HUMAN ORIGINS FINAL STUDY GUIDE

THE ROLE OF THE FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST

 Build biological profiles of unidentifiable people.
 Establish time of death or postmortem interval (PMI)
 Assess trauma to bone
 Assist in location and recover of remains
 When does the anthropologist get involved?
 Unknown human remains are found, especially in cases of advanced decomposition,
skeletonization, or burned/cremated remains.
 They also assess trauma or tool marks found on bones.
 When the investigators can’t separate human and animal bones
 Search and recovery for human remains

THE BIOLOGICAL PROFILE

 The Biological Profile is the end result in the course of a forensic anthropologist’s investigation.
 It focuses on estimated the sex, age, race/ancestry, height, weight, and any other unique
features of an otherwise unidentifiable set of remains.
 You can determine someone’s sex based on ratios of long bones, shape of the pelvis, and
features on the skull.
 There are features of the skull which can also assist in identifying a person’s ancestry.
 Anthropologists have created the Forensic Data Bank from the measurements of
thousands of remains.
 The measurements of unknown skeletal remains are processed by forensic software
and compared to points in this codex in order to determine a person’s race.
 This also includes identifying degenerative changes, or regular changes due to wear and tear
on the remains.
 Osteoarthritis, degenerative joint disease, osteoporosis, dental disease, etc.
 They then use this profile to match the remains to a likely identity.

METHODS OF A FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST?

 The Coroner system (aka Medical Examiner system) investigates all unattended, accidental, or
suspicious deaths in their jurisdiction.
 An ME might use dental comparison, x-ray comparison, and DNA analysis (from bone or
teeth) to identify a set of remains.
 Forensic anthropologists use methods derived from:
 Biological anthropology (human variation, ancestry, & geography)
 Human osteology & skeletal biology (bone microstructure, growth, healing, & development)
 Archeology (systematic recovery of remains).
 They work closely with:
 Forensic pathologists  Forensic toxicologists
 Forensic odonatologists  Forensic entomologists
 DNA analysts  Forensic archaeologists
 THEORIES AND EVIDENCE SURROUNDING THE SPREAD OF MODERN HUMANS
SUCCESS
 Compared to the Neanderthals and other late archaic humans, modern humans generally have
more delicate skeletons.
 Their skulls are more rounded and their brow ridges generally protrude much less. They
rarely have the occipital buns found on the back of Neanderthal skulls. They also have
relatively high foreheads, smaller faces, and pointed chins.
 Humans became behaviorally “modern” 50,000-30,000 years ago
 Blade technology increases and became more diverse. There were more materials and uses
for the various tools.
 There was also a shift form basic subsistence activities to more complex strategies.
 This means that there is a greater breadth of subsistence, as well as people living in larger
groups.
 There were also more complex expressions of humanity, such as artistic expression, burial of
the dead, and the development of other non-utilitarian objects.

