ArticleNature ecology & evolution2021
Divergence-time estimates for hominins provide insight into encephalization and body mass trends in human evolution.
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 10 papers.
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10 citing papers in PubMed, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
- Parting ways: Pan-Homo divergence revisited.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Review
- Clades, Grades, and the Genus Problem: A Case for Revising Hominin Taxonomy.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Review
- Article
- Evolution of long scalp hair in humans.The British journal of dermatology · 2025Review
- Hominin brain size increase has emerged from within-species encephalization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The allometry of brain size in Euarchontoglires: clade-specific patterns and their impact on encephalization quotients.Journal of mammalogy · 2024Article
- Diversity-dependent speciation and extinction in hominins.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- The Genome of Plasmodium gonderi: Insights into the Evolution of Human Malaria Parasites.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- From fossils to mind.Communications biology · 2023Review
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5 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Quantifying speciation times during human evolution is fundamental as it provides a timescale to test for the correlation between key evolutionary transitions and extrinsic factors such as climatic or environmental change. Here, we applied a total evidence dating approach to a hominin phylogeny to estimate divergence times under different topological hypotheses. The time-scaled phylogenies were subsequently used to perform ancestral state reconstructions of body mass and phylogenetic encephalization quotient (PEQ). Our divergence-time estimates are consistent with other recent studies that analysed extant species. We show that the origin of the genus Homo probably occurred between 4.30 and 2.56 million years ago. The ancestral state reconstructions show a general trend towards a smaller body mass before the emergence of Homo, followed by a trend towards a greater body mass. PEQ estimations display a general trend of gradual but accelerating encephalization evolution. The obtained results provide a rigorous temporal framework for human evolution.
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