After going through all the material for week five, there were a few hominin traits that really stood out to me: brain size, size and shape of the teeth, and bipedalism.

First, I wanted to mention brain size. Before learning that hominins have a much smaller brain size, I imagined their brains to be larger than humans’. As there was an increase in the process of learning new languages and skills, there was an increase in the size of the brains. Today, humans have large complex brains that allow us to process and utilize the information we intake.

Another trait that caught my eye was the size and shape of the teeth. From the lecture, I learned that Ardipithecus and Australopithecus had very large canines. They needed their canines to use during fights. As evolution went on, there was a reduction in the size of the canine teeth and an increase in the size of premolars and molars. As humans, we need our teeth to chew/eat food and not to use them to fight. Also, to chew, we do not use the front of our teeth, we use the teeth in the back. This evolutionary change demonstrates not only how the size and shape of the teeth have changed, but how their function has changed too. We can also use this knowledge to understand which species we may have had an ancestral connection with.

Last but not least, the trait that stood out to me was the bipedal trait. Having the bipedal trait meant that the species could walk around on both feet, just like humans, instead of walking around on both their feet and hands. This was an evolutionary change that affected the skeletal structure of organisms, making it more comfortable to walk upright. This can inform us about modern human biology because it helps us understand why we walk on two legs and where we come from (primates) because not all the species had the bipedal trait.

Those were just three examples of hominin traits that can inform us about modern human biology. There are many more that demonstrate the evolution of the human body.

Fossilized skeletal remains of early human ancestors can help anthropologists reconstruct and learn from the past by being able to compare them with each other and to humans. Personally, I find fossils to be very fascinating! Fossils give us a visual representation of what the species looked like. Additionally, anthropologists can use the fossils and sediments to give a date of when that species had existed – they provide a timeline. There were various techniques they can use to do this. One is the tree ring dating technique. I knew about this even before taking this course because my grandmother had mentioned this to me when I was younger. It was interesting to find out that even my grandmother had known that the thickness of the rings depends on the amount of rainfall. Overall, fossils can help provide evidence as to what traits developed, why they did, and when they did. It is a very useful tool to represent evolution.