Antón Susan C, Kuzawa Christopher W
Department of Anthropology, New York University, 25 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, 1810 Hinman Avenue, Evanston, IL 60201, USA.
Interface Focus. 2017 Oct 6;7(5):20170004. doi: 10.1098/rsfs.2017.0004. Epub 2017 Aug 18.
The Modern Synthesis led to fundamental advances in understandings of human evolution. For human palaeontology, a science that works from ancestral phenotypes (i.e. the fossil record), particularly important have been perspectives used to help understand the heritable aspects of phenotypes and how fossil individuals might then be aggregated into species, and relationships among these groups understood. This focus, coupled with the fragmentary nature of the fossil record, however, means that individual phenotypic variation is often treated as unimportant 'noise', rather than as a source of insight into population adaptation and evolutionary process. The emphasis of the extended evolutionary synthesis on plasticity as a source of phenotypic novelty, and the related question of the role of such variation in long-term evolutionary trends, focuses welcome attention on non-genetic means by which novel phenotypes are generated and in so doing provides alternative approaches to interpreting the fossil record. We review evidence from contemporary human populations regarding some of the aspects of adult phenotypes preserved in the fossil record that might be most responsive to non-genetic drivers, and we consider how these perspectives lead to alternate hypotheses for interpreting the fossil record of early genus We conclude by arguing that paying closer attention to the causes and consequences of intraspecific phenotypic variation in its own right, as opposed to as noise around a species mean, may inspire a new generation of hypotheses regarding species diversity in the Early Pleistocene and the foundations for dispersal and regional diversification in and its descendants
现代综合理论在人类进化理解方面取得了根本性进展。对于人类古生物学这门从祖先表型（即化石记录）开展研究的科学而言，用于帮助理解表型的可遗传方面、如何将化石个体归为物种以及理解这些群体之间关系的观点尤为重要。然而，这种关注点，再加上化石记录的碎片化性质，意味着个体表型变异常常被视为不重要的“噪音”，而非洞察种群适应和进化过程的一个来源。扩展进化综合理论强调可塑性是表型新奇性的一个来源，以及这种变异在长期进化趋势中的作用这一相关问题，将人们的注意力有益地聚焦于产生新表型的非遗传方式，并且这样做提供了解释化石记录的替代方法。我们回顾了来自当代人类群体的证据，这些证据涉及保存在化石记录中的成年表型的某些方面，这些方面可能对非遗传驱动因素最为敏感，并且我们思考这些观点如何导致关于早期人属化石记录解释的替代假说。我们最后指出，相较于将其视为围绕物种均值的噪音，直接更密切地关注种内表型变异的原因和后果，可能会激发关于更新世早期物种多样性以及人属及其后代扩散和区域多样化基础的新一代假说。
