Deck 4: What Can the Fossil Record Tell Us About Human Origins

Question 1

The subfield of evolutionary studies that devotes attention to short-term evolutionary changes is

A) macroevolution.
B) microevolution.
C) modern synthesis.
D) natural selection.

Answer 1

B

Question 2

The slow, gradual transformation of a single species over time is called

A) cladogenesis.
B) evolution.
C) anagenesis.
D) arrhythmia.

Answer 2

C

Question 3

The process by which a single species gives rise to a variety of descendent species over time is called

A) anagenesis.
B) cladogenesis.
C) phyletic gradualism.
D) punctuated equilibrium.

Answer 3

B

Question 4

A process in which natural selection is seen to operate among variant, related species within a single genus, family or order, is called

A) species selection.
B) gradualist transformation.
C) reverse speciation.
D) bipedalism.

Question 5

Walking on two feet rather than four is called

A) bipedalism.
B) quadrupedalism.
C) bipolarism.
D) taphonomy.

Question 6

The phenotypic pattern that shows how different traits of an organism, responding to different selection pressures, may evolve at different rates is called

A) phenotypic variability.
B) mosaic evolution.
C) taxonomic evolution.
D) hominin evolution.

Question 7

Primates that walk on two feet are called

A) anthropoids.
B) apes.
C) hominoids.
D) hominins.

Question 8

Organisms that eat a wide range of plant and animal foods are called

A) omnivorous.
B) multimodal feeders.
C) generalized foraging.
D) broadly based.

Question 9

The foramen magnum is the

A) hole formed by the pelvic bones that determines the size of the birth canal.
B) hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes on its way to the brain.
C) space between the zygomatic arch and the skull through which the temporal muscle passes.
D) angle of the spinal cord as it passes into the brain.

Question 10

It is now generally accepted that the earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans comes from

A) Europe
B) China
C) Australia
D) Morocco

Question 11

Some anthropologists have claimed that meat eating was the crucial behavioral change leading to the appearance of early Homo. This story of human origins is called the

A) missing link scenario.
B) man the hunter scenario.
C) woman the gatherer scenario.
D) foraging scenario.

Question 12

The key criterion used by paleoanthropologists in deciding whether a gracile fossil younger than 2 million years of age should be placed in the genus Homo is

A) size of molars.
B) cranial capacity.
C) presence of a U-shaped dental arcade.
D) two premolars instead of three.

Question 13

The style of stone-tool making that involves knocking a few flakes off tennis-ball-sized rocks to produce cutting edges is called the

A) core tradition.
B) Oldowan tradition.
C) Acheulean tradition.
D) chopping tool tradition.

Question 14

The study of the various processes that bones and stones undergo in the course of becoming part of the fossil and archaeological records is called

A) archaeology.
B) paleontology.
C) taphonomy.
D) topography.

Question 15

The stone-tool tradition associated with Homo erectus characterized by stone bifaces is the

A) Core Tradition.
B) Oldowan Tradition.
C) Acheulean Tradition.
D) Flake Tradition.

Question 16

The first hominin species to leave Africa was

A) Australopithecus afarensis.
B) Australopithecus africanus.
C) Homo erectus.
D) Homo sapiens.

Question 17

Hominins dating from 500,000 to 200,000 years ago possessing morphological features found in both Homo erectus and Homo sapiens are considered which kind of Homo sapiens?

A) Archaic
B) Ancient
C) Early
D) Transitional

Question 18

The hypothesis that only one subpopulation of Homo erectus underwent a rapid spurt of evolution to produce Homo sapiens 200,000-100,000 years ago is called the

A) regional continuity model.
B) replacement model.
C) Asian origin model.
D) mostly out-of-Africa model.

Question 19

The hypothesis that evolution from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens occurred gradually throughout the traditional range of H. erectus is the

A) regional continuity model.
B) replacement model.
C) Asian origin model.
D) mostly out-of-Africa model.

Question 20

The hypothesis that anatomically modern hominins might have exchanged genes with more archaic populations they encountered after they left Africa is called the

A) regional continuity model.
B) replacement model.
C) Asian origin model.
D) mostly out-of-Africa model.

Question 21

The "Neandertals" are

A) hominin fossils that apparently evolved from an earlier population of Homo erectus in Africa about 500,000 years ago.
B) Homo sapiens about 130,000 years ago.
C) hominin fossils from China that apparently evolved from an earlier population of Homo erectus about 1 million years ago.
D) hominin fossils from Asia that apparently evolved from an earlier population of archaic Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago.

