Background and goals
The conditions in which bipedal locomotion emerged are still unresolved. However they are all closely dependent on environment reconstructions. This project will contribute to the scientific community's understanding of the environments of the earliest Australopithecine.
Australopithecus anamensis is the earliest species of the genus and the first indisputably bipedal hominid. According to paleoecological analyses (isotopes, fauna, soils, etc) (2,3), these hominids were generalists who lived in mosaic environments , e.g. a mix of habitat types. However, the specifics of the exploitation of the environments by the hominids need to be further explored.Understanding the conditions of local environments is essential for understanding changes that occur on a global scale, such as with climate change. The same principle applies to ancient environments: the local can have an impact on the global. The concept of realized niche describes a niche that is actually occupied by a species in a particular site (4), as opposed to the full range of environmental conditions a species has the capacity to occupy. An animal might restrict its niche as a result of interspecific competition for instance. The aim of this project is to explore the niche breath and heterogeneity of Au. Anamensis.
Situated in both Kenya and Ethiopia, the Omo-Turkana basin it is of major importance in paleoanthropology, because it encompasses some of the most prolific hominid-bearing geological formations, such as the Koobi Fora and Shungura Formations (1). overall research plan involves the comparison of three different fossil collections from the Turkana Basin that are approximately 4 million years old (Ma): those of Mursi (Ethiopia), Allia Bay ...
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...Evolution, 49 (2) : 206-229. And references therein.
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When it comes to the Australopithecus Afarensis, the most famous products of the Australopithecus Afarensis being Lucy, found in Hadar Ethiopia, the Dikika “Chil...
Rapidly evolving throughout the late Pleistocene to the early to mid Holocene, hunter-gatherer-fisher societies hunted megafauna creatures in a systematic and ethical way. When one species migrates to a different ecosystem, that species is not usually recognized as a threat to other species. Survival, during the late Pleistocene and Holocene era, was one of the most important aspects to life. Any organism, regardless of size, living within their environment had to stay alive and reproduce. During these two eras, it seems...
Robbins Burling, David F. Armstrong, Ben G. Blount, Catherine A. Callaghan, Mary Lecron Foster, Barbara J. King, Sue Taylor Parker, Osamu Sakura, William C. Stokoe, Ron Wallace, Joel Wallman, A. Whiten, Sherman Wilcox and Thomas Wynn. Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), pp. 25-53
Kim Oakberg Allegretto. "The Moatfield ossuary: isotopic dietary analysis of an Iroquoian community, using dental tissue." Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 22. (2003): 245-261. Web. 14 Nov. 2013. .
Discoveries relating to the human lineage are extremely exciting and often baffling. This is the case with the recent discovery of what seems to be the oldest member of the human family. A skull found in northern Chad in 2001, has been deemed the earliest relative to the human ever found. Nicknamed Toumai, and discovered by Michel Brunet and his paleontology team, this new category of human has been given the scientific name, Sahelanthropus tchaensis. What makes this skull so definitive is the fact that it dates back approximately 6-7 million years in the earth’s history (Whitfield 2002). Since the discovery there have been anthropologists and paleontologists that have disputed the hominid status of Toumai (Evans 2002), but many, especially those involved in the finding of the skull still believe that they have the oldest relative to the human race we know today.
Australopithecus afarensis existed between 3.9 and 3.0 million years ago. The distinctive characteristics of A. afarensis were: a low forehead, a bony ridge over the eyes, a flat nose, no chin, more humanlike teeth, pelvis and leg bones resembled those of modern man. Females were smaller than males. Their sexual dimorphism was males:females; 1.5. A. afarensis was not as sexually dimorphic as gorillas, but more sexually dimorphic than humans or chimpanzees. A lot of scientists think that Australopithecus afarensis was partially adapted to climbing the trees, because the fingers and toe bones of the species were curved and longer than the ones of the modern human.
2011 Revisiting Water and Hominun Evolution. In Was Man More Aquatic in the Past? Fifty
American Philosophical Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1984): 227-36.
Nanda, S and Warms, R.L. (2011). Cultural Anthropology, Tenth Edition. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. ISBN – 13:978-0-495-81083-4.
Schultz, Emily A. & Lavenda, Robert H. 2005, Cultural Anthropology, 6th edn, Oxford University Press, New York, Chapter 3: Fieldwork.
Paleolithic age presents the era when key human adaptations evolved in response to a variety of environmental changes experienced at the time. This period of human evolution coincided with change within the surrounding of man. Such included cooling, drying and unpredictable climatic patterns over the time. This increased amount of variability in environmental conditions raised the level of uncertainty and instability in their respective terms of survival, necessitated the man to adopt new habits to increase adaptability to the new and changing surroundings. The evolved structures and behaviors led to specialization to enable coping with changing and unpredictable conditions.
the story in the Phillip Whitten and David E. K. Hunter anthropology book of No
In 1958, their population was approximately 40,000. The pursuant gatherers of Mbuti people are separated into several subgroups. They lived within their individual region, where they have their own languages and engage in their hunting practices. Each Mbuti subgroup uses a language of a nearest person and they do not have a text method. Their sizes are usually small and average; they also have naturally brown skin and churlish hairs. Mbuti persons exist in bands of 15 to 60. They live in hot, sticky and plentiful precipitation forest which is sprinkled with lakes and rivers. It also has a wealthy variety of flowers and animals. The Mbuti have exte...
Ember, Carol R., Melvin Ember, and Peter N. Peregrine. Anthropology. Thirteenth ed. Boston, MA: Prentice Hall, 2011. Print.
This essay discusses the evolution of amphibians. Amphibians are classified into three orders (anura, caudata and apoda) and are in the superclass tetrapoda (Kolesova, et el, 2007). The Apoda is comprised of organisms with no legs, and these organisms normally live in barrows. Tretrapods are comprised of vertebrates with four limbs; and examples of tetrapods are reptiles and amphibians (Kolesova, et el, 2007). Tetrapods were the earliest vertebrates to be able to walk on land and that was during the Devonian period about 360-370 million years ago (Kolesova, et el, 2007). Before the existence of amphibians almost all vertebrates lived in water (Kolesova, et el, 2007).