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Mark Collard - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • estimating fossil hominin body mass from cranial variables an assessment using ct data from modern humans of known body mass
    American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2014
    Co-Authors: Marina Elliott, Helen K Kurki, Darlene A Weston, Mark Collard
    Abstract:

    Body mass estimates are integral to a wide range of inferences in Paleoanthropology. Most techniques employ postcranial elements, but predictive equations based on cranial variables have also been developed. Three studies currently provide regression equations for estimating mass from cranial variables, but none of the equations has been tested on samples of known mass. Nor have the equations been compared to each other in terms of performance. Consequently, this study assessed the performance of existing cranial equations using computed tomography scans from a large, documented sample of modern humans of known body mass. Virtual models of the skull were reconstructed and measured using computer software, and the resulting variables were entered into three sets of published regression equations. Estimated and known body masses were then compared. For most equations, prediction errors were high and few individuals were estimated within ±20% of their known mass. Only one equation satisfied the accuracy criteria. In addition, variables that had been previously argued to be good predictors of mass in hominins, including humans, did not estimate mass reliably. These results have important implications for Paleoanthropology. In particular, they emphasize the need to develop new equations for estimating fossil hominin body mass from cranial variables. Am J Phys Anthropol 154:201–214, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Robin Dennell - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • palaeoanthropology homo sapiens in china 80 000 years ago
    Nature, 2015
    Co-Authors: Robin Dennell
    Abstract:

    A discovery in southern China of human teeth dated to more than 80,000 years old indicates that Homo sapiens was present in the region considerably earlier than had previously been suspected. See Letter p.696 A collection of 47 anatomically modern human teeth from the Fuyan Cave in Daoxian, southern China, shows that anatomically modern humans were in the region at least 80,000 years ago, and possibly as long as 120,000 years ago. That is 30,000–70,000 years earlier than in the Levant and Europe. These people were much more modern-looking than hominins in northern and central China. The discovery adds to the complexity of the human story and shows that much remains to be discovered.

  • palaeoanthropology early homo sapiens in china
    Nature, 2010
    Co-Authors: Robin Dennell
    Abstract:

    The timing of the dispersal of our species from Africa is a continuing and lively topic of debate. Evidence that modern humans existed in China more than 100,000 years ago is both equivocal and thought-provoking.

  • the paleolithic settlement of asia
    2008
    Co-Authors: Robin Dennell
    Abstract:

    1. Asia and its place in palaeoanthropology 2. The African background to the colonisation of Asia 3. The climatic background to hominin settlement in Asia before a million years ago 4. The earliest inhabitants of Southwest Asia 5. The earliest inhabitants of South and Southeast Asia, and China 6. 'Out of Africa 1' reconsidered and the earliest colonisation of Asia 7. The climatic and environmental background to hominin settlement in Asia between ca. 1 Ma and the last interglacial 8. The Middle Pleistocene archaeological record of Southwest and Central Asia 9. The Middle Pleistocene archaeological record of the Indian sub-continent 10. The archaeological record of China and Southeast Asia ca. 800-125 ka 11. Human evolution in Asia during the Middle Pleistocene.

Christopher J Norton - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • asian Paleoanthropology an introduction
    2011
    Co-Authors: Christopher J Norton, David R Braun
    Abstract:

    In the days of Ernst Haeckel, Eugene Dubois, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Roy Chapman Andrews, Asia was often considered the center where major events in human evolution occurred. Since the middle of the twentieth century, however, the focus of Paleoanthropology shifted to Africa, due (at least in part) to the many significant hominin fossils found there (Dennell 2001). It is now generally accepted that most of the major human evolutionary events during the late Neogene and the early Early Pleistocene took place in Africa, rather than Asia.

  • asian Paleoanthropology from africa to china and beyond
    2010
    Co-Authors: Christopher J Norton, David R Braun
    Abstract:

    1. Asian Paleoanthropology: An introduction Christopher J. Norton and David R. Braun 2. The colonization of "Savannahstan": issues of timing(s) and patterns of dispersal across Asia in the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene Robin W. Dennell 3. On the road to China: The environmental landscape of the Early Pleistocene in western Eurasia and its implication for the dispersal of Homo Miriam Belmaker 4. East Africa and East Asia: Comparisons of the earliest archaeological evidence David R. Braun, Christopher J. Norton, and John W.K. Harris 5. Inter-continental variation in Acheulean bifaces Ceri B. K. Shipton and Michael D. Petraglia 6. Cranial shape in Asian Homo erectus: geographic, anagenetic, and size-related variation Karen L. Baab 7. Rethinking the Palearctic-Oriental biogeographic boundary in Quaternary China Christopher J. Norton, Changzhu Jin, Yuan Wang, and Yingqi Zhang 8. The history of hominin occupation of Central Asia in review Michelle M. Glantz 9. Core-and-flake assemblages of India Parth R. Chauhan 10. South Asia as a geographic crossroad: Patterns and predictions of hominin morphology in Pleistocene India Sheela Athreya 11. Cranial morphology and variation of the earliest Indonesian hominins Yousuke Kaifu, Etty Indriati, Fachroel Aziz, Iwan Kurniawan, Teuku Jacob, and Hisao Baba 12. Central-East China - a Plio-Pleistocene dispersal corridor: The current state of evidence for hominin occupations Christopher J. Norton, Xing Gao, Wu Liu, David R. Braun, and Xiujie Wu 13. The earliest hominin occupations in the Nihewan Basin of northern China: recent progress in field investigations Chen Shen, Xing Gao, and Qi Wei 14. Peopling in the Korean Peninsula Kidong Bae 15. When were the earliest hominin migrations to the Japanese Islands? Kazuto Matsufuji

