5 Hominin species drawings: From now until Exam 1, you won′t have any required quizzes. Quizzes are available to you to self-test your reading comprehension and fossil knowledge, but they are optional. Instead, you are going to learn what you need to know about fossil hominins by CREATING. Between now and Exam 1, you will be producing drawings of 5 fossil hominin species that lived at different times. You may choose one species for 5 of the following 7 time periods. Make sure you′ve got at least 5 of the following 7 time periods covered by your species choices. The point is for you to put together the ″big picture″ of fossil hominin evolution by drawing different species of your choice. 1. Choose a species that lived between 6-7 mya. 2. Choose a species that lived between 5-6 mya. 3. Choose a species that lived between 4-5 mya. 4. Choose a species that lived between 3-4 mya. 5.Choose a species that lived between 2-3 mya. 6. Choose a species that lived between 1-2 mya. 7. Choose a species that lived between 0-1 mya. (except Homo sapiens, shown below) Drawings (12 pts) Your drawing should include all of the material that we have in the fossil record for your chosen species, but not the material that we don′t have. This will mean that you should NOT be drawing soft tissue reconstructions, because we don′t have soft tissue. And it will mean that you need to look around outside your book and do a little digging to see what we have for the whole species. Your book might only have a picture of a single specimen. And maybe that specimen doesn′t have a skull, but maybe another specimen from the same species does, so we still know what the skull looked like! Your drawing can be a composite, or can feature many different specimens separately, but it should show everything we currently know about the bones and teeth of your chosen species. Also, if your species might possibly have used tools, based on their time and locations in the fossil record, draw a representative tool that your fossil species could have used or certainly did use. If you don′t think you can draw, you can print something out and trace it (though I also can′t draw, but I find that if I look at a picture and try to replicate it, I can do a reasonable job). The purpose of this assignment is to really get an understanding of trait variation across hominin species and for you to really know what these animals′ skeletons looked like and what inferences about their behavior we can make from their skeletons. You really learn this best through action. Copied and pasted photos of fossils will not earn credit. This is supposed to be active learning. Your drawing should be sufficiently detailed that I can recognize your species without looking at the species name, because that′s how you′re going to learn what the different species look like! Annotations (10 pts) Leave yourself some space on the page to note the following things in a list. List the following on your drawing, numbered and organized in the following order: 1) Scientific name (1 pt) 2) when it lived (entire published date range for the species) (1 pt) 3) where it lived (countries and continents, not site names) (1 pt) 4) brain size (in cubic centimeters) (1 pt) 5) canine size (in the range demonstrated across fossil hominins: small, medium, or large) (2 pts) 6) molar size (in the range demonstrated across fossil hominins: small, medium, or large) (2 pts) 7) leg length (in the range demonstrated across fossil hominins: short or long) (2 pts) 8) List any other features it has that are relevant to reconstructing its locomotor behavior, and indicate your interpretation of that evidence (e.g., long, curved fingers –˃ probably somewhat arboreal). Note: You will need to wait to assess canine size, molar size, and leg length until you′ve gotten the idea of how much variation there is in the following traits across ALL of the hominins you are learning about in this section. For example, your mom might be 4′8″ tall and I′m 5′4″. If I ask you to categorize us, you might categorize me as tall. But if I ask you to consider all humans across the world, then I′m definitely short. You should be categorizing based on all hominins. And look out! Sometimes your textbook authors are writing from the perspective of comparing species X to species Y, or species X to a chimpanzee, not species X to all hominins. I′m asking you to compare species X to all hominins.
