- I am a paleoanthropologist who studies the evolution of human diets, especially the zooarchaeology and taphonomy of E... moreI am a paleoanthropologist who studies the evolution of human diets, especially the zooarchaeology and taphonomy of Early Stone Age hominin carnivory. I also do research on evolution education.edit
Skeletal remains and historical accounts indicate that grey whales ( Eschrichtius robustus ) existed in the North Atlantic Ocean from the Pleistocene into the seventeenth century. Fossil and sub-fossil occurrences in this basin are rare,... more
Skeletal remains and historical accounts indicate that grey whales ( Eschrichtius robustus ) existed in the North Atlantic Ocean from the Pleistocene into the seventeenth century. Fossil and sub-fossil occurrences in this basin are rare, distributed from the east coast of the United States to Iceland and Europe. Here, we report an incomplete skeleton of a Holocene grey whale from Pender County, North Carolina, USA. This specimen represents a physically immature individual and is the most complete North Atlantic grey whale specimen reported to date. It comprises 42 cranial and postcranial elements, including the cranium, parts of the rostrum, both mandibles, both scapulae, humeri, radii and ulnae, most of the vertebral column anterior to the lumbar region and numerous ribs. Its provenance near the inlet of a large estuary is consistent with previous findings from the southeastern USA and parallels the species' habitat use in Baja California breeding and calving grounds in the Nor...
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The year 2023 was another exciting year for research in human evolution. Many of the top stories this year tell us more about our early ancestors’ and relatives’ diet, tool use, and the environment in which they lived. Others provide... more
The year 2023 was another exciting year for research in human evolution. Many of the top stories this year tell us more about our early ancestors’ and relatives’ diet, tool use, and the environment in which they lived. Others provide evidence for behaviors: hunting, making jewelry, and interacting with each other in previously unexplored ways. Whether by taking a new look at previously excavated fossils or uncovering new evidence altogether, all of these stories expand the breadth of knowledge about our shared ancient past and bring to light more information about what it means to be human.
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Carcass butchery is a culturally mediated behavior that reflects the technological, social, economic, and ecological factors that influence human diet and foodways. Butchery behavior can thus reveal a great deal about the lives of past... more
Carcass butchery is a culturally mediated behavior that reflects the technological, social, economic, and ecological factors that influence human diet and foodways. Butchery behavior can thus reveal a great deal about the lives of past peoples. Actualism provides a critical link between the dynamics of carcass butchery and the static remains of the archaeological record. This study provides an overview of actualistic butchery studies in zooarchaeology over the past century and a half. A systematic search through the English literature identified a total of 236 such studies published between 1860 and 2021. Thematic analysis revealed several trends. The most common themes have been the identification of signature criteria for different taphonomic effectors, the use of butchery traces to characterize the nature of human intervention with carcasses, and the documentation of butchery in an ethnoarchaeological context. Methodologically, the bulk of this research has focused on the butchery of large bovids with lithic implements, largely as a means to explore Paleolithic subsistence. Actualistic approaches will benefit from (1) additional work with non-bovid taxa and with other tool raw materials, (2) applications to broader anthropological issues, and (3) a concerted effort to replicate existing studies and design future studies with replication in mind.
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The Dobe !Kung were a group of foragers living in northern Botswana in the Kalahari Desert. In the second half of the twentieth century, their butchery actions on animal prey were recorded (1968-1975) and their abandoned camps from... more
The Dobe !Kung were a group of foragers living in northern Botswana in the Kalahari Desert. In the second half of the twentieth century, their butchery actions on animal prey were recorded (1968-1975) and their abandoned camps from 1944-1976 were excavated to retrieve faunal remains from butchered prey animals. Here we test the hypothesis that bone surface modifications on these excavated faunal remains accurately reflect these butchery observations. We find that despite a few exceptions, the observed bone surface modifications follow the expectations derived from observations of butchery of different sized animals. This supports the idea that past butchery actions, based on the location and presence of bone surface modifications on modern bones, can be confidently linked to past butchery behaviours. We also suggest that bone surface modifications can provide information about past hunter-gatherer processing behaviours, cooking styles, and use of hides.
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Zooarchaeology is the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. Africa has the longest archaeological record in the world, potentially extending into the Pliocene and spanning the entire Pleistocene epoch. However, in comparison to... more
Zooarchaeology is the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. Africa has the longest archaeological record in the world, potentially extending into the Pliocene and spanning the entire Pleistocene epoch. However, in comparison to other regions of Eurasia, this extended chronology in Africa has not translated to larger numbers of identified sites, more even distribution of sites, or more abundant faunal data. Here, we describe the methods commonly used by zooarchaeologists to analyze faunal assemblages, followed by a summary of general faunal taxonomic patterns across the continent. We then compile data from all Pleistocene zooarchaeological assemblages in Africa for which there is a published record of the site in a peer-reviewed journal or book as of the end of 2020. This facilitates a region-by-region discussion of trends in readily available zooarchaeological data and evaluation of their potential to inform about past environments and hominin interactions with faunal communities. We note that faunal remains exclusively recovered from surface contexts are not included as it is not possible to ascertain their chronological coherence or certainty of association.The reviewed faunal assemblages (N = 409) display a great deal of variability in composition, size, and distribution patterns, largely driven by a combination of depositional factors (in which fossils are likely to preserve in stable depositional settings) and research emphasis (in which archaeologists have worked most intensively versus those less explored). This variability is also tied to the individual regional histories of archaeological infrastructure development, which support repositories and training centers in the form of museums and universities. Most of the faunal data come from eastern, southern, and northern Africa and the Horn, which have rich assemblages from both open-air and cave/rock shelter sites that span the Pleistocene. In contrast, most archaeofaunas from other regions derive from sheltered sites that emphasize the preservation of the Late Pleistocene part of the record and tend to comprise many more fragments. In spite of significant geographic and chronological bias, research on Pleistocene faunal assemblages from Africa has made substantial contributions to understanding early human–animal interactions, developing zooarchaeological methods, and reconstructing ancient environments. There is significant potential for future research to continue doing so, both by revisiting the existing assemblages with new methods and by excavating new ones.