Question 22

Associated with Neandertal finds in Europe and southwestern Asia is a new stone-tool tradition called the

A) Acheulean.
B) Mousterian.
C) Aurignacian.
D) Châtelperronian.

Question 23

Recent advances in the sequencing of ancient DNA seem to indicate that

A) Neandertals share many DNA sequences with contemporary humans.
B) about 1% to 4% of the genomes of modern, non-Africans contain Neandertal DNA sequences.
C) modern humans are descended from Neandertals.
D) the category "Neandertal" is invalid.

Question 24

Denisovans and Neandertals

A) are very closely related.
B) have a common ancestor.
C) evolved into modern humans in different places.
D) came from Africa.

Question 25

The Denisovans are a population of

A) early Homo erectus found in the Republic of Georgia.
B) Pleistocene hominins whose bones have been found in Africa and in Southeast Asia.
C) Pleistocene hominins known only from ancient DNA recovered from three tiny fossils found in a cave in Russian Siberia.
D) hominins ancestral to the early robust australopiths found in eastern Africa.

Question 26

What is the name given to the period of highly elaborate stone-tool traditions in Europe in which blades were important, 40,000-10,300 years ago?

A) Denosivans
B) Early Paleolithic
C) Upper Paleolithic/Late Stone Age
D) Copper Age

Question 27

Stone tools that are at least twice as long as they are wide are

A) composite.
B) flakes.
C) blades.
D) Levallois.

Question 28

Tools in which several different materials are combined to produce the final working implement are considered

A) composite.
B) flakes.
C) blades.
D) Levallois.

Question 29

The theory of punctuated equilibrium is based on the observation that

A) long periods of intense speciation alternate with long brief periods of stasis.
B) new species appear in the fossil record alongside their unchanged ancestors.
C) evolutionary change occurs at a constant pace.
D) change does not occur over time.

Question 30

Most hominin fossils older than 3 million years of age are called

A) anthropoids.
B) australopiths.
C) protohominids.
D) australoids.

Question 31

The bones of the fingers and toes of Au. afarensis are slightly curved, and the toes are much longer than the toes of modern human beings. This suggests to paleoanthropologists that

A) the bipedalism of Au. afarensis was even more efficient than that of modern human beings.
B) Au. afarensis did not move with a full striding gait, as later hominins did.
C) Au. afarensis lost tree-climbing ability.
D) the bipedalism of Au. afarensis was remarkably inefficient.

Question 32

The Laetoli footprints

A) appear to have been made by a hominin with a striding gait and short, straight toes.
B) fit perfectly with the reconstructed foot anatomy of Au. Afarensis.
C) were probably made by Homo habilis.
D) were probably made by Homo erectus.

Question 33

Australopiths with small and lightly built faces are known as

A) ramidine australopithecines.
B) gracile australopithecines.
C) robust australopithecines.
D) pygmy australopithecines.

Question 34

Australopiths with rugged jaws, flat faces, and enormous molars are known as

A) ramidine australopithecines.
B) gracile australopithecines.
C) robust australopithecines.
D) pygmy australopithecines.

Question 35

The fossils of Australopithecus sediba, from the site of Malapa in South Africa,

A) have been dated to between 8-10 million years ago.
B) show a cranial capacity dissimilar to Au. africanus.
C) Homo.
D) have resulted in little evidence contributing to the story of human evolution.

Question 36

Paleoanthropologists suspect that perhaps more than one species belonging to the genus Homo may have coexisted in eastern Africa in the early Pleistocene because

A) Homo habilis show too much internal variation to all belong to the same species.
B) more than one species of robust australopithecine coexisted in the late Pliocene.
C) more than one species of gracile australopithecine has been found in southern Africa.
D) both robust and gracile australopithecines coexisted in earlier periods.

Question 37

The paleoanthropologists who discovered the fossils they called Homo naledi justified classifying the fossils as a variety of early Homo for which reason?

A) Their large cranial capacity
B) Stone tools found in association with the fossils
C) fossils and other early Homo fossils
D) Their firm dating at 1 million years of age

Question 38

The oldest human tools were part of which tradition?

A) Core tradition
B) Lomekwian tradition
C) Acheulean tradition
D) Chopping tool tradition

Question 39

Richard Potts has argued that the most efficient way for early hominins to get stones for stone tools together with the animal carcasses to be processed with those tools would be for early hominins

A) to carry the stones with them in shoulder slings made of animal hides.
B) to use the stones found in the area of the carcass and discard them after use.
C) to store stones at various spots and bring the carcasses to the nearest supply of stones.
D) to establish a strong home base with a large supply of stones collected from around the region and bring the carcasses back to the home base.

