Comparison of the human skull with the skulls of anthropomorphic monkeys. Monkey skull Pictured is a gibbon ape
The modern human skull is structurally significantly different from the skulls of anthropomorphic apes and fossil hominids. In modern humans, the size of the cerebral part of the skull predominates over the facial part.
One of the most important anthropometric indicators of the skull is the volume of its brain region. Thus, the average volume of the brain skull of gorillas is 500 cm3, in Zinjanthropus - 530 cm3, in Australopithecus - 435-520 cm3, in Homo habilis - 657-680 cm3, in Pithecanthropus - 900 cm3, in Sinanthropus - 915-1,225 cm3, in Neanderthals - 1325 cm3, Cro-Magnons - 1,400-1,500 cm3, modern humans - 1,400-1,600 cm3.
In humans, the upper part of the occipital scales grows significantly, and the foramen magnum of the occipital bone moves forward and downward, which is one of the most important differences between the human skull and the skulls of monkeys.
The mastoid process in modern humans is well defined, but almost invisible in apes and very poorly developed in the fossil ancestors of humans. The development of the mastoid process depends on the function of the sternocleidomastoid muscle to which it is attached.
Unlike the elderly faces of ancient hominids and apes, the forehead of modern humans is convex, and the slope of the frontal scales of the frontal bone is small. The angle between bregma, glabella (which is the apex of this angle) and INION of modern humans is 56-61 °, in Pithecanthropus - 37-38 °, in Neanderthals - 44-53 °. The level of curvature of the base of the skull determines the angle connecting 3 points - the basion, the point on the posterior edge of the anterior fissure and the nasion. In modern humans it is 131-135°, in gorillas - 178°, in chimpanzees - 159°.
The relative mass of the lower jaw relative to the mass of the skull (without the lower jaw) in gorillas is 40-46%, in modern humans - 15%. In apes, the angle between the body of the lower jaw and its ramus is approximately 90°, on the fossil Heidelberg jaw it is 95°, in Neanderthals it increases to 100°, in modern humans - 110-130°. The jaws of anthropomorphic monkeys, Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus, unlike humans, protrude sharply forward.
The human skull is characterized by a chin protrusion, which is not present in Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus and ancient hominids, but Neanderthals, whose skeletons were found in Palestine, have a chin protrusion, an even row of teeth, and no diastema. In monkeys, there are large diastemas between the canines and incisors of the upper jaw and the canines and small molars of the lower jaw. They are also found in Pithecanthropus, but are absent in Sinanthropus.
A bony nose protrudes on the human skull, which is absent in anthropomorphic monkeys. In humans, unlike fossil hominids, the nasal section of the skull is narrow. The cellular arch of the human superior celus differs from the cellular arches of fossil hominids in the greater roundness of the anterior section.
The shape and structure of the teeth of ancient people is similar to the teeth of anthropomorphic monkeys, but in synanthropes these features are less pronounced. Neanderthal skulls are similar to ancient human skulls. They have very powerful supraorbital ridges, a sloping forehead, a flattened arch, the angle of bending of the base of the skull is much greater than that of modern humans, but Neanderthals, like modern humans, already have a protruding nose and a small cheekbone, the face protrudes slightly forward.
The skull is a symbol of knowledge or a valuable thing that you do not know how to use. Historical figure or powerful rival.
Finding a skull means finding a trail, coming across an important idea.
To dig a skull out of the ground means to look for answers to something important in the past.
Burying the skull means eliminating what contributed to the delusion.
Keeping a skull on your table means receiving help in spiritual work.
A collection of skulls means significant connections, interesting friends.
The skull is framed in gold - a meeting with a scientist or getting to know him.
A skull in the form of a bowl or drinking from it - immerse yourself in the world of religious ideas, fruitful ideas in general.
Pouring water from a skull means striving for a moral ideal.
To pour water from it onto the ground means to lose spiritual strength.
Scooping a skull from a river means finding fruitful ideas in a fantasy world.
To store money in the skull means to receive benefits from spiritual figures.
Breaking a skull with a hammer means ruin, deception.
Wearing a skull on a pole means setting out on a journey for the wrong purpose.
To pray to a skull is to overestimate the role of the mind in life, to create an idol for yourself out of a certain person.
Kissing a skull means longing for the dead.
Throwing out the skull means trying in vain to start a new life. To abandon good principles, to forget the deceased undeservedly.
Boil water in the skull - give in to crazy ideas, waste great things on trifles.
To see a giant skull is to have a false judgment of authority.
A skull that is too small means underestimating the capabilities of your mind.
Skull with three eyes - indicates a great person in your environment, a magician, etc.
The metal skull is an evil person.
Subscribe to the Dream Interpretation channel!
