Reference no: EM131683785

Over the last 10 or 20 years dieting has become a major concern in Western cultures. This has seen both the development of serious science in this area (medical researchers and nutritionists with significant university education and clinical training in human physiology) and the proliferation of theories on human diet from individuals with much less formal training who are often trying to cash-in on peoples' interest in eating healthier by selling them fad diets. Some people have chosen to adopt vegetarian diets mainly for moral reasons (concern about the treatment of animals or concern about damage to the environment), but some people have become vegetarians because of perceived improved health benefits. In two or three paragraphs discuss your own views on what a ‘healthy' human diet is. However, it's important that you keep in mind both what you now know about traditional hominin diets, traditional hunter-gather diets (they love fat!), the diets of our close cousins - chimps and bonobos - (specifically, what we talked about in this lecture) as well as how Natural Selection processes work.

Homo habilis seems to be the best candidate for the first stone tool maker - since they both seem to appear about the same time in East Africa. If this species was the first to be manufacturing stone tools it would have been doing so for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years and so this behaviour would have been subject to natural selection. What sort of morphological changes in their bone structure might we expect to have evolved to suit this behaviour? Can you suggest some analysis that we could carry out on their skeletal remains that might detect such morphological changes? Consider how you might compare their skeletal morphology to earlier hominids who we know didn't make stone tools and later hominins who we know did.