Welcoming Aaron Filler to Anthropology.net
I’m in the middle of my finals week, and am stressed out. Coincidentally it happens to be a very big week in anthropology news. I know I haven’t reported on Hawks’ new human evolution acceleration paper and I just missed the new study suggesting that the curvature of the female human spine is an evolutionary adaptation to pregnancy. 
It disappoints me that I haven’t had the time to write about either… But I will have a chance in the next week or so when I find some more time to sit down and read up on both studies.
In the mean time, I’m happy to announce that my recent skepticism with a new hypothesis proposed by Dr. Aaron Filler has cumulated into him guest blogging for the site. If you don’t know Aaron Filler, he recently published “Homeotic Evolution in the Mammalia: Diversification of Therian Axial Seriation and the Morphogenetic Basis of Human Origins,” in PLoS One. He has a medical and doctorate degree and specializes neurosurgery. He been a director of Comprehensive Spine Center at UCLA. I’m pretty sure that is one of the places where he built up expertise with the structure and function of spine to suggest that the transformed hominiform type of lumbar vertebrate found in Morotopithecus bishopi suggests bipedalism originated about over 20 million years ago.
I’d like to welcome him to our site, I’m sure he’ll provide much more clarity than I’ve given on the subject. I can’t wait to read some posts from him as well as the comments that you all ask.
fyi earth is only 100mil yrs old, if the earth was any older then the sun would have been to close to earth to support life, check it out before dismissing.
mike
June 9, 2008 at 4:55 am
What I really enjoy about Filler’s recent work is not that I’m necessarily won over by his arguments but rather the challenging nature of the ideas. Morotopithecus may or may not have been our ancestor (though I’m certainly swayed to notion that it was a habitual biped) but what I find puzzling is the resistance to the notion that we may have evolved from a line of apes which had been upright for 20 million years.
As the post-cranial fossil evidence from beyond 4 million years is sketchy at best there is no reason yet to fight off Filler’s scenarios. So what if they were upright all along? Are we trying to discover our true ancestry or just attempting to make sure what we find adheres to long standing ideas about our ancestors?
When, and if, the definitive fossils from the divergence of chimps and apes are found they’ll speak for themselves. No need to get up in arms and take sides over an issue which simply is not clear at this point.
Frank Roberts
July 16, 2008 at 5:45 pm