Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage

A team of paleontologists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with colleagues from Xi'an Jiaotong University, the University of York, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Research Center ...

The inner ear hides clues on human evolution

A PNAS study led by the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP) analyzed the kinship between two Miocene great apes (Hispanopithecus and Rudapithecus) based on the morphology of their inner ear semicircular ...

Video: The long arm and short legs wars in palaeoanthropology

For decades a war raged within the field of palaeoanthropology. At the center of the battle were some of the most important fossils hominids ever discovered, the fossils from Hadar in Ethiopia, and included the famous Lucy ...

Video: The muddle in the middle-Pleistocene

During the late middle Pleistocene—between 400 000 and 150 0000 years ago—the populations occupying Earth, and Africa specifically, looked very differently from what they do now. There is evidence for at least three forms ...

Tongzi hominids are potentially a new human ancestor in Asia

The CENIEH has been participating in a comparative research about human teeth discovered in this Southern China site which has revealed that Tongzi's teeth do not fit the morphological pattern of traditional Homo erectus.

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Hominidae

The Hominidae (pronounced /hɒˈmɪnɨdiː/; anglicized hominids, also known as great apes), as the term is used here, form a taxonomic family, including four extant genera: chimpanzees (Pan), gorillas (Gorilla), humans (Homo), and orangutans (Pongo).

It is also common to use the term in a more restricted sense of humans and relatives of humans closer than chimpanzees. In this usage, all species other than Homo sapiens are extinct.

A number of known extinct genera are grouped with humans in the Homininae subfamily, others with orangutans in the Ponginae subfamily. The most recent common ancestor of the Hominidae lived roughly 14 million years ago, when the ancestors of the orangutans speciated from the ancestors of the other three genera. The ancestors of the Hominidae family had already speciated from those of the Hylobatidae family, perhaps 15-20 million years ago.

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