REPLACEMENT OF ARCHAIC FORMS

 Current data suggest that modern humans evolved from archaic humans primarily in East Africa.
 By 115,000 years ago, early modern humans had expanded their range to South Africa and
into Southwest Asia (Israel) shortly after 100,000 years ago.
 http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_4.htm
 The Replacement Model of Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews proposes that modern
humans evolved from archaic humans 200,000-150,000 years ago only in Africa.
 After that, some of them migrated into the rest of the Old World, replacing all of the
Neanderthals. Other late archaic humans began around 60,000-40,000 years ago.
 If this interpretation of the fossil record is correct, all people today share a relatively
modern African ancestry. All other lines of humans that had descended from Homo
erectus presumably became extinct.
 Therefore, the regional differences that we now see among humans must be recent
developments.
 This hypothesis is also referred to as the "out of Africa", "Noah's ark", and "African
replacement" model.
 The Regional Continuity Model (or multiregional evolution model) advocated by Milford
Wolpoff, proposes that modern humans evolved more or less simultaneously in all major
regions of the Old World from local archaic humans.
 For example, modern Chinese are seen as having evolved from Chinese archaic humans
and ultimately from Chinese Homo erectus. This would mean that the Chinese and some
other peoples in the Old World have great antiquity in place.
 Supporters of this model believe that the ultimate common ancestor of all modern
people was an early Homo erectus in Africa who lived at least 1.8 million years ago.
 It is further suggested that since then there was sufficient gene flow between Europe,
Africa, and Asia to prevent long-term reproductive isolation and the subsequent
evolution of distinct regional species. It is argued that intermittent contact between
people of these distant areas would have kept the human line a single species at any one
time.
 NEANDERTHAL
 The Neanderthals are the most famous of the most famous of the archaic Homo sapiens, even
though they’re actually a specialized version called Homo neandertalensis.
 First found in Germany 1856
 They appeared to be a cold adapted offshoot of ancient Homo sapiens. They made it to the
regions they were best adapted for, and didn’t really move from there.
 Many robust features in the cranium and body can be interpreted as adaptions to a cold
environment
 Their enlarged nasal cavity stems from their mid facial projection.
 Post-cranial robusticity: strong and powerful
 Barrel-shaped chest
 Pelvic morphology: less complicated neonatal delivery, possibly due to larger infants at
birth, mostly likely because of differing centers of gravity and locomotion.
 Large, well-worn teeth were used as tools for gripping and processing, as well as to
tenderize and pulverize things. They didn’t have a chin.
 They had a larger cranial capacity than modern humans at 1400 ml. There was a long, low
cranium with an occipital bun and large brows.
 They were short and heavy, which corresponds to Bergman’s rule. The large head helps to
conserve heat.
 The short limbs correspond to Allen’s Rule
 Neanderthals used Levallois and Mousterian methods to make modified tool flakes
 They used Châtelperronian tools 36,000 years ago, which were a blend of blade and flake
tools. Anthropologists believe that this is evidence of Neanderthals attempting to copy
Aurignacian tools.
 They lived mostly in settlements at the mouth of caves facing south, which was important during
the coldest parts of the year.
 They were occupied repeatedly, and refuse built up over time. It was well preserved because
of its protection from the elements.
 Neanderthals grew up fast, and only lived to be about 40 years old. This meant that there were
more orphans who could not learn from the long-term experience of elders.
 They lived a rough life with many broken bones and extreme arthritis.
 They also had a high enough awareness to bury their dead.
 The Shanidar (“flower child”) burial site was known for the earliest evidence of
intentional burial, where the tomb was surrounded by rocks and flowers.
 The Kebara burial site (60,000 years old) in Israel included a person’s tools in their tomb.
 The La Ferraise site included a family burial.
 With the complexity of their behavior and culture, they must have been able to speak and
communicate in some way. They had all the necessary biological structures to speak.
 If they grew up faster, there is even less time to learn language before the brain would
have become “fixed” and prohibit further language development.
 They eventually became extinct, but they were very successful for nearly 200,000 years.
Anthropologists know this because they are well represented in the fossil record.
 Neanderthals were too specialized for their own good. By 40,000-50,000 years ago, modern
Homo sapiens developed more sophisticated tool kits, improved hearths, and had better
clothes which allowed them to survive in colder climates as well.
 Cultural adaptions are much quicker than biological ones.

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  Even the slightest advantage could have led to the extinction of Neanderthals within 30
or 40 generations.

THEORIES, SITES, AND EVIDENCE FOR THE PEOPLING OF THE AMERICAS

 For the longest time, it’s been believed that humans came during the latest ice age about 12,000-
15,000 years ago.
 However, consistent finds of earlier materials are throwing this scenario into question, and
there may have been several migrations from different directions.
 The last glaciation was about 70,000-12,000 years ago, and the most convincing evidence for
humans living in the Americas post-dates that.
 People came from Siberia after 20,000 years ago (no
further back than 30,000), but that path depended on a
coastal route and unfavorable archaeological conditions.
 During this glacial period, sea levels dropped about
120 meters below modern sea level, which exposed
continental shelves.
 The exposed area created a coastal route along
the Aleutian island range off the Alaskan
Peninsula, where there were most likely points of
unglaciated land.
 This makes it hard to find evidence since it’s 360’
below sea level, and they didn’t really have big
sites to begin with as hunter-gatherers. Archeologists found tools on what would have
been a coastline at the time to support this hypothesis.
 The glaciers retreated around 12,000 years ago, creating an ice-free corridor that allowed
Northeastern Asian people to migrate through a very inhospitable environment.
 The Bering Land Bridge (Beringia) would have been exposed periodically between
75,000-35,000 years ago, and would have been continuously exposed from 35,000-11,000
years ago.
 The people would have stuck with the herds, living off animal fat to survive. They would
most likely have been completely unaware that they were coming to a new continent.

