Upright Ape?

Multiple outlets are reporting on the discovery of a fossil ape that appears to have at least a partially facultatively bipedal stance.  Here is the Fox News version of events:

The remains of an 11 million-year-old ape suggest that our ancestors started to stand upright millions of years earlier, according to scientists.

A team of researchers claims the fossilized partial skeleton of a male ape that lived in the humid forests of what is now southern Germany bears a striking resemblance to modern human bones. In a paper published on Wednesday by the journal Nature, they concluded that the new species — dubbed Danuvius guggenmosi — could walk on two legs but also climb like an ape.

The findings “raise fundamental questions about our previous understanding of the evolution of the great apes and humans,” Madelaine Boehme of the University of Tuebingen, Germany, who led the research, told The Associated Press.

Here is how the Nature paper actually reads:

Here we describe the fossil ape Danuvius guggenmosi (from the Allgäu region of Bavaria) for which complete limb bones are preserved, which provides evidence of a newly identified form of positional behaviour—extended limb clambering. The 11.62-millionyear-old Danuvius is a great ape that is dentally most similar to Dryopithecus and other European late Miocene apes. With a broad thorax, long lumbar spine and extended hips and knees, as in bipeds, and elongated and fully extended forelimbs, as in all apes (hominoids), Danuvius combines the adaptations of bipeds and suspensory apes, and provides a model for the common ancestor of great apes and humans.

First, this is way-the-heck back there, some five and a half million years before the first actual evidence of bipedalism (Orrorin). Second, there are no “hip” remains. The only post-cranial remains are long bones.  Much is inferred.  In hominins, the femoral neck and the connection to the femoral head provide much diagnostic locomotion information.  The fossil remains for this region are very scant, consisting only of a partial head.  Much of the argument for even some bipedality rests with the tibial angle, to wit:

The near perpendicular tibial angle is a shared character between hominins and Danuvius and supports the inference of a habitual valgus knee position and bipedalism for the new genus.

I think a new genus designation is certainly warranted. I have grave reservations about the “bipedalism” designation. We have possible evidence from Crete at 5.5 million years for bipedalism in the form of footprints. That is as far north as it gets.  All of the other evidence we have for the emergence of hominins and bipedalism comes from North Africa.  It is far more likely that this represents an independent adaptation/homoplasy for this hominoid.   If we had more evidence from later in the Miocene or, better yet, the Pliocene, then this might carry more weight.