In the language of adaptive explanations, cost and benefit refer to the impact of
behaviors on the animal’s
a. overall health.
b. reproductive success.
c. foraging success.
d. social relationships.
The Laetoli footprints show that Australopithecus afarensis was
a. an efficient biped compared with humans.
b. an inefficient biped compared with humans.
c. about as equally efficient a biped as humans.
d. not bipedal.
Evidence suggests that Homo heidelbergensis
a. hunted large game such as woolly rhinoceros.
b. did not hunt large game.
c. scavenged only small prey.
d. was vegetarian.
According to the genetic data, after modern humans left Africa they migrated first to
which geographic area?
a. Europe
b. The Pacific
c. Northern Asia
d. Southern Asia
If you have one deleterious recessive that causes early death in its homozygous state,
what is the probability that an offspring by you and your full sibling would acquire the
lethal disease?
a. 1:1
b. 1:2
c. 1:4
d. 1:8
Which of the following plays a crucial role in our understanding of primate societies?
a. Metabolism
b. Diet
c. Mating systems
d. Physiology
Some biologists hypothesize that introns are maintained in eukaryotes because their
population sizes are much smaller than in prokaryotes. ________ is the random,
nonadaptive evolutionary process that explains this phenomenon.
a. Genetic drift
b. Natural selection
c. Protein synthesis
d. Transcription
Which of the following foods requires specific digestive adaptations in primates?
a. Mature leaves
b. Young leaves
c. Flowers
d. Tree sap
Of the following, which is the most certain way to identify kin in primates?
a. Phenotypic matching
b. Age/cohort
c. Proximity/context
d. Reconciliation
Which type of social group has the largest relative testis size?
a. Pair bonded
b. One-male, multifemale
c. Multimale, multifemale
d. One female, multimale
Allopatric speciation occurs when
a. gene flow is maintained between two subgroups of a mother population.
b. two morphologically different subgroups of a species share the same habitat.
c. gene flow prevents genetic variants from being exchanged between subgroups.
d. a subgroup is physically isolated from the mother population and gene flow can no
longer occur.
mtDNA evidence supports the idea that modern humans arose in
a. Africa.
b. Asia.
c. Europe.
d. India.
Tay-Sachs disease may give partial resistance to tuberculosis
a. in heterozygous individuals.
b. and may be an example of a balanced polymorphism.
c. and occurs at a higher rate in Western European Jewish populations than in other
Jewish populations.
d. both a and b.
Which of the following important geological events occurred approximately 150 mya?
a. Laurasia divided into Pangaea and Gondwanaland.
b. Gondwanaland divided into North America and Europe.
c. Pangaea divided into Laurasia and Gondwanaland.
d. India moved north to join Europe.
Researchers think that the negatively selected sequence HAR1
a. is related to the rapid evolution of the large and complex human brain.
b. has a slower rate of change in humans than in other lineages.
c. is found in a coding region and results in new proteins.
d. is involved in speech production along with FOXP2.
In order to conduct a meaningful comparative analysis, a researcher must
a. not take phylogeny into account.
b. only compare behavioral features.
c. only use independently evolved features.
d. compare absolutely everything about two taxa.
When Mendel crossed true-breeding plants bearing yellow seeds with true-breeding
plants bearing green seeds, what was the phenotypic ratio among the offspring?
a. All aa individuals
b. All AA individuals
c. Half yellow and half green individuals
d. All yellow individuals
Male primates commit infanticide in one-male, multifemale groups because
a. it enhances male attractiveness to females.
b. females without nursing infants resume sexual receptivity.
c. females do not want infants sired by a nonalpha male.
d. they want to limit the number of males in their group.
A shift to extractive foraging and hunting would favor
a. larger brain size and greater intelligence.
b. a shortened juvenile period.
c. a shorter overall life span.
d. no change in brain size or life history.
Based on blending inheritance, which Darwin and his contemporaries believed in, if a
finch with a large beak depth mates with a finch with a small beak depth, then the
offspring will have
a. beaks with small depth.
b. beaks with medium depth.
c. beaks with large depth.
d. beaks with random depth.
Why does senescence occur?
a. Because of the relative magnitude of the benefits that animals can derive from current
reproduction versus from living longer.
b. Because things must eventually wear down, like the transmission on a car.
c. Because everything must grow old and die as a part of the cycle of life.
d. As yet there is no good Darwinian explanation for this.
