WI: New World Hominids

As mojojojo says, baboons are fully quadrupedal terrestrial monkeys. I.e. baboons don't have brachiation, so they don't have the same movility in shoulder and torso as we or apes, thus making them very unlikely to develop bipedal walk like we did. Instead, they walk on ground like monkeys walk over branches, with the full hand palm over the ground, not knuckles, and their backbone is paralel to the grpund line while on march instead of inclined. In short words, baboons are monkeys that, when trees disappeared in their home, continued to live there without trees.

In the Americas this did not happened. When trees disappeared from a region, leading to grasslands, monkeys just disappeared from that region as well. So who knows. Maybe SA monkeys were just less lucky than African ones.



But there is a problem of order there. The minute the animal just leaves the tree he's not an instant good ground dweller. Meanwhile, ground sloths are expert ground dwellers in that exact moment. It doesn't matter if monkeys could outcompete sloths if given enough time to evolve some better features, because nobody is giving them time to do so in the first place.

So If I understand your correctly ur saying that New World Babboons would be necessary to first compete with the ground sloths, and then once there out of the niche it would be easier for other New World Monkey's to make the transition to a Bipedial species?
 
Forgive me for speaking out of turn, but by no baboon equivalent I think he means there are no large New World monkeys that are adapted to forging primarily on the ground. If a monkey is going to spend much of it’s time on the ground a baboon type form works best hence the development of baboons and mandrills (and the related drills) both of whom are descended from different groups of monkeys. On they subject of Spider Monkeys I think their further development towards something like a hominid would be hindered by their lack of thumbs.

So Perhaps, the Capuchin monkey might be a better template species? They are known to have an highly omnivorious diet eating not only fruits, nuts, seeds and buds, but also insects, spiders, bird eggs and small vertebrates. Capuchins living near water will also eat crabs and shellfish by cracking their shells with stones. They are also considered most inteligent monkey of the New World as well as there long term tool usage...The Problem is just getting them out of the tree's and get them walking lol under OTL conditions.
 

mojojojo

Gone Fishin'
A related point, would a monkey species have to leave the trees to develop human level intelligence? Could something other than life on the ground spur the in the direction towards sapience?
 
So If I understand your correctly ur saying that New World Babboons would be necessary to first compete with the ground sloths, and then once there out of the niche it would be easier for other New World Monkey's to make the transition to a Bipedial species?

No, I was just giving another existing example of primate adaptation to open plains.
 
No, I was just giving another existing example of primate adaptation to open plains.

Here is an interesting thought on we might get apelike primates in the New World, as it is postulated in the Future is Wild documentary, where scientists believe that in 5 million years the Amazon will have turned into a raging grassland,where some of the New World monkeys elvolve into babboon like creatures. http://www.thefutureiswild.com/index.asp?level1id=3&level2id=6&level3id=3&level4id=8&level5id=8

The only problem is we gotta get drier conditions in OTL earlier or have the monkey's move into drier North America
 
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