User:Calray/Leslie Aiello

Leslie Aiello is a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology currently working with the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. With Christopher Dean, she co-wrote the widely used textbook “An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy” (Academic Press, 1990), of which Mark F. Teaford of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine reviewed in an issue of American Journal of Physical Anthropology: "Its unique blend of anatomy and paleontology will be extremely useful for a wide range of students and researchers in anthropology, anatomy, and paleontology"

She has been credited with producing or co-producing two seminal concepts in the field of Evolutionary Anthropology. One being an idea called the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis (ETH), which argues that at some point between one and two million years ago, based on the fossil record, early human diets began to include more meat - a high energy source of calories that does not require as large an intestinal system as it's evolutionary predecessor. Harvard Professor Daniel E. Lieberman describes this idea as the inversed proportional size between developing human's intestinal systems and increased human brain size. ETH explains why, as the human brain grew, the body walked more upright and gut tissues stretched and adapted to the taller stature.

An April 2008 article published in the Harvard Gazette describes the second seminal idea co-produced by Professor Aiello - "that increased brain size meant higher reproductive costs for females — who, over time, compensated in part by increasing in size at a greater rate than males of the genus Homo. (Homo erectus females had a 64 percent larger body mass than earlier hominids; males of the species — though still larger than females — were larger than their earlier male counterparts by only 45 percent.)"