What about the tail?
What about the tail?
This fossil greatly intrigues me, but the publicity and the hype leaves many questions unanswered. With all the efforts to connect this fossil to human evolution, no one has yet addressed the creature's tail, which seems suspicious.
No competing interests declared.
The authors consider this species to be close to the ancestors of *all* haplorhine primates -- not just humans, but apes, monkeys, and tarsiers as well. (But note that some other scientists consider this species to be on the strepsirrhine side, closer to lemurs and lorises.)
Humans have many ancestors, most of which we share with other living species. The authors are definitely *not* positing this species as ancestral to humans and nothing else alive. Some of the hype has indeed been misleading (although that's true of most scientific discoveries, it seems).No competing interests declared.
