What moves us? How mobility and movement are at the center of human evolution

Kuhn, Steven L.; Raichlen, David A.; Clark, Amy

doi:10.1002/evan.21480

Cited by 40 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 88 publications

(207 reference statements)

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“…It seems likely that this space in the niche assisted H. antecessor and any of its descendants in establishing a foothold in the early Pleistocene of Europe. The shift to a more meat-rich diet in later Homo has been well represented in the literature and movement across trophic levels influences how required resources are transported, and over what distances (Kuhn et al, 2016). Additionally, carrying was possibly a significant factor in the later evolution of the genus Homo, as upper limb length was recently found to more strongly correlate with energy expenditure during catchment and transport of raw materials than lower limb length (Vidal-Cordasco et al, 2017).…”

Section: Changes In Energy Expenditurementioning

confidence: 98%

Aspects of human physical and behavioural evolution during the last 1 million years

Galway‐Witham

Cole

Stringer

2019

J Quaternary Science

106

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This paper reviews some of the main advances in our understanding of human evolution over the last 1 million years, presenting a holistic overview of a field defined by interdisciplinary approaches to studying the origins of our species. We begin by briefly summarizing the climatic context across the Old World for the last 1 million years before directly addressing the fossil and archaeological records. The main themes in this work explore (i) recent discoveries in the fossil record over the last 15 years, such as Homo naledi and Homo floresiensis; (ii) the implications of palaeogenetics for understanding the evolutionary history of, and relationships between, Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens; (iii) the interplay between physiology and metabolic demand, landscape use, and behavioural adaptations in the evolution of morphological and behavioural innovation; and (iv) recent advances in archaeological understanding for the behavioural record, in particular that of the Neanderthals. This paper seeks to provide a broad‐scale, holistic perspective of our current understanding of human evolution for the last 1 Ma, providing a reference point for researchers that can be built upon as new discoveries continue to develop the landscapes of human evolution. © 2019 The Authors. Journal of Quaternary Science Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Section: Changes In Energy Expenditurementioning

confidence: 98%

Aspects of human physical and behavioural evolution during the last 1 million years

Galway‐Witham

Cole

Stringer

2019

J Quaternary Science

106

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“…The reason is that this Lévy-like strategy is more efficient, in general, than other strategies. That could be the reason why, as mentioned before, this Lévy flight mode of searching or mobility is used not only by many animal species, but for humans as well [5–14]. In the context of searching in a changing complex environment, like a city, it turns out that this strategy is also very useful.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, human mobility just recently started to be explored in detail, thanks to geolocalized data of mobile phones and location-based social networks. Some of these studies show that human mobility follows a long-range dynamics, akin to Lévy walks [3, 4], as has been shown before as a common strategy in many animal species and humans [5–14]. …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergence of encounter networks due to human mobility

Riascos

Mateos

2017

PLoS ONE

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There is a burst of work on human mobility and encounter networks. However, the connection between these two important fields just begun recently. It is clear that both are closely related: Mobility generates encounters, and these encounters might give rise to contagion phenomena or even friendship. We model a set of random walkers that visit locations in space following a strategy akin to Lévy flights. We measure the encounters in space and time and establish a link between walkers after they coincide several times. This generates a temporal network that is characterized by global quantities. We compare this dynamics with real data for two cities: New York City and Tokyo. We use data from the location-based social network Foursquare and obtain the emergent temporal encounter network, for these two cities, that we compare with our model. We found long-range (Lévy-like) distributions for traveled distances and time intervals that characterize the emergent social network due to human mobility. Studying this connection is important for several fields like epidemics, social influence, voting, contagion models, behavioral adoption and diffusion of ideas.

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“…Early Homo evolved in an increasingly unpredictable climate, with periods of great aridity, and forest habitats changing to grasslands (Antón et al, 2014). This change in climate and habitat structure led to selection in Homo for a suite of traits to increase bipedal locomotory efficiency, such as increased lower limb length, which allowed archaic humans to forage more economically for widely dispersed resources (Steudel-Numbers, 2006;Bramble and Lieberman, 2004;Kuhn et al, 2016;Antón et al, 2014;Antón, 2012;Lieberman, 2011).…”

Section: Olfaction In Homomentioning

confidence: 99%

The navigational nose: a new hypothesis for the function of the human external pyramid

Jacobs

2019

Journal of Experimental Biology

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One of the outstanding questions in evolution is why Homo erectus became the first primate species to evolve the external pyramid, i.e. an external nose. The accepted hypothesis for this trait has been its role in respiration, to warm and humidify air as it is inspired. However, new studies testing the key assumptions of the conditioning hypothesis, such as the importance of turbulence to enhance heat and moisture exchange, have called this hypothesis into question. The human nose has two functions, however, respiration and olfaction. It is thus also possible that the external nose evolved in response to selection for olfaction. The genus Homo had many adaptations for long-distance locomotion, which allowed Homo erectus to greatly expand its species range, from Africa to Asia. Long-distance navigation in birds and other species is often accomplished by orientation to environmental odors. Such olfactory navigation, in turn, is enhanced by stereo olfaction, made possible by the separation of the olfactory sensors. By these principles, the human external nose could have evolved to separate olfactory inputs to enhance stereo olfaction. This could also explain why nose shape later became so variable: as humans became more sedentary in the Neolithic, a decreasing need for long-distance movements could have been replaced by selection for other olfactory functions, such as detecting disease, that would have been critical to survival in newly dense human settlements.

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What moves us? How mobility and movement are at the center of human evolution

Cited by 40 publications

References 88 publications

Aspects of human physical and behavioural evolution during the last 1 million years

Aspects of human physical and behavioural evolution during the last 1 million years

Emergence of encounter networks due to human mobility

The navigational nose: a new hypothesis for the function of the human external pyramid

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