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The peopling of the Americas and human interaction with the Pleistocene megafauna in South America remain hotly debated. The Santa Elina rock shelter in Central Brazil shows evidence of successive human settlements from around the last... more
The peopling of the Americas and human interaction with the Pleistocene megafauna in South America remain hotly debated. The Santa Elina rock shelter in Central Brazil shows evidence of successive human settlements from around the last glacial maximum (LGM) to the Early Holocene. Two Pleistocene archaeological layers include rich lithic industry associated with remains of the extinct giant ground sloth Glossotherium phoenesis. The remains include thousands of osteoderms (i.e. dermal bones), three of which were human-modified. In this study, we perform a traceological analysis of these artefacts by optical microscopy, non-destructive scanning electron microscopy, UV/visible photoluminescence and synchrotron-based microtomography. We also describe the spatial association between the giant sloth bone remains and stone tools and provide a Bayesian age model that confirms the timing of this association in two time horizons of the Pleistocene in Santa Elina. The conclusion from our traceological study is that the three giant sloth osteoderms were intentionally modified into artefacts before fossilization of the bones. This provides additional evidence for the contemporaneity of humans and megafauna, and for the human manufacturing of personal artefacts on bone remains of ground sloths, around the LGM in Central Brazil.
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Identification of butchery marks on hominin fossils from the early Pleistocene is rare. Our taphonomic investigation of published hominin fossils from the Turkana region of Kenya revealed likely cut marks on KNM-ER 741, a ~ 1.45 Ma... more
Identification of butchery marks on hominin fossils from the early Pleistocene is rare. Our taphonomic investigation of published hominin fossils from the Turkana region of Kenya revealed likely cut marks on KNM-ER 741, a ~ 1.45 Ma proximal hominin left tibia shaft found in the Okote Member of the Koobi Fora Formation. An impression of the marks was created with dental molding material and scanned with a Nanovea white-light confocal profilometer, and the resulting 3-D models were measured and compared with an actualistic database of 898 individual tooth, butchery, and trample marks created through controlled experiments. This comparison confirms the presence of multiple ancient cut marks that are consistent with those produced experimentally. These are to our knowledge the first (and to date only) cut marks identified on an early Pleistocene postcranial hominin fossil.
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Seasonality shapes environments by driving vegetation patterns and faunal community composition, and identifying seasonality patterns in the past can provide unique insight into paleoenvironments and how they changed over time. Many... more
Seasonality shapes environments by driving vegetation patterns and faunal community composition, and identifying seasonality patterns in the past can provide unique insight into paleoenvironments and how they changed over time. Many environmental proxies operate on too large a time scale to glean data about intra-annual seasonality. However, serial enamel isotope samples from the teeth of high-crowned ungulates show promise for providing this temporal resolution of data. Interpreting these data remains a challenge due to the complexity of factors related to animal physiology and the isotopic values of environmental inputs. This study seeks to establish a method for interpreting intra-tooth isotopic change in modern equid teeth as a signal of seasonality by applying a linear mixed effect model to the isotope data to detect periodicity in serial enamel isotope values. Using a modern assemblage of zebra (Equus quagga) from Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, where long-term climate data has been collected, allows us to compare known climatic seasonality patterns to periodicity in the zebra tooth enamel isotopes. The results of the linear mixed effect modeling, in tandem with the climate data from Ol Pejeta, demonstrate the impact high precipitation variability can have on an environment. While our isotope results point towards measured precipitation seasonality patterns at Ol Pejeta, noise in our data and the variation identified by the models illustrate the challenges of working with serial enamel isotope data. Future refinement and application of this model will allow us to better characterize seasonality in both modern and fossil enamel datasets.
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While biological anthropology intersects with science education via numerous topics, and many practicing biological anthropologists are college or university faculty members, studies of biological anthropology pedagogical best practices... more
While biological anthropology intersects with science education via numerous topics, and many practicing biological anthropologists are college or university faculty members, studies of biological anthropology pedagogical best practices at the undergraduate level are scarce. The purpose of this chapter is to (1) outline obstacles and opportunities in teaching two content areas in biological anthropology perceived as "controversial": human evolution and human variation (sometimes understood as "race") and (2) present evidence-based recommendations for pedagogical best practices and approaches that US college and university faculty members can use when teaching these topics in undergraduate classrooms.
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This year—2022—has been another exciting year for research in human evolution. With many projects around the world proceeding despite the COVID pandemic, there were multiple exciting discoveries and breakthroughs in a variety of fields.... more
This year—2022—has been another exciting year for research in human evolution. With many projects around the world proceeding despite the COVID pandemic, there were multiple exciting discoveries and breakthroughs in a variety of fields. From telling us more about our food, our health, our close relatives and ancestors, and even our animal friends, these new discoveries shed more light on what it means to be human.
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Skeletal remains and historical accounts indicate that grey whales (Eschrichtius robustus) existed in the North Atlantic Ocean from the Pleistocene into the seventeenth century. Fossil and sub-fossil occurrences in this basin are rare,... more
Skeletal remains and historical accounts indicate that grey whales (Eschrichtius robustus) existed in the North Atlantic Ocean from the Pleistocene into the seventeenth century. Fossil and sub-fossil occurrences in this basin are rare, distributed from the east coast of the United States to Iceland and Europe. Here, we report an incomplete skeleton of a Holocene grey whale from Pender County, North Carolina, USA. This specimen represents a physically immature individual and is the most complete North Atlantic grey whale specimen reported to date. It comprises 42 cranial and postcranial elements, including the cranium, parts of the rostrum, both mandibles, both scapulae, humeri, radii and ulnae, most of the vertebral column anterior to the lumbar region and numerous ribs. Its provenance near the inlet of a large estuary is consistent with previous findings from the southeastern USA and parallels the species’ habitat use in Baja California breeding and calving grounds in the North Pacific Ocean. Radiocarbon dating indicates an age of827 ± 172 years before present. Cut marks on multiple skeletal elements indicate that the animal was butchered, suggesting some level of human exploitation of the species in the southeastern USA in the twelfth century, approximately 500 years prior to its extirpation in the North Atlantic.
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This year – 2021 – has been a year of progress in overcoming the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on human evolution research. With some research projects around the world back up and running, we wanted to highlight new and exciting... more
This year – 2021 – has been a year of progress in overcoming the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on human evolution research. With some research projects around the world back up and running, we wanted to highlight new and exciting discoveries from thirteen different countries on five different continents! Human evolution is the study of what links us all together, and we hope you enjoy these stories we picked to highlight the geographic and cultural diversity of human evolution research – as well as the different types of evidence for human evolution: fossils, archaeology, genetics, and even footprints!
