Author: Marie Soressi,Harold Lewis Dibble
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
ISBN: 9781931707428
Category: Social Science
Page: 290
View: 7351
Faustkeil - Silex - Pebble Tool.
Author: Kaye Reed,John G Fleagle,Richard E Leakey
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400759193
Category: Science
Page: 282
View: 7993
Australopithecus species have been the topic of much debate in palaeoanthropology since Raymond Dart described the first species, Australopithecus africanus, in 1925. This volume synthesizes the geological and paleontological context of the species in East and South Africa; covers individual sites, such as Dikika, Hadar, Sterkfontein, and Malapa; debates the alpha taxonomy of some of the species; and addresses questions regarding the movements of the species across the continent. Additional chapters discuss the genus in terms of sexual dimorphism, diet reconstruction using microwear and isotopic methodologies, postural and locomotor behavior, and ontogeny.Origin and Early Evolution of the Genus Homo
Author: Frederick E. Grine,John G Fleagle,Richard E. Leakey
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402099809
Category: Social Science
Page: 220
View: 9829
There are some issues in human paleontology that seem to be timeless. Most deal with the origin and early evolution of our own genus – something about which we should care. Some of these issues pertain to taxonomy and systematics. How many species of Homo were there in the Pliocene and Pleistocene? How do we identify the earliest members the genus Homo? If there is more than one Plio-Pleistocene species, how do they relate to one another, and where and when did they evolve? Other issues relate to questions about body size, proportions and the functional adaptations of the locomotor skeleton. When did the human postcranial “Bauplan” evolve, and for what reasons? What behaviors (and what behavioral limitations) can be inferred from the postcranial bones that have been attributed to Homo habilis and Homo erectus? Still other issues relate to growth, development and life history strategies, and the biological and archeological evidence for diet and behavior in early Homo. It is often argued that dietary change played an important role in the origin and early evolution of our genus, with stone tools opening up scavenging and hunting opportunities that would have added meat protein to the diet of Homo. Still other issues relate to the environmental and climatic context in which this genus evolved.Biology Reconsidered
Author: Fred H. Smith,James C. Ahern
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118659902
Category: Science
Page: 480
View: 2646
This update to the award-winning The Origins of Modern Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence covers the most accepted common theories concerning the emergence of modern Homo sapiens—adding fresh insight from top young scholars on the key new discoveries of the past 25 years. The Origins of Modern Humans: Biology Reconsidered allows field leaders to discuss and assess the assemblage of hominid fossil material in each region of the world during the Pleistocene epoch. It features new fossil and molecular evidence, such as the evolutionary inferences drawn from assessments of modern humans and large segments of the Neandertal genome. It also addresses the impact of digital imagery and the more sophisticated morphometrics that have entered the analytical fray since 1984. Beginning with a thoughtful introduction by the authors on modern human origins, the book offers such insightful chapter contributions as: Africa: The Cradle of Modern People Crossroads of the Old World: Late Hominin Evolution in Western Asia A River Runs through It: Modern Human Origins in East Asia Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Australians Modern Human Origins in Central Europe The Makers of the Early Upper Paleolithic in Western Eurasia Neandertal Craniofacial Growth and Development and Its Relevance for Modern Human Origins Energetics and the Origin of Modern Humans Understanding Human Cranial Variation in Light of Modern Human Origins The Relevance of Archaic Genomes to Modern Human Origins The Process of Modern Human Origins: The Evolutionary and Demographic Changes Giving Rise to Modern Humans The Paleobiology of Modern Human Emergence Elegant and thought provoking, The Origins of Modern Humans: Biology Reconsidered is an ideal read for students, grad students, and professionals in human evolution and paleoanthropology.