TOOL TRADITIONS, TECHNOLOGY, AND CULTURE

EARLY TOOLS & HOW THEY EVOLVED
 The earliest rudimentary tools were used by Australopithecines, who used rocks and sticks as
tools for foraging.
 Underground Storage Organs (USO) were a useful food sources, but to harvest them, you
needed to know where they were and what was the best technique.
 However, the arrival of genus Homo was the real beginning of tool use for hominids.
 The earliest evidence for tool use was found 2-2.6 million years ago. Of course, we don’t have
any evidence for tools made out of anything other than stone since the stone would be durable
enough to survive, while organic matter is not.
 The cast offs and evidence of manufacturing are usually found as well as the tool itself.
 This is material evidence for problem solving. A larger brain means there’s a larger
capacity for culture, leading up to the point of food acquisition via hunting and gathering.

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  These stone tools increased the variety of foods which hominids could eat, since their teeth
and nails were not strong enough to tear through things like tough animal skin.
 The earliest stone tools were found around animal bones. There are cut marks which
indicate that they were used to shear more meat off the bones, or at least crack the
bones open to reach the marrow.
 This doesn’t mean that they were hunters. They were most likely scavengers of other
predators’ kills.
 They also probably helped chase away predators like large cats and hyenas.
 Olduwan tools were the earliest form of stone tools known so far.
 Choppers were large rocks that were about the right size for hominids to grasp with a few
flakes knocked off which allowed them to be used to cut and chop.
 Percussion flaking is one technique used to make Olduwan tools. It consists of striking one
stone to another to break off pieces.
 The core is the largest part of the rock from which the chips and flakes are removed.
 The flakes are the pieces removed from the core.
 The hammerstone is a stone from a harder material that was used to strike the core and
remove the flakes.
 There is evidence that hominids selected “good rocks” to bring back to the site. This
suggests planning and a passable understanding of which stone properties were desirable.
 Homo habilis had the first dedicated manufacturer of tools. They also used shaping methods and
core technology.
 This indicates that they were likely opportunistic feeders that would use stone tools to bust
open bones for the marrow or cut off chunks of meat they could carry away from another
animal’s kill site.
 Acheulean Tools were first created by Homo erectus
for scavenging. They were bi-facial instruments that
weren’t found east of the Movius line.
 The Movius Line is the furthest that they’ve
found Acheulean tools.
 May have occurred because there isn’t the
right kind of stone beyond that boundary.
The hominids who used them may have
adapted to using other types of stone or
materials.
 Also may have occurred because the area
beyond the border is densely forested
regions which were not viable habitats for hominids at that point.
 Compared to Olduwan, Acheulean tools had straighter & sharper edges, thinner instruments,
a standardized specialization, etc.
 Archaic Homo sapiens modified the tool industry further about 200,000 years ago.
 The levallois (“prepared core”) technique standardized the tool-making industry, making it
much more efficient.
 The core was pre-hewn to a shape which allowed 6-8 similar sized and shaped flakes to
be removed when necessary
 This created a “tool kit”, which included points, scrapers, drills, and 61 other types.
 This variation in the tool kit reflects the site function. Flake tools may have been
hafted, in which the tool maker attaches a blade to a handle.