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Review of: A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent
of Man Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution. Edited by
Jeremy DeSilva. 2021. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
(ISBN 9780691191140). 288 pages. Hardcover $27.95
of Man Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution. Edited by
Jeremy DeSilva. 2021. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
(ISBN 9780691191140). 288 pages. Hardcover $27.95
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2020 has been… quite the year! The pandemic changed a lot about the world including the ways in which paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, and other fieldwork-based researchers operate. This year, we want to highlight the different lines... more
2020 has been… quite the year! The pandemic changed a lot about the world including the ways in which paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, and other fieldwork-based researchers operate. This year, we want to highlight the different lines of evidence that are used in human origins research-so we've organized our nine highlighted discoveries into four broader "lines of evidence" categories. Since many scientific articles are years in the making, a lot of exciting discoveries were still revealed in 2020!
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The ability to distinguish between the taphonomic patterns inflicted by different carnivore taxa in the fossil record is currently underdeveloped. Previous efforts to identify taxon-specific taphonomic damage to prey bones inflicted by... more
The ability to distinguish between the taphonomic patterns inflicted by different carnivore taxa in the fossil record is currently underdeveloped. Previous efforts to identify taxon-specific taphonomic damage to prey bones inflicted by larger felids have largely focused on tooth marks. Recent work, however, which considers patterns of chewing damage are only beginning to yield methods that can consistently distinguish between species, or even families, of large predators. Here we present a new low-cost, low-tech, semi-quantitative method for coding carnivore-inflicted chewing damage patterns using a basic 5-stage scale (0= no damage, 1 = tooth marks only, 2 = minimal chewing damage, 3 = moderate chewing damage, 4 = severe chewing damage, fragmentation, or destruction), including a photographic guide to different levels of bone damage inflicted on different skeletal elements and portions. An independent test of this method by three experienced taphonomic analysts indicates that this method is easy to use and results in consistent data across analysts. We also apply this method to document and describe the intensity of damage that free-ranging African lions inflicted on a sample of zebra bones. This method can be used in conjunction with efforts to distinguish taxon-specific tooth mark shapes or patterns to more confidently infer the identity of different predators based on their chewing damage.
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fossil hominin footprints preserve data on a remarkably short time scale compared to most other fossil evidence, offering snapshots of organisms in their immediate ecological and behavioral contexts. Here, we report on our excavations and... more
fossil hominin footprints preserve data on a remarkably short time scale compared to most other fossil evidence, offering snapshots of organisms in their immediate ecological and behavioral contexts. Here, we report on our excavations and analyses of more than 400 Late Pleistocene human footprints from engare Sero, tanzania. the site represents the largest assemblage of footprints currently known from the human fossil record in Africa. Speed estimates show that the trackways reflect both walking and running behaviors. estimates of group composition suggest that these footprints were made by a mixed-sex and mixed-age group, but one that consisted of mostly adult females. One group of similarly-oriented trackways was attributed to 14 adult females who walked together at the same pace, with only two adult males and one juvenile accompanying them. In the context of modern ethnographic data, we suggest that these trackways may capture a unique snapshot of cooperative and sexually divided foraging behavior in Late pleistocene humans. Footprints are often ephemeral but when preserved in the geological record, these ichnofossils can provide unique snapshots of the lives of ancient organisms. Fossil tracks are generated and preserved on far shorter time scales than other common forms of fossil data (e.g., skeletal fossils), leading to a distinct set of hypotheses that can be developed and tested with this form of evidence. In paleoanthropology, researchers have analyzed fossil hominin footprints through a variety of analytical approaches that address a wide range of research questions (many are reviewed by Bennett and Morse 1). Perhaps most common are analyses that derive inferences regarding hominin body size and size variation 2-4 , or foot anatomy, foot function and/or locomotion 4-17. However, since footprint assemblages typically form on short time scales, these data can also be used to infer group composition and other behaviors of individuals who must have lived on the same landscape at the same time 16,18-23. Here, we report on Late Pleistocene human footprints discovered at Engare Sero, Tanzania. While our previous publications focused on the geological context and preservation of this site 24,25 , we explore the paleoanthro-pological implications of this remarkable assemblage of more than 400 human footprints. This includes inferences regarding the body sizes, locomotor behaviors, and composition of the group of humans who generated these tracks.
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Fossil hominin footprints preserve data on a remarkably short time scale compared to most other fossil evidence, offering snapshots of organisms in their immediate ecological and behavioral contexts. Here, we report on our excavations and... more
Fossil hominin footprints preserve data on a remarkably short time scale compared to most other fossil evidence, offering snapshots of organisms in their immediate ecological and behavioral contexts. Here, we report on our excavations and analyses of more than 400 Late Pleistocene human footprints from Engare Sero, Tanzania. The site represents the largest assemblage of footprints currently known from the human fossil record in Africa. Speed estimates show that the trackways reflect both walking and running behaviors. estimates of group composition suggest that these footprints were made by a mixed-sex and mixed-age group, but one that consisted of mostly adult females. One group of similarly-oriented trackways was attributed to 14 adult females who walked together at the same pace, with only two adult males and one juvenile accompanying them. In the context of modern ethnographic data, we suggest that these trackways may capture a unique snapshot of cooperative and sexually divided foraging behavior in Late Pleistocene humans.
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Objectives: To describe and interpret previously unreported marks on the dry cranium of an adult chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) from Côte d'Ivoire at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (USNM 450071). Materials and... more
Objectives: To describe and interpret previously unreported marks on the dry cranium of an adult chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) from Côte d'Ivoire at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (USNM 450071). Materials and Methods: All marks on the cranium were documented and assessed through physical examination of the specimen, photography, micro-computed tomog-raphy (micro-CT), and 3D laser scanning. Pits and punctures were measured with digital calipers for comparison with published carnivore tooth mark measurements. Results: The cranium shows perimortem or postmortem damage to the temporal, occipital, and maxillary regions that is not recent. Size and color variation in the marks suggest two damage events, possibly involving chewing by different animals, at least one of which was a large-bodied mammal. The 22 tooth pits and punctures (0.89-8.75 mm in maximum length and 0.88-6.63 mm in breadth) overlap in size with those inflicted by wild leopards, the most significant predators of common chimpanzees due to their largely overlapping ecological distributions. Conclusions: Based on qualitative and quantitative evidence, we conclude that leopards are the most likely cause of the most prominent marks on the cranium. However , we cannot rule out the additional possibility of other chimpanzees, although there are no published studies of chimpanzee tooth marks for direct comparison. This study is the most extensive documentation to date of a modern adult chimpanzee skull exhibiting tooth marks by a large mammal, thus providing new evidence to help identify and interpret other events of predation and scavenging of large-bodied apes in the modern and fossil records.