Author: Donald B. Brinkman,Patricia A. Holroyd,James D. Gardner
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400743084
Category: Science
Page: 580
View: 2535
This volume celebrates the contributions of Dr. Eugene Gaffney to the study of turtles, through a diverse and complementary collection of papers that showcases the latest research on one of the most intriguing groups of reptiles. A mix of focused and review papers deals with numerous aspects of the evolutionary history of turtles, including embryonic development, origins, early diversification, phylogenetic relationships, and biogeography. Moreover it includes reports on important but poorly understood fossil turtle assemblages, provides historical perspectives on turtle research, and documents disease and variation in turtles. With its broad scope, which includes descriptions of material and new taxa from Australia, Asia, and Europe, as well as North and South America, this work will be an essential resource for anyone interested in the morphology and evolution of turtles. “This volume’s breadth of time, geography, and taxonomic coverage makes it a major contribution to the field and a ‘must have’ for all vertebrate paleontologists.”, James F. Parham, California State University, CA, USA “A comprehensive and sweeping overview of turtle evolution by the top experts in the field that will interest everyone curious about these unique reptiles.” Jason S. Anderson, University of Calgary, Canada “An invaluable addition to the literature that covers the full spectrum of approaches toward understanding the evolution of these noble creatures.” Ann C. Burke, Wesleyan University, CT , USA “A truly comprehensive volume that both the student of fossil turtles, as well as the general reader interested in these enigmatic creatures, will find fascinating.” Tyler Lyson, Yale University, CT, USAFrom Africa to China and Beyond
Author: Christopher J. Norton,David R. Braun
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9789048190942
Category: Social Science
Page: 216
View: 5300
This volume brings together a group of authors that address the question of the first out of Africa into Asia c. 2 Ma. The scope of the book is comprehensive as it covers almost every major region of Asia. The primary goal of this volume is to provide an updated synthesis of the current state of the Asian paleoanthropological and paleoenvironmental records. Papers include detailed studies of the theoretical constructs underlying the move out of Africa, including detailed reconstructions of the paleoenvironment and possible migration routes. Other papers detail the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological and hominin fossil records of particular regions.
Author: Robert Jurmain,Lynn Kilgore,Wenda Trevathan,Russell L. Ciochon,Eric Bartelink
Publisher: Cengage Learning
ISBN: 1337515914
Category: Social Science
Page: 592
View: 669
INTRODUCTION TO PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, presents the most up-to-date, balanced, and comprehensive introduction to the field, combining an engaging writing style and compelling visual content to bring the study of physical anthropology to life for today's students. With a focus on the big picture of human evolution, the 15th Edition helps students master the basic principles of the subject and arrive at an understanding of the human species and its place in the biological world. It continues to keep pace with changes in the field, with new material on genetic technology and other topics reflecting recent scientific findings, including recent fossil discoveries as well as ancient DNA research on Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.
Author: Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226493237
Category: Religion
Page: 344
View: 4351
Over the past century, Buddhism has come to be seen as a world religion, exceeding Christianity in longevity and, according to many, philosophical wisdom. Buddhism has also increasingly been described as strongly ethical, devoted to nonviolence, and dedicated to bringing an end to human suffering. And because it places such a strong emphasis on rational analysis, Buddhism is considered more compatible with science than the other great religions. As such, Buddhism has been embraced in the West, both as an alternative religion and as an alternative to religion. This volume provides a unique introduction to Buddhism by examining categories essential for a nuanced understanding of its traditions. Each of the fifteen essays here shows students how a fundamental term—from art to word—illuminates the practice of Buddhism, both in traditional Buddhist societies and in the realms of modernity. Apart from Buddha, the list of terms in this collection deliberately includes none that are intrinsic to the religion. Instead, the contributors explore terms that are important for many fields and that invite interdisciplinary reflection. Through incisive discussions of topics ranging from practice, power, and pedagogy to ritual, history, sex, and death, the authors offer new directions for the understanding of Buddhism, taking constructive and sometimes polemical positions in an effort both to demonstrate the shortcomings of assumptions about the religion and the potential power of revisionary approaches. Following the tradition of Critical Terms for Religious Studies, this volume is not only an invaluable resource for the classroom but one that belongs on the short list of essential books for anyone seriously interested in Buddhism and Asian religions.
Author: Robert Baron,Ana C. Cara
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617031070
Category: Social Science
Page: 320
View: 5893
Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, Creolization as Cultural Creativity explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in the postcolonial creole societies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southwest Indian Ocean region, as well as a universal process that can occur anywhere cultures come into contact. An extraordinary number of cultures from Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, the southern United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Réunion, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Suriname, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone are discussed in these essays. Drawing from the disciplines of folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, history, and material culture studies, essayists address theoretical dimensions of creolization and present in-depth field studies. Topics include adaptations of the Gombe drum over the course of its migration from Jamaica to West Africa; uses of “ritual piracy” involved in the appropriation of Catholic symbols by Puerto Rican brujos; the subversion of official culture and authority through playful and combative use of “creole talk” in Argentine literature and verbal arts; the mislabeling and trivialization (“toy blindness”) of objects appropriated by African Americans in the American South; the strategic use of creole techniques among storytellers within the islands of the Indian Ocean; and the creolized character of New Orleans and its music. In the introductory essay the editors address both local and universal dimensions of creolization and argue for the centrality of its expressive manifestations for creolization scholarship.
