ANT203H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Piltdown Man, Homo Erectus, Java Man
Document Summary
Lessons from the past the piltdown forgery. Recap: human lineage diverged from common ancestor shared with chimpanzees 5-7mya. Our lineage, including ancestors: what is a hominid. Cladistics: great apes, humans and ancestors: identification of hominins in fossil record difficult due to mosaic evolution, diagnostic hominin traits: bipedalism, large brains, hominin dentition, tool making, bipedalism is most reliable diagnostic feature. Leading hypothesis: what makes us human is our very large brain. At this time, there were very few fossils to refute or confirm this hypothesis. Hypothesis was accepted by the majority of scientists. Fossils of human ancestors found at this time. Neander valley (1856: germany was seen as the birthplace of humans due to limited samples of humans. All living things descended from a common ancestry. Scientists at the time identified these as darwin"s most audacious claims: humans and apes were related, human evolution occurred in africa. Evidence of early humans found in spain and france.