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Questions about the timing, frequency, resource yield, and behavioral and biological implications of large animal carcass acquisition by early hominins have been a part of the "hunting-scavenging debate" for decades. This article presents... more
Questions about the timing, frequency, resource yield, and behavioral and biological implications of large animal carcass acquisition by early hominins have been a part of the "hunting-scavenging debate" for decades. This article presents a brief outline of this debate, reviews the zooarchaeological and modern ecological evidence for a possible scavenging niche among the earliest animal tissue-consuming hominins (pre-2.0 Ma), revisits some of the questions that this debate has generated, and outlines some ways to explore answers to those questions with evidence from the archaeological record.
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Paranthropus boisei was first described in 1959 based on fossils from the Olduvai Gorge and now includes many fossils from Ethiopia to Malawi. Knowledge about its postcranial anatomy has remained elusive because, until recently, no... more
Paranthropus boisei was first described in 1959 based on fossils from the Olduvai Gorge and now includes many fossils from Ethiopia to Malawi. Knowledge about its postcranial anatomy has remained elusive because, until recently, no postcranial remains could be reliably attributed to this taxon. Here, we report the first associated hand and upper limb skeleton (KNM-ER 47000) of P. boisei from 1.51 to 1.53 Ma sediments at Ileret, Kenya. While the fossils show a combination of primitive and derived traits, the overall anatomy is characterized by primitive traits that resemble those found in Australopithecus, including an oblique scapular spine, relatively long and curved ulna, lack of third metacarpal styloid process, gracile thumb metacarpal, and curved manual phalanges. Very thick cortical bone throughout the upper limb shows that P. boisei had great upper limb strength, supporting hypotheses that this species spent time climbing trees, although probably to a lesser extent than earlier australopiths. Hand anatomy shows that P. boisei, like earlier australopiths, was capable of the manual dexterity needed to create and use stone tools, but lacked the robust thumb of Homo erectus, which arguably reflects adaptations to the intensification of precision grips and tool use. KNM-ER 47000 provides conclusive evidence that early Pleistocene hominins diverged in postcranial and craniodental anatomy, supporting hypotheses of competitive displacement among these contemporaneous hominins.
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It almost seems like every year is a new, incredible year for human evolution discoveries! There was no exception in 2019, keeping human evolution researchers (and students) on their toes. This year’s blog post is going to focus on... more
It almost seems like every year is a new, incredible year for human evolution discoveries! There was no exception in 2019, keeping human evolution researchers (and students) on their toes. This year’s blog post is going to focus on discoveries that give us a new twist on old ideas – from previously unknown hominin species to other evidence that sheds new light on old questions. If you want to learn more about our favorite discoveries from previous years, read our 2017 and 2018 blog posts.
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The religious or cultural objections by many people to the teaching of evolution in high school biology classrooms can impact both students’ willingness to explore a scientific understanding of evolutionary theory and teachers’... more
The religious or cultural objections by many people to the teaching of evolution in high school biology classrooms can impact both students’ willingness to explore a scientific understanding of evolutionary theory and teachers’ willingness to provide sound instruction on the topic. Pedagogical approaches designed to address this tension in the public or private US high school classroom during regular biology classroom instruction on evolution are needed. We developed a Cultural and Religious Sensitivity (CRS) Teaching Strategies Resource to aid teachers in acknowledging students’ religious and cultural concerns about evolution, introducing the variety of possible relationships between science and religion, and focusing on the nature of science. The resource provides both background information for the teacher and activities to engage students in two 50–75 min directed classroom discussions. The CRS resource is part of a designed-based study, the Teaching Evolution through Human Examples (TEtHE) project that created and field tested four curriculum units for advanced placement high school biology classes that use human examples to teach evolution (Pobiner et al. Evol Educ Outreach. 2018;11:3 2018). Here we describe the design of the CRS resource and qualitative results of student focus groups that explore the extent to which the CRS resource activities helped to create a supportive classroom environment as well as more generally what benefits, if any, students derived from participating in these activities. Focus groups were conducted with students from five classes of four different teachers in both public and private US high schools. Focus group transcripts were analyzed to identify common themes expressed in relation to the students’ experience of one of the two CRS activities. Benefits of participating in these activities noted by students included reduced tension around the topic of evolution, a recognition that evolution is not necessarily in conflict with religious belief, and an increased understanding of the cultural context of modern and historical views about evolution. The themes identified through qualitative analyses of focus group transcripts support the conclusion that acknowledging students’ concerns about evolution is a promising pedagogical approach to teaching evolution in conjunction with lessons designed to teach the content of evolutionary theory. The approach merits further research with general introductory high school biology classes.
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Since its inception, the East African Association for Palaeoanthropology and Palaeontology has brought together scholars and researchers who conduct research in palaeoanthropology, archaeology and palaeontology, creating a balanced forum... more
Since its inception, the East African Association for Palaeoanthropology and Palaeontology has brought together scholars and researchers who conduct research in palaeoanthropology, archaeology and palaeontology, creating a balanced forum for the study of human heritage in Africa.
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Researchers in various contexts have long struggled with an apparent disconnect between an individual's level of understanding of biological evolution and their acceptance of it as an explanation for the history and diversity of life.... more
Researchers in various contexts have long struggled with an apparent disconnect between an individual's level of understanding of biological evolution and their acceptance of it as an explanation for the history and diversity of life. Here, we discuss the main factors associated with acceptance of evolution and chart a path forward for evolution education research.
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What does it mean to be human? What makes us unique among all other organisms on Earth? Is it cooperation? Conflict? Creativity? Cognition? There happens to be one anatomical feature that distinguishes modern humans (Homo sapiens) from... more
What does it mean to be human? What makes us unique among all other organisms on Earth? Is it cooperation? Conflict? Creativity? Cognition? There happens to be one anatomical feature that distinguishes modern humans (Homo sapiens) from every other living and extinct animal: our bony chin! But does a feature of our jaws have actual meaning for our humanity? We want to talk about the top six discoveries of 2018, all from the last 500,000 years of human evolution, that give us more insight into what it means to be human. If you want to learn more about our favorite discoveries from last year, read our 2017 blog post!
