Human Origins 1400-231HO-OG

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
3. Hominin classification; Temporal and Environmental Context
4. Test (to evaluate the background concepts learnt); Plesiadapiforms
5. Fossil Prosimians
6. Primate and Euprimate Origins; Early Anthropoids
7. Fossil Monkeys
8. Primitive Catarrhines; Fossil Apes
9. Subfossil Lemurs; Patterns in Primate Evolution
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, Homo luzonensis, Archaic Homo sapiens, Neandertals
15. Origins of Anatomically Modern Humans; Denisovans; Homo longi