The speciation of Australopithecus and Paranthropus was caused by introgression from the Gorilla lineage
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Anthropology, Evolutionary Studies, Genomics
- Keywords
- anthropology, australopithecus, chimpanzee, darwin, gorilla, homo, introgression, numt, pan, paranthropus
- Copyright
- © 2018 Nygren
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. The speciation of Australopithecus and Paranthropus was caused by introgression from the Gorilla lineage. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27130v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27130v3
Abstract
The discovery of Paranthropus deyiremeda in 3.3–3.5 million year old fossil sites in Afar (Haile-Selassie, 2015), together with 30% of the gorilla genome showing lineage sorting between humans and chimpanzees (Scally, 2012), and a NUMT (“nuclear mitochondrial DNA segment”) that is shared by both gorillas, humans and chimpanzees, and that dates back to 6 million years ago (Popadin, 2017), is conclusive evidence that introgression from the gorilla lineage caused the speciation of both the Australopithecus lineage and the Paranthropus lineage, providing a lens into the gorilla-like features within Paranthropus, as well as traits within Homo that originate from the gorilla branch, such as a high opposable thumb index (Almécija, 2015), an adducted great toe (Tocheri, 2011; McHenry, 2006), and large deposits of subcutaneous fat.
Author Comment
This version fixes a typo.