Fifty Years of Looking at Human Evolution: Backward, Forward, and Sideways

Jolly reviews the last half century work in the field of biological anthropology, work done by & many others in the field. In writing this paper, he had two major themes in mind: (1) that the pathway to modern humanity can be understood as a sequence of phases, in which each shift has a simple trigger that opens the way to complex & far-reaching consequences, representing a new direction of evolution; & (2) that the rest of nature (for Jolly, this is represented by the cercopithecine monkeys) provides analogies that help to clarify the processes involved with the phase shifts. While he has identified three phases, he acknowledges that there may well be more, which could be revealed as new material becomes available. He is confident that the coming half century of hominin studies will be as eventful as the last. S. Stanton