be included as a human species? Was it the physical difficulty of human childbirth that encouraged the development of social groups in early human species? Did humans and Neanderthals interbreed? Why did humans supplant Neanderthals in the end? In answering such questions, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins sheds new light on one of the most important questions of all: What makes us human? |
 |
Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins by Dr. Donald Johanson (Author), Kate Wong (Author) “Lucy is a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton who has become the spokeswoman for human evolution. She is perhaps the best known and most studied fossil hominid of the twentieth century, the benchmark by which other discoveries of human ancestors are judged.”–From Lucy’s Legacy In his New York Times bestseller, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, renowned paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson told the incredible story of his discovery of a partial female skeleton that revolutionized the study of human origins. Lucy literally changed our understanding of our world and who we come from. Since that dramatic find in 1974, there has been heated debate and–most important–more groundbreaking discoveries that have further transformed our understanding of when and how humans evolved.... |
 |
The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, Third Edition by Richard G. Klein (Author) Since its publication in 1989, The Human Career has proved to be an indispensable tool in teaching human origins. This substantially revised third edition retains Richard G. Klein’s innovative approach while showing how cumulative discoveries and analyses over the past ten years have significantly refined our knowledge of human evolution. Klein chronicles the evolution of people from the earliest primates through the emergence of fully modern humans within the past 200,000 years. His comprehensive treatment stresses recent advances in knowledge, including, for example, ever more abundant evidence that fully modern humans originated in Africa and spread from there, replacing the Neanderthals in Europe and equally archaic people in Asia. With its coverage of both the fossil... |
![Nova: In Search of Human Origins, Part 1 - The Story of Lucy [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/210ZAQRFACL._SL160_.jpg) |
Nova: In Search of Human Origins, Part 1 - The Story of Lucy [VHS] Starring: Don Johanson The award-winning exploration of the beginnings and expansion of the human race. Discover the missing link between humans and apes. |
 |
National Geographic: The Human Family Tree Starring: Artist Not Provided Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 09/01/2009 Run time: 96 minutes Rating: Nr |
 |
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello (Author) Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just... |
 |
Our Amazing Ancestors Science Kit Trace the Origins of the Human Race! by Educational Design Inc Our Amazing Ancestors Science Kit. Trace the Origins of the Human Race. 3-D Skulls and Portrait Heads. 6 Foot Timechart Poster. Stone Tools. Cave Painting. Morphing Flipbooks. 96 page Science Book. |
 |
Evolution (part 1): Darwin's Dangerous Idea Starring: Liam Neeson (narrator) Directed By: David Espar, Susan K. Lewis Darwin's Dangerous Idea: For 21 years, Charles Darwin kept his theory of evolution secret from all but a few friends. He confided to one: "It is like confessing to a murder." His torment resonates in society today in the challenge his incredibly powerful idea poses to our understanding of our world and ourselves. We interweave the drama in key moments of Darwin's life with documentary sequences of current research, linking past to present and introducing major concepts of evolutionary theory. We also explore why Darwin's "dangerous idea" matters perhaps even more today than it did in his own time, and how it conveys the power of science to explain the past and predict the future of life on earth. |
| © 2009 BrightSurf.com |