Author: Ashraf M.T. Elewa
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3540958533
Category: Science
Page: 367
View: 5834
Morphometrics is concerned with the study of variations and change in the form (size and shape) of organisms or objects adding a quantitative element to descriptions and thereby facilitating the comparison of different objects and organisms. This volume provides an introduction to morphometrics in a clear and simple way without recourse to complex mathematics and statistics. This introduction is followed by a series of case studies describing the variety of applications of morphometrics from paleontology and evolutionary ecology to archaeological artifacts analysis. This is followed by a presentation of future applications of morphometrics and state of the art software for analyzing and comparing shape.Genes, Race, and History
Author: Jonathan Marks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351514628
Category: Social Science
Page: 321
View: 5998
Are humans unique? This simple question, at the very heart of the hybrid field of biological anthropology, poses one of the false of dichotomies—with a stereotypical humanist answering in the affirmative and a stereotypical scientist answering in the negative. The study of human biology is different from the study of the biology of other species. In the simplest terms, people's lives and welfare may depend upon it, in a sense that they may not depend on the study of other scientific subjects. Where science is used to validate ideas—four out of five scientists preferring a brand of cigarettes or toothpaste—there is a tendency to accept the judgment as authoritative without asking the kinds of questions we might ask of other citizens' pronouncements. In Human Biodiversity, Marks has attempted to distill from a centuries-long debate what has been learned and remains to be learned about the biological differences within and among human groups. His is the first such attempt by an anthropologist in years, for genetics has undermined the fundamental assumptions of racial taxonomy. The history of those assumptions from Linnaeus to the recent past—the history of other, more useful assumptions that derive from Buffon and have reemerged to account for genetic variation—are the poles of Marks's exploration.
Author: Leslie F. Marcus
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780306453014
Category: Mathematics
Page: 587
View: 3152
''An important addition to your library.'' ---American Scientist
Author: Leslie Floyd Marcus,Elisa Bello,Antonio García-Valdecasas
Publisher: Editorial CSIC - CSIC Press
ISBN: 9788400073534
Category: Education
Page: 264
View: 9034
New Perspectives
Author: Clive Bonsall,Vasile Boroneanț,Ivana Radovanović
Publisher: British Archaeological Reports Limited
ISBN: 9781407303734
Category: Social Science
Page: 260
View: 383
This book had its origins in a symposium held at the University of Edinburgh from 30 March to 2 April 2000, which was attended by archaeologists with a shared interest in the prehistory of the small but distinctive region of Southeast Europe known as the Iron Gates. In the broad sense the area refers to the section of the Danube valley where the river forms the modern political border between Serbia and Romania, and this definition is adopted for the present volume. First and foremost the volume is intended to illustrate the immense research potential of the Iron Gates region. A second objective is to provide case studies that illustrate the nature of current research and the rich possibilities offered by the growing range of scientific techniques available to archaeologists and their application to existing archaeological collections. Contents: 1) Lithic technology and settlement systems of the Final Palaeolithic and Early Mesolithic in the Iron Gates (Dusan Mihailovic); 2) The development of the ground stone industry in the Serbian part of the Iron Gates (Dragana Antonovic); 3) Sturgeon fishing along the Middle and Lower Danube (Laszlo Bartosiewicz, Clive Bonsall & Vasile Sisu); 4) The Mesolithic-Neolithic in the Derdap as evidenced by non-metric anatomical variants (Mirjana Roksandic); 5) Demography of the Derdap Mesolithic-Neolithic transition (Mary Jackes, Mirjana Roksandic & Christopher Meiklejohn); 6) Approaches to Starcevo culture chronology (Joni L. Manson); 7) Faunal assemblages from the Early Neolithic of the central Balkans: methodological issues in the reconstruction of subsistence and land Use (Haskel Greenfield); 8) Lepenski Vir animal bones: what was left in the houses? (Vesna Dimitrijevic); 9) New-born infant burials underneath house floors at Lepenski Vir: in pursuit of contextual meanings (Sofija Stefanovic & Dusan Boric); 10) DNA-based sex identification of the infant remains from Lepenski Vir (Biljana Culjkovic, Sofija Stefanovic & Stanka Romac); 11) Dating burials and architecture at Lepenski Vir (Clive Bonsall, Ivana Radovanovic, Mirjana Roksandic, Gordon Cook, Thomas Higham & Catriona Pickard); 12) Reanalysis of the vertebrate fauna from Hajducka Vodenica in the Danubian Iron Gates: subsistence and taphonomy from the Early Neolithic and Mesolithic (Haskel Greenfield); 13) Velesnica and the Lepenski Vir culture (Rastko Vasic); 14) The human osteological material from Velesnica (Mirjana Roksandic); 15) The Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Trieste Karst (north-eastern Italy) as seen from the excavations at the Edera Cave (Paolo Biagi, Elisabetta Starnini & Barbara Voytek).
