Exam 14: Human Evolution

You are a researcher excavating a site in a cave in Israel. There are many layers of sediment and primitive artifacts (flint tools for cutting and scraping) from ancestral Homo species within the cave. As you work your way deeper and deeper through the layers, you notice that artifacts in the deeper layers (laid before 350,000 years ago) do not show any signs of having been exposed to fire. Artifacts in layers less than 350 tya show rapidly increasing evidence of exposure to fire. Your colleagues working in nearby caves and caves scattered around the eastern Mediterranean Sea have found similar evidence dating in the same time frames. The evidence is also consistent with that of European sites. What does this suggest about the use of fire by ancestral humans?

It is possible that modern humans may have comingled with which of these other ancestors?

Fossilized hominin bones have been found in Germany along with some tools and evidence of charred and fossilized bones from large animals dating to about 350,000 years ago. The hominin bones bear resemblance to both Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. Which of the following is the most likely possible identity of these fossils?

The first vertebrates to evolve lacked jaws and had skeletons made from a strong flexible tissue called cartilage. The lamprey is a modern example of this ancient group of vertebrates known as

Using this hominin evolutionary tree, indicate roughly when DNA from Neanderthals would have been introduced to the human genome if that Neanderthal DNA was a remnant from a common hominin ancestor. Support your answer by indicating which hominin would be the most likely candidate as the ancestor.

Fossils from different species of the genus Homo dating from 1.7-1.9 mya have been found in ecologically diverse areas across central Asia, China, and Indonesia. These species appear to be closely related to Homo erectus. Which of the following is a likely explanation of these findings?