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:e27130v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27130v1
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
The origin of our species has increasingly been discovered over the past century, through Darwin to the discovery of DNA and the double-helix, to Lucy and fossils of Australopithecines that originate from the Afar region in Ethiopia from the Pliocene. The genetic data from Scally in 2012, and Popadin in 2017, now provides conclusive evidence for how Paranthropus and Australopithecus, as two separate lineages, both speciated as a result of introgression from the gorilla lineage (Fig. 1). That introgression fills in the "missing link" and shows how the origin of our species is not one single continuous lineage, but the hybridization of both the gorilla lineage and the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, an event that occurred in the late Miocene.
