Chimps can behave in a surprisingly human manner. They engage in advanced co-operative hunting, manufacture tools and even pass deliberate messages to one another. One of the more important – yet often overlooked – of these “human” attributes is the fact that chimpanzees have cultures. The important part here is not so much the culture … Continue reading »
Food sharing is an important human behaviour that enables our modern, complex society to function as it does. Since food is distributed throughout the group everyone does not have to spend their time farming or hunting. This frees up their time to do other things, like become specialist tool makers or write entertaining blogs on … Continue reading »
Australopithecus afarensis, of which AL-288-1* was a member, lived between 3.9-2.9 million years ago and was fairly adept at walking upright. Whilst not as good at being bipedal as later species, such as Homo sapiens, they could still walk well. However, whilst their anatomy was adapted for upright walking, they still retained some characteristics that … Continue reading »
Oh bipedalism, where would we be without you? A lot closer to the ground, that’s for sure; and probably far from the civilisation we find ourselves in. After all, it was walking purely on our hind limbs that freed up our hands and enabled them to develop the fine motor control that makes tool use … Continue reading »
Most people are aware that there was once more than one species of hominin. That our lineage had cousins who lived alongside us for most of our prehistory. However, few know the full extent our family tree branched out too. Our group separated from chimps ~5-7 million years ago. When we first emerged it seems … Continue reading »
Chimps and humans have differently structured hips. Whilst still very similar, a chimp hip is significantly flatter and higher than the human pelvis. A variety of evolutionary pressures have prompted this divergence in hip shape, although the strongest has been each species preferred locomotory method. A chimp pelvis is adapted to quadrupedal knuckle walking, a … Continue reading »
For those of you who’ve been following this blog you should be able to recall that last week I wrote about a paper that purported to identify the development of monogamy in the human family tree. For those of you who haven’t been following I still wrote that post. And you can still read it. … Continue reading »
When faced with a choice between a known and an unknown amount, humans do this clever thing whereby they use past experience to decide which one they should go for. In particular, it is based on the mean rate of return for a resource. For example, say you lived your whole life in a town … Continue reading »
Humans are a rather self-centred bunch. From thinking an unimaginably large universe exists to benefit the inhabitants of one speck of it to, well….starting a blog called “EvoAnth.” Within science there is a significant bias towards the investigation of how we got here compared to the origins of most other living animals. As such, we know relatively … Continue reading »
If you were asked what it was that makes Homo sapiens so successful, how might you respond? That it is our technology, which enables us to conquer any environment? But what allowed the development of such technology? Our big brains of course! But why did our brains get so big? To facilitate larger group sizes! … Continue reading »
