ANTH 196 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Lumbar Vertebrae, Orrorin, Gluteus Maximus Muscle
Document Summary
Use of complex tools in everyday life and situations. Primate evolution: the miocene epoch (23-5 mya) was the heyday of the apes where early primates ran rampant. The miocene - three major groups of fossil apes appear: During the miocene, there were many fossil apes, few were fossils of old world monkeys. However, as the climate cooled over the course of the miocene, owm were better able to adapt. As a result, presently, there are few living apes and many living owm on earth. The late miocene is where we start to see apes that are more similar to humans - these are hominins, classified by bipedality. They are a bipedal member of the evolutionary lineage leading to modern humans. Operationally, paleoanthropologists use bipedalism as a diagnostic trait that defines all hominins - thus, what they look for in the fossil record is bipedalism.
