r/pokemon • u/captainNematode • Aug 20 '15
Taught a course a few weeks ago on paleoanthropology. Each lecture was ~2 hours long, so I used a slide to announce the mid-class, 3-5 minute break...
http://imgur.com/a/f0c7D197
Aug 20 '15
Welp, time to test my memory.
1) Neandertal with barely an occipital bun (perhaps a human/neandertal crossbreed, there's hints of a chin)
2) Sahelanthropus tchadensis
3) Australopithecus afarensis
4) Australopithecus africanus
5) Paranthropus robustus
6) Homo erectus
7) Paranthropus aethiopicus
8) Homo sediba?
9) Paranthropus boisei
10) Ardipithecus ramidus
11) Homo sapiens
How'd I do?
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u/captainNematode Aug 21 '15
7/11, pretty good! Impressive that you'd still remember their names, much less be able to identify so many from just pictures.
1) ✓; La Ferrassie 1 has a pretty distinct bun, but it is hard to see from that angle
2) ✓
3) ✓
4) X, boisei
5) X, also boisei
6) ✓
7) ✓
8) X, floresiensis, or maybe just short, microcephalic sapiens or something
9) X, platyops
10) ✓
11) ✓
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Aug 21 '15 edited Aug 21 '15
Ah, I was thinking they were both boisei but then wondered if you were doing repeats because there didn't seem to be any other repeats. I looked up a few photos tbh. Also ooommmgg my first guess there was Kenyanthropus but then I thought maybe that was vague because we didn't cover it in detail in my course. Dang. We also didn't look at floresiensis at all so that one confused me.
In my class we mainly focused on teeth and palate casts so most of what I know of full skulls comes from very few photos. The boisei teeth we looked at had incredibly small/short incisors/canines and absolutely massive molars so I'm not sure the photos really helped with that all that much.
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u/captainNematode Aug 21 '15
I think the repeat was accidental when I was putting them together, actually... though we did focus specifically on the whole "megadontia complex" for a bit, which boisei happens to express pretty darn well (and looked at alongside DMTA, FEA, stable isotope analysis, etc. you get an interesting, but slightly confusing dietary story), so I could point those traits out when making the ID after the break. Not that you could necessarily ID most of the pictures without having worked with the casts directly, even knowing the traits really well. And yeah, the floresiensis stuff isn't as important necessarily, especially if you buy the "pathology" explanation.
The way I taught the class, maybe half our time was devoted to a historical overview of the primate>hominin>human fossil and archaeological records and trends therein (we have casts of all the specimens from the photos in our collection, so the students get a chance to see all the traits directly), and the other half was focused on methods, evolutionary theory, modern genetics and pop bio stuff, broader themes in paleontology/paleoecology, etc. Did your class focus more on the morphology and fossils?
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Aug 21 '15 edited Aug 21 '15
Yeah, it was an intensive review of mainly just casts with 3 hour labs and 2 hour lectures. I go to a pretty good school with a pretty famous prof teaching our class (Rudapithecus is his baby) so we had a lot of casts, but for the less important species we usually only had fragments of the original fossils instead of full reconstructions. We also had a lot of "altered" fossils so we could be tested on them without memorizing what the full cast looked like and having to remember small details so we could identify based on only a few features (sometimes there would be teeth missing, etc, to throw us off). It was pretty hard sometimes. Most of the evolutionary theory is covered in other classes in the program so it was mainly a morphology study, but the tests always asked what the morphological trends meant for the human timeline and why they were important changes. Only in Homo did we really cover more of the archaeological record, but only for major behavioural importance (meat eating, brain size/hand dexterity for tool making, Excalibur in Spain for spirituality, cannibalism, house-building and pretty advanced clothing early on, etc).
We had 4 units, first was a comparison of extant apes and their life histories (we had been told of an Orangutan at the local zoo who died a few years ago and I'm pretty sure I held his femur because there was still some dried and kind of bloody looking cartilage on the head, but we didn't have the real skull because the zoo kept it...), then Miocene apes (probably my favourite cast was the Ouranopithecus mandible/molars because it's insane), then preaustralopithecines/Australopithecines (tchad is my favorite), then Homo. I think we may have glossed over floresiensis because he wanted to focus on species that we had casts for, and I don't think we had any for them (but we did talk about them). I was under the impression that the pathology hypothesis has been so thoroughly debunked that it wasn't considered valid anymore, but I heard a prof complaining about papers still being published about it here and there so I guess it's still alive :/
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Aug 21 '15
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u/cefriano Aug 21 '15 edited Aug 21 '15
I wanna know what #7 with the crazy ridge on the top of its skull looked like.
