The Herto hominids: seek & ye shall find

[kantjac]

I have been amazed at the reaction to last week's disclosure in "Nature" of the long-sought chronological and morphological link between the likes of Kabwe, Bodo and such --all much earlier-- and such as Ngaloba (LH 18), Galana Boi, and the Omo Kibish remains --all much more recent. On another list, all the discussion has been about, "but could they hybridize?" [ think "Clan of the Cave Bears"] It covers everything from the hybrid vigour of gibbon/siamang mixes, to bonobos & "common" chimps, to Asian & African elephants, and whatever weird combination you can imagine.

Missing is any coherent discussion of the fossil morphology. The three skulls present an unusual suite of features: the child's head is rounded, without prominent brow, and no hint of an occipital bun-- but then neither do all known Neandertal kids (Teshik-Tash, Kiik-Koba, La Quina, La Ferrassie), while several Gravettian amHs (Mladec, Predmosti, Pavlov) show the "typical" Neandertal pattern.

A detailed critique is beyond this short note. I have .pdfs of all three Nature articles and would gladly upload them to a PALANTH archive, if such exists.

With hopes for an active discussion, my best,

Ken Antanaitis-Jacobs,
Co-Editor and part-time at UNLV

[lagarvelho]

Ken:

<Missing is any coherent discussion of the fossil morphology. The three skulls present an unusual suite of features: the child's head is rounded, without prominent brow, and no hint of an occipital bun-- but then neither do all known Neandertal kids (Teshik-Tash, Kiik-Koba, La Quina, La Ferrassie), while several Gravettian amHs (Mladec, Predmosti, Pavlov) show the "typical" Neandertal pattern.>

If it's any comfort to you(and I don't suppose it is), such thinking appears to me to be fairly typical of a lot of these workers.  They tend to think in what I call "little boxes":  e.g., all members of a given group all supposedly have all of the traits askcribed to that group.  So Neandertals are all "supposed" to have prominent browridges, occipital bunning, low foreheads, no chins, etc., etc., and AMH are all "supposed" to hae high, rounded foreheads, chins, no "bunning", no browridges, etc.  The trouble is, things don't work this way in widespread populations.  As you correctly pointed out, the N children don't exhibit these features to speak of.  This tends to be explained away by the notion that they would have acquired them as they grew older.  Never mind that no *adult* Neandertals exhibit the entire suite of traits ascribed to them, either(I got this from Wolpoff's Paleoanthropology).  And also as you correctly point out, some early "modern" populations have some awfully suspiciously "Neandertalish" traits.  I'm not sure about Predmosti and Pavlov --- though I wouldn't be surprised to see such traits among these populations --- but I've seen pictures of Mladec, and there's no doubt in my mind of a relationship, although some workers keep trying to explain these obviously "Neandertalish" traits away.  I can only conclude from this that such workers seem to be acting on faith, not science in this instance.  

<A detailed critique is beyond this short note. I have .pdfs of all three Nature articles and would gladly upload them to a PALANTH archive, if such exists.>

If you can upload these papers, I would like to have a look at them.
Anne G]

[Daryl Habel]

I will transcribe in full a letter from C. Loring Brace to the editor of the New York Times, published Sunday June 22.

******************

To the Editor:

"The Beginning of Modern Humans" (editorial, June 15) states that a newly discovered Ethiopian skull more than 150,000 years old is "recognizably modern to paleoanthropologists but not to most of the rest of us."  It does not look recognizably modern to  _this_ paleoanthropologist, and it is a much less probable candidate for being the ancestor of the modern European human than the European Neanderthal is.

I have superimposed the outlines of the crania being compared.  Statistical analysis of a battery of measurements shows that the European Neanderthal is more closely related to modern Europeans than to anyone else in the world.  This can only be because there is an actual genetic relationship.

That splendid Ethiopian specimen is a good candidate for being an ancestor of Ethiopians, but not Europeans.

C. Loring Brace

****************************

No surprises here, but I just thought some might have missed Dr. Brace's immediate response to the finds at Herto and would be interested.

Yellowstoned, and enjoying it,
Dar

[lagarvelho]

Dar:

Gosh.   I sure missed it.  But then, I can't get my hands on NYT very often.  I'm glad you're "Yellowstoned" and back at least for the moment, though.  Oh, and you're right.  Dr. Brace's letter to the editor is one way of looking at the evidence.
Anne G

[kantjac]

I agree entirely with Anne's comments about the altogether too common tendency for paleoanthropologists (of the biological and archaeological ilk) to be content to think within their "little black boxes." It lacks a chin? Must be a Neandertal--this despite 30% of adult !Kung lacking a noticeable chin. No evidence of an occipital bun or surpa-iniac depression? Must be amHs, this despite half-a-dozen Neandertals without their "mark of Cain."

