Lab 105 Human Species Lab Report

Anth. 105 Human Species – Lab 3 Report
Sirin Gul
November 11, 2017

Introduction In Lab 3, we examined the relationships between diet quality, tooth shape and daily travel distance. Evolution has changed how humans and other primates live and survived according to their environment. They are relatively related/similar to each other when it comes to fossil hominins, humans and other primates. For humans, the tooth shape reflects based on how we consume in our diet quality. The majority of humans in today’s generation consume meat, which molds our molars to be a lot smaller opposed to the other primates. The diet quality of fossil hominins is relevant to the shape of their tooth, in which certain kinds of their species that have consumed fruits

Our daily travel distance also tends to affect our diet quality score. The longer our travel distance is, the higher our diet quality score will be in order to have sufficient amount of calories for the travel. As for primates, their diet quality also molds/sculpts their molar area in which the primates who consume fruits and leaves that have a larger body mass tend to have bigger molars opposed to the primates with a much smaller body mass. A low quality diet pertains to consuming leaves which would mean that primates’ molar sizes will be larger; however, they are more abundant compared to fruit and meat. A high quality food would be fruits but they are less abundant which means that the primates would be required to travel further and will more than likely have smaller molar sizes. Humans have smaller sized molars compared to all the other primates simply because we don’t consume as many leaves. Humans consume meat more than anything else and this has resulted in the size of our molars being reduced. Also, we tend to eat more high quality foods but unlike the hunter-gatherer (Hadza) people, we don’t travel as much as them. This is due to humans

In order to find the molar area, we multiplied the length by the width and we had to measure it in millimeters (mm). In order to get the diet quality scores of the students in our Anthropology 105 class, we had to estimate the percentages of several different kinds of food we consumed out of 100. Then, we multiplied those percentages respectively, to the number indicated on the data sheet. Daily travel distance was measured using a pedometer just so that way, we can track the amount of steps we walked within three days. Finally, we combined all these finalized results and divided it by three in order to get the average. We adjusted/converted miles (m) to kilometers