Introduction: Who am I?

Hello, Welcome! My name is Logan Faircloth and I am currently a senior at Appalachian State University. I am a Biological Anthropology Major graduating in December and hoping to then get into Nursing School. I created this blog for one of my classes called Human Evolution or ANT4320. I will be posting a lot of reflections, my thoughts, and possible notes or informative information regarding our class theme, Human Evolution. I hope you enjoy it!

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Bipedalism

Human Evolution. (n.d.). Retrieved June 04, 2020, from https://humanevolutionb36.weebly.com/ This week in our Human Evolution class we focused a lot on Bipedalism. Bipedalism is a form of locomotion that involves walking on two legs/limbs. Skeletal evidence for bipedalism can be vast, but when trying to apply this evidence to our past ancestor (in order to determine human evolution) it can be hard because we have very few bones that will be found. The main evidence of bipedalism in which I will focus on is the postcranial evidence of spinal curvatures. I chose this specific evidence because I watched a video lecture called “Early Hominin Body Form” by Carol Ward. Ward was talking about spinal curvatures of early hominins vs great apes. In this video, she states that spinal curvatures are distinctive for humans and they not seen in animals such as the chimp. This means that bipedalism could have something to do with our spinal curvatures. Later on, in the lecture, Carol Ward goes ...

Evolution from Chimps...

“If we evolved from Chimps, then why are there still Chimps today,” this is the million-dollar question that we would all love the answer too, but the truth is there is NO definitive answer. Our education and theories about our past ancestors and how they once lived is still evolving today. Unfortunately, when examining the human origin, the answer will not be as simple as 2+2=4. I have read many articles over the past couple of days trying to pose my answer to this question, but the truth is… I don’t have one. Evolution is not linear, and it is an involuntary action that occurs of thousands of years so perhaps chimps are still in a primitive phase or maybe it is because we share a common ancestor as the chimps that allow us to be so close in DNA. I read this article from Fabio Mendes that states: “We did not evolve from a modern, living ape, like a chimpanzee. We evolved and descended from the common ancestors of apes, which lived and died in the distant past. This means that we...

Ardipithecus ramidus

For the past fifty years, anthropologists have had a traditional view that our ancestors arose or started to walk bipedality in the grassy savannas of Africa. This viewpoint got put to the test when a fossil was founded that showed a creature walking upright in an intermediate way living in the woodlands. This fossil that was discovered is named Ardipithecus ramidus (A. ramidus ) or Ardi for short. Ardi dates back to 4.4 million years ago and is thought to be one of the earliest hominins known to mankind. Ardipithecus ramidus had to brain size of a chimpanzee, was not using tools (as seen by the record), and had a divergent big toe. This week in our Human Evolution class, we read an article on Ardipithecus ramidus and then were asked to read another article on our own reading this hominin species. I will be discussing the article that I read this week regarding Ardipithecus ramidus called “Taphonomic, Avian, and Small Vertebrate Indicators of Ardipithecus ramidus Habitat”. This artic...

Human Evolution

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