5. Conclusions
As possibly the earliest higher primate to eschew the trees and descend to the ground, Victoriapithecus offers several important lessons that may have implications for understanding our own ancestry. First, while paleoenvironment obviously constrains paleoecology, it should not be equated with a species’ paleoecology. Although there is a definite correlate between substrate preference and locomotor mode, evidence from Victoriapithecus suggests there is no a priori relationship between locomotor mode and paleoenvironment; that is, wooded or forested environs do not preclude terrestrial behaviors.
Second, body size is likely to be a consequence of the shift to terrestriality, rather than a cause for the shift. The small body size of Victoriapithecus and other early cercopithecoids probably proved a liability with the advent of widespread savannah habitats. Size increases within the hominid lineage show a similar trajectory, as hominids gradually adapted to, and then came to dominate, the grassland environment.
Finally, the adoption of terrestriality has traditionally been linked with the spread of grassland habitats and the shift to bipedalism. Victoriapithecus, however, provides proof that terrestrial behavior among the Catarrhini is instead first seen in a cercopithecoid that lived 12–20 million years ago in a wooded environment. As similar environmental contexts are now postulated for some of the very earliest hominids, the adoption of terrestriality and the eventual acquisition of bipedalism must now be linked to a very different set of adaptive correlates. The presence of terrestrial behaviors in African apes and in the hominid lineage, as well as possible evidence of knuckle-walking in both some Miocene hominoids and in our own ancestry, also argue strongly for a reconsideration of the role of terrestriality in our heritage, its timing, and in its correlates of diet and environment.
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Blue, K.T., McCrossin, M.L., Benefit, B.R. (2006). Terrestriality in a Middle Miocene Context: Victoriapithecus from Maboko, Kenya. In: Ishida, H., Tuttle, R., Pickford, M., Ogihara, N., Nakatsukasa, M. (eds) Human Origins and Environmental Backgrounds. Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-29798-7_4
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