  • the current state of korean Paleoanthropology
    Journal of Human Evolution, 2000
    Co-Authors: Christopher J Norton
    Abstract:

    The hominid fossil and Paleolithic archaeology records from the Korean Peninsula are extensive, but relatively little is known about the Korean human evolutionary record outside this region. The Korean paleoanthropological record is reviewed here in light of major research issues, including the hominid fossil record, relative and chronometric dating, lithic analysis, hominid subsistence, and the presence of bone tools, art and symbolism. Some of the major conclusions drawn from this review include: (1) hominid fossils have been found in nine separate sites on the Korean Peninsula; (2) possible Homo erectus fossils are present in North Korea; (3) Ryonggok Cave, in North Korea, has exposed the remains of at least five archaic Homo sapiens individuals; (4) a possible burial of an anatomically modern Homo sapiens child, discovered in Hungsu Cave in South Korea, has been tentatively dated to roughly 40,000 years ago; (5) handaxes and cleavers have been found at a number of sites near Chongokni and they appear to date to at least 100,000 years ago; and (6) taphonomic studies are necessary for addressing issues related to determining the nature of hominid-carnivore interaction over similar resources (e.g. carcasses and shelter); and the presence/absence of Early Paleolithic bone tools, art, and symbolism in Korea.

Ian Tattersall - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • natural selection as agent of evolutionary change a view from Paleoanthropology
    2021
    Co-Authors: Ian Tattersall
    Abstract:

    Following the triumph of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis in the 1940s and 1950s, natural selection became viewed by most anglophone evolutionary biologists as the primary or even the only instrument of evolutionary change. Under the “hardened” version of the Synthesis as it was absorbed into Paleoanthropology after 1950, generation-by-generation change under selection’s guiding hand became not only a necessary but a sufficient vehicle for explaining the unilinear pattern of human evolution that was perceived under the allied notion that the human “niche” was too broad to admit the existence of more than one hominid species at any one point in time. Subsequent additions to the hominid fossil record, as well as a better understanding of evolutionary process itself, have in contrast revealed a pattern of hominid diversity over time much better explained by sorting propelled by drift and external environmental change than by species-intrinsic natural selection as classically envisaged. Indeed, selection—a mathematical certainty in any population in which more individuals are born than reproduced—very plausibly acted among extinct hominids much more as a crucial homeostatic mechanism (“stabilizing selection”), than as an agent of change.

  • the minimalist program and the origin of language a view from Paleoanthropology
    Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
    Co-Authors: Ian Tattersall
    Abstract:

    In arguing that articulate language is underpinned by an algorithmically simple neural operation, the Minimalist Program (MP) retrodicts that language emerged in a short-term event. Because spoken language leaves no physical traces, its ancient use must be inferred from archeological proxies. These strongly suggest that modern symbolic human behavior patterns - and, by extension, cognition - emerged both abruptly and late in time (subsequent to the appearance of Homo sapiens as an anatomical entity some 200 thousand years kyr ago). Because the evidence is compelling that language is an integral component of modern symbolic thought, the archeological evidence clearly supports the basic tenet of the MP. But the associated proposition, that language was externalized in an independent event that followed its initial appearance as a conduit to internal thought, is much more debatable.