People, as might be expected, are understandably orgasmic when new fossils emerge. They tend to forget the already huge and grossly understudied sample that has been accumulating since 1848 [when a British Leftenant Fowler, while on a wooing picnic with a local charmer in Gibraltar, stumbled upon a skull, thought it not so terribly different from a typical human and had it shipped to the British Museum, where it languished for many decades]. It reminds me of a story a geologist teacher/friend once told me, of a colleague who freely admitted of a famous discovery he had made, "if I hadn't believed it, I never, ever would have seen it."

What, to my mind, is messing up paleo is that  when the older [in the sense of having been discovered earlier] material is looked at at all, it is to find a specific feature that supports ones pet notion. Seemingly forgotten is a concept Franz Weidenreich developed in a masterful series of articles and monographs published between 1928 and 1951: "the total morphological pattern." If one finds a unique morphological feature in every individual, every individual is a species, which is prima facie absurb, especially since darned near every biophilosopher is now telling us that we need to treat species as individuals [with births, developments, and deaths] if we are to make sense of them.

For the best overview of just how morphologically variable hominids were at any time and place, Wolpoff's magisterial "Paleoanthropology" [2nd ed.] remains unsurpassed. In person, he can be as heated and argumentative as Chris Stringer is both in person and in print (I once asked him who was his role model; his answer of Sir Arthur Keith did not surprise me). Wolpoff has his opinions, but in print is even-handed.

As far as the European situation, Frayer's meticulous documentation of "Neandertal" features in a wide rane of European Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and later humans [Frayer, D.W.; 1992; "Evolution at the European edge: Neandertal and Upper Paleolithic relationships," _Prehistoire europeene 2:9-69] should dispel and open and active mind of the notion that Neandertals did not contribute greatly to the European gene pool.

In a similar vein, I find it curious that in the Nature articles, there was no comparison to Australian aboriginals--prehistoric or modern. There is no resemblance, a point Alan Thorne has noted and is working on. But "The Garden of Eden' is a powerful trope and one that is going to be tough to shake, as long as all the research monies and efforts go to the Awash Garden.

Ken Antanaitis-Jacobs
UNLV Continuing Education
Contributing Political Editor, "Las Vegas City Life"

[colin]

Hi Anne
Your right, the degree of variation within populations seems often overlooked - and not only in the  "widespread populations" you mention. On those occassions where a single location has harboured many specimens - Atapuerca or Krapina, say - there have been considerable variation within the  one population. For example, Atapuerca4 has a canine fossa whereas Atapuerca5 has none. Had Atapuerca5 been an isolated find, no doubt we would have concluded  that all Europeans of that era lacked a canine fossa! Maybe the "type specimen" system encourages this kind of thinking. That and the fact that often tens of thousands of years may sometimes be represented by just one fossil, so we give that an exaggerated importance and assume it is typical of its time when it may not be atall.
Cheers
Colin
Cheers  

[kantjac]

To Anne, Daryl, and Colin: I think we’re all nibbling around different edges of the same huge cookie. Or,if you prefer, we are the blind men trying to define an elephant while feeling its different parts.

The notion of “the type specimen” [may Linnaeus be tossing & turning in his personal Purgatory amidst diverse versions of the same thing!!] is part of basic typological thinking, for whom we have Plato to thank(?). Downplaying intrasite diversity is an old habit. The two Spy crania, discovered in 1886, were portrayed as being vitually identical by both Fraipont and Klaatsch, yet anyone would now see one as “Neandertal” and the other as early amHs. The two mandibles from Arago are wildly different and neither comes close to fitting the skull. Three species, anyone?

I think Loring hit the nail on the head: East Africa offers a wonderfully complete record of the evolution of East Africans; glacial and other taphonomic depredations make it more difficult to get a clear picture of Europe, much less Central, North, and South Asia. To get all extant humans from Herto is to turn a pumpkin into a gided carriage.

Ken

[lagarvelho]

Colin and Ken(and everybody else):

Let me tell you a little story, which will well illustrate his comment about "if I hadn't believed it, I wouldn't have seen it".  This may appear OT, but there's a method in the madness, as Hamlet said in the play of that name.  

Years and years ago, I studied Russian.  I won't go into the details of *why* I was studying Russian; they're too boring to go into in any case.  However, during the course of that study, I happened to see the Eisenstein film "Alexander Nevsky".  Certain scenes kind of stuck in my mind, one of which was the scene right after the battle of what the Russians call Lake Chudskoye, and everybody else calls, Lake Peipus, there are these bodies littered all over the place with various scavengers, such as ravens, etc.  

