Hominid economics

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...

Hominid evolution: genetics versus memetics

The last few million years on planet Earth have witnessed two remarkable phases of hominid development, starting with a phase of biological evolution characterised by rather rapid increase of the size of the brain. This has been followed by a phase of even more rapid technological evolution and concomitant expansion of the size of the population, that began when our own particular ‘sapiens’ spe...