Hominin

[...] prefer the third explanation for the advanced-looking features of Neandertals (Chapter 7) and the Ngandong hominins (Chapter 6), but they have had little to say about the post-Erectine archaics from China.

Caspari and Lee carried out comparisons ranging from ancient hominins such as australopithecines through to Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, assessing the ratios of young adults to old adults.

This means that, in addition to democracy and gorillas, we must now credit Greece with being the cradle of the hominins - of which we humans are the only living representatives.

Much of what is known about human evolution and early hominins comes from skulls, but the fossils are often damaged or deformed. […] Scientists first noticed that the skulls exhibited a mosaic of primitive traits resembling Homo erectus (the first species to have a human-like body shape and gait) as well as features suggestive of later hominin species, such as Homo sapiens. […] "The cranium is clearly plesiomorphic in overall form, presenting primitive traits shared by earlier hominins," the authors wrote.

This early slowdown is one piece of a broader evolutionary trend known as gracilization, the tendency for modern humans to become more delicate in form. Our bones are thinner, our muscles smaller, and our faces flatter than those of earlier hominins.