Australian Cranial Traits: Function, Development, and ModernHuman Origins

澳大利亚颅骨特征：功能、发育和现代人类起源

• 批准号: 9804861
• 负责人: Susan Anton
• 金额: $ 5.16万
• 依托单位: University of Florida
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1998
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1998-09-01 至 2001-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9804861&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Australian; Cranial; Traits; Function; Development

The relationship between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens is critical to understanding the origin of modern humans. Two schools of thought exist, one that sees regional evolution of Homo sapiens from local populations of H. erectus throughout the Old World, and another that sees H. sapiens originating in Africa and ultimately replacing local H. erectus populations. Both schools use cranial characters to examine the degree of continuity in a geographic region but differ on their interpretations of the significance of these characters. Both agree that the best case for such continuity can be made in Australasia. This study uses comparative human anatomy to explicitly test whether the characters used to link Indonesian H. erectus and Australian modern humans are likely to be good indicators of genetic relatedness. The hypotheses to be tested are: 1) are the linking features functionally associated with a robust masticatory (chewing) pattern in modern Australians, 2) are features of the neurocranium (braincase) structural consequences of growth universal to long-headed individuals but not necessarily of genetic valence, and 3) are cranial keels structurally similar across taxa. These hypotheses are tested using 15 geographically diverse modern human samples, metric and nonmetric traits, and Computed Tomography. Answers to each of these three questions are critical to evaluating whether the linking features are likely to reflect genetic relatedness or some other shared environmental or developmental condition. Without explicit evaluation of the sources of these features, the simple enumeration of features in modern and fossil samples is not phylogenetically interpretable.

直立人和智人之间的关系对于理解现代人类的起源至关重要。 存在两种思想流派，一种认为智人是从当地的H.直立人在整个旧大陆，另一个看到H。起源于非洲的智人，最终取代了当地的H.直立人 这两个学派都使用颅骨特征来考察地理区域的连续性程度，但对这些特征的意义有不同的解释。 双方都同意，这种连续性的最佳案例可以在澳大拉西亚进行。 这项研究使用比较人体解剖学明确测试是否用于连接印尼H。直立人和澳大利亚现代人可能是遗传相关性的良好指标。 要测试的假设是：1）是功能上与现代澳大利亚人的强大咀嚼（咀嚼）模式相关的链接功能，2）是脑颅（脑颅）结构的特征，这是长头个体普遍存在的生长结果，但不一定是遗传价，3）在分类群中颅龙骨结构相似。 这些假设进行测试，使用15个地理上不同的现代人类样本，度量和非度量性状，和计算机断层扫描。 这三个问题的答案是至关重要的，以评估是否链接功能可能反映遗传相关性或其他一些共同的环境或发展条件。 如果不对这些特征的来源进行明确的评估，那么简单列举现代和化石样本中的特征就无法进行遗传学解释。