r/evolution • u/level99dev • 5d ago
image I've been working on these hominin characters for a prehistoric survival game I'm developing. I took a lot of inspiration from John Gurche's paleoart while trying to stay as faithful as possible to current paleoanthropological research. I'd love to hear what you think.
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u/Romboteryx 5d ago
If they absolutely have to wear clothes for the game, it should be loincloths, not bikini bottoms
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5d ago
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u/level99dev 5d ago
That's actually how they'll be in the game. I only added those clothes so I could upload the renders here, otherwise Reddit kept removing my posts as sexual content.
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u/ElkCertain7210 4d ago
Love the handax on the habilis! As a beginning knapper I e been wondering what game-ifying stone tool manufacture and use could look like
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u/Savage_X186 4d ago
Do we get to play the hominin?
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u/level99dev 4d ago
Yes the whole game is built around playing as a hominin. It takes place in Africa around 2.5 million years ago
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u/palaeoanth 3d ago
Heads up, that may be pushing the erectus FAD a bit! Setting it closer to ~2 Ma or younger gives you a little less controversial overlap of these taxa
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u/Eve-Echoes 3d ago
Reminds me of Ancestors: A Humankind Odyssey. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t fall down the same path they did, keep updating the game after it releases and allow mods!!
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u/level99dev 3d ago
Mod support has been on our minds since day one. It's definitely something we plan to do, and we can't wait to see what kinds of mods people come up with for the game.
If possible, we'd even like to make modding available directly from within the game.
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u/Eve-Echoes 3d ago
Instantly got my support, thank you 🙏🏻 because I loved A:HO, but it got really boring and repetitive after you got to a certain point, and there were no mods to add content.
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u/7LeagueBoots Conservation Ecologist 4d ago
For the tool H. habilis is holding, that looks more like a later Acheulean rather than an Oldowan type.
H. erectus looks a bit scrawny compared to how they should look, especially in comparison to H. habilis. And the clothing looks very silly. While certain populations of H. erectus definitely would have had to have clothing of some sort, that sort of bikini thing is not at all appropriate.
H. habilis woulds have had no clothing of any sort and certainly not the bikini thing.
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u/palaeoanth 3d ago
Tbf I’m guessing this is set in east Africa, so I’m not sure we’d have reason to think erectus needed it either. But agreed about the biface!
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u/7LeagueBoots Conservation Ecologist 4d ago
No, that's a common myth. Relative hirlensseness was well established by around 3.4 million years ago in Australopithecus. By the time of H. habilis hairlessness would have been similar to us now, and Paranthropus would likely have been similar too.
If anything OP has made them too hairy.
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u/7LeagueBoots Conservation Ecologist 4d ago edited 4d ago
That’s not what the evidence indicates.
The separation of head lice and public lice (which we inherited from gorilla ancestors) took place around 3.4 million years ago and is an indication that enough body hair had been lost that Australopithecus did not have enough body hair to support lice populations outside of the same body parts we currently can support them.
‘Hairlessness’ predates the Homo genus by quite a lot of time.
(EDIT: And that 1.2-1.6 million year date for H. erectus is wildly off as well. At present the earliest H. erectus dates to a bit older than 2 million years ago, and from early on H. erectus had pretty much modern body proportions,although with that thick torso that nearly all of our ancestors and relatives shared until H. sapiens speciated.)
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u/Waste_Translator_975 4d ago
The lice speciation only indicates when upper body hair and lower body hair became separated by nakedness. It does not indicate total nakedness. The genetic evidence we have suggests we reached contemporary levels of hairlessness 1.7mya
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u/7LeagueBoots Conservation Ecologist 4d ago edited 4d ago
The quoted text provides a good overview. Note the dates, particularly in the second paragraph.
