Maybe human, maybe not

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, paleoanthropology, essays

We could wish more finds were like this. By far the most frequent discoveries by paleoanthropologists are of single teeth or parts of bones. Finding a half-jawbone with a few teeth attached is cause for newspaper headlines.

In natural history museums all over the world we see dinosaur skeletons galore (of course, each skeleton found in reasonably complete form is copied numerous times and sold to other museums). Yet only a handful of early human or Neanderthal or hominid/hominin skeletons have so far been found. Why? It is all about numbers.

Dinosaurs of many species were common all over the Earth for about 185 million years. Since the origin of hominins (pre-human apes and proto-humans), only a 4-6 million years have passed. Also, for much of that time, their numbers were few, in the thousands to a few hundred thousands, worldwide (mostly Africa and parts of Europe for most of that time). Thirdly, the number of species represented by the monikers "hominin", "hominid" and "early human" totals fewer than thirty, while there were hundreds of species of dinosaur, many of which existed in the millions and for millions of years.

To be blunt: lots more dinosaurs lived and died, compared to the record of human ancestry.

Given the rather small number of examples that exist, it is amazing that certain conclusions have been made about human ancestry. A few of the stories told by the old bones are relayed to us in Close Encounters with Humankind: A Paleoanthropologist Investigates Our Evolving Species by Sang-Hee Lee and Shin-Young Yoon (translated from Korean, translator not named). The 22 chapters began as columns written for a journal and a special issue.

A question often asked, "What was the first human ancestor after the split with apes?", led to Chapter 3, "Who were the first hominin ancestors?" By the way, it took me a while to learn the difference between hominins and hominids. To summarize online sources: "Hominids refer to all modern and extinct great apes, including humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, along with their ancestors. Hominins, on the other hand, specifically include modern humans and all our extinct ancestors that are more closely related to us than to chimpanzees." Thus, "hominin" strictly refers to an ancestor species to Homo sapiens, and "hominid" refers to all the "cousins" that are the great apes and their ancestors, back to the first great ape which split from the "all apes" common ancestor. On the Hominid Family Tree, the Hominins are a single branch leading to us. I hope that helps.

So, who were the first hominin ancestors? Six pages of discussion result in, "Probably either Australopithecus afarensis or A. amanensis." A. afarensis was "Lucy", whom you may have read about. More fossil discoveries and more study are needed to pin it down. Both these candidates lived between 3 and 4 million years ago.

An interesting coincidence is behind Chapter 8, "Is Granny an artist?" Two strains of discoveries come together in time. Firstly, evidence that woman began living long after menopause led to the Grandmother Hypothesis, that having grandmothers handy reduced the workload on young mothers, allowing them to have children more frequently. This is behind an early population boom. Secondly, the earliest instances of rock art are found in the same time period. It seems that such proto-writing/pictorial storytelling extended the lengthening memories of the grandmothers (and a smaller number of grandfathers; then as now, women usually outlived men, if they survived childbirth).

Another interesting intersection: upright walking came before brain enlargement. The changing vegetation of East Africa made it more favorable for apes that could see over the brush on the savanna. Spending more time upright made it easier to carry stuff (including babies) in the two hands that were no longer needed for locomotion. Why did babies need to be carried? Chimp and gorilla babies can cling to their mothers' fur. Humans don't have fur, and it is surmised that neither did hominins, after a certain point.

I have long had a certain idea about when and why humans lost their fur. Fire. There is a time mismatch that bothers me. Upright walking seems to have arisen between 4 and 7 million years ago, with fully modern striding-style walking appearing about 4 million years ago. However, the earliest evidence for controlled use of fire is just over one million years old. But it isn't known when "uncontrolled" use began. By definition, controlled use includes the ability to kindle a fire. Taking advantage of naturally occurring fires must have predated this by a lot.

Side note: the crazy old film Quest for Fire has "cave men" carefully tending a vessel holding burning coals, their only method of starting fires. In a battle with apish enemies it goes out, and one of them goes to find a burning fire he can "capture", but stumbles upon a group of people who know how to start a fire with friction. Other details are just eye candy. The racial overtones of that flick are astonishing.

Anyway, I have long thought it is likely that once proto-humans began spending lots of time around fires, being furry became a detriment and natural selection drove the species toward furlessness. Thus, the "naked ape."

