Not a Great Debates question, nor even a scientific question. Just a semantic question. What do you call whatever it was that humans evolved from?
I would call them “apes”. Tail-less, bipedal primates. Sounds pretty simple to me. Of course, everybody says it’s wrong to call them apes. I suppose this is because they feel that “ape” is synonymous with “modern ape”, so you couldn’t have a prehistoric ape, since that would mean “prehistoric modern ape”.
So, if “prehistoric ape” is a contradiction in terms, what are those critters? I’m not talking so much about late “brow-ridge people” (Homo erectus, for example); I’m talking more about Australopithecus africanus or maybe H. habilus. Is there a general term for these species?
The dictionary ( http://www.m-w.com ) defined ape as either (a) monkey or (b) a member of either the family Pongidae and Hylobatidae. So (b) is right out as an ancestor to humans. “Monkey” is still okay for my purposes, since monkey is defined as any primate other than humans and lemurs, especially when it doesn’t have a tail.
Hominids are members of the family Hominidae which includes all members of the genus Homo as well as Australopithecus. Our ancestors would then be early hominids. The apes that were alive when Australopithecus was alive were early apes or early pongids. The common ancestor of men and apes were early homonoids (not to be confused with hominids).
What are humans evolved from? How far back do you want to go? 100,000 - 130,000 years our ancestors were Hominids that were bipedal and tail-less. 7-8 million years ago, the time frame for “the missing link” our ancestor was probably a partially upright knuckle dragging tailed hominoid. I really hope that I’m not confusing hominid and hominoid. Several million years ago, the ancestor for all mammals were a rat sized quadraped. A few billion years ago and you’re looking at single celled ameoba-like critters. First, you need to define a time frame, and then the correct species can be identified for what you want.
A tailbone does not funtction as a tail does. Tails help animals keep balance, and in some monkeys, mainly new world species, it is an extra gripping appendage. The fact that we have a tailbone and not a tail is an example of evoulution at work.
I understood that the modern apes were gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, gibbons, baboons, and humans (at least, that’s what the informative plaques at the Cleveland Zoo say). By that definition, then Australopithecus et al. would likewise be apes. It’s probably a bit too general of a term to be useful, though.
Yeah, Chronos, that what I was getting at in my passing defense of the statment “Humans descended from apes”.
Okay, bibliophage, it looks like the answer to my question is “pleistocene hominids”.
If I wanted to go back further I’d say “miocene hominoids”, or perhaps “tertiary hominoids” if I wanted to confuse people, which apparently I am good at.
Side question. If the two periods of the Cenozoic Era are the Quaternary and the Tertiary, where are the Secondary and Primary? Are these obsolete terms for the (Mesozoic’s) Cretaceous and Jurassic Periods? Or do they refer to other (longer?) divisions of time? Here’s a link if you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/help/timeform.html
I don’t think baboons are apes. I think they are (Old World) monkeys, since they have tails.
It’s not supposed to by theoretical anthropology, handy. Really I was just asking a question because I had forgotten (or never knew) the real term for something.
I found a news article about the common ancestor to man and the modern apes. It was about 100 pounds, it lived 20 million years ago (early miocene), and it walked on two legs with some help from its palms. It was funny, the article was titled something like “earliest common ancestor to man and the apes”. I was thinking … earliest? Isn’t the latest common ancestor more significant? Wouldn’t the earliest common ancestor be a one-celled thing? Then I figured out it was just the earliest common ancestor we had positively identified; we don’t know which of the early rodent/primate type things are actually ancestors and which are just cousins. So I feel better.
Baboons are monkeys, but to me they look more like apes than gibbons do. There are about 7 species of gibbons, and exactly where they all belong on the evolutionary tree is disputed. Experts seem to agree they are apes.