Human Origins 1400-231HO
The lecture drives the student through the several stages of non-human and human primate evolution. The course will start with background knowledge on relevant skeletal anatomy, non-human primate taxonomy, hominin classification, and an introduction to the temporal and environmental context for non-human and human primate evolution. For the first half of the course, we will go through the many stages of primate evolution, becoming familiar with the great diversity of fossil primate groups, starting with plesiadapiforms in the Paleocene and ending with the great apes of the Miocene. For the second half of the course, we will focus specifically on hominin evolution, starting with the potential earliest hominins from the Miocene, and exploring the record of hominin species until the most recent anatomically modern humans.
The course will be supplemented with laboratories. The aim of the laboratories is to guide the course participants through the diversity of fossil primates and fossil hominins. The students will learn the key traits to be able to discern between major groups of primates and hominin lineages. The approach to identification is morphological and to the extent that material is available, students will be working with skeletal material and casts or relevant human and non-human primate groups. The student will also have access to 3D reconstructions of key fossils, covering the entirety of the evolutionary history of primates and humans. A major lab activity for this course will be the ‘Mystery Fossil Project’, in which students will be presented with an unidentified fossil and some biogeographic information and will have to put their identification skills at use to figure out what it is, following a reasoned logic for identifying morphological characters learned throughout the course and labs.
The course lectures will follow the schedule below:
1. Housekeeping; Primate Taxonomy
2. Skeletal Anatomy I
3. Skeletal Anatomy II
4. Primate Adaptations
5. Test (to evaluate the background concepts learnt); Temporal and Environmental Context
6. Early Primates
7. Fossil Prosimians
8. Early Anthropoids; Panamerican Monkeys
9. Afroeurasian Monkeys; Primitive Catarrhines; Fossil Apes
10. Bipedalism and Earliest Hominins; Gracile Australopiths I
11. Gracile Australopiths II
12. Robust Australopiths; Australopith Behaviour and Evolution
13. Early Homo, Homo erectus, Homo naledi
14. Homo floresiensis, Archaic Homo sapiens, Neanderthals
15. Origins of Anatomically Modern Humans; Denisovans; Homo longi
Main fields of studies for MISMaP
Type of course
Mode
Course coordinators
Learning outcomes
K_W06, K_W07, K_W09, K_W10, K_W11, K_W12, K_W18
K_U03, K_U04, K_U07, K_U08, K_U10
K_K01, K_K04, K_K07, K_K08
Student:
- Name the defining features of the order Primates and explain their significance.
- Define the characteristics of major primate groups.
- Describe the phylogenetic relationships of the major clades of primates.
- Describe the major evolutionary trends in hominins.
- Identify hominin species.
- Distinguish between gracile and robust australopiths.
- Understand the ecological context in which bipedalism evolved and the consequences of adopting a bipedal posture.
- Summarize the major migrations of anatomically modern humans around the globe and understand the impact of human migration to the hybridization between different Homo species.
- Understand the consequences of the increase in brain size to human development and explain the origins of speech.
Assessment criteria
The student will be evaluated based on a test in class in the middle of the course, and by handing a final piece of written work: the ‘Mystery Fossil Project’, in which the student chooses four selected ‘mystery fossils’ and provides reasoned explanations for their identification.
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: