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      Estimating origination times from the early hominin fossil record

      1 , 2 , 3 , 4
      Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews
      Wiley

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          A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa.

          The search for the earliest fossil evidence of the human lineage has been concentrated in East Africa. Here we report the discovery of six hominid specimens from Chad, central Africa, 2,500 km from the East African Rift Valley. The fossils include a nearly complete cranium and fragmentary lower jaws. The associated fauna suggest the fossils are between 6 and 7 million years old. The fossils display a unique mosaic of primitive and derived characters, and constitute a new genus and species of hominid. The distance from the Rift Valley, and the great antiquity of the fossils, suggest that the earliest members of the hominid clade were more widely distributed than has been thought, and that the divergence between the human and chimpanzee lineages was earlier than indicated by most molecular studies.
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            Generation times in wild chimpanzees and gorillas suggest earlier divergence times in great ape and human evolution.

            Fossils and molecular data are two independent sources of information that should in principle provide consistent inferences of when evolutionary lineages diverged. Here we use an alternative approach to genetic inference of species split times in recent human and ape evolution that is independent of the fossil record. We first use genetic parentage information on a large number of wild chimpanzees and mountain gorillas to directly infer their average generation times. We then compare these generation time estimates with those of humans and apply recent estimates of the human mutation rate per generation to derive estimates of split times of great apes and humans that are independent of fossil calibration. We date the human-chimpanzee split to at least 7-8 million years and the population split between Neanderthals and modern humans to 400,000-800,000 y ago. This suggests that molecular divergence dates may not be in conflict with the attribution of 6- to 7-million-y-old fossils to the human lineage and 400,000-y-old fossils to the Neanderthal lineage.
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              Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees.

              The genetic divergence time between two species varies substantially across the genome, conveying important information about the timing and process of speciation. Here we develop a framework for studying this variation and apply it to about 20 million base pairs of aligned sequence from humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and more distantly related primates. Human-chimpanzee genetic divergence varies from less than 84% to more than 147% of the average, a range of more than 4 million years. Our analysis also shows that human-chimpanzee speciation occurred less than 6.3 million years ago and probably more recently, conflicting with some interpretations of ancient fossils. Most strikingly, chromosome X shows an extremely young genetic divergence time, close to the genome minimum along nearly its entire length. These unexpected features would be explained if the human and chimpanzee lineages initially diverged, then later exchanged genes before separating permanently.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews
                Evolutionary Anthropology
                Wiley
                1060-1538
                1520-6505
                October 18 2021
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Primate Models for Behavioural Evolution Lab, Institute of Human Sciences, School of Anthropology University of Oxford Oxford UK
                [2 ]Gorongosa National Park Sofala Mozambique
                [3 ]Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behavior (ICArEHB) Universidade do Algarve Faro Portugal
                [4 ]Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology George Washington University Washington District of Columbia USA
                Article
                10.1002/evan.21928
                34662482
                0bc3ee00-772c-4240-b07f-b9720209dc6b
                © 2021

                http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

                http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/tdm_license_1.1

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