Despite its detrimental nature, cannibalism can evolve by natural selection because
a. cannibalistic groups are ferocious enough to scare predators away.
b. individuals who cannibalize have higher fitness than those who do not.
c. natural selection is always immoral.
d. cannibalistic individuals kill off the rest of their population and have no mates left to
reproduce with.
The distribution of cortical bone in the femur
a. is diagnostic of locomotor patterns.
b. can be used to estimate body weight.
c. cannot be measured in fossils.
d. tells you how strong a species was.
Members of the Franklin Expedition of 1846
a. perished because they were unable to figure out how to adapt to the arctic habitat.
b. succeeded in surviving the harsh arctic conditions.
c. had access to accumulated local knowledge.
d. brought with them a diverse tool kit.
Variation in mtDNA among modern humans suggests that
a. we are all descended from a single man, or “Adam.”
b. we are more genetically variable compared with other species, such as chimpanzees.
c. humans underwent a recent population collapse.
d. all of our mtDNA comes from a woman who lived long ago.
________ is used as evidence that Neanderthals did not have modern language.
a. The simplicity of Mode 3 technology
b. The crural index
c. The relatively flat basicranium
d. The reconstruction of past climates
Bipedalism may have evolved because hominin ancestors were
a. above-branch quadrupeds.
b. below-branch, suspensory primates.
c. vertical clingers and leapers.
d. amphibians.
Cognitive differences between humans and great apes
a. are related to their differences in physical cognition.
b. do not exist because both have a theory of mind.
c. seem to reflect the specialized skills humans evolved for living and exchanging
knowledge in cultural groups.
d. are manifested within the act of deception.
Homologous chromosomes
a. come in pairs.
b. move together into the gametes during meiosis.
c. are found only in mammals.
d. have three codons.
Kipsigis women who reach menarche early
a. have longer reproductive life spans.
b. have decreased fertility.
c. have lower offspring survivorship.
d. increase their chances of having pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions.
Evidence in favor of the viewpoint that modern humans evolved in Africa includes the
fact that ________ lived side-by-side.
a. in Asia Homo erectus and modern humans
b. in the Middle East Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans
c. in Africa Homo ergaster and modern humans
d. in Australia Homo erectus and modern humans
What makes primates useful models for understanding human evolution?
a. Primate evolution is more complex than the evolution of lower animals.
b. We share many of the same adaptations as other primates.
c. We share an interest in evolution with other primates.
d. Modern primates represent the primitive condition of our common ancestor.
How can dominance status affect female reproductive success? Illustrate your answer
with specific primate examples.
What evidence is there that primates understand third-party relationships? How is this
knowledge beneficial?
How does speciation occur? After a speciation event, by what mechanisms do new
species remain distinct?
Describe the lifeways of the Neanderthals, comparing them with what is known about
contemporary human foragers. Specifically address their behavioral ecology, their diet,
and what is known about their culture
What is the evidence that Neanderthals took care of the sick and buried their dead?
What three conditions did Darwin conclude are necessary for natural selection to take
place? Support your answer by either providing a real example from the chapter or
coming up with a reasonable hypothetical example of how evolution operates. Be sure
to discuss the role of the environment in your answer.
Provide three lines of evidence that help evaluate whether or not H. ergaster ate meat.
Include evidence from archaeology (artifacts), as well as physical anthropology (the
hominin fossils), in addition to comparative and geographical information. Do any of
these lines of evidence suggest that they hunted their game?
Why do some researchers feel that there was not a human revolution at all?
Who is mitochondrial Eve? Did all humans evolve from mitochondrial Eve? Why or
why not?
Imagine you are a European explorer living in nineteenth-century Europe and you
decide to embark on an expedition to explore the Arctic. Based on historical evidence,
how likely are you to survive this journey and why?
Although only a small fraction of protein-coding genes shows evidence of selection
since the divergence of human and chimpanzee lineages, humans and chimpanzees are
vastly different in their phenotypes. How can this be?
Why is it difficult to determine which early hominin species may have invented the use
of chipped stone tools?
Consider the following population: 30 AA individuals, 50 Aa individuals, and 20 aa
individuals. Is this population in Hardy”Weinberg equilibrium? Explain your answer.
Imagine a cross between two AaBb individuals, where A = yellow, a = green, B =
smooth, and b = wrinkled. What is the genotypic and phenotypic ratio among the
offspring?
Conflict and aggression are a large part of group life for many primate species, which
would seem disruptive to social bonds. What, then, keeps social groups cohesive?
In what ways is human cooperation different from that of other mammal species?
Explain why shared ancestral characters do not yield good information about
relationships between species.