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30 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Name two transitional hominins |
1. Homo habilis 2. Homo rudolfensis |
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What hominin is this |
Homo habilis |
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Homo habilis |
2.8- 1.4 mya - east Africa - nicknames handy man as they were thought to be first tool users - jaw fragments, skull parts, hand, foot and leg bones - brain size 500 - 650cm3 (alight enlargement) - smaller teeth and jaw then afarensis - relatively secure associations of fossil remains with oldowan tools - ancestral to H. ergaster - questioned whether they should be in homo genus - homo habilis bridges brain freshold to be considered homo, have to be 600cm3 up - gracile skull - degree of pragmatism - skull more rounded - fully bipedal - still have long arms - still using trees - lived in open and wooded habitats |
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What caused variations in Australopithecine genus |
Dietary adaptation to dif enviros that are appearing as forests retreat - range to dif strategies used to survive in these dif landscapes - gracile had more range of food - robust specialised in harder to chew foods |
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In what 3 forms do macronutrients come in |
1. Carbs 2. Fats 3. Proteins |
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How is diet important |
1. Affects energy available to hominins - richer diets = more calories and nutrients - can potentially allow brain explanation - require more intelligence to obtain these nutrient rich foods 2. Diet is major driver of anatomical and cognitive adaptions - obtaining food - digesting food: gut and teeth |
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What is the primate diet |
- fruit eating is key, mixed with leaves of animal matter - frugivory is unique to pronates among mammals - smaller primates include more animal matter, large primates include more leaves - great apes mostly reply on plants - primate diets vary seasonally |
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Gut and teeth adaption for different diets |
Folivores/ herbivores: - incisors used for shearing - molars for grinding - developed molar crests for grinding enamel thickness - larger stomachs and expanded compartments for bacterial fermentation of cellulose in large intestine Frugivores: - intermediate, depend on toughness of fruit Carnivores: - large incisors and canine - molars less pronounced - teeth rounded and low - gut dominated by small intestine, main area for absorption - simple stomach, short intestine |
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Why can hominins have small guts yet large brains |
Change facilitated by switch to consumption of meat |
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When do Chimps have meat |
1. Form of male social bonding 2. Exchange for sex- not a primary motivation 3. Not down to nutritional shortfall, only hint meat when they have abundant food |
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Teeth microware |
Doesn’t show long term, just record of last days or weeks they consumed prior to death - need to look at number of individuals - heavy pitting indicate tough diet e.g. p. robustus |
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Isotopic evidence (diet) |
- can be used to look at diet - c3 and c4 plants |
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What plants do each hominin eat (c3, c4) |
1. A. ramidus - C3 2. P. boisei- C4 3. P. robustus and A. africanus - mix between C3 and C4 |
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How to get high C4 foods |
Can eat grass or insects that live in enviro e.g. 1. Locusts 2. Termites |
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Diet of A. Sediba |
- enviro indicators from sediments indicate mixed C3 and C4 - rations indicate nearly 100% C3 plant consumption - almost unwise diet among hominin studies so far - dental wear patterns similar to earlier hominin but showed hard food component - found 38 phytoliths- fruit, leaf, wood, bark of C3 species - ignored C4 plants on landscape near site - suggest they needed a large territory to secure enough C3 food or broadened it diet to include wider range of C3 e.g. bark |
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When do we see a switch to more open landscapes |
Post 2.9mya |
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Oldowan sites as favoured places |
- sites as residual products of repeated visits and activity over time - dif activities in dif locations and at dif times - May have offered protection, shade, safety, vantage point and later stone and bone resources - no elaborate social arrangements - do see evidence of hominins visiting same places thousands of years apart |
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FLK-Zinj finds |
- material low to zero hydraulic transportation (movement by water, not created by geological action, assemblage created by hominins) - bone wear suggests burial after several months or years - 43kg of modifies lithics, some of which were carried |
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FLK-Zinj: hunting or scavenging |
1. Hunting - frequency and location of cut marks suggest fully flashed carcasses - occasion transport of whole carcasses - carnivores consumes non meaty bones only (suggests secondary access) 2. Rejects previous analysis identifying abundant carnivore damage 3. Confrontational scavenging too dangerous even using modern tec 4. Hunting best interpretation 5. But found 190 bones had biochemical marks, 91 tooth marks and 109 percussion marks |
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Raw material transport at FxJj50 |
1.6-1.5 mya - 1500 lithics - many cores with no associated debitage , I.e. tool and cores being transported - incorporation of meat resources in diet to much greater extent than other primates - cutmarked bones and lithics suggests meat eating - tool marks suggest disarticulation of limbs, removal of meat from bones and crushing of bones for marrow |
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Costs of bigger brain |
1. Spread cost of feeding and looking after children across more than one individual 2. Children have longer period of growing time as infants 3. Life span increase, have a post reproductive phase where women become infertile (doesn’t exist in other primates) 4. Long life span critical in raising children, helping support this - group care |
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Example of hominins being hunted |
- swarthran South Africa - size and spacing of holes in SK54 specimens of Paranthropus robustus - matched lower canines of fossil leopards from same deposits |
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Give an example of an oldowan site |
FLK-Zinj |
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FLK-Zinj |
- one of best known sites - estimated over large area - find of stone tools and bones - have a concentration, possibly a site cluster - collection of raptor bones around tree where they were bringing their kills and where they died - found bones from Paranthropus boisei - also found bones from homo habilis at same site - first assumed boisei was tool maker then later changed to habilis |
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What are the dif interpretations of FLK-Zinj |
1. Living floor 2. Home base and implied sexual division of labour 3. Central place for god sharing - form of Defending meat 4. Palimpsest where hominin participation was marginal |
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What type of site are oldowan sites typically |
Palimpsests |
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Oldowan sites as home bases |
- nonhuman primates normally eat resources as they encounter them - humans transport them to a central place to share - stones and bones were transported for processing and sharing - range of other activities happen on site e.g. sexual division of labour, monogamy and food sharing |
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What’s the problem with oldowan sites as home bases |
1. It assumed to much the social life of early hominins 2. Would hominins really have lived next to carcass remains? |
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Oldowan sites as foraging/ scavenging stations |
Lewis binford 1981 - introduces the scavenging model which slightly undermined home bases - carnivore accumulations were repeatedly visited by hominins with stone tools to scavenge - carnivores have habit of stashing kills in trees when then fall and create rings around tree, if humans are looking to scavenge this is where you would expect to see them - e.g of carnivores - leopards (same on that was found to kill hominin) |
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Oldowan sites as stone caches |
Richard Potts - food stone intentionally cached at useful points in landscape - hominins brought bones there to process - energy efficient - would need degree of planning and understanding landscape - would be proto home base |
