Essay On Bipedalism

It is quite interesting, because before this discovery, it was thought that the first humans only left Africa 1 million years ago. However, archaeological evidences show that there were already Dmanisi hominids in Dmanisi 1.77 million years ago. It was also thought that the first humans out of Africa were tall, big-brained, and well-developed stone tools. However, the Dmanisi hominids were small, had small brains, and used primitive tools. The Dmanisi also provided paleoanthropologists with a new site to discover.

The article I have chosen was written by Helen Pilcher and is about evolution of creatures, especially for primates. However, until now, what do our very first primates were like still remain mysterious as we do not have sufficient information and evidences which are 60 million years ago. Yet, we still cannot deny that evolution occurs in creatures. No matter for humans, animals or plants, all of them will make changes because of their living habits and environment in order to survive. In this article, the author explains everything clearly about the primate evolution was taken around million years ago and ancestors are a small and nocturnal creature.

We measured the skulls of the fossil hominins: Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Neanderthal. We measured the length, height, width and orbit height of their skulls to calculate the estimated brain size and estimated body mass. Hypothesis 1. For Life History, humans will reproduce earlier than the primates and apes because of their body mass.

Hominin Split: They were the first primates that left the trees and stood up in grassland approximately 7 to 6 million years ago. They were called spilt because this separates hominins which are basically any primates that stands at least part time from other primates like Chimpanzees, apes, Gorillas and etc. They were historically important because they were the first primates to stand up in grass land so that they can hunt and survive their life more easily comparing to other primates who didn’t stand up and which gives us idea about that from them evolution of modern man have started gradually.

As Darwin would describe the hominid transition, us humans were better fit to survive and reproduce on Earth’s landscape. Our superiority drove the Neanderthals to extinction. An article published in Science compares the 4 billion nucleotide DNA sequence of the Neanderthals to modern day humans. The researchers identify a number of genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection, including genes involved in metabolism and in cognitive and skeletal development. Genetic sequencing studies support this claim as well.

In order to compare these anatomical differences, especially regarding tooth size and shape of skull, I will be looking into two hominids (and their skulls) in particular—Australopithecus Afarensis and Paranthropus Boisei. Under the category of Gracile Australopithecine, the Australopithecus Afarensis and the skull being used was from Ethiopia during the Pliocene epoch, roughly around 5.3-1.8 million years ago. As for the Paranthropus Boisei—under the category of Robust Australopithecine—this hominid and its skull was retrieved from Tanzania during the Pleistocene epoch, roughly 1.8 million-10,000 years

The physical nature of a primate body as wells as its movement is a unique factor in the animal kingdom. There has been continuous change through locomotion and body configuration throughout each grades of primate evolution. In this essay I will be discussing the modifications in time as well as theories in each grade of primate. This research paper will try to elaborate on the evolutionary modifications and some of the theories that have been proposed for these changes throughout our and other primate evolution. With time primates development was due to environmental changes.

Climate change influenced nonhuman primate evolution by forcing the evolution of species and creating new environments that allowed for primates to live. "A rapid temperature increase around 55 mya ... led to an expansion of evergreen tropical forests, the environment that made possible many mammalian groups, including primates." (pg. 260). As rapid temperature increase created new environments a rapid cooling in the beginning of the Oligocene limited the range of habitats greatly. Due to this reduction a majority of the primates during this time lived around the fayum region in northeast Africa.

climate change influenced nonhuman primate evolution because with the changes, nonhuman primates were forced to evolve in order to survive. As the climate change progressed and several species started to die out, nonhuman primates evolved through time and thus they were able to survive and climate change that occurred and were able to evolve into creatures that we see during present times. The theories of early primate evolution appeared about 60 million years ago after most of the early living species had already become extinct. New discoveries have supported one theory over another as more research is done.

One of those ways was the it let them see farther in the savannah. When human ancestors started moving out of the jungles and into the savannahs, they needed to be able to see far off into the distance. They started standing up on their back legs, which eventually led to normally walking on 2 legs, AKA bipedalism. Bipedalism also helped human ancestors travel faster and more efficiently. Walking on four legs required more energy and burned more calories than walking on two feet, which allowed for faster and longer travel.

This environment led the evolution of primates in its direction

It has recently been suggest that there is no evolutionary trade-off between the brain and the gut, or another expensive organ in hominins (Navarrete et al. 2011: 91-93). Instead encephalization is made possible by the stabilization of energy inputs and the redirection of energy from locomotion, growth and reproduction (ibid.). Larger brains are the result of a shift to eating cooked meat and underground tubers which gradually decreased the size of the digestive track (ibid.). Additionally, the expensive-tissue hypothesis lacks empirical support and nor has it never been fully proved or experimented on (ibid.). Nonetheless, this rebuttal also currently lacks evidence, namely morphological data (ibid.).

Evolutionists believe that man originated from apes which pertains to the natural selection while creationists believe that man was created in God’s image by God. Evolutionists say that scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits of humans originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of around 6 million years. The ability to walk on two legs evolved over 4 million years ago. Other human characteristics like a large and complex brain, the ability to make tools, and the capacity for language developed recently. Physical and genetic similarities show that the human species, homo sapiens, has a very close relationship to another group of primate species, apes.

Studies show that walking on two legs requires less energy and is therefore more advantageous to the hominid. A study was done to assess the energy level of chimps when walking on a treadmill, on two and four legs. The results displayed that walking on four legs required 75% more energy than walking on two, thus confirming the theory that it is more effective and

Hominid hunters were able to return to a fire, cook, and share wisdom that has been passed down to them. The different groups of hominids then began developing their own cultures that would distinguish these societies from each other