Question 40

Homo erectus finds from Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia,
appear to show the first hominin species to migrate out of Africa at a
date to 1.8 mya.

Question 41

Fossils of early Homo disappear around

A) 10.8 million years ago.
B) 5.8 million years ago.
C) 1.8 million years ago.
D) 85,000 years ago.

Question 42

The species of large-brained, robust hominins that lived between 1.8 and 0.4 mya is

A) Homo habilis
B) Homo erectus
C) Homo ergaster
D) Homo sapiens

Question 43

Biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham suggests that cooking food affected human evolution in which of the following ways?

A) Smaller teeth evolved.
B) Hunting became possible.
C) Plant food became more digestible.
D) Refined palettes evolved.

Question 44

The scope of evolutionary adaptation attained by H. erectus

A) shows that the brain was considerably smaller than its precursors.
B) allowed for simpler stone tool production.
C) H. habilis.
D) resulted in a lack of migratory patterns.

Question 45

The average Neandertal cranial capacity

A) is larger than that of modern human populations.
B) is smaller than that of modern human populations.
C) averages about 1,400 cubic centimeters.
D) suggests that the Neandertal brain was symmetrical.

Question 46

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) recovered from a fossil hominin from Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain shows connections to the mtDNA of

A) Ardipithecus ramidus.
B) the robust australopiths.
C) the gracile australopiths.
D) the Denisovans.

Question 47

Which of the following statements describes Neandertal culture?

A) They buried their dead.
B) They left a profusion of objects made of bone, ivory, antler, and shell.
C) Many of their dwellings have been excavated.
D) They abandoned their dead.

Question 48

Compared with Neandertals, anatomically modern human beings

A) are less robust.
B) have larger molars.
C) have retromolar spaces.
D) lack chins.

Question 49

Anatomically modern human beings are about how many years old?

A) 300,000 years old
B) 100,000 years old
C) 25,000 years old
D) 10,000 years old

Question 50

The oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans at Herto date from

A) between 154,000 and 160,000 years ago.
B) between 300,000 and 350,000 years ago.
C) between 500,000 and 550,000 years ago.
D) between 2 and 2.5 million years ago.

Question 51

Genetic evidence indicates Neandertals were

A) ) from Homo sapiens.
B) the same as Denisovans.
C) avoiding interbreeding with modern humans.
D) adapting to be competitive with modern humans.

Question 52

The most striking evidence for a modern human capacity for culture in the Upper Paleolithic/Late Stone Age comes from

A) deliberate burials.
B) regular hunting of large game.
C) art.
D) domesticated plants.

Question 53

Modern human beings in the Upper Paleolithic/Late Stone Age

A) were more numerous and more widespread than were previous hominins.
B) suffered many, many injuries.
C) were the first hominins to move out of the coldest, harshest climates in Asia.
D) relatively unhealthy.

Question 54

The oldest formally accepted evidence for human occupation in the Americas in found at

A) Clovis, New Mexico.
B) Folsom, Arizona.
C) Monte Verde, Chile.
D) Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania.

Question 55

By ______ years ago, modern human beings had spread to every continent except Antarctica.

A) 2,000
B) 12,000
C) 2 million
D) 5 million

Question 56

The concept of mosaic evolution suggests that all of the primary evolutionary characteristics of humanity (having a larger brain, tool usage, bipedality, and language, for example) evolved at different rates.

Question 57

H. erectus has long been seen as a logical link between more primitive hominins and our own species, H. sapiens.

Question 58

The evidence for Neandertal cannibalism includes the deliberate cutting apart of bodies and the cutting away of muscle from bone.

Question 59

The first anatomically modern humans (H. sapiens), to reach the Americas are called Denisovans.

Question 60

There is increasing evidence that the genetic changes that underlie speciation may be based on

A) accumulated small changes in gene frequencies.
B) mutations in regulatory genes that govern the timing of interrelated biological processes.
C) radical transformations of the genetic code.
D) the need to adapt to dramatically changing environments.

Question 61

Which of the following abilities is NOT considered an advantage of bipedalism over quadrupedalism?

A) Climbing trees
B) Spotting predators easily in open country
C) Escaping more easily from predators in open country
D) Covering greater distances with greater energy efficiency, although at lower speeds

Question 62

The "Lucy" fossil is famous because

A) she was the first australopith ever found.
B) she left footprints that were discovered at the same time.
C) her skeleton was 40% intact and undisturbed.
D) the Beatles wrote a song about her.

