ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
The origin and evolution of Homo sapiens.
Review 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 85 papers.
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85 citing papers in PubMed.
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- The Middle Pleistocene human metatarsal from Sedia del Diavolo (Rome, Italy).Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Concurrent Asian monsoon strengthening and early modern human dispersal to East Asia during the last interglacial.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Hunter-gatherer genetics research: Importance and avenues.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- How (and why) languages became more complex as we evolved more prosocial: the human self-domestication view.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Archaic Introgression Shaped Human Circadian Traits.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Animals evoking fear in the Cradle of Humankind: snakes, scorpions, and large carnivores.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2023Article
- The (Co)Evolution of Language and Music Under Human Self-Domestication.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
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- Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Article
25 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
If we restrict the use of Homo sapiens in the fossil record to specimens which share a significant number of derived features in the skeleton with extant H. sapiens, the origin of our species would be placed in the African late middle Pleistocene, based on fossils such as Omo Kibish 1, Herto 1 and 2, and the Levantine material from Skhul and Qafzeh. However, genetic data suggest that we and our sister species Homo neanderthalensis shared a last common ancestor in the middle Pleistocene approximately 400-700 ka, which is at least 200 000 years earlier than the species origin indicated from the fossils already mentioned. Thus, it is likely that the African fossil record will document early members of the sapiens lineage showing only some of the derived features of late members of the lineage. On that basis, I argue that human fossils such as those from Jebel Irhoud, Florisbad, Eliye Springs and Omo Kibish 2 do represent early members of the species, but variation across the African later middle Pleistocene/early Middle Stone Age fossils shows that there was not a simple linear progression towards later sapiens morphology, and there was chronological overlap between different 'archaic' and 'modern' morphs. Even in the late Pleistocene within and outside Africa, we find H. sapiens specimens which are clearly outside the range of Holocene members of the species, showing the complexity of recent human evolution. The impact on species recognition of late Pleistocene gene flow between the lineages of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans is also discussed, and finally, I reconsider the nature of the middle Pleistocene ancestor of these lineages, based on recent morphological and genetic data.This article is part of the themed issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'.
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