The most significant hominin trait is being bipedal. This is the tendency to walk on two legs as a primary form of locomotion. It is interesting to think that of all the species that are bipedal, other than us, are all dead. It kind of makes me wonder if walking on two feet is the most practical way of moving. I found it interesting to learn that we determine if the species was bipedal by looking at their foramen magnum, or hole at the base of our skulls. It seems crazy to me that this significant characteristic of bipedalism was determined on what to me seems like a small detail. The lecture said that they don’t even have fossils of this species’ legs, at least in the case of Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
Another interesting trait of these hominins is the reduced size of the canines. Prior to this lecture I had always heard that canines were primarily used for tearing meat off bones when eating. According to the lecture however, canines are instead most used for fighting and defense, which I suppose is essentially still ripping meat from bone but for a different purpose. When bipedal, it isn’t as practical to attack with your face when you have long arms that are available for punching or hitting. It is pointed out that many primates with larger canines do not even eat meat, which seems obvious once pointed out by not something I ever considered.
The comparison of brain sizes is important to note as well. Early hominins had chimp-sized brains, significantly smaller than the modern human.
Hominin diversity has made us who we are today. Without diversity, we wouldn’t have existed because everyone could have died out. The variance in species contributes to survival. There may be traits that one population had that made the difference between surviving and not surviving adverse conditions. Obviously these traits would continue to be passed on through natural selection.
Fossilized remains contribute significantly the anthropologists’ study of the past because fossils are essentially preserved past itself. This information can be used to create a timeline of changes. We are able to learn so much from fossils about bone structure and from bone structure we are able to form an idea of behavior. As mentioned earlier, the placement of the spine related to the skull is a good example of this. Fossils including a foramen magnum helped scientists discover something significant that goes beyond just the fossil itself, bipedalism. All of this can help to explain how and why we got to where we are now in an evolutionary sense. The fossilized remains help scientists to create a picture of an environment. The lack of a grasping big toe would indicate that this particular species did not spend a lot of time climbing around in trees, therefore allowing the scientist to determine that they would have most likely been in a flat environment. The more fossils we are able to obtain, the more gaps in the timeline of human evolution we are able to fill.