How many theories of ancient apes are there?

(1) Darwin's African Ape Saying

British scholar Darwin pointed out in his book "The Origin of Mankind and Sexual Selection" that human beings evolved from the extinct ancient African apes. In this book, Darwin affirmed both the kinship between humans and apes, as manifested in the physical structure, psychological characteristics and physiological features; and the difference between humans and apes in terms of uprightness, hands, teeth, brain, intelligence and so on. He believed that what governed the differentiation of man and ape was not something supernatural but the law of biological evolution, i.e., natural and sexual selection were used to explain all the changes in the process of the origin of mankind.

Darwin believed that the great apes of Africa were the closest to humans, and thus hypothesized that humans originated in Africa. He pointed out that the most important differences between man and apes were the bipedal, upright walking mode of action, as well as small canine teeth, high intelligence, and the ability to use tools, which were associated with the shift from arboreal to predominantly hunting ground life. Ground-dwelling primates were able to walk upright, leaving their hands free to carry weapons for hunting, he said. These weapons were used as an adaptation, and increased intelligence guided the use of the weapons, causing the large, prominent canines to become smaller as they became ineffective.

While some have suggested that gibbons and even cobras are the closest of the primates to humans, most acknowledge that the African great apes are the closest, as detailed anatomical and behavioral studies as well as biochemical characterization have shown. Darwin's argument that the African great apes are our closest relatives has been supported by various sources for a long time. Only recently has it been suggested that the orangutans of Asia are more closely related to man than the African great apes.

Was the ***same*** ancestor of humans and apes arboreal? Fossils from the Proto-Conchurian apes from the Miocene of East Africa, and from a possible ape ancestor found in the Oligocene of Pharomboeum, Egypt, suggest that they were indeed arboreal. It also shows that Darwin's argument was correct. Comparative anatomical studies of modern humans and modern apes have also shown that many of their similarities are due to arboreal life.

From Darwin's arguments above, a variety of hypotheses evolved.

(2) Rama and southern apes

This is a traditional theory based on Darwin's theory of evolution.

In the middle of the 19th century, Darwin put forward the theory that human beings originated from ancient apes. For a long time, the ancient forest apes of the New Tertiary (Miocene and Pliocene) have been regarded as the ****same ancestor of man and apes. However, it is not clear which kind of forest apes, and in which period of the Tertiary period.

Scholars have the following speculations:

One is the Lama ancient ape. It survived 14 million to 8 million years ago, was more than 1 meter tall, had a brain capacity of about 300 milliliters, was able to walk upright, and may have had the ability to speak. The strongest evidence is its teeth enamel "prismatic crystals" in the shape of lock holes, and human beings are very similar. But some scholars hold different views.

The second is the southern great ape. Some paleoanthropologists believe that the southern ape is an early member of the human family, its brain capacity has reached the modern human 1/2 or 1 / 3. But some people believe that the southern ape and the "fully formed man" is coexisting, but it did not develop into a human, but only human lineage, and in 1 million years ago on the extinction.

In the late 1960s, Simmons and Pilbeam proposed that humans and apes began to diverge in the Miocene of the Tertiary period, with the Rama apes being the earliest representatives of the human family, and several species of forest apes in the genus Rama being the ancestors of a variety of extant apes. It is also believed that the Rama apes evolved from a forest ape about 15 million years ago, and later evolved from the Rama apes into the southern apes about 4 million years ago, which further developed into modern humans.

The origin of man was roughly along the following lines: the forest apes that appeared in the Miocene evolved into the Rama apes. The Lama apes lived between 14 million and 8 million years ago, and almost all of them died out 8 million years ago. After the Rama apes came the southern apes. The Australopithecines lived from about 4 million to 1 million years ago. In them, on the one hand, still retained a number of primitive characteristics inherited from the main stem of the ape and human super-family ancestors, on the other hand, more importantly, has evolved the emergence of the characteristics of the human family which is unique to the human family, but distinguished from the ape family.

After the preliminary solution of the problem of the origin of man, with the passage of time, the continuous development of science, the large number of fossils unearthed, the paleoanthropologists continue to deepen the study, and found a lot of new problems. The most prominent problem is the phenomenon called "fossil missing ring", that is, there is from 8 million years ago to 4 million years ago this period of 4 million years of fossil missing ring. The absence of any fossils of intermediate transitional organisms that could prove the origin of human beings during this 4-million-year period poses a problem for the classical theory of human origins.

(3) Great apes and chimpanzees

Great apes are also a species of great interest. The great apes were named in 1935 by a Dutchman, Konawa. He acquired a large number of fossilized mammal teeth in a Chinese medicine store in Hong Kong, including a huge lower molar of a higher primate, which he thought represented a new genus and species, and named it Bu's great ape. He speculated that this great ape fossils produced in South China, the stratigraphic era is probably the middle of the Pleistocene. 1954, originally from West Germany into the U.S. citizenship of Wei Dunrui, according to the Kung Nihua later acquired another two teeth (before and after the *** three teeth), that the great apes have a distinctly human nature, and therefore advocated that the great apes were renamed the "giants," and He argued for the renaming of the great apes as "giants" and put forward the theory of the giant origin of human beings. He theorized that "giants" may be the ancestors of human beings, and then gradually become smaller, through the Javanese erect apes, Peking apes and the development of modern man. Later, Kung Nyi Hwa went to a traditional Chinese medicine store in Nanyang and collected five teeth that might have belonged to the great apes, and in 1952, based on the eight teeth he had obtained, he published a paper, giving up his original view and agreeing that the great apes were indeed giants; however, he thought that they were a specialized side branch of the human evolutionary system, rather than our direct ancestors. Anthropologists around the world disagree on whether the great apes are humans or apes, and know nothing about the geological era, distribution area, or evolutionary process of the great apes' existence. The great apes have thus become an important issue in the study of the origin of mankind.

