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Body size is a fundamental biological property of organisms, and documenting body size variation in hominin evolution is an important goal of palaeoanthropology. Estimating body mass appears deceptively simple but is laden with theoretical and pragmatic assumptions about best predictors and the most appropriate reference samples. Modern human training samples with known masses are arguably the 'best' for estimating size in early bipedal hominins such as the australopiths and all members of the genus Homo, but it is not clear if they are the most appropriate priors for reconstructing the size of the earliest putative hominins such as Orrorin and Ardipithecus The trajectory of body size evolution in the early part of the human career is reviewed here and found to be complex and nonlinear. Australopith body size varies enormously across both space and time. The pre-erectus early Homo fossil record from Africa is poor and dominated by relatively small-bodied individuals, implying that the emergence of the genus Homo is probably not linked to an increase in body size or unprecedented increases in size variation. Body size differences alone cannot explain the observed variation in hominin body shape, especially when examined in the context of small fossil hominins and pygmy modern humans.This article is part of the themed issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'., (© 2016 The Author(s).)

Body size directly influences an animal's place in the natural world, including its energy requirements, home range size, relative brain size, locomotion, diet, life history, and behavior. Thus, an understanding of the biology of extinct organisms, including species in our own lineage, requires accurate estimates of body size. Since the last major review of hominin body size based on postcranial morphology over 20 years ago, new fossils have been discovered, species attributions have been clarified, and methods improved. Here, we present the most comprehensive and thoroughly vetted set of individual fossil hominin body mass predictions to date, and estimation equations based on a large (n = 220) sample of modern humans of known body masses. We also present species averages based exclusively on fossils with reliable taxonomic attributions, estimates of species averages by sex, and a metric for levels of sexual dimorphism. Finally, we identify individual traits that appear to be the most reliable for mass estimation for each fossil species, for use when only one measurement is available for a fossil. Our results show that many early hominins were generally smaller-bodied than previously thought, an outcome likely due to larger estimates in previous studies resulting from the use of large-bodied modern human reference samples. Current evidence indicates that modern human-like large size first appeared by at least 3-3.5 Ma in some Australopithecus afarensis individuals. Our results challenge an evolutionary model arguing that body size increased from Australopithecus to early Homo. Instead, we show that there is no reliable evidence that the body size of non-erectus early Homo differed from that of australopiths, and confirm that Homo erectus evolved larger average body size than earlier hominins., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The early Pleistocene marks a period of major transition in hominin body form, including increases in body mass and stature relative to earlier hominins. However, because complete postcranial fossils with reliable taxonomic attributions are rare, efforts to estimate hominin mass and stature are complicated by the frequent albeit necessary use of isolated, and often fragmentary, skeletal elements. The recent discovery of 1.52 million year old hominin footprints from multiple horizons in Ileret, Kenya, provides new data on the complete foot size of early Pleistocene hominins as well as stride lengths and other characteristics of their gaits. This study reports the results of controlled experiments with habitually unshod Daasanach adults from Ileret to examine the relationships between stride length and speed, and also those between footprint size, body mass, and stature. Based on significant relationships among these variables, we estimate travel speeds ranging between 0.45 m/s and 2.2 m/s from the fossil hominin footprint trails at Ileret. The fossil footprints of seven individuals show evidence of heavy (mean = 50.0 kg; range: 41.5-60.3 kg) and tall individuals (mean = 169.5 cm; range: 152.6-185.8 cm), suggesting that these prints were most likely made by Homo erectus and/or male Paranthropus boisei. The large sizes of these footprints provide strong evidence that hominin body size increased during the early Pleistocene., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The article discusses a study which examines postcranial size dimorphisms in Australopithecus afarensis using two resampling methods. The methods allow for significance tests between comparative and fossil multivariate data sets with missing data. Multivariate postcranial size dimorphism is measured using eight measurements of the femur, tibia, humerus and radius in samples of A. afarensis, modern humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans.

Abstract: Previous analyses have suggested that Australopithecus africanus possessed more apelike limb proportions than Australopithecus afarensis. However, due to the errors involved in estimating limb length and body size, support for this conclusion has been limited. In this study, we use a new Monte Carlo method to (1) test the hypothesis that A. africanus had greater upper:lower limb-size proportions than A. afarensis and (2) assess the statistical significance of interspecific differences among these taxa, extant apes, and humans. Our Monte Carlo method imposes sampling constraints that reduce extant ape and human postcranial measurements to sample sizes comparable to the fossil samples. Next, composite ratios of fore- and hindlimb geometric means are calculated for resampled measurements from the fossils and comparative taxa. Mean composite ratios are statistically indistinguishable (α =0.05) from the actual ratios of extant individuals, indicating that this method conserves each sample''s central tendency. When applied to the fossil samples, upper:lower limb-size proportions in A. afarensis are similar to those of humans (p =0.878) and are significantly different from all great ape proportions (p ≤0.034), while Australopithecus africanus is more similar to the apes (p ≥0.180) and significantly different from humans and A. afarensis (p ≤0.031). These results strongly support the hypothesis that A. africanus possessed more apelike limb-size proportions than A. afarensis, suggesting that A. africanus either evolved from a more postcranially primitive ancestor than A. afarensis or that the more apelike limb-size proportions of A. africanus were secondarily derived from an A. afarensis-like ancestor. Among the extant taxa, limb-size proportions correspond with observed levels of forelimb- and hindlimb-dominated positional behaviors. In conjunction with detailed anatomical features linked to arboreality, these results suggest that arboreal posture and locomotion may have been more important components of the A. africanus behavioral repertoire relative to that of A. afarensis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]