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Background: While recent research indicates that using human examples can be an engaging way to teach core evolutionary concepts such as natural selection and phylogenetic thinking, teachers still face potential conflicts and challenges... more
Background: While recent research indicates that using human examples can be an engaging way to teach core evolutionary concepts such as natural selection and phylogenetic thinking, teachers still face potential conflicts and challenges that arise from cultural barriers to teaching and learning about evolution. The "Teaching Evolution through Human Examples" (TEtHE) project developed (1) a set of four curriculum mini-units for advanced placement (A.P.) biology that use human examples to teach evolutionary principles (Adaptation to Altitude, Evolution of Human Skin Color, Malaria, and What Does It Mean To Be Human?), and (2) a cultural and religious sensitivity (CRS) teaching strategies resource that includes background materials and two in-class activities to help teachers create a classroom environment to increase student willingness to engage the topic. Methods: This paper reports on the development and field test of the TEtHE materials in A.P. biology classes in 10 schools in 8 states during the 2012-2013 school year using a design-based research framework (cf. Anderson and Shattuck in Educ Res 41:16-25, 2012). We chose A.P. classrooms to study the potential impacts of the materials in a "best case scenario" and analyzed data about understanding and acceptance of evolution from pre-post assessments in the 10 classrooms separately to mitigate potential validity concerns arising from the design (Anderson and Shat-tuck in Educ Res 41:16-25, 2012; Shadish et al. in Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2002). These data were treated as a secondary source of formative data to add additional perspective to teacher self-reports, observations, student and teacher questionnaires, teacher interviews, and student focus groups. Results: Results indicate that the use of the three curriculum mini-units which focus on natural selection and the CRS classroom activities generally increased A.P. biology students' understanding and acceptance of evolution. Students whose teachers used one of the CRS activities showed generally larger increases in understanding of evolution than those whose teachers did not use one of the CRS activities. Conclusions: Although the utility of using human examples to teach evolution in college-level classes has been demonstrated in a few previous studies, this is the first national project of which we are aware to systematically explore the effect of a similar approach in high school biology classes. While we recognize that the results may be mitigated by the limitations of design-based research, particularly the absence of a comparison or control group, the general effectiveness of this approach suggested by qualitative and quantitative data in increasing student understanding and acceptance of evolution suggests that using human examples and explicitly creating a classroom environment to help students engage the topic of evolution are worth considering for further development and more robust testing.
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ntelligent design (ID) is a nonscientific idea that holds certain features of the universe and living things as too complex to have arisen through undirected, chance processes such as evolution by natural selection. Instead, proponents... more
ntelligent design (ID) is a nonscientific idea that holds certain features of the universe and living things as too complex to have arisen through undirected, chance processes such as evolution by natural selection. Instead, proponents claim these features are evidence of design in nature and best explained by an unspecified intelligent cause or agent. The modern ID movement, which seeks to include ID content in science classrooms, distances itself from its clear Christian creationist roots by deliberately not referencing a supernatural designer.
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We may never know the intricate details of early human diets-and sometimes, different lines of evidence can seem contradictory. Happy National Fossil Day! Fossils are among the most thrill-inducing traces of the past to discover. These... more
We may never know the intricate details of early human diets-and sometimes, different lines of evidence can seem contradictory. Happy National Fossil Day! Fossils are among the most thrill-inducing traces of the past to discover. These preserved remains of once-living organisms, usually more than 10,000 years old, are a primary source of evidence about the past. For a paleoanthropologist like me who is interested in reconstructing the diets of ancient humans, fossils are invaluable clues to that help piece together a puzzle that is inevitably incomplete. I will outline four kinds of fossil-based techniques that use different kinds of evidence to shed on the diets of various early human species-some of which yielded surprising and seemingly contradictory results.
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Cut marks on fossils from Plio-Pleistocene faunal assemblages can elucidate the timing and nature of hominin procurement of animal tissues. Although butchery experiments have great potential to enhance our ability to understand hominin... more
Cut marks on fossils from Plio-Pleistocene faunal assemblages can elucidate the timing and nature of hominin procurement of animal tissues. Although butchery experiments have great potential to enhance our ability to understand hominin butch-ery behaviours, studies that model variation in the timing of access to carcasses and butcher expertise have either yielded conflicting results or have not yet been under-taken. We conducted butchery experiments on 8 pig limbs with replicated Oldowan flake tools that varied the amount of flesh removed prior to butchery (simulating early or late carcass access) and butcher expertise. These experiments investigated the effects of these variables on resultant cut mark count, length, and number of tool strokes. The relationship between the number of tool strokes as a measure of butch-ery intensity and the number of cut marks produced was also explored. We also compared the length of experimental cut marks with those on 1.5-million-year-old fossil bones from Koobi Fora, Kenya. Although the bones that were partially defleshed prior to butchery had a higher number and longer cut marks on average than fleshed bones, and the expert butcher created fewer and shorter cut marks than the novice butcher, none of these relationships were statistically significant. We found no relationship between the number of tool strokes and the amount of flesh removed prior to butch-ery or the number of cut marks produced during butchery, although the expert butcher used fewer tool strokes. Although not statistically significant, the length of cut marks created by the novice butcher is much more variable than those created by the expert butcher and the fossil cut marks, and fossil cut marks are much shorter than those created by both modern butchers. More work needs to be undertaken to identify cut mark attributes that may be influenced by behavioural or ecological variables that can be measured and manipulated during butchery experiments. KE Y WOR D S actualistic study, butcher expertise, butchery, carcass, cut marks, hominin, Plio-Pleistocene, tool strokes 1 | I NT RO D UCTI O N Studies of butchery-marked faunal assemblages from African Plio-Pleistocene sites have provided insight into the carcass acquisition and processing practices of the earliest meat and marrow-eating hominins. Evidence for at least occasional hominin butchery of larger mammal carcasses dates back to at least 2.5-2.6 Ma at Gona and Bouri, Ethiopia (de Heinzelin et al., 1999; Domínguez-Rodrigo,
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Questions about our origin as a species are universal and compelling. Evolution-and in particular human evolution is a subject that generates intense interest across the world, evidenced by the fact that fossil and DNA discoveries grace... more
Questions about our origin as a species are universal and compelling. Evolution-and in particular human evolution is a subject that generates intense interest across the world, evidenced by the fact that fossil and DNA discoveries grace the covers of major science journals and magazines as well as other popular print and online media. However, virtually all national polls indicate that the majority of Americans strongly reject biological evolution as a fact-based, well-tested, and robust understanding of the history of life. In the popular mind, no topic in all of science is more contentious or polarizing than evolution and media sources often only serve to magnify this polarization by covering challenges to the teaching of evolution. In the realm of teaching, debates about evolution have shaped textbooks , curricula, standards, and policy. Challenges to accepting and understanding evolution include mistrust and denial of science, cognitive obstacles and misconceptions, language and terminology, and a religious worldview, among others. Teachers, who are on the front lines of these challenges, must be armed with the tools and techniques to teach evolution in formal education settings across grades K-16 in a straightforward, thorough, and sensitive way. Despite the potentially controversial topic of human evolution, growing research is demonstrating that a peda-gogical focus on human examples is an effective and engaging way to teach core concepts of evolutionary biology.
