BACKGROUND
ABSTRACT: The discovery of Paranthropus deyiremeda in 3.3–3.5 million year old fossil sites in Afar (Haile-Selassie, 2015), together with 30% of the gorilla genome showing lineage sorting between humans and chimpanzees (Scally, 2012), and a NUMT (“nuclear mitochondrial DNA segment”) that is shared by both gorillas, humans and chimpanzees, and that dates back to 6 million years ago (Popadin, 2017), is conclusive evidence that introgression from the gorilla lineage caused the speciation of both the Australopithecus lineage and the Paranthropus lineage, providing a lens into the gorilla-like features within Paranthropus, as well as traits within Homo that originate from the gorilla branch, such as a high opposable thumb index (Almécija, 2015), an adducted great toe (Tocheri, 2011; McHenry, 2006), and large deposits of subcutaneous fat.
OBJECTIVE
The origin of our species has increasingly been discovered over the past century, through Darwin to the discovery of DNA and the double-helix, to Lucy and fossils of Australopithecines that originate from the Afar region in Ethiopia from the Pliocene. The genetic data from Scally in 2012, and Popadin in 2017, now provides conclusive evidence for how Paranthropus and Australopithecus, as two separate lineages, both speciated as a result of introgression from the gorilla lineage (Fig. 1). That introgression fills in the "missing link" and shows how the origin of our species is not one single continuous lineage, but the hybridization of both the gorilla lineage and the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, an event that occurred in the late Miocene.
METHODS
References
RESULTS
The reason 15% of your genome is closer to gorilla than to chimpanzee (Scally, 2012), is because there was introgression. That even can be dated to 6 million years ago, from a NUMT on chromosome 5, that had diverged as much as 4.5 million years at the time it was transferred to Gorilla, Pan and Homo, so since the Gorilla/Pan-Homo split around 11 million years ago. That introgression caused the speciation of both Australopithecus and Paranthropus.
CONCLUSIONS
The speciation of Australopithecus and Paranthropus was caused by introgression from the Gorilla lineage