ARCH 131 Lecture Notes - Hominini, Australopithecus Anamensis, Paranthropus Boisei
Document Summary
Great apes and early hominin ancestors: 5-7 million years ago. Only found in africa: 2 main sites: east africa, south africa. South africa (in caves mostly vertical / some are horizontal: sterkfontein, taung i. e. , taung child (raymond. Remains of 8 different hominin individuals: makapansgat, swartkrans, malapa recently discovered found in 2008. East african rift valley no caves. Would ve been more wet back then dry now: hadar, kada gona oldest known stone tools, omo river, west turkana, olduvai gorge louis leakey, koobi for a, laetoli. Taxonomy is the process of classifying organisms based on those relationships the different groups in the taxonomic system (different species or genera) are referred to as different taxa. Weight all the available evidence (traditional approach): fossil morphology, dates of fossils, and geographical data. Employ cladistics analysis: base on shared characteristics between different fossils, ignore the time dimension in the fossil record (dates, avoid weighting different characteristics (i. e. assuming some to be more important than others)