Fort Ternan Hominid

Dietary and environmental reconstruction with stable isotope analyses of herbivore tooth enamel from the Miocene locality of Fort Ternan, Kenya.

Tooth enamel of nine Middle Miocene mammalian herbivores from Fort Ternan, Kenya, was analyzed for delta 13C and delta 18O. The delta 18O values of the tooth enamel compared with pedogenic and diagenetic carbonate confirm the use of stable isotope analysis of fossil tooth enamel as a paleoenvironmental indicator. Furthermore, the delta 18O of tooth enamel indicates differences in water sources ...

Hominid Adaptations and Extinctions

According to David W. Cameron, the goal of his book Hominid Adaptations and Extinctions is “to examine the evolution of ape morphological form in association with adaptive strategies and to understand what were the environmental problems facing Miocene ape groups and how these problems influenced ape adaptive strategies” (p. 4). Cameron describes himself as being “acknowledged internationally a...

Early hominid biogeography.

We examined the biogeographic patterns implied by early hominid phylogenies and compared them to the known dispersal patterns of Plio-Pleistocene African mammals. All recent published phylogenies require between four and seven hominid dispersal events between southern Africa, eastern Africa, and the Malawi Rift, a greater number of dispersals than has previously been supposed. Most hominid spec...

Hominid revelations from Chad.

Language and Hominid Politics

Language is the main distinctive feature of our species. Why do we feel the urge to communicate with our fellows, and why is this form of communication, characterised by relevance, unique in animal kingdom ? In this chapter, we will first stress this specificity of human communication. In a second part, using computer evolutionary simulations, we will dismiss the usual claim that human communic...