Postcranial morphology of the middle Pleistocene humans from Sima de los Huesos, Spain
| Autor: | Eudald Carbonell, Ignacio Martínez, José María Bermúdez de Castro, Adrián Pablos, Ana Pantoja-Pérez, Nohemi Sala, Carlos Lorenzo, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Rebeca García-González, Ana Gracia-Téllez, Almudena Alcázar de Velasco, Alejandro Bonmatí, Laura Rodríguez, José Miguel Carretero, Nuria García, Eva María Poza-Rey, Arantza Aranburu, Rolf Quam, Gloria Cuenca-Bescós, Asier Gómez-Olivencia |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: |
Pleistocene
Population Dynamics Population Sima Postcrania Morphology (biology) Bone and Bones Paleontology Genus Animals Body Size Humans education Phylogeny Neanderthals education.field_of_study Multidisciplinary Phylogenetic tree Fossils Skull Hominidae Biological Sciences Body Height Geography Sister group Spain Evolutionary biology |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112:11524-11529 |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.1514828112 |
| Popis: | Current knowledge of the evolution of the postcranial skeleton in the genus Homo is hampered by a geographically and chronologically scattered fossil record. Here we present a complete characterization of the postcranium of the middle Pleistocene paleodeme from the Sima de los Huesos (SH) and its paleobiological implications. The SH hominins show the following: (i) wide bodies, a plesiomorphic character in the genus Homo inherited from their early hominin ancestors; (ii) statures that can be found in modern human middle-latitude populations that first appeared 1.6-1.5 Mya; and (iii) large femoral heads in some individuals, a trait that first appeared during the middle Pleistocene in Africa and Europe. The intrapopulational size variation in SH shows that the level of dimorphism was similar to modern humans (MH), but the SH hominins were less encephalized than Neandertals. SH shares many postcranial anatomical features with Neandertals. Although most of these features appear to be either plesiomorphic retentions or are of uncertain phylogenetic polarity, a few represent Neandertal apomorphies. Nevertheless, the full suite of Neandertal-derived features is not yet present in the SH population. The postcranial evidence is consistent with the hypothesis based on the cranial morphology that the SH hominins are a sister group to the later Neandertals. Comparison of the SH postcranial skeleton to other hominins suggests that the evolution of the postcranium occurred in a mosaic mode, both at a general and at a detailed level. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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