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For decades, the 'hunting-scavenging debate' has been an important research focus in Plio-Pleistocene hominin behavioral ecology. Here I present new data on potential scavenging opportunities from fresh carnivore kills on a conservancy in... more
For decades, the 'hunting-scavenging debate' has been an important research focus in Plio-Pleistocene hominin behavioral ecology. Here I present new data on potential scavenging opportunities from fresh carnivore kills on a conservancy in central Kenya. This ecosystem is dominated by felids (mainly lions) and has a different carnivore guild than in many earlier studies of scavenging opportunities that took place in areas such as Ngorongoro and Serengeti in Tanzania and Maasai Mara in Kenya, where lions face high levels of inter-specific competition from bone-crunching hyenas. I found that while scavenging opportunities vary among carcasses, most carcasses retained some scavengeable resources. Excluding within-bone resources, even the scavengeable meat on 'defleshed' larger sized prey carcasses is usually substantial enough to meet the total daily caloric requirements of at least one adult male Homo erectus individual. I argue, as others have before me, that scavenging opportunities in a particular ecosystem will vary in part due to carnivore taxon, density and guild composition; prey size, biomass and community structure; and habitat (e.g., vegetation, physiography). We should expect variability in scavenging opportunities in different locales and should focus our research efforts on identifying which variables condition these differences in order to make our findings applicable to the diversity of ecological settings characterizing the past.
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Homo erectus was the first human lineage to disperse widely throughout the Old World, the only hominin in Asia through much of the Pleistocene, and was likely ancestral to H. sapiens. The demise of this taxon remains obscure because of... more
Homo erectus was the first human lineage to disperse widely throughout the Old World, the only hominin in Asia through much of the Pleistocene, and was likely ancestral to H. sapiens. The demise of this taxon remains obscure because of uncertainties regarding the geological age of its youngest populations. In 1996, some of us co-published electron spin resonance (ESR) and uranium series (U-series) results indicating an age as young as 35-50 ka for the late H. erectus sites of Ngandong and Sambungmacan and the faunal site of Jigar (Indonesia). If correct, these ages favor an African origin for recent humans who would overlap with H. erectus in time and space. Here, we report 40 Ar/ 39 Ar incremental heating analyses and new ESR/U-series age estimates from the ''20 m terrace'' at Ngandong and Jigar. Both data sets are internally consistent and provide no evidence for reworking, yet they are inconsistent with one another. The 40 Ar/ 39 Ar analyses give an average age of 546612 ka (sd65 se) for both sites, the first reliable radiometric indications of a middle Pleistocene component for the terrace. Given the technical accuracy and consistency of the analyses, the argon ages represent either the actual age or the maximum age for the terrace and are significantly older than previous estimates. Most of the ESR/U-series results are older as well, but the oldest that meets all modeling criteria is 143 ka+20/217. Most samples indicated leaching of uranium and likely represent either the actual or the minimum age of the terrace. Given known sources of error, the U-series results could be consistent with a middle Pleistocene age. However, the ESR and 40 Ar/ 39 Ar ages preclude one another. Regardless, the age of the sites and hominins is at least bracketed between these estimates and is older than currently accepted.
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In discussions of Paleolithic hominin behavior it is often assumed that cut marks are an unwanted byproduct of butchery activities, and that their production causes the dulling of stone tool edges. It is also presumed that Paleolithic... more
In discussions of Paleolithic hominin behavior it is often assumed that cut marks are an unwanted byproduct of butchery activities, and that their production causes the dulling of stone tool edges. It is also presumed that Paleolithic butchers would have refrained from making cut marks to extend the use life of their tools. We conducted a series of butchery experiments designed to test the hypothesis that cut marks affect the use life of tools. Results suggest cut marks are not associated with edge attrition of simple flake tools, and therefore it is unlikely that Paleolithic butchers would have avoided contact between bone surfaces and tool edges. Edge attrition is, however, significantly greater during skinning and disarticulation than during defleshing. This suggests that skinning and disarticulation activities would require more tool edges relative to butch-ery events focused purely on defleshing. Differences between the number of cut-marked bones relative to the number of stone artifacts deposited at taphonomically comparable archaeological localities may be explicable in terms of different types of butchery activities conducted there, rather than strictly the timing of carcass access by hominins. Archaeological localities with higher artifact discard rates relative to raw material availability may represent an emphasis on activities associated with higher edge attrition (e.g. skinning or disarticulation).
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Domınguez-Rodrigo (2008) recently evaluated several studies of butchery experiments designed to interpret cut-mark patterns on fossil bones from FLK Zinj. He critiques my dissertation work, yet I neither conducted butchery experiments nor... more
Domınguez-Rodrigo (2008) recently evaluated several studies of butchery experiments designed to interpret cut-mark patterns on fossil bones from FLK Zinj. He critiques my dissertation work, yet I neither conducted butchery experiments nor attempted to interpret cut marks at FLK Zinj. His hypothesis that the presence of cut marks on upper or 'meaty' limb elements (and especially midshafts of these meaty limb elements) is a zooarchaeological signal of hominin early access to carcasses is based in part on observations of flesh yield on felid kills. My research is relevant because my observations increase the range of variation in flesh yield of abandoned felid kills and document variability in intra-limb patterns of flesh distribution. Domınguez-Rodrigo's approach to Early Pleistocene hominin carcass acquisition and/or processing strategies must take this variability into account.
