Human evolution in comparative perspective
In the early 1970s, Milford Wolpoff suggested that a trait then considered unique to hominins - ‘culture’ - likely changed how speciation occurs in hominins compared to how it does in other taxa. Although culture (socially transmitted behaviour or information), technology, and other ‘uniquely human’ traits are now known to characterise other extant and extinct taxa, the broader underlying question raised by Wolpoff remains, given the extreme expression of these traits in our lineage. To what extent do the processes that characterise the evolution of our lineage operate in the same way as they do in other animal groups? In this talk, I will discuss my recent comparative work on two processes in human evolution, studied across both micro- and macroevolutionary scales: (1) speciation and (2) interspecific competition.
I will first describe how quantitative approaches to deal with sampling bias in the fossil record can produce new insights into the mode of speciation across hominin taxa, with ‘budding’ speciation being more common than previously supposed. I then move on to considering how population-level processes drive speciation in mammals, and propose a taxonomic model that will allow these processes to be studied in hominins. I will briefly outline ongoing work that moves these two lines of research forward: the inference of a new hominin phylogeny that expands taxonomic coverage, and is based on a character matrix that includes, for the first time, postcranial characters. The first stages of this project have produced a phylogeny that clarifies the phylogenetic position of the highly contested ‘Little Foot’ Australopithecus prometheus individual.
Whilst interspecific competition is known to play an important role in vertebrate evolution, surprisingly little explicit attention has been given to this process in hominins. I will discuss my recent work that indicated a role for interspecific competition between hominin taxa in speciation and extinction across 4 million years of hominin evolution, and describe pilot results that extend this framework to potential nonhominin competitors of our lineage - Plio-Pleistocene papionins, suids, and felids. Finally, I will introduce my long-term field site in Guinea, West Africa, where I currently head a research programme on interspecific competition between hominids (Western chimpanzees), papionins (sooty mangabeys, spot-nosed guenons), and suids (red river hogs). The vast amount of data being generated in this project has, so far, generated insights relevant for wild, unhabituated chimpanzee social (and interspecific!) learning, but my primary motivation is to use these taxa as models for interspecific interactions across ecological time in human evolutionary history.
Speaker: Laura van Holstein, University of Cambridge
Thursday, 02/06/25
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