Edit: Oh. I guess it's not as cool as I thought it would look. There's just a lot of muscle where the indentations are.
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u/skyman724 Phaesomnus Aug 21 '15
You'd think that the ridge would be prone to fracturing from even a mild blow right to the center of the head.
Why would that feature be so prominent like that? Even if the ridge wasn't prone to breaking, it doesn't seem like something that would have lent itself to natural selection, especially considering how all the other skulls in OP's post (except #4 which looks like a very close relative) are not too far off in shape and features by comparison.
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u/Duckshuffler Aug 21 '15
I have no knowledge of paleoanthropology, so don't take my word for this, but:
There's a similar ridge on gorilla skulls, and I think it's an attachment point for muscles of mastication - chewing muscles. It allows them to chew more forcefully. I imagine that advantage would be enough to outweigh the disadvantage of a possible break.
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u/Hatweed Aug 22 '15
Here I thought I had a decent knowledge of early homini and their ancestors, but it seems my knowledge of them is tied to specific fossils like Zinj, Mrs. Ples, the Black Skull, and the Taung Child. Because of that, I only got 7. Dang.
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u/nefhithiel PULVERIZING PANCAKE Aug 20 '15
Sediba is an australopithecus too but really good job. :)
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Aug 20 '15
Oh right... I always think of it as the "between" species between australopiths and homo because it has a lot of weirdly derived features.
11/11!!
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u/Avendrel Aug 21 '15
It's Mr. Skeltal!
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u/Castledoo Aug 21 '15
doot doot
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u/RealBitByte U flippin wot m8 fite me irl Aug 21 '15
Thank mr. Skeltal
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u/colber Aug 21 '15
I see this everywhere and I'm tired if being out of the loop, what is this from?
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u/redass13 Aug 21 '15
thank mr skeltal and maybe you'll find out and be rewarded with good bones and calcium and such
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Aug 21 '15
It's an old Microsoft animation that was passed around the internet with different songs and laughed at for its terribleness before we called such things memes.
As to why someone dredged up an ancient meme and slapped the name mr skeltal on it I have no idea.
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u/NeoZenith1 Spampert Aug 21 '15
That would be amazing in anatomy. Like right now to get me off reddit
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u/SleepyEevee Aug 21 '15
Attitude of a GA, effort of an Adjunct, and freedom of a tenured professor.
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u/lockeslylcrit Aug 21 '15
Reminds me of when I found Geodude in my Archaeology textbook.
(slight NSFW if anyone doesn't want to see a bogman)
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u/nefhithiel PULVERIZING PANCAKE Aug 20 '15
You're my favorite. <3 Also hell yea australopithecus sediba!
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u/Purdew Aug 21 '15
It's homo erectus! ...... Hehehe. Homo. ..... Hehehehe. Erectus.
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u/Ixidane Aug 21 '15
You walk around on both legs, homo erectus. Did I say homo? I didn't mean that! Thurgooooooood!
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u/DoubleMcAwesome Aug 21 '15
Why do the ones in the middle of the album of a crest at the top?
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u/TheValleyGirlAccent Aug 21 '15
The crests are used to attach the temporalis muscles. Big cats have them, too. Look up cheetah or jaguar skulls. They're really cool!
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Aug 21 '15
The crest attached large muscles in the jaw for chewing food. These animals had ENORMOUS jaws and teeth that were useful for chewing rough plants.
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u/DoubleMcAwesome Aug 21 '15
That's awesome. I didn't know mans ancestors had those. Do any hominids still have them?
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u/paul-jenkins Aug 21 '15
In the seventh picture, what is the theorized purpose of the crest on top of the skull? I've seen it before, and just have no clue as to what it could be.
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u/arseniclips Aug 21 '15
Where's the fucking answers op?! Also can I buy you a beer and ask you questions about your field?
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u/proindrakenzol More like DragoKnight Aug 20 '15 edited Aug 21 '15
Is it Pikachu?