In this week’s video lectures and readings, we learned a lot about the different types of hominins and their traits. A lot of their traits that we learned about can inform us about modern human biology. It was interesting to learn about the traits that we gained and lost from our ancestors. One of those significant traits would be hominins going from quadruped to bipedal. The apes that survive extension all had to adapt in order to survive. The apes that adapted were all bipedal. This trait was brought up in the second video lecture mentioning that you will see a chimpanzee stand up on two legs every once in a while. This is not the most comfortable position for them to move around, but they can do it. This leads to the evolution of humans because we are very similar to chimpanzees in DNA. Since we evolved from apes, we transition to standing up and moving by using our two legs. For humans to do this, we have to burn more calories. We have to eat more to provide us with more energy for us to burn off more calories.
The evolution of teeth would be another major trait that took place in human evolution. We went from having large canine teeth to having small canine teeth. Large canine teeth were used for fighting and defensive strategies. Since we don’t have large canine teeth, we don’t lead with our head to attack someone. We would use our arms and hands to initiate an attack. Also, large canine teeth were not linked to meat-eaters. Hominin with smaller teeth are linked to eating meat. It is easier to eat meat with smaller canine teeth because humans use them as incisors.
The grasping big toe is another major trait that leads to human evolution. Chimpanzees use their grasping big toe to swing from tree to tree and to hang from trees. It gives them more support for doing those actions. We as humans don’t need a grasping big toe because we don’t need to swing from trees and hang from trees to get to the next location. We can walk on our two legs for longer distances more comfortably compared to apes. That’s why the grasping toe disappeared when we evolved into humans.
Fossilized skeletal remains of early human ancestors can help anthropologist reconstruct and learn from the past. This has allowed us to find different species that were similar to us that lived for more than a million years ago. This can enable us to see and determine how our ancestor’s appearance and height. The last video we watched, we learned that anthropologists could determine from recovering fossilized skeletal remains how that hominin died. We also learned that they were able to figure out how old they were when they died. In the video, they were able to figure out that the hominin that they found died from falling into a cave. Later in the video, we found out that there were multiple caves in that area. Fossilized skeletal remains can help us find a lot of valuable information for us to learn about the world from millions of years ago.
Hi Daniel,
Adapting to bipedalism was a very important aspect of our evolution from apes. Like you mentioned, the hominins that were able to adapt to this bipedalism survived and the ones that could not adapt to it did not survive. This shows how important bipedalism is in modern human biology. It allows us, homo sapiens, to be at our best.
It was interesting to read that large canine teeth were not linked to meat-eaters, but smaller canine teeth are linked to eating meat. I would think the opposite to be true. It would seem that eating meat with larger canine teeth would be easier than eating meat with smaller canine teeth.
The help of fossilized skeletal remains has allowed us to recreate our ancestors and learn more about how much diversity there was.
I wrote about teeth in my blog as well because it was probably the most surprising thing I learned this week. I always thought large canine teeth were linked to eating meat. We see large canines in cats and dogs, and both of them eat meat (especially cats who are obligate carnivores) so I guess I just assumed they were linked mostly to a diet of meat. I never considered that teeth evolved the way they did because of the need to defend or attack. It’s definitely interesting all the factors that influence how our teeth evolved! This week showed me just how complicated every step of evolution really could be, with bipedalism and cranium size, right down to how our teeth form.