Early in 1956, China's scientific workers in Guangxi around the cave investigation and excavation, in Daxin County, Lanxi District, the village of the cattle sleeps in the black hole in the village of the mountain found three great ape teeth. In the fall of the same year, Qin Xiuhuai, a farmer from Xinshechong Village, Fengshan District, Liucheng County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, found a great ape mandible in a cave on Lengzhai Mountain. The relevant scientific departments carried out a long-term excavation of this cave and found two more great ape mandibles and more than 1,000 individual teeth as well as a large number of mammal fossils, thus determining the stratigraphic age of the great apes of Liucheng to be the early Pleistocene.

Wu Rukang studied this material in 1962 and showed that most of the features of the jaws and teeth of the great apes were intermediate between those of humans and apes. In apes, the tooth rows on each side are parallel; in humans, they are spread backward; in great apes, they are neither parallel to each other nor separated backward to a far lesser extent than in humans. The human dentition is curvilinear, with no apparent turn; the great ape has a remarkable turn at the canines, but not as remarkable as that of the apes. Apes canine teeth before and after the gap, not in contact with its teeth before and after; great apes have no front gap, but there is a relatively small back gap; humans are generally no gap. The shape of the canines of the great apes, their proportions to the other teeth, their wear, and the differences between the sexes are also intermediate between those of man and ape. The lower first premolars are both approximately scalloped (ape-like) and bicuspid and anterior and posteriorly concave (human-like).

The incisors of the great apes were small and vertical; the cusps of the molars were square, and the occlusal ridges were fewer and coarser, with a sixth cusp. All of these features are similar to those of humans.

These new great ape materials give us an insight into the great apes. Because the great ape material found so far has been limited to mandibles and teeth, with no skulls, body bones or limb bones found, its taxonomic position is still debated. Some consider it to be a paraphyletic branch that branched out early on the human family system, while others say it is a specialized type of ape. Because it is too recent in date and too large in size, it seems unlikely that it is an ancestor of humans, but more likely an extinct paraphyletic branch on the ape system. Weidenreich's theory of the giant origin of man is unfounded. All available human fossil material indicates that human stature has gradually increased rather than decreased during the course of evolution. It is also now known that the great apes survived from the early to mid-Pleistocene of the upper Pleistocene of the Tertiary period, and were distributed from the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent in southern Asia to the Guangxi and Hubei regions in southern China. The size of the great apes also gradually increased over time to the point of extinction. These studies contribute to our understanding of the question of human origins.

S.L. Washburm of the University of California, Berkeley, and his students, as well as others, envisioned that humans and apes had the ****same ancestors most like living chimpanzees, and that human origins were being adapted to sparse savannahs like those of living baboons. But because chimpanzees differ from baboons in anatomical structure and behavioral traits, and because there are important differences between the two. Once primates like chimpanzees began to adapt to life in grasslands as baboons did, the result was a move toward man. For the ancient ape in this situation, in order to survive, had to rely on tool use, as reflected in the reduction in size of the canine teeth. The use of tools led to bipedal upright walking, the enhancement and complication of group relations, and so on. As a further inference from the fact that mother-child relationships in extant primates can be maintained throughout life, the same may have been true for members of the early human family. Females were more familiar with the surrounding environment, played a more important role in the group than males, and thus played a greater role than males in the formation of early primitive cultures.

In summary, they see the interplay of four traits - tool use, upright walking, smaller canine teeth, and intellectual and social behavior - as factors in human origins.

(4) Lesser and Remnant Apes

Tuttle's Lesser Ape Hypothesis suggests that members of the human family first evolved from smaller apes. The lesser ape of Southeast Asia, the gibbon, often stands up in trees and almost always walks bipedally when on the ground, and while this does not suggest that it is any closer to humans than the great apes of Africa, it does imply that a type of ape that was smaller in Africa evolved similar actions, thus envisioning that mankind evolved from another, smaller type of ape. Its smaller stature could have evolved to act bipedally and upright in trees like gibbons, grasping food with its hands, or crawling vertically in trees with its trunk in a vertical position, and having been able to walk bipedally when it came down to the ground to move around.

In the late Tertiary period, East Africa and other places in the geological big changes, high mountain areas began to become lower, occurred a number of volcanic eruptions, the rainfall decreased; many areas due to severe drought, the tropical rainforests for the sparse tree-dry grasslands and open dry or semi-dry grasslands replaced. What used to be vast areas of continuous forest became a mosaic of forest, savanna and grassland. The young apes descended to the ground and used tools to obtain and prepare plant foods and also hunted small animals for food. The omnivorous diet allowed for a wide range of food sources. Lesser apes also used clubs for self-defense, which was more advantageous than utilizing canines: for one thing, it allowed for fights with hostiles farther apart, and for another, when a club broke, a new one could be used in its place, unlike canines, which have no replacements when broken. Life on the ground, with the need to carry food and clubs, made greater use of the forelimbs, and thus allowed for more effective bipedal upright walking toward man.

The "evolution of the crippled ape" was the subject of a 1990 book by two Frenchmen, biologist Charles de Veyer and geopaleontologist Jean Chalinee, entitled "Evolution". In a 1990 book titled Evolution, the two Frenchmen - biologist Charles DeVille and geopaleontologist Jean Chalinee - suggested that the origins of mankind were probably due to a crippled ape that had a physiological defect that prevented it from walking on four legs like its fellow apes. Since an upright posture is more conducive to intimidating rivals in a group of apes, the physical defect of the sick ape became an advantage, making it easier for it to approach and possess females, and pass on the "uprightness" to the next generation, thus becoming the ancestor of the bipedal apes and later human beings.