How humans lost their tails — and why the discovery took 2.5 years to publish
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00610-x
“Where’s my tail?”
Geneticist Bo Xia asked that question as a child and it was on his mind again a few years ago, while he was recovering from a tailbone injury during his PhD at New York University (NYU) in New York City.
Xia and his colleagues now have an answer. The researchers identified a genetic change shared by humans and other apes that might have contributed to their ancestors’ tail loss, some 25 million years ago.
Genes found for human ancestors to lose tails and walk upright
https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/pala ... l-upright/
The genetic code that saw ancient human ancestors lose their tails and walk upright has been found. And the same DNA might also have some negative side effects.
It is still not clear exactly when our ancestors first walked upright. Bipedalism – walking on two legs, instead of four – appears to have emerged as far back as 7 million years ago. It enabled hominins to navigate the African savannahs which were growing and encroaching upon their dwindling forest homes as the climate began to dry.
A new study, published in Nature, compared tail-less apes and humans to those of monkeys which have tails. The researchers scanned 140 genes linked to vertebrate tail development. The research revealed a DNA insertion in a gene called TBXT present in apes and humans, but not in monkeys.
When inserting the same gene into mice, they were born with various effects in their tails – including some without tails at all.