Inside the mind of a modern day australian, the great ape can be hard to read.
But the world of apes may soon become even easier to read because a new paper in Nature has shown just how much we’ve gotten by ignoring them: a species of primate with a remarkably complex brain, including a powerful understanding of language, has given evidence that we’re even missing out on ancient primates.
In the 1970s researchers tried to identify the earliest ancestors of modern humans by using the oldest fossil hominin species.
But what they found was remarkably shallow – even a couple million years earlier than expected. And it’s not the first time that this has happened: when the remains of Australopithecus sediba, the last hominin species of the genus Homo, were discovered, many scientists believed the skeleton wasn’t even from that group at all.
Since then scientists have tried a bunch of other methods to map ancient human evolution – including using radiocarbon dating, a met카지노 사이트hod that measures ancient soil carbon dioxide levels, and sequencing the genome of a small number of individuals.
But scientists still couldn’t pin a precise date on the age of the fossils – in other words, we couldn’t even agree upon what Homo erectus was supposed to be.
But with the exception of a small fraction of the fossilised remains, most of the human genome that scientists have ever sequenced is in a form that has only just been sequenc바카라사이트ed, and is far too fragile to be subjected to the same kind of intense and expensive analysis performed by humans today.
But thanks to a technique called bioinformatics, a team of scientists from Australia’s RMIT University found just how complex the brain of Australopithecus sediba could be – revealing the ancient knowledge that we don’t really have.
These researchers wrote the most recent manuscript of their effort for Nature’s Genetics paper, which has just been publ카지노 사이트ished in the journal, the same journal that published research showing we’ve already missed out on the last few hundred years of ancient human evolution.
Image caption The fossil hominin was a relatively small, well-preserved specimen
And in their paper they write:
«Modern apes’ sophisticated brain structures would make them the closest living relative of our own direct ancestors in evolutionary terms.
«While all our archaic and modern hominin species have large brains, our ancestors were not necessarily the smartest.»
And when they compare the modern brain of Australopithecus to that of modern humans – th