TY - JOUR
T1 - Early Homo, plasticity and the extended evolutionary synthesis
AU - Antón, Susan C.
AU - Kuzawa, Christopher W.
N1 - Funding Information:
Authors’ contributions. Both authors designed interpreted data and drafted, revised and approved the article. Competing interests. We declare we have no competing interests. Funding. We received no funding for this study. Acknowledgements. S.C.A. is grateful to Denis Noble, Kevin Laland, John Dupre, Nancy Cartwright and Sir Patrick Bateson, organizers of the joint discussion meeting of the Royal Society and the British Academy ‘New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives’, 7–9 November 2016 and to
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - The Modern Synthesis led to fundamental advances in understandings of human evolution. For human palaeontology, a science that works from ancestral phenotypes (i.e. the fossil record), particularly important have been perspectives used to help understand the heritable aspects of phenotypes and how fossil individuals might then be aggregated into species, and relationships among these groups understood. This focus, coupled with the fragmentary nature of the fossil record, however, means that individual phenotypic variation is often treated as unimportant ʼnoise’, rather than as a source of insight into population adaptation and evolutionary process. The emphasis of the extended evolutionary synthesis on plasticity as a source of phenotypic novelty, and the related question of the role of such variation in long-term evolutionary trends, focuses welcome attention on non-genetic means by which novel phenotypes are generated and in so doing provides alternative approaches to interpreting the fossil record. We review evidence from contemporary human populations regarding some of the aspects of adult phenotypes preserved in the fossil record that might be most responsive to non-genetic drivers, and we consider how these perspectives lead to alternate hypotheses for interpreting the fossil record of early genus Homo. We conclude by arguing that paying closer attention to the causes and consequences of intraspecific phenotypic variation in its own right, as opposed to as noise around a species mean, may inspire a new generation of hypotheses regarding species diversity in the Early Pleistocene and the foundations for dispersal and regional diversification in Homo erectus and its descendants.
AB - The Modern Synthesis led to fundamental advances in understandings of human evolution. For human palaeontology, a science that works from ancestral phenotypes (i.e. the fossil record), particularly important have been perspectives used to help understand the heritable aspects of phenotypes and how fossil individuals might then be aggregated into species, and relationships among these groups understood. This focus, coupled with the fragmentary nature of the fossil record, however, means that individual phenotypic variation is often treated as unimportant ʼnoise’, rather than as a source of insight into population adaptation and evolutionary process. The emphasis of the extended evolutionary synthesis on plasticity as a source of phenotypic novelty, and the related question of the role of such variation in long-term evolutionary trends, focuses welcome attention on non-genetic means by which novel phenotypes are generated and in so doing provides alternative approaches to interpreting the fossil record. We review evidence from contemporary human populations regarding some of the aspects of adult phenotypes preserved in the fossil record that might be most responsive to non-genetic drivers, and we consider how these perspectives lead to alternate hypotheses for interpreting the fossil record of early genus Homo. We conclude by arguing that paying closer attention to the causes and consequences of intraspecific phenotypic variation in its own right, as opposed to as noise around a species mean, may inspire a new generation of hypotheses regarding species diversity in the Early Pleistocene and the foundations for dispersal and regional diversification in Homo erectus and its descendants.
KW - Developmental plasticity
KW - Homo erectus
KW - Human biology
KW - Phenotypic variation
KW - Speciation
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U2 - 10.1098/rsfs.2017.0004
DO - 10.1098/rsfs.2017.0004
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85027885712
SN - 2042-8898
VL - 7
JO - Interface Focus
JF - Interface Focus
IS - 5
M1 - 20170004
ER -