  • Paleoanthropology and evolutionary theory
    History and Philosophy of The Life Sciences, 2012
    Co-Authors: Ian Tattersall
    Abstract:

    Paleoanthropologists of the first half of the twentieth century were little concerned either with evolutionary theory or with the technicalities and broader implications of zoological nomenclature. In consequence, the paleoanthropological literature of the period consisted largely of a series of descriptions accompanied by authoritative pronouncements, together with a huge excess of hominid genera and species. Given the intellectual flimsiness of the resulting paleoanthropological framework, it is hardly surprising that in 1950 the ornithologist Ernst Mayr met little resistance when he urged the new postwar generation of paleoanthropologists to accept not only the elegant reductionism of the Evolutionary Synthesis but a vast oversimplification of hominid phylogenetic history and nomenclature. Indeed, the impact of Mayr's onslaught was so great that even when developments in evolutionary biology during the last quarter of the century brought other paleontologists to the realization that much more has been involved in evolutionary histories than the simple action of natural selection within gradually transforming lineages, paleoanthropologists proved highly reluctant to follow. Even today, paleoanthropologists are struggling to reconcile an intuitive realization that the burgeoning hominid fossil record harbors a substantial diversity of species (bringing hominid evolutionary patterns into line with that of other successful mammalian families), with the desire to cram a huge variety of morphologies into an unrealistically minimalist systematic framework. As long as this theoretical ambivalence persists, our perception of events in hominid phylogeny will continue to be distorted.

  • Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, and the question of species in Paleoanthropology
    2007
    Co-Authors: Ian Tattersall
    Abstract:

    Summary - Species boundaries in the fossil record are frustratingly elusive to recognize, largely because of the untidy way in which biological diversity is “packaged”. Accepting that species are most fundamentally “individuals,” with origins, births, and extinctions, rather than essentialist collections of traits, means also accepting that neither qualitative nor quantitative assessments of morphology will provide an infallible guide to species status. Beyond a certain level of diff erentiation the problem ceases, however, and this level is comfortably exceeded by Homo neanderthalensis. What is more, the Neanderthals appear not simply to constitute a separate species lineage, but to form part of a larger endemic European clade to which such distinctive forms as the Sima de los Huesos and Steinheim fossils also belong. Th is clade has a contemporary occurrence in Europe with the larger and more cosmopolitan species Homo heidelbergensis (exemplifi ed by specimens such as those from Arago, Petralona, Kabwe, and Bodo, and probably also Dali and Jinniushan), showing that hominid history in this region is more complex than simply that of a sincle lineage evolving toward the terminal species Homo neanderthalensis.

  • handbook of Paleoanthropology
    2007
    Co-Authors: Winfried Henke, Ian Tattersall
    Abstract:

    Volume 1: Principles, Methods, and Approaches: Historical Overview of Paleoanthropological Research.- Charles Darwin, Paleoanthropology, and the Modern Synthesis (NEW).- Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus.- The Ontogeny-Phylogeny Nexus in a Nutshell: Implications for Primatology and Paleoanthropology.- Principles of Taxonomy and Classification: Current Procedures for Naming and Classifying Organisms.- Species Concepts and Speciation: Facts and Fantasies.- Quantitative Approaches to Phylogenetics.- Homology: A Philosophical and Biological Perspective.- Chronometric Methods in Paleoanthropology.- Patterns of Diversification and Extinction.- Taphonomic and Diagenetic Processes.- Contribution of Stable Light Isotopes to Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction.- The Paleoclimatic Record and Plio-Pleistocene Paleoenvironments (NEW).- Geological Background of Hominid Sites in Africa.- Paleosols.- Quaternary Geology and Paleoenvironments (NEW).- Quaternary Deposits and Paleosites.- Paleoecology: An Adequate Window on the Past?.- Zoogeography: Primate and Early Hominin Distribution and Migration Patterns.- The Paleodemography of Extinct Hominin Populations.- Hominin Paleodiets: The Contribution of Stable Isotopes.- Estimation of Basic Life History Data of Fossil Hominoids.- Genetics and Paleoanthropology (NEW).- Ancient DNA .-Modeling the Past: The Primatological Approach.- Modeling the Past: The Paleoethnological Approach .-Modeling the Past: Archaeology.- The Evolution of Speech and Language (NEW).- General Principles of Evolutionary Morphology.- Virtual Anthropology and Biomechanics (NEW).- Paleopathology: Vestiges of Pathological Conditions in Fossil Human Bone (NEW).- Microscopic Research on Fossil Human Bone (NEW).- Investigation on Extracellular Matrix Proteins in Fossil Bone: Facts and Perspectives (NEW).- Images in Paleoanthropology: Facing Our Ancestors (NEW).- Prospects and Pitfalls.- Volume 2: Primate Evolution and Human Origins: Primate Origins and Supraordinal Relationships: Morphological Evidence.- Molecular Evidence of Primate Origins and Evolution (NEW).- Fossil Record of the Primates from the Paleocene to the Oligocene (NEW).- Fossil Record of Miocene Hominoids.- The Biotic Environments of the Late Miocene Hominids.- Postcranial and Locomotor Adaptations of Hominoids.- Hominoid Cranial Diversity and Adaptation.- Dental Adaptations of African Apes.- Evolution of the Primate Brain.- Primate Life Histories.- Great Ape Social Systems.- Evolutionary Biology of Ape and Monkey Feeding and Nutrition.- The Hunting Behavior and Carnivory of Wild Chimpanzees.- Cooperation, Coalition, and Alliances.- Primate Intelligence.- Theory of Mind: A Primatological Perspective (NEW).- Volume 3: Phylogeny of Hominins: Potential Hominoid Ancestors for Hominidae.- Defining Hominidae.- Role of Environmental Stimuli in Hominid Origins.- Origins of Homininae and Putative Selection Pressures Acting on the Early Hominins.- Origin of Bipedal Locomotion.- The Evolution of the Hominid Brain (NEW).- Analyzing Hominin Phylogeny: Cladistic Approach.- Phylogenetic Relationships of Hominids: Biomolecular Approach.- The Miocene Hominoids and the Earliest Putative Hominids.- The Species and Diversity of Australopiths.- Defining the Genus Homo.- The Earliest Putative Homo Fossils.- Homo ergaster and Its Contemporaries.- Defining Homo erectus (NEW).- Later Middle Pleistocene Homo.- Neanderthals and Their Contemporaries.- Homo floresiensis (NEW).- Origin of Modern Humans.- Population Biology and Population Genetics of Pleistocene Hominins.- Dispersals of Early Humans: Adaptations, Frontiers, and New Territories (NEW).- Dentition of American Indians: Evolutionary Results and Demographic Implications Following Colonization from Siberia.- Overview of Paleolithic Archaeology.- Cultural Evolution During the Middle and Late Pleistocene in Africa and Eurasia.- Evolution of Religion (NEW).- Paleoanthropology and the Foundation of Ethics: Methodological Remarks on the Problem of Criteriology.

