24 January 2025: This paper was inadvertently published prematurely before all proof corrections had been finalized. It has been temporarily unpublished while this is rectified.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn 1938, the first distal femur of a fossil Australopithecus was discovered at Sterkfontein, South Africa. A decade later, another distal femur was discovered at the same locality. These two fossil femora were the subject of a foundational paper authored by Kingsbury Heiple and Owen Lovejoy in 1971.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe evolution of the medial longitudinal arch (MLA) is one of the most impactful adaptations in the hominin foot that emerged with bipedalism. When and how it evolved in the human lineage is still unresolved. Complicating the issue, clinical definitions of flatfoot in living Homo sapiens have not reached a consensus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe forelimbs of hominoid primates (apes) are decidedly more flexible than those of monkeys, especially at the shoulder, elbow and wrist joints. It is tempting to link the greater mobility of these joints to the functional demands of vertical climbing and below-branch suspension, but field-based kinematic studies have found few differences between chimpanzees and monkeys when comparing forelimb excursion angles during vertical ascent (upclimbing). There is, however, a strong theoretical argument for focusing instead on vertical descent (downclimbing), which motivated us to quantify the effects of climbing directionality on the forelimb kinematics of wild chimpanzees () and sooty mangabeys ().
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAgents interacting with their environments, machine or otherwise, arrive at decisions based on their incomplete access to data and their particular cognitive architecture, including data sampling frequency and memory storage limitations. In particular, the same data streams, sampled and stored differently, may cause agents to arrive at different conclusions and to take different actions. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on polities-populations of agents predicated on the sharing of information.
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