Anthropology: Life History. Life Sciences Lab Report

Your Name
Subject and section
Professor’s Name
May 23, 2020
Anthropology: Life History
Understanding life history is important for any Anthropologist. It allows him to be able to understand the relationship between humans and their environment with regards to the coping mechanisms as well as its success in allowing them to survive. Accordingly, one way to understand life history is by looking at the different periods of development that humans had during their lifetimes. Periods such as birth, infancy, maturity, reproduction, and death, that are all connected with the external circumstances in society. In this paper, the author would try to understand how human’ life expectancy has evolved through time by understanding the different periods of development that were experienced by humans in different periods of time. The periods of development would depend on the different body sizes that human species had. Particularly, the analysis would be done through the measurement of fossil sizes, which would shed light on the trajectory of development for early humans through time. Nonetheless, the author of the paper believes that different species of humans also had different life spans, in relation to the differences in their body sizes.
Methods
In order to understand the relationships between the variables in this study, the author initially measured a collection of fossils for different human and ape species. He used a Vernier caliper to obtain cranial measurements and orbital height. However, since it is difficult to obtain full-body samples of each of the species, the author had to rely on the orbital measurements in order to obtain an estimate of the body mass of the species. This estimate is based from the studies that show a strong relationship between a species’orbital height and the overall body mass CITATION Aie94 \l 1033 (Aiello and Wood). Subsequently, all of the...