ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Morphological variation in Homo erectus and the origins of developmental plasticity.
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 19 papers.
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19 citing papers in PubMed, 59 citations in OpenAlex.
- Reading hominin life history in fossil bones and teeth: methods to test hypotheses regarding its evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Reading hominin life history in fossil bones and teeth: methods to test hypotheses regarding its evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Temporal Changes in Vertebral Morphology of the Free-Ranging Rhesus Macaques From Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Human Digestive Physiology and Evolutionary Diet: A Metabolomic Perspective on Carnivorous and Scavenger Adaptations.Metabolites · 2025Review
- Why did the human brain size evolve? A way forward.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Disparate and parallel craniofacial climatic adaptations in native populations of Asia, North America, and South America.Journal of anatomy · 2024Article
- No relationship found between dental fluctuating asymmetry, birthweight, and birth term in two modern North American samples.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2024Article
- Coming to the Caribbean-acclimation of Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) at Cayo Santiago.American journal of biological anthropology · 2023Article
- Frontal sinuses and human evolution.Science advances · 2022Article
- The ontogeny of sexual dimorphism in free-ranging rhesus macaques.American journal of biological anthropology · 2022Article
- Origins of modern human ancestry.Nature · 2021Review
- Reconstructing cranial evolution in an extinct hominin.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Evidence of different climatic adaptation strategies in humans and non-human primates.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Sexual dimorphism in Homo erectus inferred from 1.5 Ma footprints near Ileret, Kenya.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Morphology and structure ofPeerJ · 2018Article
- Long-term patterns of body mass and stature evolution within the hominin lineage.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- EarlyInterface focus · 2017Review
- Network analysis of the hominin origin of Herpes Simplex virus 2 from fossil data.Virus evolution · 2017Article
- Major transitions in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Homo erectus was the first hominin to exhibit extensive range expansion. This extraordinary departure from Africa, especially into more temperate climates of Eurasia, has been variously related to technological, energetic and foraging shifts. The temporal and regional anatomical variation in H. erectus suggests that a high level of developmental plasticity, a key factor in the ability of H. sapiens to occupy a variety of habitats, may also have been present in H. erectus. Developmental plasticity, the ability to modify development in response to environmental conditions, results in differences in size, shape and dimorphism across populations that relate in part to levels of resource sufficiency and extrinsic mortality. These differences predict not only regional variations but also overall smaller adult sizes and lower levels of dimorphism in instances of resource scarcity and high predator load. We consider the metric variation in 35 human and non-human primate 'populations' from known environmental contexts and 14 time- and space-restricted paleodemes of H. erectus and other fossil Homo Human and non-human primates exhibit more similar patterns of variation than expected, with plasticity evident, but in differing patterns by sex across populations. The fossil samples show less evidence of variation than expected, although H. erectus varies more than Neandertals.This article is part of the themed issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'.
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