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Palaeobotanical evidence reveals the living conditions of Miocene Lufengpithecus in East Asia

BACKGROUND: Understanding the relationship between human evolution and environmental changes is the key to lifting the veil on human origin. The hypothesis that environmental changes triggered the divergence of humans from apes (ca. 9.3–6.5 million years ago, Ma) has been poorly tested because of li...

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Autores principales: Lu, Li-Li, Yao, Yi-Feng, Wang, Guo-An, Xie, Gan, Lu, Kai-Qing, Sun, Bin, Li, Jin-Feng, Bruch, Angela A., Ferguson, David K., Cui, Yi-Ming, Wang, Qiang, Zhou, Xin-Ying, Gao, Feng, Wang, Yu-Fei
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10031969/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36945024
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12870-023-04165-3
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author Lu, Li-Li
Yao, Yi-Feng
Wang, Guo-An
Xie, Gan
Lu, Kai-Qing
Sun, Bin
Li, Jin-Feng
Bruch, Angela A.
Ferguson, David K.
Cui, Yi-Ming
Wang, Qiang
Zhou, Xin-Ying
Gao, Feng
Wang, Yu-Fei
author_facet Lu, Li-Li
Yao, Yi-Feng
Wang, Guo-An
Xie, Gan
Lu, Kai-Qing
Sun, Bin
Li, Jin-Feng
Bruch, Angela A.
Ferguson, David K.
Cui, Yi-Ming
Wang, Qiang
Zhou, Xin-Ying
Gao, Feng
Wang, Yu-Fei
author_sort Lu, Li-Li
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Understanding the relationship between human evolution and environmental changes is the key to lifting the veil on human origin. The hypothesis that environmental changes triggered the divergence of humans from apes (ca. 9.3–6.5 million years ago, Ma) has been poorly tested because of limited continuous environmental data from fossil localities. Lufengpithecus (12.5-6.0 Ma) found on the southeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau (SEMTP) across the ape–human split provides a good chance for testing this hypothesis. RESULTS: Here, we reconstructed the habitats of L. keiyuanensis (12.5–11.6 Ma) with comprehensive vegetation, climate, and potential food web data by palaeobotanical evidence, together with other multidisciplinary data and partly tested the environment-driven hypothesis by revealing the living conditions of Lufengpithecus. CONCLUSION: A detailed comparison of hominoids on different continents reveals their behaviour and fate divergence across the ape–human split against the background of global climate change, i.e., the stable living conditions of SEMTP not only provided a so-called ‘refuge’ for arboreal Lufengpithecus but also acted as a ‘double-edged sword’, preventing their further evolution while vegetation shifts in East Africa probably stimulated the emergence of human bipedalism, and the intense climatic changes in Europe possibly prevented those hominoids from surviving that time interval. Our findings provide interesting insight into the environmental impacts on the behavioural evolution of hominoids. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12870-023-04165-3.
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spelling pubmed-100319692023-03-23 Palaeobotanical evidence reveals the living conditions of Miocene Lufengpithecus in East Asia Lu, Li-Li Yao, Yi-Feng Wang, Guo-An Xie, Gan Lu, Kai-Qing Sun, Bin Li, Jin-Feng Bruch, Angela A. Ferguson, David K. Cui, Yi-Ming Wang, Qiang Zhou, Xin-Ying Gao, Feng Wang, Yu-Fei BMC Plant Biol Research BACKGROUND: Understanding the relationship between human evolution and environmental changes is the key to lifting the veil on human origin. The hypothesis that environmental changes triggered the divergence of humans from apes (ca. 9.3–6.5 million years ago, Ma) has been poorly tested because of limited continuous environmental data from fossil localities. Lufengpithecus (12.5-6.0 Ma) found on the southeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau (SEMTP) across the ape–human split provides a good chance for testing this hypothesis. RESULTS: Here, we reconstructed the habitats of L. keiyuanensis (12.5–11.6 Ma) with comprehensive vegetation, climate, and potential food web data by palaeobotanical evidence, together with other multidisciplinary data and partly tested the environment-driven hypothesis by revealing the living conditions of Lufengpithecus. CONCLUSION: A detailed comparison of hominoids on different continents reveals their behaviour and fate divergence across the ape–human split against the background of global climate change, i.e., the stable living conditions of SEMTP not only provided a so-called ‘refuge’ for arboreal Lufengpithecus but also acted as a ‘double-edged sword’, preventing their further evolution while vegetation shifts in East Africa probably stimulated the emergence of human bipedalism, and the intense climatic changes in Europe possibly prevented those hominoids from surviving that time interval. Our findings provide interesting insight into the environmental impacts on the behavioural evolution of hominoids. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12870-023-04165-3. BioMed Central 2023-03-22 /pmc/articles/PMC10031969/ /pubmed/36945024 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12870-023-04165-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Lu, Li-Li
Yao, Yi-Feng
Wang, Guo-An
Xie, Gan
Lu, Kai-Qing
Sun, Bin
Li, Jin-Feng
Bruch, Angela A.
Ferguson, David K.
Cui, Yi-Ming
Wang, Qiang
Zhou, Xin-Ying
Gao, Feng
Wang, Yu-Fei
Palaeobotanical evidence reveals the living conditions of Miocene Lufengpithecus in East Asia
title Palaeobotanical evidence reveals the living conditions of Miocene Lufengpithecus in East Asia
title_full Palaeobotanical evidence reveals the living conditions of Miocene Lufengpithecus in East Asia
title_fullStr Palaeobotanical evidence reveals the living conditions of Miocene Lufengpithecus in East Asia
title_full_unstemmed Palaeobotanical evidence reveals the living conditions of Miocene Lufengpithecus in East Asia
title_short Palaeobotanical evidence reveals the living conditions of Miocene Lufengpithecus in East Asia
title_sort palaeobotanical evidence reveals the living conditions of miocene lufengpithecus in east asia
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10031969/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36945024
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12870-023-04165-3
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