Matt Cartmill | Boston University (original) (raw)

Papers by Matt Cartmill

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Sep 1, 1981

The 81st Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Portland, OR, 2012

Evolutionary Anthropology, Nov 1, 2017

Springer eBooks, 1980

Almost all the skeletal features that distinguish anthropoids from typical lower primates are fea... more Almost all the skeletal features that distinguish anthropoids from typical lower primates are features of the skull. To the untrained observer. perhaps the most obvious of these is the bony postorbital septum anthropoids, which walls off the temporal fossa from the orbit proper and so converts the orbit into a shadowy eye socket. A somewhat less complete postorbital septum is found in Tarsius. As far as I know, no other vertebrate, living or fossi1, has developed a bony partition between the temporal muscles and the periorbita. Because the postorbital septum is unique to anthropoids and Tarsius, systematists who lump tarsiers and anthropoids together as “Haplorhini” have generally regarded the septum as a sign of tarsiers’ affinities to higher primates (Pocock, 1918; Jones, 1929; Hershkovitz, 1974; Cartmill and Kay, 1978; Luckett and Szalay, 1978). Conversely, those who believe that the closest allies of tarsiers are Eocene “tarsioids” (which lack the septum), or who think that lemurs are more closely related to anthropoids than tarsiers are, or who regard Anthropoidea as a polyphyletic taxon, have sought to prove that the septum of Tarsius is not homologous with the septum of anthropoids (Simons and Russell, 1960; Gingerich, 1973; Cachel, 1976, 1979; Schwartz et al., 1978).

The 88th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Cleveland, Ohio, 2019

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Apr 6, 2018

Alan Cyril Walker was born on August 23, 1938 in the industrial city of Leicester in the English ... more Alan Cyril Walker was born on August 23, 1938 in the industrial city of Leicester in the English Midlands. His relatives on both sides of his family were small tradesmen, artisans, and factory workers; his father Cyril was a cabinet-maker and carpenter. Much of Walker’s childhood was spent in straitened circumstances that reflected his family’s limited income, the hardships imposed by the Second World War, and the long persistence of wartime rationing in Britain. As a boy, Walker showed both artistic and mechanical gifts, and his score on the national “eleven-plus” examination won him admission to an upper-level grammar school. In his free time, he and his friends used to ride bicycles to explore the countryside around Leicester. One of these expeditions led to what Walker later called an “epiphany”:

Anatomical Record-advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology, Jan 3, 2023

For a given body mass, hominoids have longer clavicles than typical monkeys, reflecting the later... more For a given body mass, hominoids have longer clavicles than typical monkeys, reflecting the lateral reorientation of the hominoid glenoid. Relative length of the clavicle varies among hominoids, with orangutans having longer clavicles than expected for body mass and gorillas and chimpanzees having shorter clavicles than expected. Modern humans conform to the general hominoid distribution, but Neandertals and Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens have longer clavicles than expected for their size and exhibit marked positive allometry in clavicle length. Relative to clavicle length, adult and newborn humans have broader shoulders (biacromial breadths) than comparable apes, because the reduced elevation of the human shoulder swings the acromion laterally downward away from the head. Since broadened shoulders yield an increased risk of maternal and neonatal injury and/or death from shoulder dystocia during birth, we might expect hominins to manifest trends toward reduction in shoulder breadth and clavicle length. They do not, presumably because of countering selection pressures favoring a long clavicle in the adults. The marked sexual dimorphism seen in patterns of clavicular growth and static adult allometry in humans suggests that those selection pressures have disproportionately affected the males.

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, May 1, 1978

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2010

... L, lateral orbital fissure. ... Impact of increased character sampling on the phylogeny of Ce... more ... L, lateral orbital fissure. ... Impact of increased character sampling on the phylogeny of Cetartiodactyla (Mammalia): Combined analysis including fossils. ... Recent reviews of the systematics, diversity, and evolution of extinct primates can be found in Hartwig (2002) and Cartmill and ...

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Jun 1, 1989

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1989

Springer eBooks, 1994

At the moment, nearly all students of primate evolution agree that modern anthropoids comprise a ... more At the moment, nearly all students of primate evolution agree that modern anthropoids comprise a holophyletic clade with respect to other living primates, i.e., that there was once a single species from which all anthropoids, and no other extant animals, are descended. The 1992 conference at Duke University upon which this volume is based demonstrated that there is not much current agreement on other points concerning anthropoid origins, no matter whether cladistic questions (which primates are the phyletic sister group of the Anthropoidea?) or gradistic questions (which characteristic traits of modern anthropoids did the ancestral anthropoid species possess?) are at issue.

Springer eBooks, Jan 4, 2007

The order Primates in the strict sense—Euprimates or primates of modern aspect—is defined by a fa... more The order Primates in the strict sense—Euprimates or primates of modern aspect—is defined by a familiar suite of synapomorphies. Some of these may represent adaptively neutral contingencies (for example, the formation of the auditory bulla by an outgrowth from the petrosal, rather than by a separate entotympanic bone). However, others appear to be telling us things about the basal adaptations of the order. Compared to primitive placental mammals, primates have a reduced sense of smell and an enhanced sense of vision. primate eyes point forward and are encircled by a ring of bone. The first toes of primates are stout, divergent grasping organs. All primates have reduced, flattened claws on the first toe, and most of them have them on the other digits as well. The adaptive meaning and origins of some of these morphological synapomorphies of the primate order are discussed in other chapters of this book. One behavioral synapomorphy of primates, which has received less attention in discussions of primate origins, is their distinctive walking gait. When

The International Encyclopedia of Biological Anthropology, Oct 4, 2018