(a) Discuss the geographical distribution of Homo erectus. Taking into account its physical features, where does it fit in human…

**(a) Geographical distribution of Homo erectus and its place in human evolution**

Homo erectus (in the broad sense, c. 2.0 million to c. 110,000 years ago) was the first hominin to spread across the Old World.

• Africa: Drimolen, South Africa (DNH 134, c. 2.0 Ma, the oldest known); Koobi Fora (KNM-ER 3733) and Nariokotome (KNM-WT 15000, the "Turkana Boy", c. 1.5 Ma) in Kenya; Olduvai Gorge (OH 9) in Tanzania; Bouri–Daka in Ethiopia. Many workers call the early African specimens Homo ergaster.
• Caucasus: Dmanisi, Georgia (c. 1.8 Ma). These small-brained skulls (c. 550–775 cc) are the earliest undisputed hominins outside Africa.
• East Asia: Gongwangling (Lantian, c. 1.6 Ma) and Zhoukoudian near Beijing ("Peking Man", once called Sinanthropus pekinensis, c. 780–400 ka), with its rich evidence of stone tools.
• Southeast Asia: Java, where Eugène Dubois found "*Pithecanthropus erectus*" at Trinil in 1891; Sangiran (early–middle Pleistocene); and Ngandong on the Solo River, dated to c. 117–108 ka, the last known H. erectus.
• South Asia: the Hathnora calvarium from the Narmada valley (Arun Sonakia, 1982) was first described as H. erectus narmadensis. It is now more often classed as archaic H. sapiens or H. heidelbergensis, and its date is uncertain.
• Europe: there is no undisputed H. erectus. Early Europeans (Atapuerca, Ceprano) are assigned to H. antecessor or H. heidelbergensis.

Physical features. The skull is long and low with a flat, receding forehead, a thick continuous brow ridge (supraorbital torus), marked narrowing behind the eye sockets (post-orbital constriction), a midline sagittal keel, and a sharply angled occipital torus at the back. The vault bones are thick, and the skull is widest near its base, so it looks pentagonal from behind. Cranial capacity ranges from about 750 to 1,250 cc (mean near 900–1,000 cc), against about 600 cc in H. habilis and about 1,350 cc in modern humans. The face projects less than in earlier Homo, the teeth are smaller, and there is no chin. Below the neck the body is close to ours: the Turkana Boy had long legs, short arms, a narrow pelvis and a tall, linear build, which point to efficient long-distance striding. Size differences between the sexes are smaller than in australopithecines.

Culture. H. erectus made Acheulean hand-axes and cleavers from about 1.76 Ma (Kokiselei, Kenya), although East Asian sites mostly have simpler chopper tools (the "Movius line"). Evidence of controlled fire appears at Wonderwerk Cave (c. 1 Ma) and Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (c. 790 ka). The species exploited meat regularly and spread into new climates.

Place in the evolutionary line. H. erectus evolved from early Homo (H. habilis or H. rudolfensis) in Africa about 2 Ma. It forms the grade between early Homo and later, larger-brained humans.

• Under the "Out of Africa" (recent African origin) model, African H. erectus/ergaster gave rise to H. heidelbergensis and then to H. sapiens in Africa, and to the Neanderthals in Europe. Asian H. erectus was a side branch that died out; Ngandong shows it survived until about 110 ka.
• Under the multiregional model (Wolpoff, Thorne), Asian H. erectus populations evolved locally into modern humans, linked by gene flow. Its supporters cite shovel-shaped incisors from Zhoukoudian and modern East Asians.
• Ancient DNA shows that modern humans are mainly of recent African origin, with small inputs from Neanderthals and Denisovans, not from H. erectus. So H. erectus is best seen as an ancestral grade in Africa, while its Asian populations formed a long-lived branch that did not lead to us.

(b) Applications of forensic anthropology

Forensic anthropology applies physical anthropology, especially human osteology, dental anthropology and genetics, to questions of law. Its main task is to identify people from skeletal or decomposed remains and to reconstruct what happened to them.

• Initial screening: deciding whether bones are human or animal, counting the minimum number of individuals, and estimating the time since death. Taphonomy (weathering, animal gnawing, burial and burning) separates what happened after death from what happened at death.

Biological profile:

• Sex from the pelvis (wide sub-pubic angle and broad greater sciatic notch in females; about 95% accurate in adults) and from the skull (mastoid process, brow ridge, chin).
• Age from tooth formation and eruption and from the fusion of bone ends (epiphyseal union) in the young. In adults it comes from the pubic symphysis (Suchey–Brooks method), the auricular surface, the rib ends and the cranial sutures.
• Stature from long-bone lengths through regression formulae (Trotter–Gleser, and population-specific Indian formulae).
• Ancestry from skull measurements, for example with the FORDISC program.
• Individual identification: healed fractures, dental records, surgical implants, craniofacial superimposition of a skull on a photograph, facial reconstruction, and DNA extracted from bone or teeth.
• Trauma analysis: telling ante-mortem, peri-mortem and post-mortem injuries apart, and recognising sharp-force, blunt-force, ballistic and blast injuries.
• Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) under the Interpol protocol, and the investigation of mass graves in human-rights cases, as the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team did.
• Age estimation of living persons from X-rays of the wrist, pelvis and teeth. Courts use this to decide juvenile status under the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, and in sexual-offence and child-marriage cases.