Great apes or hominoids are a superfamily that includes the most highly developed representatives of the order of primates. It also includes man and all his ancestors, but they are included in a separate family of hominids and will not be discussed in detail in this article.
What distinguishes an ape from a human? First of all, some features of the body structure:
The human spine bends forward and backward.
The facial part of the ape's skull is larger than the brain.
The relative and even absolute volume of the brain is significantly less than that of humans.
The area of the cerebral cortex is also smaller, and the frontal and temporal lobes are also less developed.
Apes do not have a chin.
The chest is round and convex, while in humans it is flat.
The monkey's fangs are enlarged and protrude.
The pelvis is narrower than that of a human.
Since a person is erect, his sacrum is more powerful, since the center of gravity is transferred to it.
The monkey has a longer body and arms.
The legs, on the contrary, are shorter and weaker.
Monkeys have a flat grasping foot with the big toe opposed to the others. In humans, it is curved, and the thumb is parallel to the others.
Humans have virtually no fur.
In addition, there are a number of differences in thinking and activity. A person can think abstractly and communicate using speech. He has consciousness, is capable of summarizing information and drawing up complex logical chains.
Signs of great apes:
large powerful body (much larger than that of other monkeys);
absence of a tail;
lack of cheek pouches
absence of ischial calluses.
Hominoids are also distinguished by their way of moving through trees. They do not run along them on all fours, like other representatives of the primate order, but grab branches with their hands.
Skeleton of apes also has a specific structure. The skull is located in front of the spine. Moreover, it has an elongated front part.
The jaws are strong, powerful, massive and adapted for gnawing solid plant food. The arms are noticeably longer than the legs. The foot is grasping, with the big toe set to the side (like on a human hand).
Great apes include, orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees. The first are separated into a separate family, and the remaining three are combined into one - pongidae. Let's take a closer look at each of them.
The gibbon family consists of four genera. All of them live in Asia: India, China, Indonesia, on the islands of Java and Kalimantan. Their color is usually gray, brown or black.
Their sizes are relatively small for anthropoid apes: the body length of the largest representatives reaches ninety centimeters, weight - thirteen kilograms.
Lifestyle – daytime. They live mainly in trees. They move uncertainly on the ground, mostly on their hind legs, only occasionally leaning on their front legs. However, they go down quite rarely. The basis of nutrition is plant food - fruits and leaves of fruit trees. They may also eat insects and bird eggs.
Pictured is a gibbon ape
Gorilla is very great ape. This is the largest representative of the family. The height of a male can reach two meters, and weight – two hundred and fifty kilograms.
These are massive, muscular, incredibly strong and resilient monkeys. The coat color is usually black; older males may have a silver-gray back.
They live in African forests and mountains. They prefer to be on the ground, on which they walk mainly on four legs, only occasionally rising to their feet. The diet is plant-based and includes leaves, grass, fruits and nuts.
Quite peaceful, they show aggression towards other animals only in self-defense. Intraspecific conflicts occur, for the most part, between adult males over females. However, they are usually resolved by demonstrating threatening behavior, rarely even leading to fights, much less murder.
Pictured is a gorilla monkey
Orangutans are the rarest modern apes. Currently, they live mainly in Sumatra, although previously they were distributed throughout almost all of Asia.
These are the largest of the monkeys, living mainly in trees. Their height can reach one and a half meters, and their weight can reach one hundred kilograms. The coat is long, wavy, and can be of various shades of red.
They live almost entirely in trees, not even coming down to drink. For this purpose, they usually use rainwater that accumulates in the leaves.
To spend the night, they make nests in the branches, and build a new home every day. They live alone, forming pairs only during the breeding season.
Both modern species, Sumatran and Climantan, are on the verge of extinction.
In the photo there is an orangutan monkey
Chimpanzees are the smartest primates, apes. They are also the closest relatives of humans in the animal world. There are two types of them: ordinary and dwarf, also called. Even the normal size is not too big. The coat color is usually black.
Unlike other hominoids, with the exception of humans, chimpanzees are omnivores. In addition to plant foods, they also eat animals, obtaining them by hunting. Quite aggressive. Conflicts often arise between individuals, leading to fights and death.
They live in groups, the average number of which is ten to fifteen individuals. This is a real complex society with a clear structure and hierarchy. Common habitats are forests near water. Distribution: Western and central part of the African continent.
Pictured is a chimpanzee monkey
Ancestors of great apes very interesting and varied. In general, there are much more fossil species in this superfamily than living ones. The first of them appeared in Africa almost ten million years ago. Their further history is very closely connected with this continent.
It is believed that the line leading to humans separated from the rest of the hominoids about five million years ago. One of the likely candidates for the role of the first ancestor of the genus Homo is considered Australopithecus - great ape, who lived more than four million years ago.