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Reconstruction of early Pleistocene hominin carcass acquisition and processing behaviors are necessarily based at least in part on butchered fossil bones. This paper provides zooarchaeological and taphonomic analyses and behavioral... more
Reconstruction of early Pleistocene hominin carcass acquisition and processing behaviors are necessarily based at least in part on butchered fossil bones. This paper provides zooarchaeological and taphonomic analyses and behavioral interpretations of three 1.5 million-year-old archaeofaunas from areas 1A and 103 in the Okote Member of the Koobi Fora Formation, northern Kenya: FwJj14A, FwJj14B, and GaJi14. These sites are all located in similar paleoenvironmental contexts, near shallow water with swampy, seasonally flooded areas, and some evidence for more wooded or gallery forest settings. Both individual specimen-and assemblage-level analyses of butchery-marked bones indicate that the hominins appear to have practiced similar butchery strategies at all of these sites, with butchery (defleshing, disarticulation, and marrow extraction) of both high-and low-ranked skeletal elements with no apparent preference for prey size, skeletal region, limb class, or limb portion. Only four tooth-marked specimens, including one likely crocodile-tooth-marked bone, are preserved in all three archaeofaunas. A paucity of limb epiphyses suggests that bone-crunching hyenids may have deleted these portions subsequent to hominin butchery. Strangely, there are no stone tools preserved with the 292 cut-marked and 27 percussion-marked faunal specimens (out of a total of 6,039 specimens), suggesting that raw material availability may have conditioned hominin lithic discard patterns at these locales. These assemblages increase our knowledge of the dietary behavior and ecology of Homo erectus, and provide support for variability in early Pleistocene hominin carcass foraging patterns.
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This paper reviews the evidence for tooth marks made by sharks, crocodiles, dinosaurs, rodents, and especially mammalian carnivores on modern and fossil bones. The ecological and taphonomic information revealed in tooth marks, including:... more
This paper reviews the evidence for tooth marks made by sharks, crocodiles, dinosaurs, rodents, and especially mammalian carnivores on modern and fossil bones. The ecological and taphonomic information revealed in tooth marks, including: predator identity, prey preferences, and feeding behavior and ecology are discussed, and a compilation of metric measurements of taxon-specific modern and fossil mammalian carnivore tooth marks from the published literature is also provided. Some recommendations intended to improve the scope and scale of future tooth-damage research are also presented.
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This study provides a taphonomic analysis of the largest known sample of bone fragments collected from chimpanzee hunts. The entire sample consists of 455 bone fragments from 57 chimpanzee hunting episodes of 65 prey individuals at Ngogo,... more
This study provides a taphonomic analysis of the largest known sample of bone fragments collected from chimpanzee hunts. The entire sample consists of 455 bone fragments from 57 chimpanzee hunting episodes of 65 prey individuals at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda. It has low taxonomic diversity, consisting overwhelmingly of primates, especially red colobus monkeys. The age distribution of the prey remains is skewed towards pre-adults. Cranial bones are the dominant element, followed by long bones. Axial postcranial elements have low survivorship, with a complete absence of pre-caudal vertebrae. Bone is damaged in distinct ways, such as: destruction of long bone ends, typically with intact but chewed shafts; fragmentation and compression cracking of crania; and preservation of only the iliac blades of the innominates. Tooth marks are present but uncommon (4.4% of total NISP). These analyses enable us to: 1) describe and characterize consistent patterns of bone damage inflicted by chimpanzees across a much larger prey sample than has been previously studied; 2) make a preliminary comparison of the generalized chimpanzee taphonomic signature to that of leopard and eagle consumption of primates, as well as modem human consumption of small mammals; and 3) assess the utility of such samples for recognition of early hominin small mammal camivory. We present a model that may be useful for detecting a pre-technological hominin carnivory and suggest some fossil locales at which close inspection of cercopithecoid remains for the above patterns might reveal traces of hom-inin hunting, though we caution that a pre-technological hominin hunted "assemblage" is not likely to be archaeologically visible.
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We survey vertebrate taphonomic studies being conducted by the Olduvai Landscape Paleoanthropology Project (OLAPP) at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. These studies continue the tradition established by C.K. Brain of using taphonomy... more
We survey vertebrate taphonomic studies being conducted by the Olduvai Landscape Paleoanthropology Project (OLAPP) at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. These studies continue the tradition established by C.K. Brain of using taphonomy to reconstruct past environments and to identify the influence of carnivores on fossil bone assemblages, while extending it to establish some of the landscape ecological correlates of variability in Oldowan hominin activity traces in the Plio-Pleistocene Olduvai Basin. We use neotaphonomic findings in a variety of modern settings to interpret aspects of vertebrate fossil and stone artifact assemblages recovered from landscapes in the eastern lowermost Bed II Olduvai Basin by OLAPP since 1989, and to some of the Bed I and Lower Bed II bone assemblages recovered earlier by M.D. Leakey (1971). We address selective bone burial in lake-margin settings, crocodiles as taphonomic agents in wetland settings, small mammal assemblages as indicators of vegetation structure, tooth-marked and percussion-marked bone as indicators of the sequence of access by hominins and carnivores to carcass foods, and correlations of hyaenid ravaging of mammal long bones with patterns of stone artifact discard and loss by Oldowan hominins.
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This paper serves as an introduction and discussion of a collection of five papers originally presented in a symposium held at the 69 th meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in 2004 entitled "Applied actualism: Experimental... more
This paper serves as an introduction and discussion of a collection of five papers originally presented in a symposium held at the 69 th meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in 2004 entitled "Applied actualism: Experimental studies of hominid activity traces". These papers primarily present actualistic studies aimed at addressing questions of hominin carcass processing activities, generally using cutmark data. They serve as a reminder of the utility and importance of actualistic studies to test hypotheses of hominin behavior using zooarchaeological and taphonomic data. We review the manner in which actualism is used in these various studies of human butchery practices to construct models to generate test implications for the archaeological record. Finally, some considerations for future actualistic work are discussed.
