Recent times have seen a great deal of activity and progress in human origins research, from the advent of molecular methods in the 1960s to the many important fossil hominid discoveries of the past few years. Nevertheless, the debate over whether particular fossil species are direct human descendants or not, and whether the fossil record and molecular results support a recent African origin or multiregional continuity, continues to rage. There is clearly a substantial need for fundamental work studying the methods employed in the interpretation of these data. The primary aim of the research presented in this volume is to begin to address this need by means of direct computer modelling and simulation of the many underlying and interacting processes.

Specifically, this volume describes the development and application of two related, but distinct, simulations, each designed to model important aspects of evolution in general, and the origin and evolution of humans in particular, as well as to provide substantial analysis and a wide variety of visualisations of the results.

The first simulation, Specialist, models the evolution of species and subspecies over millions of years, by starting with a single ancestral species with a particular suite of morphological ‘characters’ and allowing it to evolve in discrete steps.