After comparing fossilized shoulder blades, scientists think that the last common ancestor between chimps and humans could have been a modern African ape. And recently published findings say our ancestors stayed up in the trees much longer than we thought.
We split from other apes a very long time ago, so fossils from that time are very rare. In order to test evolutionary hypotheses, a team of scientists compared 3D shape measurements of scapulas of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons and saw that we have features that clearly link us with African apes.
The image above shows us the scapula of different species. African ape like (top left), modern human (bottom right), predicted ancestral forms (in gray), Australopithecus afarensis (top right), Australopithecus sediba (middle left), Homo ergaster (middle right) and Homo neanderthalensis (bottom middle).
The explanation to this is that we share a common ancestor with these apes, and although we have evolved a lot, modern African apes haven’t. The reason for this to have happened is that humans evolved towards living on the ground while apes continued living in the trees.
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