Anthropology 105

I've gotten a bit behind in posting lectures -- a few technical problems arose in the fifth week of class, and took a week to sort through. Now I've got lectures for the sixth week and forward, and I'll be posting them this week.

This lecture looks at the enamel of teeth as a source of information about life history of ancient hominins and humans. The essential data are the ratios of different stable isotopes of the elements carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, and the proportion of strontium. The lecture presents some of the background to understand the relation of these stable isotopes to diet and the landscape. They provide evidence about the level on the food chain that an individual occupies, the proportion of grass-derived foods to foods from other plants, and the geographic region where an individual formed his or her teeth.

I cover some examples, including the diet of early hominins, the Neandertals, and some archaeological examples from prehistoric and medieval Britain.

Here's a lecture that presents two fascinating tales of disease and blood in the royal families of Britain. The first involves the madness of King George III, which present-day forensic historians attribute to variegate porphyria. This condition is also the subject of a famous story of founder effect in genetics, because of its current high frequency in the South African Afrikaner population. Then, the lecture turns to Rasputin and the hemophilia of Tsarevitch Alexei, inherited from Queen Victoria. The influence of genetics on history is reinforced by the recurrence of this genetic disorder in the pedigree of the Spanish royal family as well, all stemming from the one woman at the center of the European royal genealogy.

In the course of the lecture, I cover the concepts of how damage to genes due to random mutations can cause Mendelian disorders, how we can identify the causes of disorders using pedigree information, how forensic investigators can build up a case for medical diagnosis of historical figures, and how gene frequencies can change a lot due to random chance in founder populations.

In this lecture, the key concepts are homology, serial homology, gene regulation, and the geological timeline. I introduce the vertebral column and the number of vertebrae of different types in humans, gorillas, orangutans and macaques. Looking at some data from Adolph Schultz, we examine the variation in vertebra count among humans and some other species of primates. To discuss the concept of variation in segment numbers, I turn to Hox genes and segmentation patterning in early embryos. Homology of the Hox genes between fruit flies, mice and humans mirrors the homology of segmentation, including vertebrae counts. Finally, I get to some Miocene apes and their lumbar vertebral anatomy, focusing on Nacholapithecus, Morotopithecus and Proconsul.

This one stopped a bit short of where I wanted to go, but it's a neat combination of topics in anatomy and development.

This is a continuing experiment in sharing the lectures for the course online. For my explainer, you can see Lecture 2: Feet.

I'm doing an open courseware initiative with my introductory course, Principles of Biological Anthropology. I have set up the course very differently than most introductory courses in evolution. Each lecture is centered around a part of the body, giving a perspective on its evolution in hominins, the genetics underlying its variation in humans, and how we compare to other kinds of primates. This is the first lecture I'm posting to the front page of the weblog, but it is the second lecture in the course. The first lecture, which is mainly devoted to introducing the course requirements and syllabus for enrolled students, is also available online for those who may be interested.

Putting the lectures online is a true experiment for me. It is already proving to be valuable for the students enrolled here in the course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. By making the materials open, I hope that many people outside the university may also find them useful. The course schedule and other materials, including the lab assignments and readings, are online at the course webpage. They are a work in progress, as always in my courses, and run a week or two ahead of the dates indicated.

The topic of this lecture is "Feet". The lecture covers the gross anatomical differences among the feet of different great apes and humans, the evidence for bipedality in Australopithecus afarensis focusing on metatarsal anatomy and the Laetoli footprints, some details about the feet of Australopithecus sediba, which show an interesting mosaic of anatomy, the foot anatomy of Ardipithecus ramidus, and evidence for footwear in Upper Paleolithic humans based on reduction of the lateral toes. The overarching concepts reviewed in the lecture are phylogeny and the idea that different lineages may arrive at different solutions for common evolutionary problems.

The university's streaming solution uses a Flash player that I have embedded here. This solution does not work on all devices (in particular, tablets and phones) and I apologize if those are your preferred browsing medium. I'm still investigating options to make the lectures more broadly available.