Showing papers in "Journal of Human Evolution in 2009"

TL;DR: Thirteen additional pieces of incised ochre recovered from c.

TL;DR: The absence of a mammal-wide correlation between brain size and immature period argues against the Needing-to-Learn explanation for slower development among large brained mammals.

TL;DR: A general methodological framework by which missing information about biological specimens can be estimated using geometric morphometric methods is outlined and how this relates to effective paleoanthropological use of incomplete and distorted crania is discussed.

TL;DR: The hypothesis that an important and consistent effect of cooking food is a rise in its net energy value is evaluated, and it is predicted that cooking had substantial evolutionary significance.

TL;DR: The lower layers at the Qafzeh Cave contained a series of hearths, several human graves, flint artifacts, animal bones, a collection of sea shells, lumps of red ochre, and an incised cortical flake.

TL;DR: The sequence at Uçağizli Cave documents the technological transition between Initial Upper Paleolithic and Ahmarian, with a high degree of continuity in foraging and technological activities, and documents major shifts in occupational intensity and mobility.

TL;DR: Results from the squamate and amphibian study indicate that during hominin occupation the MAT was always slightly warmer than at present in the vicinity of the Gran Dolina Cave, and the MAP was greater than today in the Burgos area, giving a scenario for the palaeoclimatic conditions that occurred during the early to middle Pleistocene in Atapuerca.

TL;DR: The results of this study fail to entirely discount the hypothesis that considers H. heidelbergensis as a chronospecies leading to the Neandertals, but mainly supports the theory of an Afro-European taxon, which is the last common ancestor of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens.

TL;DR: Investigation of walking cost in early hominins using experimental data from humans and chimpanzees indicates that walking cost was likely similar to or below that of their quadrupedal ape-like forebears, and that by the mid-Pliocene, hominin walking was less costly than that of other apes.

TL;DR: A sequential analysis reveals a higher level of complexity in honey extraction than previously proposed for nut cracking or hunting tools, and compares with some technologies attributed to early hominins from the Early and Middle Stone Age.

TL;DR: The results indicate that chimpanzees ranged more widely during the dry season, when food abundance was lowest, food was available mainly in open vegetation types, and when drinking water was restricted to a few sources.

TL;DR: Comparing these findings with human ethological data on spontaneous hand use reveals that the great ape clade (including humans) probably has a common effect at the individual level, such that a person can vary from ambidextrous to completely lateralised depending on the action.

TL;DR: The Holocene sequence at the site also documents local faunal extinctions - a result of accelerating human population growth, habitat loss, and over-exploitation.

TL;DR: All skeletal remains recovered from Liang Bua were extremely fragile, but have now been stabilized and hardened in the laboratory in Jakarta and are now curated in museum-quality containers at the National Research and Development Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, Indonesia.

TL;DR: It is suggested that Heinrich events, which occurred episodically throughout the last glacial cycle, led to abrupt changes in climate that may have rendered large parts of North, East, and West Africa unsuitable for hominin occupation, thus compelling early Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa.

TL;DR: Fossil primates reconstructed are reconstructed as having been similarly agile to omomyids and derived notharctid adapoids, which suggests that when postcranial material is found for this species it will exhibit features for some leaping behaviour, or for a locomotor mode requiring a similar degree of agility.

TL;DR: Results provide some of the strongest evidence that anatomically modern humans made the Aurignacian and other (non-Châtelperronian) early Upper Paleolithic industries.

TL;DR: The Pleistocene pattern is directly associated with Homo floresiensis skeletal remains and the Holocene changes correlate with the appearance of Homo sapiens, and the one reduction sequence continues across this hominin replacement.

TL;DR: The first absolute radiometric dated evidence for early Acheulean artefacts in South Africa that have been found outside of the early hominid sites of the Gauteng Province indicates that handaxe-using hominids inhabited southern Africa as early as their counterparts in East Africa.

TL;DR: New euprimate fossils from Vastan Mine are presented, including teeth, jaws, and referred postcrania of the adapoids Marcgodinotius indicus and Asiadapis cambayensis and a new species of the omomyid VASTanomys is described.

TL;DR: The results provide substantial support for the hypothesis that local human populations expanded rapidly in size after the Last Glacial Maximum and suggest that following the post-LGM population pulse, human foragers adopted a shifting series of intensification strategies mediated by changes in residential mobility.

TL;DR: It is argued that neither extinct nor extant hominin populations are as flexible in the chosen speeds of persistence hunting pursuits as other researchers have suggested, and variations in the efficiency of human locomotion appear to be similar to those of terrestrial quadrupeds.

TL;DR: This study presents the large carnivores from the recent seasons of excavations and previously published material, and based on biochronological correlations of the carnivore guild and paloemagnetism, the age of the site is 1.5-1.2 Ma, 100-200,000 years earlier than previous estimates.

TL;DR: The results indicate that the manual phalanges of Miocene apes are much more similar to one another than to living apes, and agree with the view that hominoid locomotor evolution largely took place in a mosaic fashion.

TL;DR: The morphology of the LB1, LB2, and LB6 mandibles and mandibular teeth from Liang Bua is described, and Morphological and metrical comparisons of the mandibles demonstrate that they share a distinctive suite of traits that place them outside both the H. sapiens and H. erectus ranges of variation.

TL;DR: LB1's derived features indicate that LB1's brain was globally reorganized despite its ape-sized cranial capacity, and may form the basis for the cognitive abilities attributed to H. floresiensis.

TL;DR: The distributions of the inferred cultural traits in the wild are used to assess how diffusion relates to geographic distances, and it is found that shared traits drop by 50% from the approximately eight characteristic of close neighbours over a distance of approximately 700 km.

TL;DR: A detailed geological background to a series of hominin fossils retrieved from the newly investigated deposit of Cooper's D is provided, including uranium-lead ages for speleothem material associated with A. robustus and the paleoenvironment is reconstructed as predominantly grassland, with nearby woodlands and a permanent water source.

TL;DR: Cl cladistic analysis is used, a tool that has not, until now, been applied to the problem, to establish the phylogenetic position of the species, and suggests that H. floresiensis is an early hominin that emerged after Homo rudolfensis but before H. habilis.