Well and good.  But years later, TBS ran "Alexander Nevsky" on a time slot called "Tales from Gorbywood(you can guess what era *that* was in), and I tuned in, mostly because of the Prokofiev score, which has some of the best movie music ever written.  Anyway, I saw the *same* battle scene, this time with what were very clearly meant to be *wolves*.  The difference?  Well between the time I started studying Russian and the time when I saw the film again, I'd *learned* something about wolves.  How they howl, for instance(I can tell the difference between a wolf and coyote howl, even on TV).  

Wolves, IOW, had become familiar "territory" to me, and I "believed" in them.  This is called "cognitive consistency" and is well known in psychology.

Paleoanthropologists and prehistoric archaeologists practice cognitive consistency all the time.  So did the fellow who found the Gibraltar Neandertal.  He didn't *know* that Neandertals were "supposed" to be "different", so he doubtless assumed that what he found was a rather "odd" modern human.    Nowadays, however, a lot of people in paleoanthropology and prehistoric anthropology "know" that Neandertals are "supposed" to be "different", so they find "differences".  They find heavy browridges, occipital bunning, retromolar spaces, low, flattish tops of the skulls, and so on.  Now all these features are found among *some* Neandertals, but all these features aren't found among *all* Neandertals.  Conversely, I've seen photos of a fair number of early "modern" skulls that have features usually associated with Neandertals.  Even Herto, which seems to have a fairly large nasal opening(I'll have to look at the photo I saved im my files to be absolutely sure).  And as Ken points out, Wolpoff has a lot to say about these things in his Paleoanthropology, as do Fred Smith and David Frayer elsewhere.  

But as long as people insist on looking for "differences", they will find them.  And magnify them out of all proportion to their existence in any given population.

Finally, Colin correctly pointed out, correctly, I might add, that populations and subpopulations vary among themselves.  This is perfectly normal.  However, just to make myself clear, when I mentioned widespread populations, I was thinking of geographically widespread "generalist" organisms, such as wolves, bears, --- and humans --- just to name a few off the top of my head.  These organisms occupy a wide variety of environments, and subpopulations(subspecies?)among them vary from place to place, and of course among themselves. There's no reason to suppose early humans were any different, since they had been evolving(IMHO)in a "generalist" direction for a long time.  Thus, *both* Neandertals and "moderns" were "generalists".  And as Colin, again correctly, pointed out, the Atapuerca population was typical in that its members had various traits, but were part of a single local population.  The same is true of local populations today.  

Last, when Ken spoke of "little black boxes", I was referring partly to my own way of "visualizing" various "races" or "ethnic groups" or "religious" groups, that I had when I was growing up.  Everybody was in a "box"(no particular color, though), and everybody in that "box" was "the same", and they never "mixed".  Today, of course, I know better.  But apparently some workers in paleoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology don't.
Anne G

P.S. sorry about the long post.  Maybe it was more like a "rant".

[Dale Hoogeveen]

I wonder if some of the ability to recognize the effects of variety in human expression might not come from childhood experience with those who more easily recognize related variety coming from larger more dispersed families and those who see variety as isolated expressions coming from smaller more isolated families.  I definitely see that in my own relatives with both more variety and more tolerance for inclusiveness on the side that is huge and widely dispersed and less of both on the other which while still quite large is quite consistant to type and remains quite local.  Family gatherings of my relatives are quite different experiences in the inclusiveness of type from one side to the other.

An inherant difference in bias on how humans are basically sorted carried from childhood based on how the extended family was organized and dispersed?

Dutch

[lagarvelho]

Dale:

I< wonder if some of the ability to recognize the effects of variety in human expression might not come from childhood experience with those who more easily recognize related variety coming from larger more dispersed families and those who see variety as isolated expressions coming from smaller more isolated families.  I definitely see that in my own relatives with both more variety and more tolerance for inclusiveness on the side that is huge and widely dispersed and less of both on the other which while still quite large is quite consistant to type and remains quite local.  Family gatherings of my relatives are quite different experiences in the inclusiveness of type from one side to the other.

An inherant difference in bias on how humans are basically sorted carried from childhood based on how the extended family was organized and dispersed?>

I come from a family that had relatively few children, and each family(my cousins), had a kind of "family look".  OTOH, I have been exposed to a great variety of different kinds of people from childhood on.  As I live in Seattle, where a lot of different "ethnic groups" exist, this was easy enough for my parents to do, although when I grew up, this kind of experience was relatively rare.  I even went to a highly "mixed" high school.  So you could say I "got used to" differences among people quite early in life.  