The various chapters cover a wide, and very interesting!, range of subjects. A key element is the great increase in tools to investigate DNA relationships and the "molecular clock" (not all that clock-ish, it turns out) and newer analytical methods. Re-studying old bones, it turns out, yields new understanding. Old debates are resolved, and new debates arise.

The last chapter, #22, is "Are humans still evolving?" And of course, "Of course we are." Dr. Lee uses as an example the first thing I thought of upon seeing the chapter title: wisdom teeth. We are in the middle of losing them. More and more people are born without any. However, she brings up an interesting twist. In developed countries, better dental care is allowing people to live longer, who would have died early because of impacted or infected wisdom teeth. Perhaps this bit of natural selection has just been halted in its tracks, but only for a portion of humanity. Another example of ongoing evolution in humans is bad backs, and the gradual changes in the spine and posture. I hope later generations will be free of lumbar disk slippage and muscular ruptures in the lumbar area. It will take a while; humans and hominins before us have been upright for a few million years, and we are only partway through the process.

I could go on and on, but I hope instead that you will read this book and enjoy fascinating stories of what we know about the past few million years of human/hominin evolution, and how we know it.

She turned a branch into a bush

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, anthropology, anthropologists, human origins

I once read about Maeve Leakey that as a girl she would work a jigsaw puzzle from the back, not seeing the picture; this prepared her to work as an anthropologist, matching chips and slivers of fossil bone to reconstruct a skull or a mandible or part of a femur. Although she doesn't mention this youthful skill in her memoir The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past (co-written with Samira Leakey), she does tell of herself and her team members spending hundreds or thousands of hours piecing bits of fossil together. In the landscapes where she works, it is rare to find a scrap of bone as large as a hand, or even a finger.

While I typically find or generate an image relevant to a book I will review, in this case I could do no better than the cover photographer. This picture is a classic portrait of the remarkable paleoanthropologist.

The book touches on her younger life, but primarily begins when she had finished her PhD and was planning to work with living primates. She was invited to join an expedition with Louis Leakey in Kenya. It isn't clear when she moved to Kenya permanently, but she has lived primarily in that country ever since. She published Sediments in 2020 while her husband Richard Leakey was living; he died in 2022. Certain segments of the book outline his health challenges: Kidney disease beginning in 1969, multiple kidney transplants beginning about ten years later, and a liver transplant much later. Naturally, these episodes affected her and her work, but she persevered.

Maeve and her husband shared an admirable combination of formidable technical skills with great administrative ability, though their personalities and styles differed quite a bit. This enabled Maeve to carry on the anthropology, including fundraising and directing teams of workers while Richard filled crucial roles in major conservation organizations. Throughout the book and in the Acknowledgements she credits numerous field assistants, mostly Kenyans, whose labors enabled the tremendous scientific achievements we read about.

The thread that runs throughout is the conviction Maeve had from very early that the evolutionary path from the human-chimpanzee common ancestor to the genus Homo and then the species Homo sapiens (us) was not linear, but was one pathway through a branching bush. Near the end of the book she points out that in the period roughly 1.4-2 million years ago there were typically four hominin (human related or ancestral) species sharing the landscape of northeastern Africa. 

Further, when "early modern" H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe for the last time in prehistory, about 60-70,000 years ago, they came into the presence of the descendants of earlier migrations, the Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. There are hints that another hominin species or two existed alongside them. We do know that modern Eurasians bear a small percentage of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. Her image of a "family bush" has been vindicated.

I have read a few other books about the life and work of Richard's parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, who stand as monuments of the field, and of Richard's work. This book rounds out the collection, full of stories of a top scientist among stellar scientists, who has herself become a monument, a living legend. It helps that she is a master storyteller. I loved this book.

Discovering Neolithic political diversity

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, anthropology, political science, history

I considered various titles for this review. One strong contender was "Is totalitarianism inevitable?" But that is too narrowly focused. The scope of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is nothing less than all of human history at least since the later part of the last Ice Age, 12-15,000 years ago.

To focus the authors' intent a bit: starting with the question, "What is the origin of inequality?", they explore the history of political thought and practice, and almost immediately reveal that the question is meaningless [indeed, it is a red herring intended to obscure the machinations of totalitarian thinkers - my sentiment]. Furthermore, they examine the framework of historical thinking that forms the basis of nearly all writing on historical development—egalitarian bands of nomadic foragers developed into agriculturalists, which began to settle into villages and cities and store grain, which necessitated concepts such as property rights and the need for hierarchical and bureaucratic structures to manage it all, culminating in kings and empires and other forms of coercive government—and they conclude that it is based on circular thinking. Generations of historians have primarily been gathering "evidence" to support the linear hypothesis, while wantonly disregarding and discarding a great mass of actual evidence that paints a very different picture; more properly, a multitude of pictures, of which the "modern" environment of nation-states that we find nearly worldwide is a recent development, even a recent aberration.

Consider the Cahokia Mounds, remnants of a large, settled area that was built up over a period of a few hundred years, primarily between about 900 and 1200 AD. This painting shows how it may have looked at its peak. The gigantic Monks Mound is near top center. The whole area was abandoned and depopulated by about 1350. Although there is evidence of two flooding episodes, in about 1200 and after 1350, it is unlikely that environmental factors led to its decline (in contrast to the environmental disaster that precipitated the decline of the Maya prior to 1000 AD).

At the time Europeans first arrived in the area in the 17th Century, a small number of indigenous Americans lived nearby, but avoided the area, designating it with words meaning "Death". Some think there had been an epidemic, but no archaeological evidence points to this. Others, including the authors of Dawn, consider it likely that a coercive political structure arose and became so overweening that, over a generation or two, everyone moved elsewhere. It is likely that the remaining "overlords", faced with declining numbers of "subjects", turned inward and effectively destroyed themselves, until the last few left, probably to find themselves considered pariahs by anyone they encountered.

The authors begin by examining two contrasting views of the human "state of nature", that of Rousseau and that of Hobbes. The first is based on the premise that people are naturally good and that equality is the natural state in which "early humans" lived in foraging bands like the Hadza of Tanzania, seen here. Such peoples have few possessions, and rather than elevating "mighty hunters", make fun of them.

The Hobbesian view is dystopian, based on the premise that people are naturally selfish and cruel. He it is who wrote in Leviathan that human life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." In fact, you can find Hobbesian societies even today: a few areas in which, if two men meet in the forest, they first stand back and discuss whether they have any common relatives or friends, to determine whether they should fight to the death, or collaborate. They are a lot like chimpanzees in that regard. There are others, and these are more common, where the two men would greet one another in a more friendly way, and discuss whether their two "tribes" have goods or skills worth trading. Such peoples are satisfyingly Rousseauian. One might compare them to bonobos, who "make love not war."

Gathering all the evidence they can, particularly in writings most authors skip over or fail to cite, the authors find a wealth of diversity in the social and political structures that have arisen over time. In areas with a definite sequence of seasons, such as North America, many peoples had a dual system: Part of the year, they would live in villages or towns—sometimes temporary like "tepee cities" and sometimes more permanent but occupied only part time—and part of the year they would be nomadic, following game animals. The political structure would evolve with the seasons. Some, in certain seasons had chiefs and temporary "police" to enforce their orders, but in the opposite season the whole structure would be disbanded. More usually, any "chiefs" were primarily skilled negotiators with no power.

Indeed, Europeans who studied the cultures they encountered in North America in the 1500's and later learned that tribal councils and other groups, frequently including both men and women, discussed politics a lot, and were quite capable of modifying political structures to suit not just the season but changing times…such as the incursion of "palefaces" who didn't recognize their rights and sovereignty. The authors make a case that indigenous Americans' political opinions, first during discussions and debates with early French and Spanish explorers, and later in Europe when some visited there, influenced Enlightenment thinkers as they developed the political theories that underlay both the French and American Revolutions. It is likely that some provisions in Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10 of the U.S. Constitution) were in part based on rights the earlier Americans considered normal. By the time the Constitution was written, political discussions among the "civilized tribes" and European immigrants had been going on for almost 200 years.

Nation-states are, in historical terms, a recent innovation. Spain was unified early, in 1512. Latecomers such as Italy were formed in the middle 1800's. Empires unified before about 1000 AD fell, rose, and reformed from time to time, with final unification occurring in the same period (think of Greece).

Fun fact: During the 1600's and later, numerous indigenous Americans visited Europe. None of them wanted to return to Europe, and they abhorred the idea of living there permanently. During the same period, some Europeans lived for various periods of time among the tribes of North America, and later returned to the Euro-American societies they had lived in before. Many of them subsequently returned to "live with the Indians".

