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In the Light of Evolution Volume IV: The Human Condition (2010) / Chapter Skim
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PART I: HUMAN PHYLOGENETIC HISTORY AND THE PALEONTOLOGICAL RECORD
Pages 1-4

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From page 1...
... in these reconstructions, phylogeneticists take advantage of the voluminous biological information currently on display in living organisms to deduce the evolutionary ages and properties of the ancestors that humans shared with various other primates, thereby in effect delving backward through time, indirectly. in Chapter 1, Bernard Wood describes some of the special challenges that have confronted anthropologists wishing to reconstruct human evolution based on morphological evidence (both from fossils and extant primates)
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From page 2...
... To help simplify this imbroglio, Wood compiles, describes, and provides geological dates for all named fossil taxa in the human clade, ranging from anatomically modern Homo sapiens back to various archaic hominins and "possible hominins" that lived several million years ago, and many taxa temporally in between. Wood also addresses several looming opportunities for the field of comparative primate morphology, such as the use of new imaging technologies that should help to clarify (by permitting more detailed levels of examination)
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From page 3...
... in numerous human populations representing distinct ecoregions on planet earth, or that differ in fundamental subsistence mode with respect to diet. in principle, genetic variation among geographic populations might register adaptive differences promoted by environmental selection, or historical population-demographic effects that are mostly independent of the ecological selective regime per se.
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From page 4...
...  / Part I in the environment, and sometimes reflected to varied degrees in the current spatial distributions of languages. The net result is a fascinating but complex picture of African human demographic history, presented in a broad framework that can be further tested as additional archaeological, linguistic, and genetic analyses (especially from autosomal loci)
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Key Terms

  • modern humans
  • modern homo
  • demographic history
  • extant primates
  • homo sapiens

  • sometimes registered
  • reconstruct human
  • anatomically modern
  • evolutionary reconstructions
  • human diet

  • cultural information
  • human history
  • numerous human
  • human clade
  • including cultural

  • extraordinary genetic
  • entailed evolutionary
  • particular genetic
  • human origins
  • studying human

  • populations representing
  • imaging technologies
  • african ancestry
  • archaic hominins
  • applying analytical

  • living organisms
  • distinct ecoregions
  • ecological selective
  • anatomical traits
  • historical causation


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