ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
The evolution of body size and shape in the human career.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Competing models of hominin body size evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Severe bottleneck of ancient Homo populations: insights from computational modeling and relevant fossil evidence.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Neandertal Cold Adaptation: Technological, Anatomical, and Physiological Responses to Cold Stress in One of Our Closest Fossil Relatives.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Mechanical and morphometric approaches to body mass estimation in rhesus macaques: A test of skeletal variables.American journal of biological anthropology · 2024Article
- Three-dimensional volumetric muscle reconstruction of theRoyal Society open science · 2023Article
- Baboon perspectives on the ecology and behavior of early human ancestors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Article
- Genetic influences on dentognathic morphology in the Jirel population of Nepal.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2022Article
- Different environmental variables predict body and brain size evolution in Homo.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Long-term patterns of body mass and stature evolution within the hominin lineage.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Evidence of a chimpanzee-sized ancestor of humans but a gibbon-sized ancestor of apes.Nature communications · 2017Article
- EarlyInterface focus · 2017Review
- New footprints from Laetoli (Tanzania) provide evidence for marked body size variation in early hominins.eLife · 2016Article
- Major transitions in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Mosaic evolution and the pattern of transitions in the hominin lineage.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Body size is a fundamental biological property of organisms, and documenting body size variation in hominin evolution is an important goal of palaeoanthropology. Estimating body mass appears deceptively simple but is laden with theoretical and pragmatic assumptions about best predictors and the most appropriate reference samples. Modern human training samples with known masses are arguably the 'best' for estimating size in early bipedal hominins such as the australopiths and all members of the genus Homo, but it is not clear if they are the most appropriate priors for reconstructing the size of the earliest putative hominins such as Orrorin and Ardipithecus The trajectory of body size evolution in the early part of the human career is reviewed here and found to be complex and nonlinear. Australopith body size varies enormously across both space and time. The pre-erectus early Homo fossil record from Africa is poor and dominated by relatively small-bodied individuals, implying that the emergence of the genus Homo is probably not linked to an increase in body size or unprecedented increases in size variation. Body size differences alone cannot explain the observed variation in hominin body shape, especially when examined in the context of small fossil hominins and pygmy modern humans.This article is part of the themed issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'.
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