Another cultural trend is ferreted out from various areas, and the authors focus on the northwest coast of North America, from modern northern California to British Columbia. They describe two (very) contrasting cultures, the Kwakiutl and the Yurok, as exemplars of schismogenesis, in which peoples (such as Houstonites and New Yorkers) define themselves against one another. "One man's meat is another man's poison," in a proverb from my childhood. One tribe held slaves; the other did not and eschewed the practice. Members of one tribe were boastful; of the the other, self-effacing. Compared to these two tribes, the differences between Texans and New Yorkers practically vanish.

Though many examples from North America are used, in great part because of near-contemporary accounts written during the European influx, the authors bring together similar evidence from Mesopotamia, China, South America, and Africa. Through most of human history in all these areas, the concepts of "equality" and "inequality" were meaningless, and there are no words for them in most old languages, at least, not used is a social or political sense. [In Greek we find the word ισότης (isotés), which is used for "equality" in modern texts, but really means "parity" or "evenness", and is a more technical term]. A very common situation is found to be that "cities" were used only part of the year, in many, many places. This went on for millennia.

The real question then becomes, "How did the current situation arise?", even, "Why did humanity go down such a narrow social and political path?" In Chapter 2 the authors write,

"There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion." (p 46)

And in Chapter 3:

"If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?" (p 65)

All this serves to do no more than introduce the subject. The authors define a "civilization" as an "extended moral community". Kings, bureaucrats and armies are optional. Agriculture is even optional. Great amounts of evidence demonstrate this conclusively.

Consider this: it has been shown by experiment that wheat grass can be turned into wheat in a few decades, primarily by fostering mutations that permit the grain to remain attached to the stem after ripening. Yet the "grain revolution" in Mesopotamia, for example, was more of a mosey than a sprint, taking 3,000 years between the first purposeful use of wheat grass and the widespread cultivation of wheat as a crop that required a farmer's care.

The authors report that, in place after place, agricultural methods were used for a time, and then abandoned, only to be started anew after a few generations, and then abandoned again, and so forth. We find strong indications that the liberty of individuals and groups was found to conflict with settled society. Equality is not the point. In Chapter 12, in page 264, they contrast the French "republican" ideal, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", with the concept of social liberty, consisting of "(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings, (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others, and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones."

When I was a child, my parents once praised American freedom, and contrasted it with Russian Communism, thus: "We don't need to carry papers. We can move from California to Utah without getting government permission. We can change jobs at will. We can even leave the country for any period of time we desire, and return whenever we want." I remember when the Berlin Wall was built. I also remember when it fell, on my birthday in 1989 (I wept joyfully for a long time at the news). Freedom of Location.

We find in the Bible the apostles telling the priests, "We are bound to obey God rather than men." Though they submitted to political sanctions such as imprisonment, they not only didn't agree to obey, they announced they would never obey improper laws. That is the basis of martyrdom. It is also the basis of Freedom of Conscience. You don't need a religious reason to disobey unjust laws.

The Declaration of Independence declares in its second paragraph, 

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The idea that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed" could have been based on things spoken by indigenous American statesmen a century earlier! Pay attention to that word "just". Most governments now on Earth, being authoritarian or totalitarian, are unjust. Thus, Chapter 10 is revolutionary. It is titled, "Why the State Has No Origin: The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics". Quite simply, it snuck in over generations. 

What has actually happened? The authors make passing reference to Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. What follows is my very brief synthesis of the messages of the two books.

The bow and arrow go back as far as 70,000 years. Powerful composite bows came later, perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. The sling is at least 12,000 years old. In bronze age armies employing both archers and slingers, the slingers had greater range than the archers, with similar accuracy at distances up to a quarter mile; not terribly accurate at that distance, but 100 slingers or archers can produce a fusillade that keeps an opposing body of infantry at bay. But neither bow nor sling can be said to be a good sniper's weapon. A single archer or slinger is unlikely to achieve a clean kill, whether of man or deer, at distances exceeding 50 yards. Thus, for most of human history, coercion was limited to such distances. Freedom of Location, also known as self-exile in a political context, could be exercised rapidly enough to escape the enforcement of any ambitious "ruler" who presumed to give unpopular orders. The legends of Robin Hood and similar "outlaw" bands also show that weapon use can go both ways. Weapon parity supports Freedom to Say No.

