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Feb 3, 2016 · To those of us who study human evolution, this incredible universality suggests that our species has had language right from when Homo sapiens arose in Africa between 200,000 and 160,000...
- Mark Pagel
Jul 24, 2017 · If the capacity for language did evolve more than once, all traces of it seem to have been lost. This conclusion is buttressed by the FOXP2 evidence (all humans share the same derived gene) and by the fact that genetic data point to all modern humans descending from a common ancestor [19].
- Mark Pagel
- m.pagel@reading.ac.uk
- 2017
Slowly at first, possibly beginning with simple sounds made by our ancestors Homo heidelbergenis, and then increasingly rapidly until there were thousands of languages spoken around the planet. But this has been fiercely debated and much is still not understood.
- Climate Fluctuation
- Organisms and Environmental Change
- Adaptation to Change
- The Variability Selection Hypothesis
- Ancient Hominins Were Found in Diverse Habitats
- Two Legs, Long Arms; Moving Around in Diverse Habitats
- Stone Toolmaking: Gaining Access to Diverse Foods
- The Expanding World of Early Homo
- Hominins Persisted Through Environmental Change
- Encephalization and Adaptability
Paleoanthropologists – scientists who study human evolution – have proposed a variety of ideas about how environmental conditions may have stimulated important developments in human origins. Diverse species have emerged over the course of human evolution, and a suite of adaptations have accumulated over time, including upright walking, the capacity...
All organisms encounter some amount of environmental change. Some changes occur over a short time, and may be cyclical, such as daily or seasonal variations in the amount of temperature, light, and precipitation. On longer time scales, hominins experienced large-scale shifts in temperature and precipitation that, in turn, caused vast changes in veg...
There are many ideas about the role of the environment in human evolution. Some views assume that certain adaptations, such as upright walking or tool-making, were associated with drier habitat and the spread of grasslands, an idea often known as the savanna hypothesis. According to this long-held view, many important human adaptations arose in the...
A different hypothesis is that the key events in human evolution were shaped not by any single type of habitat (e.g., grassland) or environmental trend (e.g., drying) but rather by environmental instability. This idea, developed by Dr. Rick Potts of the Human Origins Program, is called variability selection. This hypothesis calls attention to the v...
Ancient hominin remains have been found in a variety of different habitats. While some hominins, such as Orrorin tugenensis and Ardipithecus ramidus have been found in wooded habitats, others such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis were found associated with diverse types of vegetation within a small geographic area. Reconstructions of the ancient habita...
By about 4 million years ago, the genus Australopithecus had evolved a skeletal form that enabled adjustment to changes in moisture and vegetation. The best current example of adaptability in Australopithecus is apparent in the skeleton known as Lucy, which represents Au. afarensis. Lucy’s 3.18-million-year-old skeleton has a humanlike hip bone and...
The first known stone tools date to around 3.3 million years ago. Making and using stone tools also conferred versatility in how hominin toolmakers interacted with and adjusted to their surroundings. Simple toolmaking by stone-on-stone fracturing of rock conferred a selective advantage in that these hominin toolmakers possessed sharp flakes for cut...
As predicted by the variability selection hypothesis, hominins were not found solely in one kind of habitat, but rather in a variety. A major signal of the ability to tolerate different environments was the dispersal of the genus early Homo beyond Africa into Asian environments. After 1.9 million years ago, the genus Homo is found in a variety of l...
Environmental instability may have been a factor not only in shaping adaptations but also in contributing to the extinction of some lineages. Environmental variability associated with the extinction of large mammal species has been proposed for the southern Kenya region. Sediments, stone artifacts, and animal faunal at the site of Olorgesailie span...
Brain enlargement during human evolution has been dramatic. During the first four million years of human evolution, brain size increased very slowly. Encephalization, or the evolutionary enlargement of the brain relative to body size, was especially pronounced over the past 800,000 years, coinciding with the period of strongest climate fluctuation ...
Feb 28, 2020 · Four factors—fire, language, beauty, and time—were key to humankind's ascension, argues science writer Gaia Vince. This week on the Science podcast, Vince examines our evolution through the lens of deep time, revealing how our genes, culture, and environment combined to create modern humans.
The first perspective that language evolved from the calls of human ancestors seems logical because both humans and animals make sounds or cries. One evolutionary reason to refute this is that, anatomically, the centre that controls calls in monkeys and other animals is located in a completely different part of the brain than in humans.
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The evidence for primate and human evolution has derived primarily from comparative anatomy and fossil records, although since the 1960s, molecular and biochemical evidences have increasingly been used to delineate phylogenetic relationships among living species and diverse human populations.
