Dryopithecins, Darwin, de Bonis, and the European origin of the African apes and human clade
Begun RD 2009 Geodiversitas 31:789-816
(a bit shortened while reading)

Abstract:
Darwin famously opined: the most likely origin of the Afr.apes & human common ancestor is Africa, given the distribution of its living descendents.
But it is infrequently recalled: immediately afterwards, Darwin (in his typically thorough & cautious style) noted:
a fossil ape from Europe (Dryopithecus) may instead represent the ancestors of African apes, which dispersed into Africa from Europe.
Louis de Bonis cs were the first researchers in the modern era to echo Darwin’s suggestion about apes from Europe.
Resulting from their spectacular discoveries in Greece over several decades, de Bonis cs have shown convincingly:
African ape & human clade members (hominines) lived in Europe at least 9.5 Ma.
I review the fossil record of hominoids in Europe, as it relates to the origins of the hominines.
I differ in some details with Louis, but we are in complete agreement on the importance of Europe in determining the fate of the Afr.ape & human clade..
No doubt, Louis de Bonis (died 2021 --mv) is a pioneer in advancing our understanding of this fascinating time in our evol.history.

Introd.:
In 1871, Charles Darwin published the first serious, comprehensive & well-informed analysis of human evolutionary history:
“The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” compares the morphology of extant great apes to humans:
among other things, humans & African apes are more closely related to one another than either are to orangutans.
Here he was drawing heavily on the work of Thomas Henry Huxley, esp. “Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature” 1863.
Today we recognize the phyletic link between African apes & humans, based on morphological & molecular evidence,
but for much of the 20th cent., Darwin & Huxley’s conclusions were rejected: the great apes were routinely linked together, with humans set apart.
In fairness to historically strong advocates of the Pongidae (great apes), such as Adolph Schultz (1936, 1950),
- the morphological evidence for a hominine clade (African apes & humans to the exclusion of orangs) was not overwhelming,
- the gradistic resemblances among extant great apes are undeniable.
I think it is fair to say that Darwin & Huxley were not vindicated, until genetic technology was able to establish with little doubt:
- chimps are more closely related to humans than to gorillas,
- the group of African apes & humans as a whole is more closely related to each other than any of them are to orangs.
During this time, researchers were trying to integrate fossil discoveries with our understanding of ape & human evolution.
Darwin (1871: 199) felt it most likely that African apes & humans evolved in Africa:
“In each great region of the world, the living mammals are closely related to the extinct spp of the same region:
probably, Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla & chimp;
as these 2 spp are now man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.”
But Darwin (1871: 199) knew of a discovery in France of a fossil with close similarities to living great apes:
“But it is useless to speculate on this subject:
an ape nearly as large as a man (the Dryopithecus of Lartet was closely allied to the anthropomorphous Hylobates) existed in Europe, upper-Miocene;
since so remote a period, the earth has certainly undergone many great revolutions, and there has been ample time for migration on the largest scale.”
Lartet spoke of the similarities between Dryopithecus Lartet 1856 & African apes,
these observations were repeated by later researchers commenting on newer discoveries in France & Germany (Lartet 1856, Gaudry 1890, Branco 1898, Harlé 1898, Schlosser 1901, Abel 1902).
But following impressive discoveries first in Asia, then in Africa), attention shifted away from Europe.
Lartet's Dryopithecus was eventually lumped in with most other fossil apes, vs what were then taken to be the putative ancestors of humans, the ramapithecines (Simons & Pilbeam 1965).
Attention was turned away from Europe, until the early 1970s:
discoveries from Greece & Hungary + an emerging understanding of the evol.position of the Siwalik fossil apes were leading to a renewal of interest in Europe (Begun 2002).
In 1974, a new species of Dryopithecus (macedoniensis, Bonis, Bouvrain, Geraads & Melentis 1974) was recognized on the basis of fossil spms from N-Greece.
In the same year, Kretzoi (1975) published an account of Rudapithecus Kretzoi, 1969, from Hungary.
In both cases, but based on very different lines of evidence, Europe was being repositioned as an area of great importance in interpretations of ape & human evol.history.
In the intervening 30 years or so, many new discoveries have been made in Greece, Hungary & Spain,
these have shaped the debate on the relevance of Europe in the evol.history of the African apes & humans.
For the remainder of this paper, I will review the data from these 3 most important locations + isolated discoveries from Turkey & Bulgaria,
to try to make some sense of the fossil evidence of hominids in Miocene Europe.

