Posted on 06/08/2011 10:19:59 AM PDT by Red Badger
The males of two bipedal hominid species that roamed the South African savannah more than a million years ago were stay-at-home kind of guys when compared to the gadabout gals, says a new high-tech study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.
The team, which studied teeth from a group of extinct Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus individuals from two adjacent cave systems in South Africa, found more than half of the female teeth were from outside the local area, said CU-Boulder adjunct professor and lead study author Sandi Copeland. In contrast, only about 10 percent of the male hominid teeth were from elsewhere, suggesting they likely grew up and died in the same area.
"One of our goals was to try to find something out about early hominid landscape use," said Copeland, who also is affiliated with the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "Here we have the first direct glimpse of the geographic movements of early hominids, and it appears the females preferentially moved away from their residential groups."
A paper on the subject is being published in the June 2 issue of Nature.
[snip]
The new study results were somewhat surprising, said Copeland. "We assumed more of the hominids would be from non-local areas since it is generally thought the evolution of bipedalism was due in part to allow individuals to range longer distances," she said. "Such small home ranges could imply that bipedalism evolved for other reasons."
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
This is a skull of a Paranthropus robustus from Swartkrans Cave in South Africa. (Credit: Darryl de Ruiter)
I suppose they are the ones that decorated the caves..............
GGG Ping!............
That evidence suggests raiding and kidnapping to me, not sexy cave girls stepping out.
The origin of the beer run.
Not much volume for a brain in there,Must be a early Democrat judging from the culture.
The tradition continues on Sundays during football season.
And they know this from looking at teeth? Here’s my hypothesis - Fast Lions Deposit Teeth of Slow Women in Their Feces and Scientists Look at Shinola and Claim It’s Sh_t.
Yes, the descendants of the Neanderthals gather round the campfire/TV to watch other Neanderthals...................
That’s what I thought, but the kollege edukated perfessers don’t think that way................
The conclusions are almost laughable......What’s not laughable is the Grant Money we passed out.
LOL! That was my first thought as well.
All primates species that form small bands (we are no exception) have all the juveniles of one sex or the other leave the home group and join a new group. Some suggest that teenage angst and alienation is a biological remnant of this behavior.
Among baboons it is the males.
Among chimps it is the females.
The point is that even a baboon ‘knows’ that you cannot keep reproducing within the same small group. One sex or the other has to be ‘swapped’ with another group.
“That evidence suggests raiding and kidnapping to me, not sexy cave girls stepping out.”
BINGO.
At a much more recent period, the Proto-Indo-European speakers seem to have had patriarchal families where the sons stayed put and the daughters married away--that is deduced from various words for family relationships in the later Indo-European languages.
Of course the marriage customs among the Paranthropi robusti would have differed in detail from later hominid species--they didn't throw rice since they didn't have rice.
Ya, but.... we never should have given them the right to vote.
... And they out, right?
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