These creatures contain both archaic characteristics and more progressive, already human ones. However, there are much more of the former, which does not allow Australopithecines to be classified directly as humans. There is also an opinion that this is a side, dead-end branch of evolution that did not lead to the emergence of more developed forms of primates, including humans.
But the statement that another interesting human ancestor, Sinanthropus - great ape, is already fundamentally wrong. However, the statement that he is the ancestor of man is not entirely correct, since this species already clearly belongs to the genus of humans.
They already had developed speech, language and their own, albeit primitive, culture. It is very likely that Sinanthropus was the last ancestor of modern homo sapiens. However, the possibility is not excluded that he, like Australopithecus, is the crown of a side branch of development.
Working in Uganda, announced that it has found in the north of the country a primate skull about 20 million years old, the study of which could shed light on the history of the evolution of this region, reports France-Presse.
“This is the first time that paleontologists have managed to find a complete skull of a primate of this age. This is a very important find that will give Uganda more importance in the scientific world,” says Martin Pickford, a paleontologist at the College de France, France.
Found in volcanic rocks in the northeastern Karamoja region, the skull belonged to a male of the species Ugandapithecus Major, so named because the first remains of a large prehistoric ape of this hitherto unknown species were found in Uganda in 2000. These primates, distant relatives of modern great apes, lived in South Africa about 20 million years ago.
Initial analysis of the skull showed that the herbivorous, tree-climbing animal died at about 10 years of age, with a head the size of a chimpanzee and a brain volume similar to that of a baboon. The find will now be sent to Paris, France, for cleaning, x-raying and detailed description, after which it will return to Uganda again in about a year.
Let us recall that scientists have been searching in Africa for quite some time for an intermediate evolutionary link between Australopithecus africanus (A. africanus) and Homo habilis or Homo erectus. In 2010, one of the options was proposed by a team of paleoanthropologists led by Lee Berger from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa: scientists presented a description of a new species of australopithecus, Australopithecus sediba, which can lay claim to the title of this very intermediate link .
Around the World previously reported that the remains of the prehistoric ape Darwinius masillae, identified in 2009 as a possible “missing link” between humans and primates, are actually akin to modern lemurs and lorises. Scientists have presented evidence that the 47-million-year-old Darwinius masillae is not a dry-nosed ape, which includes apes and humans, among others, but a member of the dry-nosed apes, a group of primates that includes lemurs and lorises.
Let us also recall that the scientific breakthrough of 2009 was the discovery of the fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor. The bones of a female Ardipithecus ramidus species that lived 4.4 million years ago were discovered in 1994, but due to the poor condition of the bones, researchers spent 15 years digging up the remains and analyzing them.
A study of the skull, teeth, pelvis, arm and leg bones showed that the creature, named Ardi, inherited a mixture of primitive traits from its ancestors and derived traits that were then passed on to later hominids, or humanoid creatures. Ardipithecus was even more primitive than the famous Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a representative of Australopithecus.
There are distinctive features of the skull of modern humans, anthropomorphic apes and fossil hominids. This is, first of all, the predominance of the size of the cerebral part of the skull over the facial part in modern humans. One of the most important indicators is the capacity of the skull. Thus, the average capacity of the skull in a gorilla is 500 cm3, in Zinjanthropus - 530 cm3, in Australopithecus - 435-520 cm3, in Homo habilis - 657-680 cm3, in Pithecanthropus - 900 cm3, in Sinanthropus - 915-1225 cm3, in Neanderthal - 1325 cm3, in Cro-Magnon man - 1400-1600 cm3, in modern man - 1400 cm3. In humans, the upper part of the squama of the occipital bone grows, and the position of the foramen magnum changes, moving anteriorly and downward, which is one of the most important differences between the human skull and skulls of apes. The mastoid process in modern humans is well defined, but is almost absent in apes. The development of the mastoid process is associated with the function of the sternocleidomastoid muscle, which is attached to it. In contrast to the sloping forehead of ancient hominids and apes, the forehead of modern humans is convex, and the slope of the scales of the frontal bone is small. The angle, the apex of which is the glabella (inion-glabella-bregma), in modern humans is no less than 56-61?, in Pithecanthropus it is 37-38?, in Neanderthals - 44-53?. The angle of curvature of the base of the skull, connecting three points - the bazion, the point on the posterior edge of the pre-cross groove and the nasion, in modern humans is 131-135?, in a gorilla - 178?, in chimpanzees - 159?. The ratio of the mass of the lower jaw to the mass of the skull (without the lower jaw) in a gorilla is 40-46%, in humans - 15%. In apes, the angle between the body of the lower jaw and its branch is about 90?, on the fossil Heidelberg jaw it is slightly larger - 95?, in Neanderthals it increases to 100?, in humans it is 110-130?. The jaws of anthropomorphic monkeys, unlike those of humans, protrude sharply; this feature is preserved in Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus.