Affiliation:
1. Department of Anthropology Dartmouth College Hanover New Hampshire USA
2. Ecology, Evolution, Ecosystems, and Society Graduate Program, Dartmouth College Hanover New Hampshire USA
3. Evolutionary Studies Institute University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg South Africa
Abstract
AbstractIn 1938, the first distal femur of a fossil Australopithecus was discovered at Sterkfontein, South Africa. A decade later, another distal femur was discovered at the same locality. These two fossil femora were the subject of a foundational paper authored by Kingsbury Heiple and Owen Lovejoy in 1971. In this paper, the authors discussed functionally relevant anatomies of these two fossil femora and noted their strong affinity to the modern human condition. Here, we update this work by including eight more fossil Australopithecus distal femora, an expanded comparative dataset, as well as additional linear measurements. Just as Heiple and Lovejoy reported a half‐century ago, we find strong overlap between modern humans and cercopithecoids, except for inferiorly flattened condyles and a high bicondylar angle, both of which characterize modern humans and Australopithecus and are directly related to striding bipedalism. All other measured aspects of the femora are by‐products of these key morphological traits. Additional fossil material from the early Pliocene will help to inform the evolution of the hominin distal femur and its condition in the Pan‐Homo common ancestor that preceded bipedal locomotion.
Subject
Anthropology,General Medicine
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