Implications of new early Homo fossils from Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya

Spoor, F; Leakey, Meave G.; Gathogo, Patrick N.; Brown, Francis H.; Antón, Susan C.; McDougall, Ian; Kiarie, Christopher; Manthi, Fredrick K.; Leakey, L. S. B.

doi:10.1038/nature05986

Cited by 271 publications

(166 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…) habilis have a complex relationship that includes a temporal overlap in East Africa of around half a million years (~1.9 to 1.44 mya; Spoor et al, 2007), and a less clear distinction in body mass and relative brain size than formerly thought (Spoor et al, 2007;Lordkipanidze et al, 2007;Lieberman, 2007). For instance some anatomically defined H. erectus in Georgia are in the size range of H. (A.…”

Section: The Impact Of Cooking On Human Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The energetic significance of cooking

Carmody¹,

Wrangham²

2009

Journal of Human Evolution

338

220

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While cooking has long been argued to improve the diet, the nature of the improvement has not been well defined. As a result, the evolutionary significance of cooking has variously been proposed as being substantial or relatively trivial. In this paper, we evaluate the hypothesis that an important and consistent effect of cooking food is a rise in its net energy value. The pathways by which cooking influences net energy value differ for starch, protein and lipid, and we therefore consider plant and animal foods separately.Evidence of compromised physiological performance among individuals on raw diets supports the hypothesis that cooked diets tend to provide energy. Mechanisms contributing to energy being gained from cooking include increased digestibility of starch and protein, reduced costs of digestion for cooked versus raw meat, and reduced energetic costs of detoxification and defense against pathogens. If cooking indeed consistently improves the energetic value of foods through such mechanisms, its evolutionary impact depends partly on the relative energetic benefits of non-thermal processing methods used prior to cooking.We suggest that if non-thermal processing methods, such as pounding, were used by Lower Paleolithic Homo, they likely provided an important increase in energy gain over unprocessed raw diets. However, cooking has critical effects not easily achievable by nonthermal processing, including the relatively complete gelatinization of starch, efficient denaturing of proteins, and killing of foodborne pathogens. This means that however sophisticated the non-thermal processing methods were, cooking would have conferred incremental energetic benefits. While much remains to be discovered, we conclude that the adoption of cooking would have led to an important rise in energy availability. For this reason, we predict that cooking had substantial evolutionary significance.

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Section: The Impact Of Cooking On Human Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The energetic significance of cooking

Carmody¹,

Wrangham²

2009

Journal of Human Evolution

338

220

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…And this leaving aside the conundrum of Paranthropus boisei, a species pervasively associated to Early Acheulean sites in Konso, Olduvai and West Turkana, but which is conventionally excluded from the discussions on artefact and hominin associations. This complex panorama, together with the temporal overlap between early H. erectus and H. habilis observed in East Turkana [108], might tempt some to revive biological divides to explain inter-assemblage variability in the 1.7 -1.3 Myr interval (see review in [80]). …”

Section: (E) Human Fossils and Stone Tool Associationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The origins of the Acheulean: past and present perspectives on a major transition in human evolution

Torre¹

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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The emergence of the Acheulean from the earlier Oldowan constitutes a major transition in human evolution, the theme of this special issue. This paper discusses the evidence for the origins of the Acheulean, a cornerstone in the history of human technology, from two perspectives; firstly, a review of the history of investigations on Acheulean research is presented. This approach introduces the evolution of theories throughout the development of the discipline, and reviews the way in which cumulative knowledge led to the prevalent explanatory framework for the emergence of the Acheulean. The second part presents the current state of the art in Acheulean origins research, and reviews the hard evidence for the appearance of this technology in Africa around 1.7 Ma, and its significance for the evolutionary history of Homo erectus.This article is part of the themed issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'.

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“…Patterns of pelvic evolution in earliest Homo are obscured by continuing uncertainty about taxonomy [19,60,83,[89][90][91][92] and the almost total absence of pelvic fossils that are associated with diagnostic craniodental remains (the one notable exception being the Nariokotome H. erectus skeleton from Kenya [93]). Furthermore, although hominins spread out of Africa during the Early Pleistocene and into Europe and Asia [94,95], pelvic fossils of early Homo have been recovered exclusively from Africa [2].…”

Section: (A) Early Homomentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of the human pelvis: changing adaptations to bipedalism, obstetrics and thermoregulation

Gruss

Schmitt

2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

147

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The fossil record of the human pelvis reveals the selective priorities acting on hominin anatomy at different points in our evolutionary history, during which mechanical requirements for locomotion, childbirth and thermoregulation often conflicted. In our earliest upright ancestors, fundamental alterations of the pelvis compared with non-human primates facilitated bipedal walking. Further changes early in hominin evolution produced a platypelloid birth canal in a pelvis that was wide overall, with flaring ilia. This pelvic form was maintained over 3-4 Myr with only moderate changes in response to greater habitat diversity, changes in locomotor behaviour and increases in brain size. It was not until Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and the Middle East 200 000 years ago that the narrow anatomically modern pelvis with a more circular birth canal emerged. This major change appears to reflect selective pressures for further increases in neonatal brain size and for a narrow body shape associated with heat dissipation in warm environments. The advent of the modern birth canal, the shape and alignment of which require fetal rotation during birth, allowed the earliest members of our species to deal obstetrically with increases in encephalization while maintaining a narrow body to meet thermoregulatory demands and enhance locomotor performance.

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Implications of new early Homo fossils from Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya

Cited by 271 publications

References 19 publications

The energetic significance of cooking

The energetic significance of cooking

The origins of the Acheulean: past and present perspectives on a major transition in human evolution

The evolution of the human pelvis: changing adaptations to bipedalism, obstetrics and thermoregulation

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