Body proportions in Late Pleistocene Europe and modern human origins

Stature estimation from complete long bones in the Middle Pleistocene humans from the Sima de los Huesos, Sierra de Atapuerca (Spain)

“…The tall stature of these early H. sapiens seems to have remained constant for much of the Upper Pleistocene since it also characterized European Upper Pal eo lithic populations prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (Holliday, 1997a;Formicola and Giannecchini, 1999). The decrease in absolute brain size of H. sapiens observed over the last 35,000 years has been parallelled by a general decrease in body size 1997).…”

The evolution of the human pelvis: changing adaptations to bipedalism, obstetrics and thermoregulation

“…Instead, pressure for narrowbodied women to birth larger-brained babies eventually resulted in yet another morphological compromise in the pelvis: the capacity of the birth canal was enlarged by increasing its A-P diameter, particularly at the midplane and outlet, whereas its M-L dimensions simultaneously narrowed. The resulting twist in orientation allowed the true pelvis to accommodate a larger-brained infant without also widening the body [138].…”

“…The relationship between body size and shape, overall pelvic size and shape, and birth canal size and shape in modern humans is complex [3,15,17,18,79,[138][139][140][141]. With the evolution of the modern pelvis, the size of the birth canal was essentially decoupled from the size of the body: birth canal proportions in modern humans do not necessarily correlate with body proportions [138,141,142].…”

“…Evolutionary theory would suggest that because 'selection intensity and phenotypic variability are inversely related' ( [143], p. 59), there should be sexual dimorphism in the variability of pelvic morphology, with variation in the size and shape of the female birth canal limited by obstetric demands. However, the nature and extent of sexual dimorphism in the modern pelvis are particularly complex, and a large number of studies have produced no clear indication that obstetric constraints produced between-sex differences in variability [3,18,138,139,[141][142][143]. To further complicate matters, work by Betti and co-workers [3,18,141] has suggested that among modern humans, neutral evolutionary processes reflecting demographic history have also been important in determining variation in pelvic form (see also [17]).…”

The chronology of abrupt climate change and Late Upper Palaeolithic human adaptation in Europe

“…The possible causal relationships between millennial-scale climate change and long-term hominid evolution has long been debated (e.g. Ruff, 1994;Holliday and Falsetti, 1995;Holliday, 1997Holliday, , 1999Sherratt, 1997;Housley et al,1997;Blockley et al, 2000a,b), but the idea that extremely abrupt climate shifts, decadal in scale, could be implicated as initiators of human dispersal and development has only recently emerged. It was not until the publication of the Greenland ice-core records in the early 1990s that the sheer rapidity with which the global climate system was capable of change became better appreciated (e.g.…”