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Cutmark frequencies are often cited in discussions of Oldowan hominid behavior, yet their interpretation remains enigmatic. To strengthen inferences derived from cutmark data, we conducted experiments with Turkana butchers. We test two... more
Cutmark frequencies are often cited in discussions of Oldowan hominid behavior, yet their interpretation remains enigmatic. To strengthen inferences derived from cutmark data, we conducted experiments with Turkana butchers. We test two hypotheses: (1) cutmark frequency is related to the amount of meat present, and (2) cutmark frequency is related to the size of the bone/carcass being butchered. Hypothesis 1 is not supported, while hypothesis 2 is supported. We document a positive correlation between bone/carcass size and cutmark frequency. We therefore advocate treating bones/ carcasses of different sizes as analytically discrete units.
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We report on the radioisotopic age, formation, and preservation of a late Pleistocene human footprint site in northern Tanzania on the southern shore of Lake Natron near the village of Engare Sero. Over 400 human footprints, as well as... more
We report on the radioisotopic age, formation, and preservation of a late Pleistocene human footprint site in northern Tanzania on the southern shore of Lake Natron near the village of Engare Sero. Over 400 human footprints, as well as tracks of zebra and bovid, are preserved in a series of volcaniclastic deposits. Based on field mapping along with geochemical and grain-size analyses, we propose that these deposits originated as proximal volcanic material from the nearby active volcano, Oldoinyo L'engai, and were then fluvially transported to the footprint site. Stable isotope results (δ18O and δ13C) suggest that the footprints were originally emplaced on a mudflat saturated by a freshwater spring and were later inundated by the rising alkaline waters of Lake Natron. We employed the 40Ar/39Ar and 14C dating methods to investigate the age of the site and determined that the footprint level is older than 5760 ± 30 yrs. BP and younger than 19.1 ± 3.1 ka. These radioisotopic ages are supported by stratigraphic correlations with previously documented debris avalanche deposits and the stable isotope signatures associated with the most recent highstand of Lake Natron, further constraining the age to latest Pleistocene. Since modern humans (Homo sapiens) were present in Africa ca. 200 ka, Engare Sero represents the most abundant and best-preserved footprint site of anatomically modern Homo sapiens currently known in Africa. Fossil footprints are a snapshot in time, recording behavior at a specific moment in history; but the actual duration of time captured by the snapshot is often not well defined. Through analog experiments, we constrain the depositional window in which the prints were made, buried, and ultimately preserved to within a few hours to days or months.
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We argue that the evolutionary significance of prehistoric hominid carnivory will be better appreciated if taphonomic tests for evaluating the initial encroachment on the larger carnivoran paleoguild by Oldowan hominids are developed and... more
We argue that the evolutionary significance of prehistoric hominid carnivory will be better appreciated if taphonomic tests for evaluating the initial encroachment on the larger carnivoran paleoguild by Oldowan hominids are developed and applied to zooarchaeological assemblages. We propose that the development of taphonomic tests should be guided by three premises: 1) taphonomic measures used to test scenarios of hominid carnivory should be free of interpretive equifinalities; where equifinalities are currently suspected, these must be identified and broken; 2) carnivorans are not a single, homogeneous, taphonomic agent; actualistic research is needed to differentiate the preservable feeding traces of individual carnivore taxa; 3) multiple carnivore species should be assumed to have been involved in creation and modification of bone assemblages; the recognition of the timing and nature of the access of each carnivore to prey carcasses should be sought. We offer some fundamental steps in developing a methodology to satisfy this research agenda, integrating information from naturalistic observations of carnivoran feeding on mammalian prey carcasses, actualistic studies that simulate the timing of hominid access to these prey carcasses, and functional aspects of presumed carnivoran paleoguilds defined by carcass size-specific edible tissue specialization and bone modification capabilities. We focus on skeletal element and element portion profiles in conjunction with the incidence, anatomical distribution and morphology of tooth marking as the relevant taphonomic measures. The ultimate goal is to diagnose and zooarchaeologically identify unambiguous traces of individual carnivoran taxa and ecological scenarios involving feeding sequences by multiple carnivore taxa, including hominids.
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Researchers in various contexts have long struggled with an apparent disconnect between an individual's level of understanding of biological evolution and their acceptance of it as an explanation for the history and diversity of life.... more
Researchers in various contexts have long struggled with an apparent disconnect between an individual's level of understanding of biological evolution and their acceptance of it as an explanation for the history and diversity of life. Here, we discuss the main factors associated with acceptance of evolution and chart a path forward for evolution education research.
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Conversations in Human Evolution is an ongoing science communication initiative seeking to explore the breadth and interdisciplinarity of human evolution studies. This volume reports another twenty interviews (referred to as... more
Conversations in Human Evolution is an ongoing science communication initiative seeking to explore the breadth and interdisciplinarity of human evolution studies. This volume reports another twenty interviews (referred to as ‘conversations’ as they are informal in style) with scholars at the forefront of human evolution research, covering the broad scientific themes of Palaeolithic archaeology, palaeoanthropology and biological anthropology, earth science and palaeoclimatic change, evolutionary anthropology and primatology, and human disease co-evolution. This project features academics at various different stages in their careers and from all over the world; in this volume alone, researchers are based at institutions in eleven different countries (namely Iran, India, the United Kingdom, Greece, Australia, South Africa, the United States of America, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Israel), covering five continents.
Having arisen at the start of the COVID19 pandemic, Conversations in Human Evolution aims to encourage engagement with both human evolutionary studies and the broader socio-political issues that persist within academia, the latter of which is particularly pertinent during this time of global uncertainty. The conversations delve deeply into the study of our species’ evolutionary history through the lens of each sub-discipline, as well as detailing some of the most current advances in research, theory and methods. Overall, Conversations in Human Evolution seeks to bridge the gap between the research and researcher through contextualisation of the science with personal experience and historical reflection.
Having arisen at the start of the COVID19 pandemic, Conversations in Human Evolution aims to encourage engagement with both human evolutionary studies and the broader socio-political issues that persist within academia, the latter of which is particularly pertinent during this time of global uncertainty. The conversations delve deeply into the study of our species’ evolutionary history through the lens of each sub-discipline, as well as detailing some of the most current advances in research, theory and methods. Overall, Conversations in Human Evolution seeks to bridge the gap between the research and researcher through contextualisation of the science with personal experience and historical reflection.