1. Which of the following primate traits is believed to have been selected for life in trees?
A. Fewer offspring and bipedalism
B. Meat eating and aggression
C. Larger females and gentle males
D. Fingernails (instead of claws) and soft fingertips
E. Stereoscopic vision and an opposable thumb
2. Which of the following is shared by all anthropoids?
A. The ability to knuckle-walk and carry tools
B. Bipedalism and one offspring born at a time
C. Prehensile tails
D. A decrease in the size of canines and an increase in the size of molars
E. Stereoscopic vision
3. Based on scientific theories of evolution, humans are not descended from gorillas or chimps. Rather,
A. they are descended from gorillas only.
B. they are descended from chimps.
C. it is the other way around: gorillas and chimps are descended from humans.
D. humans and African apes share a common ancestor.
E. humans are descended from Adam and Eve.
4. Bipedalism, considered a key defining characteristic that differentiated early hominins from other apes,
A. may have evolved as a result of anatomical changes caused by stone tool manufacturing.
B. evolved as a result of anatomical changes caused by an increase in brain size.
C. perhaps developed in the woodlands but became even more adaptive in a savanna habitat.
D. resulted in greater exposure to heat stress because on two feet, hominins spent increasingly more time in the open grasslands.
E. was accompanied by a sharp increase in hominins’ climbing abilities.
5.Which of the following was a key obstacle that hominins’ increase in brain size had to overcome?
A. larger skulls demanding more elastic birth canals, even though the requirements of skeletal development during a woman’s lifetime limit the elasticity of birth canals
B. the challenges of walking with a head that is too heavy
C. overcoming the trend of clumsy locomotion that makes hominins vulnerable to predators
D. overcoming the trend of ever more self-sufficient children eager to separate themselves from their mothers
E. larger skulls demanding larger birth canals, even though the requirements of upright bipedalism impose limits on the expansion of the human pelvic opening
6.What was the major hominin group that lived from about 4 million to 1 m.y.a.?
A. Homo sapiens
B. Homo erectus
C. Ramapithecus
D. Australopithecus
E. Dryopithecus
7.Fossils of Australopithecus afarensis are particularly significant because
A. they showed that humans evolved in Asia rather than Africa.
B. they are the oldest hominin fossils yet found in the New World.
C. A. afarensis remains are the oldest to be found in association with evidence of both stone tools and fire use.
D. it was the first fossil evidence to confirm that bipedalism preceded the evolution of a humanlike brain.
E. it shows that the gracile australopithecines were not hominins after all.
8. What do the skull, jaws, and teeth of australopithecines indicate?
A. Warfare was commonplace, because we see much evidence of head trauma.
B. They were carnivores.
C. They used a fairly complex spoken language.
D. Their diet was largely vegetarian.
E. They were cannibals.
9.When did the split between the later australopithecines and the ancestors of Homo take place, when they became productively isolated from the later australopithecines?
A. some 6 million years ago
B. when Australopithecus garhi discovered fire
C. They never split.
D. some 4 million years ago
E. sometime between 3 and 2 m.y.a.
10. Oldowan pebble tools
A. were found at the same site and stratigraphic layer as the Ardipithecus kadabba fossils, dramatically pushing back in time the onset of stone tool use to the late Miocene.
B. contain evidence that they were used on fellow hominins, providing the earliest evidence of human warfare and cannibalism.
C. include elaborate axes and spears.
D. were also used to decorate burial sites, suggesting very early symbolic thought.
E. represent the oldest formally recognized stone tools.
11. Biological and cultural changes enabled H. erectus to exploit a new adaptive strategy—gathering and hunting. This in turn was crucial for H. erectus to
A. diminish the mortality rate due to violent encounters with large animals and other hominins.
B. overcome its greatest challenge: an imperfect bipedal gait.
C. beat out H. habilis in competition for key ecological niches.
D. push the hominin range beyond Africa, into Asia and Europe.
E. bring about the onset of complex language.