Future discoveries of relatively complete hominin skeletons are needed to address this question.
Unfortunately, the hypothesis rests firmly on a series of assumptions about hominin social organization and behavior and anthropoid behavioral patterns that may not be valid.
We admire this approach to modeling hominin social life.
Human babies are incapable of such riding, which therefore had to have been lost during hominin evolution.
However, this is not to suggest that consortships and group integration could not have contributed to reproductive fitness and selection for language at some later point during hominin evolution.
Newman therefore hypothesizes that the underlying neural circuitry may have been important for the incorporation of speech sounds as affective stimuli during hominin evolution.
The question of the relation between these early fossil species and the hominin lineage is still to be resolved.
His most important work has been the analysis of dental microwear in order to reconstruct early hominin dietary habits.
