Human evolution
This week we’re reading the Encyclopedia Britannica article on human evolution - although the format with adverts etc interspersed is slightly unpromising, the author Russell Howard Tuttle is an extremely well-known figure in the field, and if you ever want to read much much more on this topic you can consult his magnum opus Apes and Human Evolution via the library.
As usual, read this blog, do the reading, and then take the quiz on Learn to test your understanding.
The encyclopedia entry tells the story of human evolution, from our last common ancestor with gorillas and chimpanzees to recent appearance of complex tool use and symbolic behaviour in the archaeological record, drawing on three main sources of evidence: fossil, archaeological, and genetic (briefly).
There’s quite a long section on bipedalism, partly because it’s a major divergence between us and our closest living relatives, but also because Tuttle has done a lot of work on this - don’t worry too much about the details here, but also note the kinds of evidence he is drawing on and what can (or can’t) be concluded based on that.
Don’t be intimidated by the burst of technical species designations for the most distant human ancestors (at the start of the section “Background and beginnings in the Miocene”) - it’s not important to understand this for our purposes, and as with most evolutionary stories, the tale from early australopithecines to modern Homo sapiens is a messy one: far from being a steady, obvious, unbroken chain, human evolution is littered with false starts and dead ends, with most of our species’ history having been spent alongside a variety of closely-related hominids, meaning that there’s still a great deal of uncertainty and debate about which of these various now-extinct species we are most closely related to. I think the diagrams in the article are really informative, but if you want to see some pictures or a slightly more user-friendly graphical depiction of the human family tree, check out The Smithsonian’s interactive family tree.
Despite considerable and ongoing advances in what we know about human evolution, this kind of evidence has so far proven surprisingly unhelpful in resolving long-standing debates surrounding when and how language emerged. As it currently stands, the available evidence has been argued to be consistent with the relatively early emergence of language in Homo erectus, or extremely late in modern Homo sapiens, with there being many proponents on both sides of the debate. In short, there is still a lot we don’t know. In the lecture we’ll discuss why this is the case, picking up on a number of points Tuttle makes about the difficulty of inferring cognitive abilities of linguistic behaviours from the fossil and archaeological record, and also looking at some recent attempts to use experimental approaches to answer these questions.
Tuttle, R. Howard (2024, September 3). human evolution. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution
This blog post was originally written by James Winters.
All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.