I found this weeks information very interesting.  I often have wondered about humans, and what makes us us, and to have a definition for what it means to be a hominin helps me in that goal.

When learning about hominin traits, the two that stuck out the most to me, in how they relate to modern human Biology, was our bipedalism, and our canines.  Bipedalism, with it arising very early in hominins, tells us that many of our modern traits were forming alongside our upright posture, succeeding to be amongst the traits of hominins only if there was enough synergy between it and bipedalism for the two traits to produce an animal which could survive effectively.  Secondly, the degeneration of canines as hominins became bipedal was very interesting to me. It shows the power of bipedalism to affect our evolution. I remember the videos we watched for this week saying how our canines shrunk because, more often than not, their function was as a weapon; yet as we stood upright, the sense of using our faces as a weapon became diminished.  Because canines were not beneficial to a bipedal animal, canines diminished. This seems to attest to the power of bipedalism, that it is more beneficial than another trait.  

Hominin diversity has ultimately clouded our ability to read the track of human evolution.   We know that as time shifts towards the present, hominid fossils begin to take on a more and more human form, but the diverse forms which hominins take, makes our ability to say that these earlier hominins necessarily lead to the future hominin’s fossils we have found difficult.  It could be the case that the fossils, and their diversity is due to outliers in the population of hominins at that time, or could even be from related, but ultimately isolated and different species of hominins in the past. Nonetheless, they provide data points which can help us begin to create a sketch of what could have happened in our evolutionary history.

Fossilized skeletal remains of early human ancestors can help anthropologists reconstruct and learn from the past by providing a minuscule sample of a massive population of hominins.  While it is difficult to say this sample of fossils represents the population in any meaningful way, it nonetheless provides us with some image of what is contained within this population.  Most likely we can infer that the features of any of these fossils are within x standard deviations of the normal hominin of that time.We could attempt to imagine what the bell curve of hominins would look like if this fossil was placed in different areas of the population.  One of these imagined distributions would represent the true population. We still would not be certain which is representative of the population, but as we get a larger sample of fossils, it should be easier to imagine the true population.