Abstract
To identify a fossil mammal or to describe a new species, paleontologists like to have good specimens of the skull, especially the jaws and teeth. However, when they want to know what an animal looks like, they need to have more of the skeleton. Unfortunately, it is rare to have both skull and limb bones of the same individual, and it may be some time before scientists can reconstruct the body with some confidence. Paleontologists can apply the tools used commonly by forensic anthropologists to reconstruct stature and body proportions from individual bones to give a better picture of the size and proportions of the australopithecines and early Homo. The bodies of early hominins did not evolve as quickly as had been believed.
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Langdon, J.H. (2016). Case Study 10. Reading the Bones (2): Sizing Up the Ancestors. In: The Science of Human Evolution. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41585-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41585-7_10
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