Date

8-2012

Document Type

Thesis

Location

Mobile, AL

Department

Anthropology

First Advisor

Philip Carr

Abstract

While previous studies have examined different aspects of hominin Biocultural evolution and stone tools, this project will consider the role which vision might have had in tool production. Paralleling Key and Lycett's line of argument, we believe that vision would have played just as integral a role in producing an ideal cutting tool as precision gripping. If a certain type of vision was "adaptive" to stone tool synthesis, then this would explain its frequency in modern human populations. Consequently, this study will attempt to answer why there is such a significant number of individuals possessing seemingly maladaptive visual errors in modern human populations. We hypothesize that large numbers of refractive disorders in modern populations indicates that there must have been some advantage to possessing one of these extremes in the distant past of human evolution.

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