Naked Apes

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Nakedness

-Evidence against sexual selection of hairlessness
-Evidence against sexual selection of hairlessness
-Origin of clothing 30k-114k years ago based on the evolutionary history of body lice
-Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, notes that more than 500,000 years ago, hominid species such as Neandertals lived in northern European locations that would have been very cold at times. Neandertals would have been hard-pressed to survive without wearing animal hides or some other sort of clothing, he says.
-Anthropologists have dated possible sewing needles to about 40,000 years ago, and Olga Soffer of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign has argued that figurines and pottery from about 27,000 years ago show evidence of woven clothing (SN: 10/21/00, p. 261).


Human Origins

Fire

-p.17 human paleontologists unflinchingly attribute major morphological changes or differences to natural selection, mutation, gene drift, or gene flow. Paleolithic archeologists in contrast tend to ascribe major behavioral changes to newly developed cultural strategies or to population growth, even when the changes coincide with conspicuous morphological changes.
-p.17 In my view, however, we can say that fully modern behavior appeared only 50–40 ky ago.
-p.17 Limited evidence suggests that fully modern behavior appeared first in Africa roughly 50 ky ago
[2] Ambrose SH. 1998. Chronology of the Later Stone Age and food production in East Africa. J Archaeol Sci 25:377–392.
-p.17 a strictly cultural or demographic explanation downplays archeological evidence that the capacity for human behavior grew with time and that its growth broadly paralleled evolution in the human form. The sum suggests that behavioral and anatomical evolution were aspects of a single process driven by natural selection for advantageous genetic novelties.
-p.23 The famous “Peking Man” cave of Zhoukoudian Locality 1, northern China, dated to 600–400 ky ago,68 has provided numerous large mammal bones that were probably introduced by people, and they provide no reason to suppose the Locality 1 people hunted or scavenged less proficiently than their Acheulean contemporaries. Locality 1 also contains what may be the oldest firm evidence for human mastery of fire
-p.23-24 Arguably, people could not have colonized northern China and other parts of temperate Eurasia without fire for warmth and food preparation. However, if an incontestable hearth is required for proof, mastery of fire is documented only after 200 ky ago, at in the current state of our knowledge, most of the known Acheulean sites need not have differed significantly from the margins of historic African streams or waterholes, where the events that produce carcasses can be complex and need not involve people. ARTICLES Evolutionary Anthropology 23 African, west Asian, and European cave sites.
-p.24 by 500–400 ky ago, and from this time onwards, there were at least three evolving human lineages. These may always have been able to exchange genes, but distance and small population size probably limited gene flow, and the composite fossil and archeological records indicate that the African lineage spread to replace or swamp the others beginning roughly 50 ky ago. It is thus reasonable to supply the lineages with biological species labels: Homo sapiens in Africa, H. neanderthalensis in Europe, and H. erectus in the Far East. [paragraph] The European lineage is the best documented,73 and it is marked by the progressive accumulation of Neanderthal features, culminating in the classic Neanderthals by 130 ky ago.
-p.24 The pertinent African fossil record is much less complete, but it contains no specimens that anticipate the Neanderthals, and it shows that anatomically near-modern people were widespread in Africa by 130 ky ago,74 when only Neanderthals inhabited Europe.
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