Frustration was mounting as the rejections poured in. His finding could potentially force a rewriting of textbooks and a rethinking of conventional wisdom on something near and dear to people: human evolution.

Sergio Almécija, a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook Medical School, had used state-of-the-art three-dimensional imaging to look at the femur (the thick thigh bone) of so-called Millennial Man, a fossil that was discovered in 2000. His finding was sufficiently different from what other scientists believed that some of them probably figured he was wrong, he said.

The bone was from an ape that lived about six million years ago, during the end of the Miocene period. These extinct apes haven’t exactly commanded the spotlight, especially in human evolution. Chimpanzees, who are the most closely linked to humans in DNA resemblance, are considered the most likely human cousins.

An analysis of this femur, however, suggests that human ancestors may have looked less like an earlier version of chimpanzees and more like a version of a fossil ape that doesn’t exist today.

Millennial Man, who was bipedal, is widely accepted as an early member of the human lineage, Almécija said. In the past, it was considered human-like in this femur bone. It has also been considered more similar to Australopithicus, like Lucy, and in between living apes and modern humans.

This study, however, shows that the femur is intermediate in time and shape between Lucy and previous apes that lived in the Miocene period, but not to chimpanzees.

“Our study shows that we should focus more attention on and understand those ancient fossil apes,” Almécija said.

He compared the femur of Millennial Man, known by its scientific name as Orrorin tugenensis, to all the living apes — gibbons, siamangs, orangutans, gorillas and chimps, as well as to modern humans, fossil humans and fossil apes. “I believe Orrorin represents a very good model of how the earliest bipeds would look,” he said.

The research paper has been translated into several languages, with people from the United States, Spain and France contacting the Stony Brook professor to discuss the implications of his finding.

Almécija came up with this idea about the apes back in 2010, but it took almost three years to find a publication that would share his work. “We tried to publish this in other journals, but some wouldn’t even allow us to share this with reviewers,” he said.

In some ways, what didn’t kill the idea made it stronger, Almécija suggested. Each rejection created an opportunity to improve the work and clarify the message. The paper has evolved and the researchers have learned a great deal along the way, he said.

Almécija received the support of department chair William Jungers, a distinguished teaching professor in Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook Medical School. Jungers discussed the results and encouraged Almécija to continue to move forward, despite the roadblocks.
Calling Almécija’s data, methods and results “novel, refreshing and profound,” Jungers said he “offered encouragement and some suggestions to improve his message because I was confident that reason and good science would ultimately prevail. And it did.”

Jungers suggested that textbooks will need to move away from the idea that living apes are the best window into early human evolution. Living apes, he continued, are specialized because they’ve been evolving for millions of years.

The chimpanzee is not a time machine that allows humans to look at a living ancestor. Miocene apes are much better candidates for what human ancestors likely looked like, Jungers said.

When the paper finally moved closer to publication, Almécija celebrated with members of his department, including his girlfriend Ashley Hammond, who is a research instructor. “She knows how hard it was for me to get this thing through,” Almécija said of Hammond, who lives with him in Port Jefferson. When the couple met two years ago while they were both working at the American Museum of Natural History, Almécija was already conducting an analysis of the femur.

The couple, who enjoy the beaches and being close to water, is thrilled to be a part of the Anatomical Sciences Department at Stony Brook, which Almécija described as the “top department in the world in functional morphology and human evolution.”

As for the next step with his research, Almécija said he wants to “understand the evolutionary changes in the skeleton of fossil apes and early hominins. Connecting the dots between a chimp and a human is not going to tell us most of the story, but only the last chapter of the book.”

They both compete in triathlons. They live three blocks from each other in Poquott and work at Stony Brook University. And thanks to a chance meeting in a park near their home, they have worked together to gather information about a medical problem that is likely to become more common as the baby boomer generation ages: Alzheimer’s disease.

A professor in the departments of neurosurgery and medicine at Stony Brook Medical School, William Van Nostrand created a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. Realizing, however, that he needed someone with an expertise in behavior, he turned to his longtime collaborator John Robinson, a professor in integrative neuroscience in the psychology department at Stony Brook.

Recently, the physically fit tandem showed how the collection of a protein called amyloid beta around small capillaries in their model of Alzheimer’s results in signs of the disease, even before the typical collection of amyloid plaques in the brain resulted in the cognitive decline associated with the disease.

The study shows, Van Nostrand said, that a small amount of amyloid buildup in the blood vessels is “very potent at driving impairment.” That could be a result of inflammation or inflammatory pathways or changes in the blood flow, he speculated.

While scientists and doctors had known about the build up of amyloid proteins in the vessels and in plaques, they hadn’t compared the changes in the affected region in a side-by-side way while monitoring a deterioration in behavior.

Van Nostrand was cautious about extending the results of this study to humans. He suggested that this result might be “an earlier indicator” or even a “potential contributor” to the disease and impairment later on.
“A lot more work needs to be done in looking at how this translates into humans,” Van Nostrand said.

Additionally, the amyloid accumulation is not the whole story, as defects in tau proteins, which are responsible for stabilizing polymers that contribute to maintaining cell structure, also play a role in Alzheimer’s symptoms. Most recent work, Van Nostrand explained, suggests that amyloid is likely an important initiator of other problems.

A complex disease, Alzheimer’s can vary from patient to patient. Indeed, there are people who show no signs of any deterioration in their intellectual abilities who have “lots of pathology, but they haven’t hit that tipping point yet,” where the disease progresses from the physical stage to mental impairment, Van Nostrand said.

As for what’s next for the productive collaboration, Robinson suggested they are interested in how lifestyle factors, such as diet, exercise and lifelong learning, help or hurt the chances of developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

The two scientist/athletes recognize, Robinson said, that their own athletic pursuits may help their health over the longer term, although the connection with Alzheimer’s or any other disease is difficult to make.

“If you ask Bill and me, ‘Do you think we’ll live longer because of this?’ We’d both say, yes. That’s a bias we recognize,” Robinson said. Robinson said he has collaborated with many researchers since he started working at Stony Brook in 1994 and called the connection with Van Nostrand one of his longest standing scientific partnerships.

As for their athletic training, the duo have traveled together to triathlons in Montauk and in New Jersey. Van Nostrand often competes in longer races (like Ironman competitions).

The two sometimes compete in the same triathlon, where Robinson sees his colleague’s feet amid the churned bubbles at the beginning of a race, while Van Nostrand listens over his shoulder for Robinson during the run.

While Van Nostrand has had a successful collaboration with Robinson, he has another collaboration even closer to home. His wife, Judianne Davis, who has been working with him for over 20 years, is his lab manager.

A swimmer, Davis has an interest in her family that is unique: she enters sheepherding competitions with her border collie. Van Nostrand has two sons from a previous marriage (26-year-old Joffrey and 21-year-old Kellen). The couple has an eight-year-old daughter, Waela, who is also a swimmer.

Robinson met his wife, Alice Cialella, a group leader of the Scientific Information Systems Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, on a college track team and the couple still trains together. The Poquott pair have a 16-year-old daughter Zoe, who, naturally, runs cross country and track at Ward Melville High School.

One of Davis’ dogs helped facilitate a meeting between the two researchers. Davis was walking her dog in a park near their homes when she met Robinson.

It’s a “strong collaboration,” Van Nostrand said, and has “worked out really well.”