Indian examples

• Ajnala, Punjab: skeletons found in a well in 2014 belonged to Indian soldiers killed in 1857. Panjab University anthropologists, working with geneticists, used DNA and isotope analysis (published 2022) to show that the soldiers came from the Gangetic plain, which matches the record of the 26th Native Infantry.
• Roopkund, Uttarakhand: an ancient-DNA study (Harney et al., Nature Communications, 2019) showed that the lake's skeletons come from distinct groups who died centuries apart. One group had eastern Mediterranean ancestry and died around 1800 CE.
• Nithari, Noida (2006): skeletal remains recovered from a drain were examined by forensic experts and DNA-profiled to identify missing children.
• Mass disasters: DVI teams identified victims of the 2004 tsunami and the 2013 Kedarnath floods through dental records and DNA sampling.
• Institutions: the Central and state Forensic Science Laboratories (CFSL/FSL), departments of forensic medicine, and the Anthropological Survey of India.

The main limitation is that identification standards must fit the population, and Indian reference data are still limited.

(c) Lévi-Strauss on the myth of Asdiwal, and a critique of structuralism

In "La Geste d'Asdiwal" (1958), Lévi-Strauss analysed a myth of the Tsimshian of the Skeena and Nass rivers in British Columbia, as recorded by Franz Boas. In the story, a mother and daughter, both widowed by a winter famine, set out from upstream and downstream and meet halfway. The daughter bears Asdiwal to a supernatural bird-father. Asdiwal climbs to the sky and marries Evening Star, daughter of the Sun, then returns to earth. He lives with the kin of successive wives, first upstream and then downstream towards the sea, and quarrels with his brothers-in-law. He visits the sea lions' underworld, and he ends frozen into stone on a mountain.

His reading works on four levels:

• Geographic: real places along the Skeena and Nass.
• Techno-economic: the seasonal round of winter scarcity and spring candlefish fishing.
• Sociological: marriage, residence and relations with in-laws.
• Cosmological: journeys between sky, earth and the underworld.

Beneath the narrative sequence he finds a set of oppositions: east/west, upstream/downstream, high/low (sky/underworld), land/sea, mountain-hunting/sea-hunting and famine/plenty.

The sociological key. The Tsimshian traced descent through the mother (matrilineal) but a wife moved to her husband's place (patrilocal residence), and they favoured marriage with the mother's brother's daughter (matrilateral cross-cousin marriage). The myth plays out the opposite arrangement: Asdiwal keeps living with his wives' people (matrilocal residence), and every such marriage breaks down. For Lévi-Strauss the myth does not mirror social reality. It explores an imaginary alternative and shows that it cannot work, which helps people accept the contradictions of their actual institutions. Comparing the Skeena and Nass versions, he showed that versions of a myth are transformations of one another.

Structuralism. Drawing on Saussure's linguistics and Jakobson's phonology, Lévi-Strauss treated myths as a language:

• Myths are built from minimal units ("mythemes").
• Meaning lies in their relations, especially binary oppositions, not in the story on the surface.
• These relations reflect unconscious, universal structures of the human mind.
• Myth works to mediate contradictions such as nature/culture and life/death.

He developed this across the four volumes of Mythologiques (1964–71), starting with The Raw and the Cooked (the raw/cooked opposition standing for nature/culture). In The Savage Mind (1962) he described mythical thought as bricolage: logical thinking built from whatever materials are at hand.

Strengths

• It showed that "primitive" thought is as logical as science.
• It gave a comparative method that works across hundreds of myths.
• It brought hidden patterns to the surface.
• It influenced linguistics, literary theory and semiotics.

Criticisms

• The analysis cannot be verified. The analyst chooses the oppositions, so another reader can find different ones. Mary Douglas ("The Meaning of Myth", 1967) admired the Asdiwal study but warned that the method can reduce any myth to the same few structures. Edmund Leach applied structuralism to Genesis yet cautioned against its excesses.
• It is synchronic and ahistorical. It neglects change, the history of contact, and the order in which a narrative unfolds.
• It leaves out meaning, emotion and agency. Clifford Geertz called its subject a "cerebral savage", a mind without feeling or social context. Its approach differs sharply from Malinowski's view of myth as a social "charter".
• Binary oppositions can impose Western logic on indigenous thought.
• Later theory moved on. Post-structuralists (Derrida) and practice theorists (Bourdieu) turned attention to fluid meanings and to what people actually do.

Structuralism remains most convincing where, as with Asdiwal, it rests on detailed ethnography. It is weakest when it claims universal laws of the mind.