Concl.
This review stresses the phyletic unity & ecol.diversity of European mid- & late-Miocene hominines,
it explicitly recognizes the pioneering efforts of Louis de Bonis in providing strong evidence for decades to support the Afro-European Miocene hominine connection.
Diversity in European Miocene hominines parallels that of Pliocene to Recent hominines, with a range of ecological preferences:
from suspensory, highly arboreal soft-fruit frugivores in closed forests, to hard-object feeders, possibly much more terrestrial, in more open settings.
The conclusion that hominines originate & experience their initial adaptive radiation in Europe is significant in setting the ecological & temporal context for the evolution of our subfamily.
Hominines & pongines are likely to have evolved from early mid-Miocene thickly enameled taxa,
e.g. Griphopithecus from Europe & W-Asia, or a close relative from later localities in Africa (Nacholapithecus, Equatorius, Kenyapithecus).
It seems unnecessarily complicated to suggest that multiple dispersals and/or range extensions occurred between Africa & Eurasia during hominid evolution, before the late-Miocene hominine
disperse from Europe to Africa a final time,
but this is the scenario proposed for several taxa, incl. aardvarks, several carnivores, antelopes, hippos & probably at least 1 lineage of proboscidean.
Major changes experienced by hominines & pongines in Eurasia include
- diversification of positional behavior & the development of the extant hominid suspensory body-plan,
- specialization of dietary adaptations,
- increases in overall body & brain size & an overall slowing of life history.
The one aspect of hominid biology that unites all of these characteristics is behavioral flexibility & the ability to cope with diverse & changing ecological conditions.
These adaptations first appear in Eurasia, in response to Eurasian ecological conditions,
they likely permitted hominids to survive & adapt to changing conditions late-Miocene, and disperse into SE.Asia & Africa.:
the adaptations that developed in European hominines persist in extant hominines, and set the stage for the development of further changes in positional behavior, diet & eventually brain-size that characterize hominin evol.history.

____

:-)
This beautifully confirms my hypotheses (google "aquarboreal") on plate tectonics & hominoid splitttings:
-India approaching Eurasia (c 30 Ma?): cercopith/hominoid split:
hominoids in Indian archipelagoes + coastal forests: large, vertical, broad sternum, no tail... wading + suspensory = aquarboreal,
-India under Eurasia split gr.apes West & hylobatids East (c.20 Ma?) in northern Tethys-ocean coastal forests,
-the Mesopotamian Seaway closure c.15 Ma split hominids-dryopiths West (peri-Medit.Sea + rivers) & pongids-sivapiths East,
-European+Medit.hominids-dryopiths died out (drought?), but hominids s.s. survived in the (incipient) Red Sea forests:
--Gorilla-Praeanthropus 8-7 Ma followed the (incipient) northern Rift ->afarensis->boisei cs.
6-5 Ma the Red Sea opened into the Gulf of Aden (cf. Zanclean mega-flood 5.33 Ma??):
--Pan-Australopithecus went right ->E.Afr.coast ->the (incipient) southern Rift ->africanus->robustus, habilis, naledi etc.
--Pliocene Homo went left ->S.Asian ->H.erectus Java ->coastal dispersal + shellfish-diving, google "pachyosteosclerosis":
late-Pleist.H.neanderth.cs wading+walking, seasonally along Rhine etc.,
google "gondwanatalks verhaegen bonne".

Early-Miocene Hominoidea prefered coastal forests?
late-Miocene hominids s.s. prefered incipient rift forests?

littor...@gmail.com wrote:

> Louis de Bonis cs were the first researchers in the modern era to echo Darwin’s suggestion about apes from Europe.
> Resulting from their spectacular discoveries in Greece over several decades, de Bonis cs have shown convincingly:
> African ape & human clade members (hominines) lived in Europe at least 9.5 Ma.

When reason why I like Aquatic Ape so much is because t shifts "Origins"
from a place to an environment. With Aquatic Ape we go from a geographic
point, "East Africa," to "Waterside"... and that waterside can literally be
anywhere.

This is valuable to me for several reasons.

#1. It pulls us out of linear models and the limitations they impose on
our thinking.

#2. It abandons the racial narrative. We shouldn't be worried about it.
We shouldn't even be thinking about it. It should never be a concern.

If someone feels inferior because Australia wasn't settled in a single
migration by a single people, who gives a fuck? And if someone feels
inferior because an ancestor did it with the ancestor or a cave ape?
Again, who fives a fuck? These people need therapy, not lies.

We have to work our assess off to make people dumber else some
idiots will feel bad?

Worse: We have to punish people for sharing an interest, make
them dumber, fill their heads with stupidity because if we don't
then some idiots will feel bad about themselves?

Let them feel bad! If they get made and say you can't dig anymore,
just bribe someone. Say, "We'll never dig that stuff up again," then
bribe someone and go back to your digging.

I have a very different view from yours, regardless of who "You"
happen to be. For example, there is no doubt in my mind that
whatever species we are descended from was present in Africa,
was represented in Africa at the time of the retrovirus event.

....only their numbers were so depleted that they either
went extinct there, or were absorbed into the Pan side of the
divide, through interbreeding, or were absorbed by the
Eurasian populations, their DNA swamped and any traces of
the retrovirus bred out.

I detest linear models, and feel certain that they're almost
never correct and by that I mean they are never correct.

A Eurasian origins of apes?

I find that extremely to believe. Only they would have been
wiped out, or virtually wiped out 8.7 million years ago, when
Yellowstone touched off.

They would have been replaced or at least geneticall
swamped from interbreeding with back migrations from
elsewhere...

Anyway, Darwin was a mouth-breathing, flatulent twat.

Darwin was a human queef.

If Darwin got anything right it means that he either plagiarized
the right man for a change, instead of Lamarck, or he tried to
plagiarize the wrong man, fudged it up and wrote it down
wrong.

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https://jtem.tumblr.com/post/721968221374365696/saw-a-ghost-today-in-fact-saw-two