Footprint evidence for locomotor diversity and shared habitats among early Pleistocene hominins.

For much of the Pliocene and Pleistocene, multiple hominin species coexisted in the same regions of eastern and southern Africa. Due to the limitations of the skeletal fossil record, questions regarding their interspecific interactions remain unanswered. We report the discovery of footprints (~1.

Footprint evidence of early hominin locomotor diversity at Laetoli, Tanzania.

Bipedal trackways discovered in 1978 at Laetoli site G, Tanzania and dated to 3.66 million years ago are widely accepted as the oldest unequivocal evidence of obligate bipedalism in the human lineage. Another trackway discovered two years earlier at nearby site A was partially excavated and attributed to a hominin, but curious affinities with bears (ursids) marginalized its importance to the paleoanthropological community, and the location of these footprints fell into obscurity.

Kinetics of stone tool production among novice and expert tool makers.

Objectives: As is the case among many complex motor tasks that require prolonged practice before achieving expertise, aspects of the biomechanics of knapping vary according to the relative experience/skill level of the practitioner. In archaeological experiments focused on the production of Plio-Pleistocene stone tools, these skill-mediated biomechanical differences have bearings on experimental design, the interpretation of results, and lithic assemblage analysis. A robust body of work exists on variation in kinematic patterns across skill levels but less is known about potential kinetic differences.

The manual pressures of stone tool behaviors and their implications for the evolution of the human hand.

It is widely agreed that biomechanical stresses imposed by stone tool behaviors influenced the evolution of the human hand. Though archaeological evidence suggests that early hominins participated in a variety of tool behaviors, it is unlikely that all behaviors equally influenced modern human hand anatomy. It is more probable that a behavior's likelihood of exerting a selective pressure was a weighted function of the magnitude of stresses associated with that behavior, the benefits received from it, and the amount of time spent performing it.

Participation, representation, and shared experiences of women scholars in biological anthropology.

American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) membership surveys from 1996 and 1998 revealed significant gender disparities in academic status. A 2014 follow-up survey showed that gender equality had improved, particularly with respect to the number of women in tenure-stream positions. However, although women comprised 70% of AAPA membership at that time, the percentage of women full professors remained low.