OTOH, it would seem that there are a lot of people who simply have *not* had these kinds of experiences, and as adults, they don'tr have them too much, either.  Perhaps such experiences(or lack of them)*do* affect the way some of these people --- if they happen to be paleoanthropologists or prehistoric archaeologists --- might tend to assess "differences" and "similarities".
Anne G

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

A bit late, perhaps, but here is my addition to one of Wolpoff’s  comments on the Nature's Herto papers, as quoted in the last paragraph of the following Boston Globe piece.  In my view, the  latter is what with what one might call a very sensible scientific reality check.
 

The Boston Globe OnlineBoston.com

Did humans come out of Africa?

Even with new evidence, the theory that Africa is the birthplace of modern humans still remains controversial

By Robert Adler, Globe Correspondent, 6/24/2003

Blame the rains. When surging rivers trapped paleontologist Tim White near the Ethiopian village of Herto, he made the best of a bad situation by sending his team to scout for fossils. They brought back electrifying news: ''We found hominids.''

The fossils they saw ''sparkling in the sunlight'' turned out to be 160,000 years old -- the oldest known remains of modern humans, Homo sapiens like us. The nearly complete skull of one adult plus fragmentary skulls of another adult and a child fill in a 200,000-year gap in the human fossil record and seem to confirm a major prediction of the out-of-Africa theory -- the idea that all humans alive are the descendants of a few humans who lived in Africa around 160,000 years ago.

For the full article, CLICK HERE

''The future lies in the genetic and anatomical aspects of evolution coming together,'' Wolpoff said. ''In the end they both have to tell the same story. We're not even at the end of the beginning of that story.''

Difficult not to agree with this, but, with all due respect to Wolpoff,  I would just like to add that in order to arrive at some sort of half decent approximation of the “beginning of that story”, there will also be a need to factor in (the equation) the prehistoric/cultural/human biogeographical record.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[lagarvelho]

Jacques and all:

Re the Herto hominids, whoever and whatever they may be:  I'm fully in agreement with you about the cultural stuff in the prehistoric fossil and archaeological records.  And for the most part, I don't think that really has even begun yet.  Maybe it will in the near future.
Anne G

[Daryl Habel]

Hi all.

Good comments from everyone.  A quick question for Ken - What  is "Galana Boi"?.  Also, I enjoyed the amorous adventures of Lt. Fowler at Forbes Quarry, but I thought the (unrecognized) Neanderthal sample has been accumulating since 1829 (Engis).

Cheers to all,
Dar

[kantjac]

Dar,

Galana Boi is a geological formation in the Koobi Fora region. It overlies the Chari Formation and is of uncertain age. ER-3884 was found in it and has been claimed by some [Brauer, Leakey, & Mbua, 1992, "A first report on the ER-3884 cranial remains from Ileret/East Turkana, Kenya" pp.111-119 in: "Continuity or Replacement: Controversies in Homo sapiens evolution" G. Brauer & FH Smith, eds.]

In re: Engis, you are correct. It was the first [now recognized] Neandertal to be found, but it consists of fragmentary remains of an infant's skull, which are always problematic [I recall a Bill Cosby routine where, upon first seeing his first-born, he exclaimed, "my God, I've fathered a chimpanzee!!"]. Gibraltar is a nearly complete adult cranium--little room for doubt there.

Best  -Ken

[Daryl Habel]

Dar,

Galana Boi is a geological formation in the Koobi Fora region. It overlies the Chari Formation and is of uncertain age. ER-3884 was found in it and has been claimed by some [Brauer, Leakey, & Mbua, 1992, "A first report on the ER-3884 cranial remains from Ileret/East Turkana, Kenya" pp.111-119 in: "Continuity or Replacement: Controversies in Homo sapiens evolution" G. Brauer & FH Smith, eds.]

In re: Engis, you are correct. It was the first [now recognized] Neandertal to be found, but it consists of fragmentary remains of an infant's skull, which are always problematic [I recall a Bill Cosby routine where, upon first seeing his first-born, he exclaimed, "my God, I've fathered a chimpanzee!!"]. Gibraltar is a nearly complete adult cranium--little room for doubt there.

Best  -Ken

Thanks for the information re Galana Boi being a Formation at Ileret - I had thought maybe I had missed a fossil discovery sometime or another, but I have a paper on ER 3884 by Brauer somewhere at home.  I'm not sure of the dating of 3884 being more-or-less contemporary with the Omo Kibish skulls, as I seem to recollect a couple of years ago that they were suggesting a date on the order of ~270 ka or so for 3884.  Likewise LH-18 IIRC is not very well dated either (or if it is, I need to know), and there have always been questions about the stratigraphical context and 130 ka dating estimate of the 2 Omo Kibish skulls (which themselves show great variability).  I'll catch up on all this when I get home in a couple of months.  In the meantime, I'm trying my best not to fall behind too far.

Thanks again,
Dar