New scientific techniques provide us with insight into the diets, environments, and lifestyles of these ancient relatives that was not available to researchers even ten years ago. Every site discovery in the patchy hominin fossil record tells us more about our evolution. Discussions regarding which of these species were able to make and use tools continue. Modern debates now look at the relatedness of these species to us and to one another. Yet there is still so much to understand. Dates of these early relatives range from around 7 million years ago (mya) to around 1 mya, overlapping temporally with members of our genus, Homo (Figure 9.1). Specimen finds have been made all along the East African Rift System( EARS in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Malawi), in limestone caves in South Africa, and in Chad. We have multiple species (multiple genera), diverse in the extent to which they move like us and the diets on which they subsist. We also know that early human evolution occurred in a very complicated fashion. the study of the form or size and shape of things in this case, skeletal parts). In this chapter, we will tease out the details of what this looks like in terms of morphology (i.e. We now know that bipedal locomotion is one of the first things that evolved in our lineage, with early relatives having small brains and more apelike dentition. And, until research picked up in Africa, fossil finds of species mentioned above predominantly had larger heads. Original hypotheses suggested that in order to be motivated to change diet and move about in a bipedal fashion, the large brain needed to have evolved first. These included the evolution of a big brain ( encephalization), the evolution of the strange way in which we move about on two legs (bipedalism), and the evolution of our strange flat faces and small teeth (indications of dietary change). Within this conversation, naturalists and early paleoanthropologists (people who study human evolution) speculated as to which human traits came first. Adding to this debate was the discovery of the Piltdown Man in England, which turned out later to be a forgery of a modified orangutan mandible and medieval human skull. Others, such as Ernst Haekel and Eugene Dubois, insisted that we were closer in affinity to orangutans and that we evolved in Eurasia where, until the discovery of the Taung Child in South Africa in 1924, all humanlike fossils (of Neanderthals and Homo erectus) had been found (Shipman 2002). Debates in the mid-1800s regarding hominin origins focused on two key issues:Ĭharles Darwin hypothesized that we evolved in Africa, as he was convinced that we shared greater commonality with chimpanzees and gorillas on the continent (Darwin 1871). Historic interpretations of our evolution, prior to our finding of early hominin fossils, varied. Hominin, then, means everyone on “our” side of the line: humans and all of our extinct bipedal ancestors and relatives since our divergence from the last common ancestor (LCA) with chimpanzees. If an imaginary line were drawn between ourselves and our closest relatives, the great apes, bipedalism (or habitually walking upright on two feet) is where that line would be. But in order to better understand these different evolutionary trajectories, we must first define the terms we are using. It is through our study of our hominin ancestors and relatives that we are exposed to a world of “might have beens”: of other paths not taken by our species, other ways of being human.
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