| Presentation Detail
Behavior and Social Evolution Cieri, Robert [1]. Craniofacial feminization in Pleistocene Homo sapiens: testosterone, social tolerance, and the origins of behavior modernity. The last 200,000 years of human cultural evolution have witnessed the persistent establishment of behaviors involving innovation,planning depth, and abstract and symbolic thought, or what has been called behavioral modernity. The reason for rapid development of these behaviors around 50,000 years ago in Eurasia, the so-called Upper Paleolithic revolution, is the subject of persistent debate in anthropology. Because it occurs with no concurrent fossil signal for changes inhuman brain size or architecture, demographic models based on increased human population density from the late Pleistocene onwards have been increasingly invoked to understand the emergence of behavioral modernity. High levels of social tolerance, however, as seen among living humans, are a necessary prerequisite to life at higher population densities and for the kinds of cooperative cultural behaviors essential to these demographic models. Here we provide morphometric data on craniofacial feminization (reduction in average brow ridge projection and shortening of the upper facial skeleton) in Homo sapiens from the Middle Pleistocene to recent times gathered from fossil material and a large-scale data set of recent human craniometrics. We argue that temporal changes in human craniofacial morphology reflect reductions in average levels of adult circulating testosterone, which in turn reflects the evolution of enhanced social tolerance since the Middle Pleistocene.
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1 - University of Utah, Biology, 257 s 1400 e, 201 S Biology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84112, United States
Keywords:
paleoanthropology
Testosterone
craniofacial
domestication
social cooperation
morphology
humans.
Presentation Type: Regular Oral Presentation
Session: 146
Location: Alpine C/Snowbird Center
Date: Tuesday, June 25th, 2013
Time: 1:30 PM
Number: 146001
Abstract ID:753
Candidate for Awards:W.D. Hamilton Award for Outstanding Student Presentation |
