Fifty years of paleoanthropology in Journal of Human Evolution: Historical perspectives and future directions - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Human Evolution Année : 2023

Fifty years of paleoanthropology in Journal of Human Evolution: Historical perspectives and future directions

Résumé

This Special Issue (SI), titled 'The 50th anniversary of the Journal of Human Evolution: Current and future directions in reconstructing our past', marks 50 years of chronicling the origins and evolution of humans and our ancestors. Following a series of editorials by current and former editors-in-chief of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) published in various volumes in 2022, this SI not only honors the historical focus of the journal but also takes a broad view of paleoanthropology, covering a range of topics and capturing areas of inquiry and discovery that have advanced understanding of human evolution for more than a century. New technologies and methodological approaches have led to tremendous advances in paleoanthropology while at the same time opening up new questions and new avenues of research. The ten papers included in this volume approach a key question related to paleoanthropology through the historical lens of one or more seminal papers published in the early volumes of the journal. In this regard, these papers not only look back to consider how knowledge of a topic has evolved and changed over time, but they also look forward by synthesizing information across time and space to re-evaluate the state of the field. Through collaboration between one early career and one senior scholar, these papers offer new perspectives on questions that are as relevant to today as they were 50 years ago and provide fresh insights into future avenues of investigation that will reinvigorate human-evolution research and continue to change the way we think about our origins, diversity, and evolution. A number of the papers in this SI address the evolution of hominoids and hominins from the Miocene to the Late Pleistocene. In their paper on the systematics of Miocene apes, Urciuoli and Alba (2023) provide a comprehensive review of Miocene ape taxonomy, phylogeny, and paleobiogeography and address various critical issues such as relationships of Oreopithecus, the origins of hylobatids, and pongine-hominine divergence. The authors highlight the fact that craniodental and postcranial data produce different phylogenetic signals-a theme that emerges again in other papers in this SI (e.g., Antón and Middleton, 2023). They end by making some methodological recommendations for future phylogenetic studies, including encouraging the use of total-evidence Bayesian methods. Two papers tackle the topic of hominin locomotion and the evolution of bipedality but from different perspectives. Stamos and Alemseged (2023) discuss hominin locomotion and evolution from the Late Miocene to the Late Pliocene, focusing on the challenges of defining locomotor grades and how to detect the emergence of bipedalism in early hominins. The authors take their starting point from McHenry's (1986) evaluation of the earliest known hominin at the time-Australopithecus africanus-and undertake a thorough review of the evidence for bipedality, starting with the earliest putative hominins currently known and dating ∼3-4 Myr before A. africanus. Providing their own updated scheme for classifying grades of bipedality, they conclude
Fichier sous embargo
Fichier sous embargo
0 0 13
Année Mois Jours
Avant la publication
mercredi 16 octobre 2024
Fichier sous embargo
mercredi 16 octobre 2024
Connectez-vous pour demander l'accès au fichier

Dates et versions

hal-04244437 , version 1 (16-10-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Clément Zanolli, Andrea Taylor. Fifty years of paleoanthropology in Journal of Human Evolution: Historical perspectives and future directions. Journal of Human Evolution, 2023, 182, pp.103415. ⟨10.1016/j.jhevol.2023.103415⟩. ⟨hal-04244437⟩
33 Consultations
4 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

More