Agriculture
This term describes living permanently in one location, often associated with early farming communities.
What is sedentism?
This group of pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe is linked to the spread of Indo-European languages.
What is the Yamnaya?
A uniquely human “niche” referring to how humans adapt to their environment in large part through culture and technology.
What is a cultural niche?
This pigment determines skin color and protects against UV radiation.
What is melanin?
[Would also accept what is eumelanin?]
Also called the voice box, this structure houses the vocal cords.
What is the larynx?
This region is often called the “cradle of agriculture” due to early domestication of wheat and barley.
What is the Fertile Crescent?
This major expansion out of West Africa across sub-Saharan Africa spread a major language family and agricultural practices.
What is the Bantu expansion?
This refers to the genetic benefit humans gained from ancient interbreeding events with other hominins.
What is adaptive introgression?
This genetic effect explains why populations farther from Africa tend to have lower genetic diversity.
What is the serial founder effect?
This trait describes behaviors that are cooperative, helpful, and socially positive.
What is prosociality?
Wheat, rice, and corn are all examples of this type of grain-producing plant.
What is a cereal?
This phenomenon involves declining death and birth rates as societies industrialize.
What is the demographic transition?
This red blood cell shape phenotype protects against malaria but can cause disease in those with two copies.
What is sickle cell trait?
These are genetic variants found only within one population or geographic region.
What are private alleles?
This term refers to differences in the number of offspring produced by individuals in a population.
What is reproductive skew?
The process of selectively breeding plants and animals for human use is known as this.
What is domestication?
This mismatch occurs when rapid environmental changes create conditions our evolved biology struggles to handle.
What is an evolutionary mismatch?
This hypothesis links skin color evolution to the need for both UV protection and vitamin synthesis.
What is the folate–vitamin D hypothesis?
This term describes ancestors from whom you inherited no DNA, even if they appear in your family tree.
What is a ghost ancestor?
This effect describes how human culture and technology can become vastly more complex over time.
What is the ratchet effect?
This ecological term describes the maximum population an environment can sustain.
What is carrying capacity?
This hypothesis suggests that lack of early microbial exposure may contribute to allergies and autoimmune diseases.
What is the hygiene hypothesis?
This describes the way cultural behaviors like dairy farming influenced human genetic traits.
What is gene-culture coevolution?
This term describes DNA segments inherited from a common ancestor.
What is identity by descent (IBD)?
This term refers to the post-reproductive period when natural selection has less influence on traits.
What is the selection shadow?