The First Humans: Origin and Early Evolution of the Genus Homo (Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology)
Language: English
Pages: 220
ISBN: 1402099797
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
There are some issues in human paleontology that seem to be timeless. Most deal with the origin and early evolution of our own genus – something about which we should care. Some of these issues pertain to taxonomy and systematics. How many species of Homo were there in the Pliocene and Pleistocene? How do we identify the earliest members the genus Homo? If there is more than one Plio-Pleistocene species, how do they relate to one another, and where and when did they evolve? Other issues relate to questions about body size, proportions and the functional adaptations of the locomotor skeleton. When did the human postcranial “Bauplan” evolve, and for what reasons? What behaviors (and what behavioral limitations) can be inferred from the postcranial bones that have been attributed to Homo habilis and Homo erectus? Still other issues relate to growth, development and life history strategies, and the biological and archeological evidence for diet and behavior in early Homo. It is often argued that dietary change played an important role in the origin and early evolution of our genus, with stone tools opening up scavenging and hunting opportunities that would have added meat protein to the diet of Homo. Still other issues relate to the environmental and climatic context in which this genus evolved.
Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader (Anthropology, Culture and Society)
Creativity in Human Evolution and Prehistory (Theoretical Archaeology Group)
Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture
War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage
The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (3rd Edition)
Death's Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Teaches Us About Life and Living
longevity, resilience and future of the Amazon rainforest. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, 390–401. McDougall, I., Watkins, R.T., 1988. Potassium-Argon ages of volcanic rocks from northeast of Lake Turkana, northern Kenya. Geological Magazine 125, 15–23. McHenry, H.M., 2002. Introduction to the fossil record of human ancestry. In: Hartwig W.C. (Ed), The Primate Fossil Record. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 401–406. Owen, R.B., 2002. Sedimentological
erectus was found to have had a pattern of brain growth that was more ape-like than modern human-like (but see Robson and Wood, 2008 for a discussion of the basis for these conclusions). A number of recent studies have examined development in H. heidelbergensis (Bermúdez de Castro and Rosas, 2001; Ramirez Rozzi and Bermúdez de Castro, 2004; Bermúdez de Castro et al., 2003; Macchiarelli et al., 2006), and these studies suggest that the enamel formation rates of the anterior teeth of Neanderthals
Sacher, G.A., 1975. Maturation and longevity in relation to cranial capacity in hominid evolution. In: Tuttle, R.H. (Ed.), Primate Functional Morphology and Evolution. Mouton, The Hague, pp. 418–441. Schoetensack, O., 1908. Der Unterkiefer des Homo heidelbergensis aus den Sanden von Mauer bei Heidelberg. W. Engelmann, Leipzig. Skinner, M., 1997. Dental wear in immature Late Pleistocene hominines. Journal of Archeological Science 24, 677–700. Skinner, M., Wood, B.A, 2006. The evolution of modern
evolution in the Eurasian later Pleistocene. Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Darlington, P.J., 1975. Group selection, altruism, reinforcement, and throwing in human evolution. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 72, 3748–3752. Day, M.H., 1978. Hominid postcranial material from Bed I, Olduvai Gorge. In: Isaac, G.L., McCown, E.R. (Eds), Human Origins: Louis Leakey and the East African Evidence. W.A. Benjamin, Menlo Park, pp. 363–374. Dunsworth, H., Challis,
predict humerofemoral indices for LB1 and AL288-1 9 Interlimb Proportions in Humans and Fossil Hominins 97 Table 9.2 Rank order correlations (Spearman’s rho) between humerus length (mm) and interlimb indices Humerofemoral Intermembral index index and humerus and humerus Group length (rho) length (rho) African Pygmies Andaman Islanders Khoe-san Zulu African Americans Sami Inuit Total sample 0.073 0.613* 0.746* 0.141 0.194 0.330** 0.062 0.095 0.143 0.674* 0.658* 0.196 0.223 0.244 0.019 0.095