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 CREATIVE EXPLOSION
 From about 50,000-30,000 years ago, humans became behaviorally modern in the Creative
Explosion (aka Upper Paleolithic).
 Blade technology increases and becomes more diverse.
 Shifts from basic subsistence activities to more complex strategies
 People are living in larger groups with more complex expressions of humanity
 There is increased evidence of artistic expression
 Bone flutes and other musical instruments
 Body decorations (like pierced shells, teeth, and ivory), jewelry, and other manners of
expressing personal identities to other people
 Portable artwork like the Venus Statues
 Cave paintings of the first human forms, particularly those found in Lascaux Cave, France.
 These may be depictions of sympathetic magic for hunting (by painting a good hunt,
you may have a good hunt), reproduction magic (sympathetic magic for sex),
trophies of hunts, historical reenactments of events, or information flow and
exchanging of ideas.
 There was increased individuality in burials like beads around the skeleton, burials with toys
of bone and stone, artwork, and family burials.
 These forms of artwork and burial objects indicate social meaning further than tools. They
are non-utilitarian objects which have no use other than for pleasure, relationship building, or
social stratification displays.
 This does not mean that they have reached agriculture, or what is considered “civilization”.
 There was a wider range of raw materials available to use.
 Hunting was more efficient, and hunters brought back both big and small (fish & birds) game
 This meant that people had a more meat-based diet and could live in colder regions since
the big game provided everything from food, to shelter, to warmth

DARWIN, NATURAL SELECTION, AND EVOLUTION

WHO IS DARWIN?
 Darwin was a young scientist in the mid 1800s, interested in studying human origins.
 Influenced by Lyell’s Principle of Geology (first to talk about uniform processes)
 Variation and extinction: There were many variations that existed than are currently
existing, nothing is fixed
 Patterned Variation
 Artificial Breeding: (dogs, sheep, goats, horses, etc.) the role of human intervention of
animal species is to isolate and encourage the specific traits which can be useful to us
 Influenced by Malthus
 There are limited resources on earth, so all of its creatures compete for survival
 He traveled at a young age as an intern to the Galapagos Islands where he gathered data for his
essay “On the Origin of the Species” 1959
 He recognized that there was a wide range of variation within each species, and there was a
pattern within that variation
 Darwin’s Postulates
1. There is a struggle for existence because a population outgrows its food supply.
2. There is differential success to survive and reproduce.
3. Variation in a population is always present and can be passed on to offspring.

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 WHAT IS NATURAL SELECTION?
 What enables some individuals to survive and others to not?
 In the struggle for existence, some individuals are born with characteristics which allow them
to better survive and pass those traits on.
 This is called Survival of the Fittest
 One example is the Peppered Moth. There was a natural variation of both white and black
moths before the Industrial Revolution
 During the Industrial revolution, a thick film of soot covered everything, turning it black
 The white moths couldn’t blend in, and were easily picked off by predators while the
black moths were harder to find and survived to reproduce.
 The variation of white:black moths shifted from 8:2 to 2:8 within 100 years
 Advantaged individuals in a species survive and thrive in higher numbers and produce more
offspring than others without the advantage.
 It’s centered on reproductive success
 When the environment changes, organisms that have characteristics which enable them to
survive will continue to do so and reproduce offspring with the same beneficial
characteristics
 Those without will gradually disappear.

DEFINE EVOLUTION
 Evolution is a theory, which is a collection of hypotheses which haven’t been proven wrong yet.
After a while, they are identified as a theory.
 Evolution is a change in biological and cultural systems over time.
 A change in allele frequency from one generation to the next—not a lifetime
achievement.
 Allele frequencies influence genotypes, and genotypes directly influence phenotypes.
 Individuals do not evolve, but populations do
 A population is a group of individuals that can and do inbreed. Evolution can operate on
an individual level in that it’s individual genes, but does not evolve individually.
 Darwin had the idea of evolution, but lacked the mechanics to explain how it happened. He
understood selective breeding in animals and humans, but no further.
 He believed there was a mixing or blending of traits from the mother and father which came
from the blood.
 This didn’t apply to sex: you were either male or female in the womb
 Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian Monk from Moravia, and is acknowledged as the father of
genetics.
 He experimented on pea plants, and published Experiments with Plant Hybrids in 1865
 Mendalian Laws of Genetics
1) Law of Segregation: traits are inherited as discrete units which are completely separate.
They can be masked in one generation and reappear unaltered in another.
2) Laws of Independent Assortment: traits are inherited independently
 Polygenetic Inheritance: 2+ genes (not alleles) work together to effect a single
phenotypic trait, which may appear blended. Many polygenic traits are strongly
affected by the environment in which they develop