Thanks!  I'll take a look after I'm done with this week's article.

It's annoying that page load speed is one of the metrics they use to rank results -- while their own social media button slows them down so dramatically!

JS

I say theoretically because I couldn't get it to work when I tried it.

You may have better luck.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/1-button-now-faster.html

I'm also quite skeptical of the "being taller let you see farther" hypothesis.  Your second thought, I believe, is the key: "size might have started increasing when becoming big gave real advantage."  I suspect the advantage was more against our fellow apes of genus Homo than against our predators or prey...but that will enter the picture in future installments.

JS

One benefit I see of being tall is that our ancestors can see a predator from longer distance but it could be seen other way round also (Predator can see him from longer distance). So I think size might have started increasing when becoming big gave real advantage. I think that would have happened when we were able to kill them so tools and intelligent may have played an important role. And of-course food availability to support increasing size and population.

You're getting a bit ahead of me.  I need to lay the groundwork of evidence before jumping to any conclusions...and you'll note that I already mentioned that meat enters the picture in Part IV.

The problem with the size argument, of course, that no matter how big our ancestors got, it wouldn't have helped them against the much larger carnivorous predators of the time: ancestral lions, giant Pachycrocuta hyenas, and several species of saber-toothed felid.  So there must have been another explanation for increased body size.

mirrormtn:

You'll note that Part IV presents evidence that australopithecines were using naturally-occuring sharp rocks to deflesh bones 3.4 MYA.  As the series continues, I'll present the evidence for purposely manufactured stone tools in their time.

Keep in mind that composite weapons (stone-tipped spears, etc.) are a comparatively recent development, postdating anatomical modernity.  Wooden spears are older -- at least 400 KYA -- but because wood tends not to fossilize, we may never know exactly how old.  (Though chimpanzees make small wooden spears to kill sleeping monkeys in their dens, so for all we know, spears may predate stone tools!)

JS

I am not a historian or scientist, and I could be wrong in my assumptions, but I find this idea very exciting. It seems to point to many explanations, from providing a response to the silly vegan argument that we aren't meant to eat meat because we can't kill prey (without tools) to humanity's general fascination with weapons. Even our desire for possessions--we need to keep our tools in order to kill our food and process it.

How long have we been using tools? And has the use of tools, even simple ones, been an overwhelmingly significant factor in our evolutionary development?  I have a new appreciation for the cave paintings of people and their spears--maybe the two have been linked longer than I had imagined.

--

Tom

I agree...the evidence is that heidelbergensis was the most capable and fearsome of our direct ancestors.  Perhaps too capable...but I'm getting ahead of myself!

David:

There are hundreds of different graphical timelines of human evolution, but the handprint.com chart is the best I've found.  It's an eclectic site, and I confess I haven't explored it in depth yet.

JS

I'm not sure which way the causality runs -- but my guess is that the selection pressure of living more on the ground vs. in the trees pushed Ardipithecus towards being lighter in weight and more nimble (Australopithecus).  After that the picture becomes more complex because it involves technology.

JS

Thank you!  I'll look into Digg Digg.  Counters are cute, but WOW do they slow down page loads, especially in Safari, which likes to put the spinner up instead of letting you do things while waiting for something to finish.

I like Atahualpa because it's clean and heavily customizable: most themes make your site look exactly like everyone else's with that theme.  It takes a lot of experimentation and work to make Atahualpa do what you want -- but I'm reasonably happy with the results.  

That said, I'd like to have a more magazine-like front page, with the ability to have Featured Articles that stay in the Featured spot (and have a "Read More" for just that category) as well as smaller, more frequent squibs (again, using categories to tell which is which) but no one seems to make such a theme.  Let me know if you have any leads.

Uncephalized:

Yes, this one was a bit short -- but I realized that I needed a whole new article to do justice to all the issues that crash together at the beginning of the Paleolithic.  Even then it's likely to be a long article!

Re: weight, modern Homo sapiens males are only perhaps 27% heavier than Homo habilis, but sapiens females are 70% heavier than habilis females.  The sexual dimorphism is much smaller in sapiens.  These figure aren't the whole story, however, because we're much smaller than our hunter-gatherer ancestors.  Homo heidelbergensis, in particular, were huge and powerfully built: they averaged 6' tall, and males probably weighed well over 200#.  Some populations regularly grew to over 7 feet tall (2.1m)!

JS

Mean, but effective.

That graph of brain size vs. time is interesting--I didn't realize the expansion between habilis and sapiens was such a large percentage of the total growth--although I would like to see it plotted as encephalization quotient instead of absolute size, since I believe body mass was also expanding significantly during much of that time, no? I suspect that correction would flatten out the rate of increase closer to a constant.