Practice Exam 2 answers

ANT 105

Spring 2010

This practice exam is optional, and does not need to be turned in for credit or bonus credit. The answers will be posted online by Friday, March 19.

Define two of the following four terms and state their importance to anthropology:

1) Mitochondrial DNA

Mitochondrial DNA is DNA that is passed down intact from a mother to her child, and therefore can be used to track maternal lineages around the world. It is important because it is easier to extract than nuclear DNA, and is often used to look into issues of migration, lineage, and relatedness.

2) Hominid

Hominids are all fossil and living hominins, chimps, bonobos, and gorillas. Hominids are important because humans are hominids, and a trait shared by the hominids are likely to have been shared by our earliest hominin ancestor as well.

3) Jargon

A type of deception in which a person uses highly technical language that is clear to someone familiar to the technical specialty, but totally intelligible to everyone else. It makes the technical specialist sound smarter, and is important because it is a key way to deceive in human communication.

4) Foramen magnum

The “big hole” in the skull where the spinal column enters the brain. Important because bipedality can be measured in fossils by looking at whether the foramen magnum is on the bottom of the skull or not.

Write a paragraph on one of the following two topics:

5) How can studying great apes help us in anthropology? Can it? Give examples and support your answer.

Studying great apes can help us in anthropology because humans and the great apes share many important qualities, including social groups, social learning, and a long period of childcare. Since the other great apes have less complex cultures than humans, it is easier to study the relationship between biology and culture in these apes than in humans, whose culture is so much more complex. Since each great ape has similarities and differences with humans, studying all the great apes with an eye to individual traits and behaviors and then comparing them to humans is the most useful way to study these species.

6) Is bipedalism an adaptation? Be sure to give specific reasons and examples, using our standard method for determining adaptations, and the hominin fossil record.

The primary question when deciding if something is an adaptation is determining whether the trait has cost, complexity, and changes over time. In the case of bipedialism, it does have a cost—bipedalism leads to complications in childbirth, to back pain, and to stomach and digestive issues. It is very complex, as it involves a suite of physical changes, and walking itself is quite difficult, involving complex balance and motor skills. It changes over time, as we can tell by looking over the fossil record—Homo ergaster is the first hominin with fully modern bipedality. All the australopithecines and Homo habilis had, to a greater or lesser degree, apelike limb proportions and a slightly stooped gait.