Author: Richard D. Fuerle
Publisher: Spooner Press
ISBN: 9781604581218
Category: Homo erectus
Page: 352
View: 5218
Author: Richard A. Reyment,K. G. Jvreskog
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521575560
Category: Mathematics
Page: 371
View: 3920
Applied multivariate statistics has grown into a research area of almost unlimited potential in the natural sciences. The methods introduced in this book can successfully reduce masses of data to manageable and interpretable form. The authors give special attention to methods of robust estimation and the identification of atypical and influential observations. This textbook aims to introduce students of the natural sciences to the powerful technique of factor analysis and to provide them with the background necessary to be able to undertake analyses on their own. The authors explain new concepts in detail, and provide mathematical background where needed.Geometry and Biology
Author: Fred L. Bookstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521585989
Category: Mathematics
Page: 435
View: 8500
This first systematic survey of the subject combines multivariate statistical analysis, geometry, and biomathematics.
Author: Dennis E. Slice
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387276149
Category: Social Science
Page: 384
View: 4710
Morphometrics has undergone a revolutionary transformation in the past two decades as new methods have been developed to address shortcomings in the traditional multivirate analysis of linear distances, angles, and indices. While there is much active research in the field, the new approaches to shape analysis are already making significant and ever-increasing contributions to biological research, including physical anthropology. Modern Morphometrics in Physical Anthropology highlights the basic machinery of the most important methods, while introducing novel extensions to these methods and illustrating how they provide enhanced results compared to more traditional approaches. Modern Morphometrics in Physical Anthropology provides a comprehensive sampling of the applications of modern, sophisticated methods of shape analysis in anthropology, and serves as a starting point for the exploration of these practices by students and researchers who might otherwise lack the local expertise or training to get started. This text is an important resource for the general morphometric community that includes ecologists, evolutionary biologists, systematists, and medical researchers.Craniometric Analyses in the Dispersion of Modern Homo
Author: William White Howells
Publisher: Peabody Museum of Archaeology &
ISBN: N.A
Category: Social Science
Page: 189
View: 5143
In this sequel to his Cranial Variation in Man, Howells surveys present-day regional skull shapes by a uniform method, examing the nature and degree of cranial differences discernible between recent Homo sapien populations around the world.
Author: J. L. Thompson,G. E. Krovitz,A. J. Nelson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139442084
Category: Social Science
Page: N.A
View: 9538
It is generally accepted that the earliest human ancestors grew more like apes than like humans today. If they did so, and we are now different, when, how and why did our modern growth patterns evolve? Originally published in 2003, this book focuses on species within the genus Homo to investigate the evolutionary origins of characteristic human patterns and rates of craniofacial and postcranial growth and development, and to explore unique ontogenetic patterns within each fossil species. Experts examine growth patterns found within available Plio-Pleistocene hominid samples, and analyse variation in ontogenetic patterns and rates of development in recent modern humans in order to provide a comparative context for fossil hominid studies. Presenting studies of some of the newer juvenile fossil specimens and information on Homo antecessor, this book will provide a rich data source with which anthropologists and evolutionary biologists can address the questions posed above.