Exam 8: Human Origins

The famous Australopithecine Lucy belongs to the species

Stone tool expert Nicholas Toth has studied replicas of Oldowan artifacts and has detected wear from all of the following activities EXCEPT

Humans and most other tree-loving placental mammals are part of the order

The origins of humanity date deep in geological time, to the

Hominin evolution can be described as a series of adaptive radiations that took place over at least

Although there are problems with such categorizations, all of the following have been used in recent years to assign a fossil to the genus Homo EXCEPT

The Leakeys revolutionized the study of human evolution with their find in Olduvai Gorge in 1959 of a hominin skull they named

Of the two suborders of primates, apes, humans, and monkeys are

Explain how potassium-argon dating is performed. Why is this process valuable when studying human evolution?

A deep-sea core from the Arabian Sea that probed nearly 1,000 feet of seabed deposits in an effort to understand climate conditions on Earth has revealed

Louis and Mary Leakey are most closely associated with

A team of researchers working in the Awash Desert in Ethiopia discovered teeth and skull fragments from a new hominin form dating to about 2.5 million years ago, which they named

Compare and contrast Homo habilis and hominins from Australopithecus.

Dramatic confirmation of hominin bipedalism by 3.6 million years ago comes from Laetoli in Tanzania, where Mary Leakey discovered

The suborder of primates that includes lemurs and tarsiers is

The earliest known hominin, found in Chad, Central Africa, has been named

Discuss the "grandmother hypothesis." How does this idea change the way we think about gender roles in prehistoric society?

Cladistic analysis tends to emphasize

Although we don't know exactly when humankind separated from the nonhuman primates, we do know this divergence took place in

Hominins adopted bipedalism