Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Paleobiology: present perspectives on the past
- 2 Constancy and change: taxonomic uncertainty in a probabilistic world
- 3 A century of fossils
- 4 About a century of theory
- 5 Human adaptability present and past
- 6 Primate patterns of diversity and adaptation
- 7 Hominid phylogeny: morphological and molecular measures of diversity
- 8 Plio-Pleistocene hominids: the paleobiology of fragmented populations
- 9 Character state velocity in the emergence of more advanced hominids
- 10 The paleobiology of widely dispersed hominids
- 11 Paleobiological perspectives on modern human origins
- 12 A future for the past
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Human adaptability present and past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Paleobiology: present perspectives on the past
- 2 Constancy and change: taxonomic uncertainty in a probabilistic world
- 3 A century of fossils
- 4 About a century of theory
- 5 Human adaptability present and past
- 6 Primate patterns of diversity and adaptation
- 7 Hominid phylogeny: morphological and molecular measures of diversity
- 8 Plio-Pleistocene hominids: the paleobiology of fragmented populations
- 9 Character state velocity in the emergence of more advanced hominids
- 10 The paleobiology of widely dispersed hominids
- 11 Paleobiological perspectives on modern human origins
- 12 A future for the past
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The challenge of paleobiology is to explain the forms, the functions, and the behaviors of past populations – here, those of our hominid ancestors. Toward this end it is desirable to consider our antecedents on the same terms as members of present populations: as organisms functioning, at least adequately if not always optimally, in a variety of particular environmental settings.
Since the time of Darwin, the fit between organism and environment has been believed by many biologists to be the result of adaptation. A century after the idea of evolution by means of natural selection was outlined, Colin Pittendrigh (1958) stressed that ‘the study of adaptation is not an optional preoccupation with fascinating fragments of natural history, it is the core of biological study.’ In studies of living populations, this core concept is based on repeated observations of the pervasive relationship between features (or in the terminology of cladistics, character states) and functions. When the temperature drops below a given threshhold, we shiver; when the temperature rises above a given level, we sweat. Children born and raised during a prolonged famine tend to be shorter and lighter at maturity than the generation of their parents. If, however, there is a marked improvement in nutritional conditions, the offspring still can become as tall and as massive as their parents and grandparents. Members of populations that have lived for hundreds of generations under hypoxic conditions at high altitude in the Andean (South America) region exhibit chests that are large relative to stature, with the absolute thoracic dimensions changing little in the next generation even among descendants who migrate to sea level (Eckhardt, 1992a).
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- Human Paleobiology , pp. 90 - 115Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000