by E. J. Kay
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Appendix 1
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[1] Pronounced Nim-oo-ay
[2] The Messel Pit is a UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Darmstadt-Dieburg, Germany. It is a small site about 1000m long and 700 m wide. It is the source of the best-preserved fossils in the world that represent the Eocene Age, i.e. from 57 to 36 million years ago. Their remarkable preservation is due to their position in deep layers of protective sediment. The Eocene is of particular interest as it was a time of significant mammal development.
[3] Java Man is the name given to fossils discovered in 1891 on the banks of the Solo River in East Java, Indonesia. It was one of the first known specimens of Homo erectus. Until older human remains were discovered in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, these discoveries were the oldest hominin remains ever found. It was therefore suggested at the time that Java Man was an intermediate hominin between modern humans and the human/chimp common ancestor, but the current anthropological and genetic consensus is that the direct ancestors of modern humans were African populations of Homo erectus or Homo ergaster (the names are somewhat interchangeable), rather than the Asian populations of which Java Man is an example. Note that Java Man was discovered by a river, though.
[4] The existence and definition of this syndrome, where human individuals walk on all fours to varying degrees, is still controversial, having been coined by Professor Uner Tan whilst at the Cukurova Medical School in Turkey (Tan, 2005). When this syndrome was first recognised, the quadripedalism exhibited by affected patients was accompanied by severe language deficiencies and a range of other mental disabilities. Since Tan’s first paper, further examples of individuals who display quadripedalism have been identified; for example, two children who display upright walking but go onto all fours when they need to move rapidly (Tan & Tan, 2009). These children display no mental disability and have normal speech and cognitive abilities. Some patients affected by Unertan syndrome also sit awkwardly, in a manner that is reminiscent of how chimpanzees sit, with the head jutting forward rather than sitting vertically on top of the spine. This syndrome, whilst very rare, appears to be inherited via the X chromosome and suggests that, in time, it may be possible to locate the gene or genes that affect bipedalism in the human genome and thereby shed some light on when it first developed in human ancestors.
[5] Quote from the Islamic scholar Ibrahim Hakki Erzurumi (1703 – 1780). He lived in Erzurum, now in the Republic of Turkey. He is most famous for his encyclopedic work Marifetname, which includes the passage “…between plants and animals there is sponge, and between animals and humans there is monkey”. Charles Darwin was born in 1809 and died in 1882.
[6] The FOXP2 (short for Forkhead box protein P2) gene causes changes in genes that affect the growth of areas in the brain controlling language and higher level thought.
[7] Most Recent Common Ancestor
