But White would say there’s a better question to ask: Would it be possible to derive Australopithecus from Ardipithecus parts? Some scientists find this to be too much of a stretch. White disagrees. We now know from genetic studies that small alterations in the regulation of genes can have major anatomical consequences in a short amount of time. If it proved a major advantage to walk upright more effectively, White maintains, it wouldn’t take too many millennia for natural selection to evolve a big toe in line with the others and otherwise rejigger the skeletal design.The same rules apply to the transition from Australopithecus to the third stage of our assembly. Start flirting with higher calorie foods, nourish the further growth of the brain that helped you to figure out how to get at them in the first place, and presto—Daka, Bodo, Herto, us. Of course, fossils from other places in Ethiopia and beyond also light up the human evolutionary road, often more brightly than those from the Middle Awash. But its long record of change dramatically demonstrates that evolution is a matter of building on what had been built before.A car assembly line is an apt analogy, White said Bipedality is the frame Technology is the body Language is the engine, dropped in toward the end of the assembly; iPhones are the hood ornaments.
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