I’m in Italy for the annual meeting of the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution. It’s been a great conference, seeing interesting talks (check out #eshe2014 on Twitter), meeting old friends and meeting new ones, and enjoying excellent food and espresso. Here’s the poster I presented yesterday (download pdf):

It’s a follow-up to posts here and here. The long and short of it is, there was a substantial amount of body size variation (i.e., between males and females) in Homo erectus, on par with levels seen in modern day gorillas. This is interesting because H. erectus brain size (and brain size growth) would have required massive amounts of energy, so some have hypothesized a cooperative breeding strategy; sexually dimorphic species generally do not engage in such cooperative behavior. So I suggest that body size variation in H. erectus is an ecological strategy, with small female body size reducing the metabolic burden on mothers.