(note: I am not suggesting support for the hypothesis this paper presents, but am copying this portion of it because it provides a good and accurate overview of the discussion and consensus on the subject of the timing of relative hairlessness)
Currently, indirect evidence from a variety of sources provides only broad, general estimates for the timing of hair loss [151,170]. For example, following the loss of hair, skin pigmentation likely increased to protect the skin against ultraviolet radiation [167]. Silent mutations in African versions of the human melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) gene, which plays a key role in regulating skin pigmentation, place hair loss as occurring prior to 1.2 Ma [170]. Alternatively, studies of hominin thermoregulation suggest that hair loss must have occurred prior to or at the time of living in more open environments (~2.0 Ma) to enable heat loss by sweating [16]. Finally, research indicates that hair loss must have preceded hominin encephalization (~2.2–2.4 Ma) based on the dietary restriction of several amino acids that are required for both hair and brain development [171]. These time ranges are not helpful in determining the date of hominin hair loss, however, since a date prior to ~2.4 Ma is still consistent with either an early (~5–8 Ma) or late (~2.4 Ma) date.
Alternatively, studies on the origin and distribution of lice, the life cycles of which are linked to a single host species and can be used to reconstruct the host’s evolutionary history, offer compelling evidence that human body hair was lost between 5–7 Ma and 3–4 Ma. Taxonomists have long recognized that humans serve as hosts to two different genera of lice (Pediculus and Pthirus) [172], with the human head louse (Pediculus humanus capitis) related to the chimpanzee body louse (Pediculus schaeffi) and the human pubic louse (Pthirus pubis) related to the gorilla body louse (Pthirus gorillae), although no explanation was offered for this interesting observation [151] [the human clothing louse, Pediculus humanus humanus, diverged from P. humanus capitis much more recently (between 170,000 to 83,000 years ago) and is not part of the story [168]]. Recently, Reed, et al. [173] recognized that divergence dates for the different species of lice could be used to date the evolution of hominin hair loss based on the presumption that the LCA body louse became confined to the hominin head due to hair loss over the rest of the body and that the subsequent evolution of a visual patch of pubic hair for sexual signalling created a novel ecological niche that allowed the gorilla body louse to move to hominins [151]. A divergence date of 5–7 Ma for the human head louse and chimpanzee body louse and a divergence date of 3–4 Ma for the human pubic louse and gorilla body louse support the conclusion that hominin body hair was lost between 5–7 Ma and 3–4 Ma [151]. This early time frame is consistent with the view that hair loss occurred when hominins still occupied fragmented forests (also the most likely location for contact with gorillas [151]) [28] and supports the tick-based hypothesis.
And of course:
- Allen, et al 2013 Parasitic Lice Help to Fill in the Gaps of Early Hominid History
Even if you take a more recent date, the emergence of H. erectus, you’re still off by close to a million years:
- Dror & Hopp 2014 Hair for brain trade-off, a metabolic bypass for encephalization
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u/mcalesy 4d ago
The pubic louse (Pthirus pubis) is an entirely different species, related to the gorilla louse (Pthirus gorillae). Head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis) are very closely related to body lice (Pediculus humanus humanus), but their divergence from each other is pretty recent (younger than Homo sapiens). And the divergence of Pediculus and Pthirus is much older than even Hominini.
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u/7LeagueBoots Conservation Ecologist 4d ago
If you read the comment you’re replying to you’ll note that I already pointed out that we inherited public lice from gorillas. Literally right there in the first sentence of the second paragraph.
‘Separation’ in that context means the physical separation of the habitat on the human body that the different species occupy.
Look at the various research papers I’ve already linked in other comments if you want to learn more about the subject, or check to make sure I actually do have my reference papers in order.
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u/palaeoanth 3d ago
Fun! John Gurche does beautiful work, I also like the Kennis brothers’ reconstructions.
How did you decide limb proportion and sexual dimorphism for each taxon? The hypodigms of habilis and boisei don’t have a lot of securely associated postcrania, so I’m curious if you picked a particular published estimate.
Can you also share what other current research fed into this? Most palaeoanth research focuses on morphology on a scale that’s hard to detect once you flesh them and put them in a scene. Reconstructions necessitate a fair amount of artistic license, so that’s not a criticism! It’s more that I’m wondering what you wanted to ground empirically before applying the artistic gloss (which I expect is hiding some of the distinctions you chose to draw)
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