In this video, we're going to briefly discuss primates, which includes organisms such as ourselves and some of our more closely-related organisms such as chimpanzees. And so, primates are really just a group of mammals that are characterized by very specific features such as large brains and sophisticated visual systems. And, in fact, in the back of our heads, there's a region of our brain called the occipital lobe which controls our complex visual systems. Now, primates are also characterized by features such as having good parental care, meaning that they take good care of their offspring, and they are also characterized by having complex social behaviors. Now, some primates have opposable thumbs, which is really just a non-digit finger such as our thumb that is going to allow for grasping in the utilization of tools as well as fine motor skills, and so a fully opposable thumb is one in which the thumb is able to touch the front of the fingertips for each of the 4 digits. And so, humans have fully opposable thumbs but so do gorillas, and chimpanzees also have opposable thumbs as well. Now, what you'll notice is that the gibbon, it does have this thumb as you see here, however, it is distant from the fingertips, is pretty great in comparison to the chimpanzee, gorilla, and human. And again, the human isn't mentioned. And so what you'll notice is that because there's such a great distance here, they do not have fully opposable thumbs that allow them to touch their thumb to the front of their fingertips. And what you'll notice is the tarsier over here is also going to have more primitive-like features where it is not going to have a fully opposable thumb. Now, in general, these primates can be broken up into 2 major groups and those 2 major groups are the prosimians and the anthropoids or the simians. Now the root "pro" in prosimian is a root that means before, and so prosimians are going to be a group of primates that are more similar to early primates, and that's where the pro comes into play. Again pro means before, so you can think early or you know earlier primates. And the prosimians include lemurs and lorises and also the tarsiers. And so notice down below we're showing you this image of a lemur, which again is a prosimian and it is going to have features that are more similar to early primates. Now the other major group of the primates are the anthropoids or the simians and these are going to be bigger-brained primates that are going to include monkeys and apes and humans and chimpanzees and so notice down below we're showing you this image of these chimpanzees that are showing these complex social behaviors and so those are going to be an example of the anthropoids or the simians. Now these anthropoids or simians can be further grouped into what are known as hominids. And so, hominids can be defined as these are anthropoids, and the hominids are also sometimes called great apes. And so the hominids include gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, humans, and orangutans. And so if we take a look at this image down below what you'll notice is we're showing you the skeletal structure of these different primates. And we can use this image to introduce this term bipedalism. And so the term bipedalism refers to the ability to walk only on the two hind limbs, and so basically it's saying the ability to walk on 2 feet. That is what bipedalism is. So, humans are fully bipedal as adults, and what you'll notice is that many of the great apes are actually not fully bipedal and so the great apes here are going to include humans, but humans are the only ones that are fully bipedal. They're the only ones that can walk on 2 feet predominantly. Now the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, they are great apes. However, what you'll notice is that they can use their hands and they tend to use their hands for a lot of the motions and movement. And a lot of their arms, you can see the bone structure for their arms, are much longer and very extended and their posture is bent so that they can more conveniently use their hands in addition to their feet to move around. Now the gibbon on the other hand over here is not actually a great ape, it is an anthropoid but it is not a hominid and so the gibbon here also has the long extended skeletal structure in its arms and so the gibbon is going to walk more using all 4 of its limbs. So it is not going to display that bipedalism. And so this here concludes our brief introduction to some of the features of primates and some of the groups of these primates, and I'll see you all in our next video.
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Primates and Homonids
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