Evolution Test - 78

Dryopithecus was a genus of apes that is known from Eastern Africa into Eurasia during the late Miocene period. The first species of Dryopithecus was discovered at the site of Saint-Gaudens, Haute-Garonne, France, in 1856. Dryopithecus was about 4 feet long and more closely resembled a monkey than a modern ape. The structure of its limbs and wrists show that it walked in a similar way to modern chimpanzees, but that it used the flat of its hands, like a monkey, rather than knuckle-walking, like modern apes. It is considered to be the ancestor of modern apes. 

Lucy is the common name of AL 288-1, several hundred pieces of bone representing about 40% of the skeleton of a female Australopithecus afarensis. In Ethiopia, it is also known as Dinknesh which means "you are marvelous". It was discovered in 1974 at Hadar in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia. In paleoanthropology, usually only fossil fragments are found and only rarely are skulls or ribs uncovered intact. Thus, this discovery was extraordinary and provided an enormous amount of scientific evidence. Lucy is estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago and is classified as a hominin. 

As scientists try and solve the mystery of how we originated, an invaluable source of clues is the chimpanzee. Humanity did not evolve from the chimpanzee, which has spent time evolving on its own path for millions of years from our last common ancestor, just as we have. Still, chimps are our closest living relatives. We share 98.8 percent of their DNA and new research is continuing to shed light on just how similar we remain, promising to yield insights into the roots we both stem from. Based on the analysis of the sequence of 7100 nucleotides in a segment of DNA from the haemoglobin gene suggests that humans and chimpanzees are closer to one another than chimpanzees and gorillas. They matched at 98.8% of the bases in man and chimpanzee and 97.9% with gorilla and man. So, the gorilla is closest primate to man after chimpanzee than Rhesus monkey, orangutans and lemur.

New World monkeys are the five families of primates that are found in Central and South America and portions of Mexico. Callitrichidae, Cebidae, Aotidae, Pitheciidae and Atelidae. The five families are ranked together as the Platyrrhini parvorder and the Ceboidea superfamily, which are essentially synonymous since Ceboidea is the only living platyrrhine superfamily. Platyrrhini means flat-nosed, and their noses are flatter than those of other simians, with sideways-facing nostrils. Monkeys in the Atelidae family, such as the spider monkey, are the only primates to have prehensile tails. New World monkeys' closest relatives are the other simians, the Catarrhini. New World monkeys descend from African simians that colonized South America, a line that split off about 40 million years ago. 
Therefore, the correct answer is option B.

The Piltdown man was a paleoanthropological hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. These fragments consisted of parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan deliberately combined with the cranium of a fully developed modern human. 

Australopithecus afarensis is one of the longest-lived and best-known early human species paleoanthropologists have uncovered remains from more than 300 individuals. Found between 3.85 and 2.95 million years ago in Eastern Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania), this species survived for more than 900,000 years, which is over four times as long as our own species has been around. Fossils of this species plus the oldest documented bipedal footprint trails. 

Old World monkeys are medium to large in size and range from arboreal forms, such as the colobus monkeys, to fully terrestrial forms, such as the baboons. The smallest is the talapoin, with a head and body 3437 cm in length and weighing between 0.7 and 1.3 kilograms, while the largest is the male mandrill at around 70 cm in length and weighing up to 50 kilograms. They have narrow nostrils and non prehensile tail. The noses of New World monkeys are flatter than the narrow noses of the Old World monkeys, and have side-facing nostrils. New World monkeys are the only monkeys with prehensile tails in comparison with the shorter, non-grasping tails of the anthropoids of the Old World. They have wide nostrils. Prosimians are a type of primate that includes all living and extinct strepsirrhines (lemurs, lorisoids, and adapiforms) as well as the Haplorhine tarsiers and their extinct relatives, the omomyiforms. They are considered to have characteristics that are more "primitive" (ancestral or plesiomorphic) than those of simians. They are tree shrews, the ancestors of primates. The simians (infraorder Simiiformes, Anthropoidea) are the "higher primates" familiar to most people, the Old World monkeys and apes, including humans, (together being the catarrhines), and the New World monkeys or platyrrhines. 

In December 2013, researchers reported evidence that Neanderthals practiced burial behavior and intentionally buried their dead. In addition, scientists reported, for the first time, the entire genome of a Neanderthal. The genome was extracted from the toe bone of a 130,000 year old Neanderthal found in a Siberian cave. Evidence suggests that the Neanderthals were the first humans to intentionally bury the dead, doing so in shallow graves along with stone tools and animal bones. Exemplary sites include Shanidar in Iraq, Kebara Cave in Israel and Krapina in Croatia.