Deconstructing the Savanna Hypothesis

Abstract

Human Origins and Environmental Backgrounds is a compendium text for any advanced student of human origins and evolution. Bipedalism is the common thread, and the volume is a current, thorough, and diverse treatise on the origins and expressions of this key hominin adaptation. At the end of every chapter, the bibliographies are comprehensive, and thus, each is one of the main contributions of the book. I envision a beginning graduate student benefiting from the wide array of topics covered, and delving further into the cited literature. The book is dedicated to Hidemi Ishida, and the first paper celebrates his 40 years of study and research on primate anatomy and evolution. The remaining papers are partitioned into three distinct, but interrelated sections: fossil hominoids and paleoenvironments, functional morphology, and theoretical approaches. The first section reviews aspects of Miocene–Pleistocene hominoid morphology and contexts of fossil locations. Tuttle, in the first paper, aptly synthesizes seven decades of research from widespread sources. The second section includes experimental studies of living mammals, from rats to chimps. The last section endeavors to bridge the fossil record and functional aspects of hominins within a paleoenvironmental framework, which is presented as the aim of the book as evident by the title. Undoubtedly, there are many pathways between hominin morphologies and the environments in which they arose and evolved. Unraveling these pathways requires several levels of analysis beginning with the rock record. Sawada et al. provide the underlying structure to Miocene hominoid environments, succinctly integrating stratigraphy, facies interpretations, and new dates. Nakaya and Tsujikawa flesh out this geological framework with faunal community compositions. Gommery and Blue et al. provide an even higher level of environmental inference with their respective approaches on locomotor repertoires of Miocene and Pliocene primates. This first section demonstrates the seemingly disparate lines of evidence necessary to begin to understand the complexities of reconstructing past ecosystems and, in my opinion, would have benefited from additional papers. Do not judge this book solely by its title as there are insightful and detailed studies of positional behavior garnered from primate and other mammalian experimental studies in the second section. I particularly enjoyed Jouffroy andMedina’s comparative approach to the size and arrangement of gluteus maximus and its involvement in human cross-cultural foraging activities. The inclusion of functional morphoJ Mammal Evol (2009) 16:75–76 DOI 10.1007/s10914-008-9095-5