A team of scientists detailed the shoulder blades of two ancient human species that links them to a common ancestor with apes.
According to The Washington Post, the shoulder blade fossils belonged to the ancient human species known as Australopithecus. The shoulder blades suggest humans and apes both have a common ancestor that was more likely an ape than a monkey, as some previous studies have concluded.
The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, details how humans diverged from their ape-like ancestor when their shoulders began developing in order to perform labor, rather than climbing.
"Humans are unique in many ways. We have features that clearly link us with African apes, but we also have features that appear more primitive, leading to uncertainty about what our common ancestor looked like," study lead author Nathan Young, an assistant professor at the University of California - San Francisco School of Medicine, said in a press release. "Our study suggests that the simplest explanation, that the ancestor looked a lot like a chimp or gorilla, is the right one, at least in the shoulder."
Past research has undoubtedly linked humans to the African great ape, specifically bonobos and chimps, but humans were still believed to have descended from monkeys.
"Human shoulder blades are odd, separated from all the apes. Primitive in some ways, derived in other ways, and different from all of them," Young said in the release. "How did the human lineage evolve and where did the common ancestor to modern humans evolve a shoulder like ours?"
