ArticleNature ecology & evolution2021
Sex differences in the pelvis did not evolve de novo in modern humans.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sex differences in hip bone and sacrum morphology: a geometric morphometric analysis.International journal of legal medicine · 2026Article
- Humans are not unique: difficult birth is common in placental mammals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Insights into Neanderthal development, childbirth, and locomotion from the Palomas and Dederiyeh pelves.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Sexual dimorphism in pelvic measurements of Wistar rats (Rattus norvegicus) during pre- and post-pubertal periods: a 3D morphometric study.BMC veterinary research · 2026Article
- Testing the limits: the impact of extreme functional hip width on the muscular demands of walking.Biology open · 2026Article
- Investigating Associations Between Developmental Integration and Physiological Stress.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Imaging study of pelvic morphology in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis: a retrospective study.Journal of orthopaedic surgery and research · 2025Article
- Evaluating the Effectiveness of Coxal Bone Measurements for Sex Estimation via Machine Learning.Biology · 2025Article
- The Placental Steroid Hypothesis of Human Brain Evolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Variation in Pubic Symphysis Fusion Across Primates: Implications for Obstetric Adaptation.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- The extent of the hip bone sexual dimorphism in two Italian coeval modern skeletal samples.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Gradual exacerbation of obstetric constraints during hominoid evolution implied by re-evaluation of cephalopelvic fit in chimpanzees.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Sexual dimorphism of the human fetal pelvis exists at the onset of primary ossification.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Mapping sexual dimorphism signal in the human cranium.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- There is an obstetrical dilemma: Misconceptions about the evolution of human childbirth and pelvic form.American journal of biological anthropology · 2023Review
- Changes in plasticity of the pelvic girdle from infancy to late adulthood in Homo sapiens.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Pelvic inlet area is associated with birth mode.Acta obstetricia et gynecologica Scandinavica · 2023Observational
- The obstetrical dilemma hypothesis: there's life in the old dog yet.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2021Article
- Sex differences in the pelvis did not evolve de novo in modern humans.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Article
- Sacrum morphology supports taxonomic heterogeneity of "Australopithecus africanus" at Sterkfontein Member 4.Communications biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
It is commonly assumed that the strong sexual dimorphism of the human pelvis evolved for delivering the relatively large human foetuses. Here we compare pelvic sex differences across modern humans and chimpanzees using a comprehensive geometric morphometric approach. Even though the magnitude of sex differences in pelvis shape was two times larger in humans than in chimpanzees, we found that the pattern is almost identical in the two species. We conclude that this pattern of pelvic sex differences did not evolve de novo in modern humans and must have been present in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, and thus also in the extinct Homo species. We further suggest that this shared pattern was already present in early mammals and propose a hypothesis of facilitated variation as an explanation: the conserved mammalian endocrine system strongly constrains the evolution of the pattern of pelvic differences but enables rapid evolutionary change of the magnitude of sexual dimorphism, which in turn facilitated the rapid increase in hominin brain size.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.