Curtis W Marean - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • a new research strategy for integrating studies of paleoclimate paleoenvironment and Paleoanthropology
    Evolutionary Anthropology, 2015
    Co-Authors: Curtis W Marean, E Fisher, Richard M Cowling, R J Anderson, Miryam Barmatthews, Kerstin Braun, Hayley C Cawthra, Francois Engelbrecht, Karen J Esler, Janet Franklin
    Abstract:

    Paleoanthropologists (scientists studying human origins) universally recognize the evolutionary significance of ancient climates and environments for understanding human origins.[1-6] Even those scientists working in recent phases of human evolution, when modern humans evolved, agree that hunter-gatherer adaptations are tied to the way that climate and environment shape the food and technological resource base.[7-10] The result is a long tradition of paleoanthropologists engaging with climate and environmental scientists in an effort to understand if and how hominin bio-behavioral evolution responded to climate and environmental change. Despite this unusual consonance, the anticipated rewards of this synergy are unrealized and, in our opinion, will not reach potential until there are some fundamental changes in the way the research model is constructed. Discovering the relation between climate and environmental change to human origins must be grounded in a theoretical framework and a causal understanding of the connection between climate, environment, resource patterning, behavior, and morphology, then move beyond the strict correlative research that continues to dominate the field.

  • paleodistribution modeling in archaeology and Paleoanthropology
    Quaternary Science Reviews, 2015
    Co-Authors: Janet Franklin, Alastair J Potts, E Fisher, Richard M Cowling, Curtis W Marean
    Abstract:

    Abstract Species distribution modeling (SDM) is a methodology that has been widely used in the past two decades for developing quantitative, empirical, predictive models of species–environment relationships. SDM methods could be more broadly applied than they currently are to address research questions in archaeology and Paleoanthropology. Specifically, SDM can be used to hindcast paleodistributions of species and ecological communities (paleo-SDM) for time periods and locations of prehistoric human occupation. Paleo-SDM may be a powerful tool for understanding human prehistory if used to hindcast the distributions of plants, animals and ecological communities that were key resources for prehistoric humans and to use this information to reconstruct the resource landscapes (paleoscapes) of prehistoric people. Components of the resource paleoscape include species (game animals, food plants), habitats, and geologic features and landforms associated with stone materials for tools, pigments, and so forth. We first review recent advances in SDM as it has been used to hindcast paleodistributions of plants and animals in the field of paleobiology. We then compare the paleo-SDM approach to paleoenvironmental reconstructions modeled from zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical records, widely used in archaeology and Paleoanthropology. Next, we describe the less well developed but promising approach of using paleo-SDM methods to reconstruct resource paleoscapes. We argue that paleo-SDM offers an explicitly deductive strategy that generates spatial predictions grounded in strong theoretical understandings of the relation between species, habitat distributions and environment. Because of their limited sampling of space and time, archaeobiological records may be better suited for paleo-SDM validation than directly for paleoenvironmental reconstruction. We conclude by discussing the data requirements, limitations and potential for using predictive modeling to reconstruct resource paleoscapes. There is a need for improved paleoclimate models, improved paleoclimate proxy and species paleodistribution data for model validation, attention to scale issues, and rigorous modeling methods including mechanistic models.