conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about Mesozoic with the genre: Science & Math, Biological Sciences
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Vertebrate Palaeontology'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for the book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Vertebrate Palaeontology
  A key theme in palaeontological research is human origins. Indeed, this goes much deeper, because people have been intrigued about the origins of humanity for thousands of years, and it could be counted as one of the core questions any intelligent person might ask. Unfortunately, the fossil evidence for human evolution is patchy. There has been a great deal of controversy over primate and human relationships, partly because of the limited number of good fossils, but also because of the numbers of researchers involved, and the high stakes associated with each new discovery. There are almost as many palaeoanthropologists as there are good fossils, and each researcher of course has his or her own theories!
  In this chapter, the fossil evidence for primate evolution is presented, with critical assessments of the key fossils and some of the major controversies over relationships.
  Primates are essentially tree-dwellers, although many lack the remarkable agility seen in certain South American monkeys and the gibbons. Anatomical changes to permit this kind of activity include grasping hands and feet in which the big toe may be opposable, flat nails instead of claws and sensitive tactile pads on all digits, and in hominoids, a very mobile shoulder joint and elbow so that the arm can be rotated in a complete circle.
  Primates have larger brains, in proportion to body size, than all other terrestrial mammals. In addition, their eyes are generally large and close together on the front of the face, and the snout is reduced. The flattened face of most primates allows them to look forwards and to have a large amount of overlap between the fields of vision of both eyes, which makes stereoscopic, or three-dimensional, sight possible. Primates use their binocular vision to judge distances when they leap from branch to branch, and the enlarged brain allows them to cope with the variety of forest life and social interactions.
  Turning to the cranium, primates have a postorbital bar (see Figure 11.4(a,b)), a strut between the orbit and lower temporal fenestra (= fossa), which is absent in related mammals (see Section 10.13). Furthermore, the auditory bulla, the bony capsule that encloses the middle ear and other structures (see Figure 11.4(d)) in primates, is large and it is composed of the petrosal bone (see Section 10.2.1).
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After a to-and-fro between Asiatic and African stem-group anthropoids, the crown-group anthropoids split into Old and New World monkeys in the late Eocene or Oligocene, and the early history of catarrhines is documented by some intriguing, but inevitably controversial, fossils.
  Catarrhines share a number of characters. They have only two premolars in each jaw and they generally show considerable sexual dimorphism: males are larger than females and their canine teeth are almost always larger than those of females. The Old World monkeys, the Cercopithecoidea, have long molars with crests ( **lophs** ) linking transverse pairs of cusps, the bilophodont condition.
  Source: (a) Adapted from Simons (1995). (b,c) Adapted from Simons (1967). (d,e) E. Delson, CUNY, New York, NY, USA. Reproduced with permission.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Catarrhines share a number of characters. They have only two premolars in each jaw and they generally show considerable sexual dimorphism: males are larger than females and their canine teeth are almost always larger than those of females. The Old World monkeys, the Cercopithecoidea, have long molars with crests ( **lophs** ) linking transverse pairs of cusps, the bilophodont condition.
  Source: (a) Adapted from Simons (1995). (b,c) Adapted from Simons (1967). (d,e) E. Delson, CUNY, New York, NY, USA. Reproduced with permission.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'Since 2004, there have been scandals about damage to the original specimens and about difficulties of access (once described, fossils should be publicly available for all researchers)'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Since 2004, there have been scandals about damage to the original specimens and about difficulties of access (once described, fossils should be publicly available for all researchers). More significant though has been the debate about whether the Flores population really represents a distinct species or not. There have been claims that these were in some way an unusual human population, where all individuals were microcephalics (a condition in modern humans where the head size is reduced), or suffered from Laron's syndrome (a genetic disorder that reduces head size), or were endemic cretins perhaps suffering from hypothyroidism caused by a lack of iodine in their diet. All such claims of genetic disorders, diseases, and disordered growth seem unlikely in that all individuals share the morphological features, but also the specific osteological indications of the different diseases have been refuted (Brown, 2012).
  The Flores humans have been the subject of lively debate (Aiello, 2010; Montgomery, 2013), and these debates are likely to continue for a while. The stakes are high; this could be the only human species to have survived until relatively recently side-by-side with our own species.
  The timing of the peopling of North America is highly controversial (Meltzer, 2009). Ice sheets retreated from the area of Beringia (Siberia and Alaska) and there was an ice-free land bridge from Siberia to Alaska from 18,000 to 10,200 years ago. Hundreds of North American archaeological sites with tools of the Clovis industry date from 11,500 years ago, but a human occupation site at Monte Verde in southern Chile dates back to 14,600 years ago, suggesting rapid migration down the length of the Americas long before the makers of the Clovis points. Human faeces from the Paisley Caves, Oregon date to 14,200–14,000 years ago, and other human remains of this age have now been reported (Curry, 2012). Ancient DNA evidence also confirms these dates, showing that humans entered North America after the end of the last glacial maximum, whether they island hopped from Asia to North America, or used boats to work down the coast.