The Caveman’s Corner

So this is probably all you’re going to get of my promised great series on anthropoid origins. Basically, I ran out of confidence that I could handle the material intelligently and am now out of time. So, I only got about two pages in to the Adapoid Theory. Just so that work isn’t a total waste, I’ll share it with you here. It’s unfinished obviously.

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This is Meet an Ancestor installment three: Leptadapis magnus. The subject here also dovetails nicely with the post I’m writing on the adapoid theory of anthropoid origins, though it was selected a while before the idea for the latter series came into my head.

L. magnus cranium

Why is it relevant? Because L. magnus is an adapoid, specifically a member of the European family of the Adapidae. And that gives me the opportunity to tell an interesting story.

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Anthropoid origins is likely the single subject dearest to my heart in all of science, so I thought I might want to lay out in a series of essays for the reader some of the basic controversies surrounding this fascinating but much under-covered topic. I’d also like the sharpen up my own knowledge a bit as I fear it has been slipping. I’ll begin here by laying some of the basic concepts and terminology of the debate.

Anthropoid diversity

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So the whole weekly thing is pretty much out the window. I’ve been experiencing some technical difficulties for a while and I’ve had other matters to attend to/lacked motivation. But, you may unbate your breath, we have Meet an Ancestor entry number two: Propliopithecus chirobates.

A reconstruction of Propliopithecus

Woohoo, we finally got our super-obscure species that Google hasn’t heard of (Did you mean: propliopithecus chorobates). It is, however, a member of a quite famous and extremely important lineage.

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As I rather suspected would be the case, our very first “Meet an Ancestor” ancestor isn’t strictly a human ancestor. More of an extinct, collateral cousin. It is, however, a fairly well known species on which there is a good amount of information. I was afraid I’d get some obscure Plesiadapid that didn’t even register on Google.

T. oswaldi reconstruction from DKimages

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In a feeble attempt to perhaps make someone want to come back to my blog more than once, I’ll be doing some serialized features. More-or-less weekly, I’ll use a random number generator to come up with a page number and another generator to select on that page a fossil species from Fleagle’s Primate Adaptation and Evolution, 3 ed. Following from this will emerge a short summary with as much information as I have means to dig up and present succinctly. So, look forward to that.