Our earliest human ancestors may have swung on branches like chimps

摘要

THE distant forerunners of humans may have had more in common with chimpanzees than we thought. An analysis of a 4.4-million-year-old hand suggests that they swung from branches and knuckle-walked like living chimps do - challenging recent thinking that our earliest human ancestors did neither. In popular thinking, we are often imagined to have evolved from a chimpanzee-like ape on the human lineage, members of which are known as hominins. Many researchers now challenge this idea - particularly in light of fossil evidence from the early hominin Ardipithecus ramidus that was published in 2009.