idk if this is part of your human evolution exam but what's your favourite hominid and why? if you don't have a favourite, which one do you think is most significant and why?
I will happily tell you about three of my Top Hominins.
Ardipithecus! Ardipithecus was a very very early hominin genus. There's two species in the genus, A ramidus (about 4.4 million years ago) and A kadabba (5.6 mya). They were bipeds like us based on their spine and pelvis, but still had arboreal traits: their big toe was opposable, so they could better grasp tree branches and move around in trees. This means that they were spending a bunch of time in the trees still, and not 100% of their time on the ground.
Neanderthals! I love these guys. Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, to use their full name, were our very close relatives. They had art and culture, and their brains were actually bigger than ours—both in total amount and in proportion to their bodies—though they would have been shaped differently, due to differences in the cranium. They almost certainly had the use of language, although based on their skull shape they might not have been able to make back vowels like o and u like we can—so they were probably not named Thog! You're probably part neanderthal, we interbred with them a lot.
Homo erectus is also up there, just for how long they lived—they emerged about 2 million years ago, and some evidence suggests their survival up to nearly 30 thousand years ago. They were definitely our contemporaries by any estimate, though. They were also one of the first hominins discovered: Eugène Dubois decided that he was going to find a hominin, went to Indonesia, and found a femur and a skull cap on the island of Java.
As for most significant…hmm. There's a couple of ways you can define "significant." Sahelanthropus tchadensis is the earliest hominin we've found so far, at 7 mya; "Lucy" of Australopithecus afarensis might by the most famous individual fossil. It's a bit cheesy, but…they're all important.
Toumaï (S tchadensis) says hello.
