Physiology
H. antecessor was about 1.6-1.8 m (5½-6 feet) tall, and males weighed roughly 90 kg (200 pounds). Their brain sizes were roughly 1,000–1,150 cm³, smaller than the 1,350 cm³ average of modern humans. Due to its scarcity, very little more is known about the physiology of H. antecessor, yet it was likely to have been more robust than H. heidelbergensis.
According to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the co-directors of the excavation in Burgos, H. antecessor might have been right-handed, a trait that makes the species different from the other apes. This hypothesis is based on tomography techniques. Arsuaga also claims that the frequency range of audition is similar to H. sapiens, which makes him believe that H. antecessor used a symbolic language and was able to reason. Arsuaga's team is currently pursuing a DNA map of H. antecessor after elucidating that of a bear that lived in northern Spain some 500,000 years ago.
Based on teeth eruption pattern, the researchers think that H. antecessor had the same development stages as H. sapiens, though probably at a faster pace. Other features acquired by the species are a protruding occipital bun, a low forehead and a lack of a strong chin. Some of the remains are almost indistinguishable from the fossil attributable to the 1.5 million year old Turkana Boy, belonging to H. ergaster.
Read more about this topic: Homo Antecessor
Famous quotes containing the word physiology:
“I have more in common with a Mexican man than with a white woman.... This opinion ... chagrins women who sincerely believe our female physiology unequivocally binds all women throughout the world, despite the compounded social prejudices that daily affect us all in different ways. Although women everywhere experience life differently from men everywhere, white women are members of a race that has proclaimed itself globally superior for hundreds of years.”
—Ana Castillo (b. 1953)
“A physician’s physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric’s divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The world moves, but we seem to move with it. When I studied physiology before ... there were two hundred and eight bones in the body. Now there are two hundred and thirty- eight.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)