Over the years, I joined forces with colleagues from all over the world to have a new look at old fossils. Subsequently, the story goes that handy skills and bigger brains (associated with enhanced cognition ever more sophisticated technology) went hand-by-hand. Hence, a popular notion in human evolution is that our fingers became shorter and our thumbs longer to manipulate objects better and make stone tools.
However, modern apes are better suited to move in the tree canopy. Chimpanzees (like the other living apes) can’t do it because their fingers are too long relative to their thumbs. However, living apes are more limited in their “precision grips.” Now imagine yourself throwing darts. Apes use forceful “power grips” habitually, humans too (e.g., visualize yourself using a hammer). The primate hand anatomy reflects a compromise between locomotion and manipulation. Even more, primates benefit from prehensile hands (i.e., one-hand grasping), whereas most other mammals need both hands to hold objects (imagine a squirrel chewing on a nut). For example, was the LCA a knuckle walker like chimpanzees and gorillas? Was it “suspensory,” hanging below the tree branches? Hints about the locomotion of chimpanzee-human LCA can be found in the hand of living and extinct species. Why the hand? Current debates relating to the chimpanzee-human LCA’s hand morphology are fueled by competing inferences regarding this ancestor’s locomotor repertoire.
CHIMPANZEE HAND THUMB PROFESSIONAL
The salary was small and the working hours long, but hey, after years of internships and work as a technician, I would become a professional researcher! I was given a unique opportunity, and I wasn’t going to miss it.ĭid other aspects of the human body evolve from a chimp-like ancestor? I decided to check this idea for the case of the hand. On the other hand, my now colleagues David Alba and Salvador Moyà-Solà (my future advisor), who directed the work in Els Hostalets, invited me to study the hands of Pierolapithecus and Hispanopithecus (see cover image). That year I got lucky: On the one hand, I received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Catalan government, allowing me to focus on research starting the following year. No doubt, the most famous fossil from the area (and likely the entire country) is the partial skeleton of the ~12 million-year-old fossil great ape Pierolapithecus. I spent 10+ hours a day working as a field paleontologist in Els Hostalets de Pierola (near Barcelona), which is well known for its amazing paleontological discoveries. At the time, I had just graduated from college. James was left massively disfigured from the incident.ĭespite everything, the couple continued to visit Moe until he mysteriously disappeared from the sanctuary.I have been researching the origins of this “uniquely” human structure since 2005. After five minutes, LaDonna's screams caught the attention of the sanctuary owner's son. James jumped in to save his wife, and became the main victim of the attacking primates. Jealous of the Davises' attention to Moe, one went directly after LaDonna, biting her thumb off after an attempted tackle.
Tragically, two chimpanzees escaped from their cages. One fateful day, the Davises were visiting Moe at the sanctuary for his 39th birthday. Many legal battles ensued, and Moe was eventually granted the right to stay at a sanctuary for apes, where the Davises could visit him. After a raid by police and animal control, Moe was eventually taken away by the state. When Moe was in his 30s, he began to display aggressive behaviors.
CHIMPANZEE HAND THUMB TV
The trio gained local fame, and Moe even made some TV appearances. They ate, slept, and watched TV together. Over the years, the human couple and their chimpanzee lived together in West Covina, CA, a suburb about 20 miles east of Los Angeles. Not long afterward, he and LaDonna finally married. Eventually, he came home, but he wasn't alone - he brought Moe, a newborn chimpanzee he had rescued from the wild, back home with him. James left LaDonna at the alter and then skipped town shortly after on a boat headed for Africa. They had planned to get married fresh out of high school - that is, until St. James and LaDonna Davis were high school sweethearts.
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