The neutrality of these mutations meant they could be used as a yardstick of evolutionary distance - the more mutations accumulated, the longer the time since the species split. They found that the differences between the two species were mostly the result of ‘neutral’ mutations, or genetic changes with little or no consequence for the functioning of blood proteins themselves. Their findings were poised to cause a major upset among anthropologists, and would come to set the framework for understanding the origins of the human branch until today.Įmile Zuckerkandl and twice Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling were among the many workers studying haemoglobin, and were interested in differences between humans and the gorilla. It was even suggested that humans had split from a common ancestor with the African apes by about 30 million years ago, making our evolution a very long process indeed.Ĭoincidentally, at the time Ramapithecus was being touted as the first human ancestor, pioneers of the nascent field of molecular biology were beginning to compare blood proteins among different mammals, including humans and apes, to study their evolution. David Pilbeam of Harvard University argued that Ramapithecus, a 14 million year old ape from the Siwalik Mountains of Pakistan, but also found in East Africa, was the earliest member of the human line. It was unclear, however, which of the hundreds of extinct ape species found during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Africa, Europe and Asia, dating from the period 10 million to 35 million years old, gave rise to the human lineage.īy the mid-1960s this seemed to be solved. Still, Huxley’s work made it starkly clear that humans were a Great Ape, closer to our African kin than our East Asian ape cousins, the orangutan. This also squared with the view that humans were very distinct from the other African Apes, having evolved for longer, and perhaps at a faster rate, to obtain highly distinctive features like our upright posture, bipedal locomotion and big brains.
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