Question 63

The role women play in food procurement in contemporary foraging societies suggests that a unique skill in the earliest human societies was the

A) invention of endurance hunting techniques that enabled both men and women to travel long distances together.
B) ability of women to arrange their reproductive lives around the demands of their food-gathering activities.
C) ability of men and women to live apart from one another for long periods.
D) ability of active, productive males to provision passive, unproductive females who stayed in base camps to tend offspring.

Question 64

As it has become increasingly clear to paleoanthropologists that human beings are the product of mosaic evolution,

A) they have begun to pay attention to the earliest common features that define "human nature" in distant human ancestors.
B) they are less willing to claim that a bundle of traits signifying "human nature" originated at one time among our distant ancestors.
C) they are increasingly supportive of the "man the hunter" scenario.
D) they are less willing to claim that either hunting or gathering was the force that drove the development of "human nature" in our distant ancestors.

Question 65

Taphonomists would probably conclude that hominins had scavenged meat from an animal carcass they did not kill if fossil animal bones

A) showed animal tooth marks on top of stone-tool cutmarks.
B) showed stone-tool cutmarks on top of animal tooth marks.
C) and stone tools were found together in the same site.
D) showed no sign of weathering.

Question 66

The "Nariokotome boy" fossil from East Africa looks very different from Homo erectus species found on Java, in Indonesia. This leads some scholars to suggest that

A) the Nariokotome fossil is more recent than the Javanese fossils.
B) the Javanese fossils are not really hominins at all.
C) they must have belonged to separate species.
D) it is the skulls that matter most, and the skulls are from the same species.

Question 67

Which of the following is NOT a typical feature of the skull of Homo erectus?

A) Heavy brow ridges
B) A cranial capacity of around 1,000 cubic centimeters
C) An occipital bun
D) A sagittal crest

Question 68

Which of the following is NOT suggested as an adaptation for human endurance running?

A) Energetics
B) Height expansion
C) Stabilization
D) Temperature regulation

Question 69

What characterizes the burial practices during the Upper Paleolithic period?

A) They became less detailed.
B) They were always limited to single bodies in a burial space.
C) They became more elaborate.
D) They refused to bury the dead.

Question 70

Ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was extracted from the skeleton of a male infant found in association with Clovis artifacts and buried around 12,600 years ago. Analysis showed that the population to which this individual belonged is more closely related to populations from

A) Alaska than anywhere else.
B) Central and South Africa than anywhere else.
C) Northern and Central Europe than anywhere else.
D) Central and South America than anywhere else.

Question 71

Richard Potts describes the evolutionary history of the human species as "survival of the generalist" because

A) our species is narrowly adapted to a specific environment.
B) our species had the plasticity to survive the extremes of rapidly fluctuating climates of the Ice Ages.
C) our ancestors' gene-based ability to cope with small environmental fluctuations was exapted to cope with larger and larger fluctuations.
D) b and c

Question 72

According to Dunsworth and Eccleston, the hominin fossil record provided limited and tenuous information about human childbirth because primate birth is a secluded event.

Question 73

Anatomically modern humans are Hominin fossils assigned to the species Homo sapiens with anatomical features similar to those of living human populations: short and round skulls, small brow ridges and faces, prominent chins, and light skeletal build.

Question 74

In light of recent evidence of mobility and mixing among various populations of Neandertals, Denisovans, and anatomically modern humans during the Pleistocene, scientists hypothesize that European Neandertals disappeared because they evolved into anatomically modern people, developing Aurignacian culture as they did so, in line with the regional continuity model.

Question 75

The human social and cognitive skills that allowed our ancestors to survive in novel habitats were exapted by H. sapiens to colonize the world.

Question 76

Describe three major differences between the phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibria approaches to interpreting evolution?

Question 77

Identify and describe the four key evolutionary changes that occurred during hominin evolution and why is each important?

Question 78

Explain what separates Neandertals from anatomically modern human beings using the following concepts: morphology, language, and culture.

Question 79

Explain bipedal locomotion in hominoids. What are the kinds of selective pressures that could have been responsible for its development? What are the major morphological differences between habitual bipedal hominins and occasionally bipedal apes, and what makes them major difference?

Question 80

Describe three different kinds of evidence that paleoanthropologists use for assigning fossils to different hominin genera. Use specific examples. How do these forms of evidence complement each other to provide a fuller picture of the evolutionary story?