Late Medieval and Enlightenment-era palace intrigue, which relied on spies, and the funds to pay (bribe) them, could extend the power of coercion over greater distances, albeit slowly. It took the invention of firearms, and later longer-range weapons such as missiles, plus instantaneous communications, to bring about the actual ability to control country-sized areas with any reliability. A sniper with a modern rifle can kill from half a mile away, provided there isn't much wind (the record is just over 2 miles!). Nobody can outrun the radio or telephone. Large, non-personal weapons can reach anywhere on Earth.

A second "weapon" in the arsenal of the modern state is surveillance. Prior to the development of cheap video equipment, this also relied on spies and informers. Not so much any more. My cell phone has five video cameras in it, each tuned to a different use. The NSA (plus legions of hackers) is able to use the phone's audio and video functions to spy on me and on my surroundings. Of course I have some amount of phone security, but I am not naïve; NSA can get in if they want. Not only so, cell tower equipment now typically records every "ping" from a nearby phone. Police in every country (including the U.S.) routinely obtain these records to trace the movements of "persons of interest"…or anyone else they so desire. Fourth Amendment be damned [If you need to move about un-tracked, of course turn off your phone, but also put it in a bag made from an aluminized Mylar balloon. The day will come when "going off grid" that way will be considered a suspicious act in itself].

These points emphasize my opinion that governments always tend towards becoming totalitarian. At some point, it could become infeasible for "citizens" (all will be "subjects") to overcome universal surveillance and universal coercion. For a little while, some may be able to mitigate electronic surveillance by the use of frequency-scanning equipment and a device called a HERF (look it up - it burns out drones or cameras, etc., from a distance).

Authors Graeber (now deceased) and Wengrow aren't going after governments. Rather, they are tweaking the noses of anthropologists and archaeologists who have, almost unanimously, fallen prey to the linear hypothesis of social progress. Social evolution, similarly to biological evolution, is a frequently-branching tree, with many branches being pruned away even as more arise. Somehow, the bushy tree of human civilizations and social experiments has been schwacked to a single twig, that has grown monstrous and world-spanning.

Perhaps if we can, on a much broader scale, understand the varieties of social and political developments of the past, we can with a clearer eye examine today's social and political institutions, and, if we are lucky, should we find them wanting, we could resurrect (no dinosaur DNA needed!) appropriate institutions, or develop entirely new ones, that better serve the present human population.

Neanderthals come out of the shadows

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, archaeology, neanderthals

Le Monde published an article about a decade ago when it was becoming clear that most of us have a few percent of Neanderthal DNA. In other words, the Neanderthals weren't necessarily "wiped out" by Cro-Magnons (archaic humans) but more likely were assimilated.

The facial features of both figures are exaggerated. All but a few scientists are still shaking off the prejudice against Neanderthals, that they were degraded ape-men, which is how they were portrayed for at least a century and a half.

I can think of no better education in the reality of Neanderthals, as now known (and more is yet to be learned!), than Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. The book is big (400pp), and I read it closely, which explains the long delay since my last review.

In the Acknowledgements and elsewhere, Dr. Sykes credits the novels of Jean Auel with first kindling her interest in archaeology and Neanderthals in particular. I've read a couple of them also, and I recall thinking, "I bet the real Neanderthals weren't as hidebound as they are portrayed." In Kindred we find that they were definitely not that hidebound, but rather creative, innovative, explorative… in short, fully on a par with "us". It is most likely an accident of history that those we call Neanderthals are not the archaeologists wondering about the demise of "those inferior, skinny, flat-faced Cro-Magnons".

Inside the front cover of Kindred we find a map showing 99 locations of Neanderthal remains, from northeast Siberia to Gibraltar. These are selected from quite a longer list. Inside the back cover, a very tentative breeding tree shows how both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA might have become incorporated in the DNA of modern humans. Astonishingly, one fossil has been shown to be a first-generation offspring of a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother.

Our current knowledge of Denisovans, other than the DNA results, is about at the level that the Neanderthals were known in 1860, except no decent skulls have been found. Stay tuned!

I must confine myself to a few items of note. Firstly, innovation and creativity. The tool kits (plural!) used by Neanderthals, and the ways they were at times mixed-and-matched, show that they were thinking about how to improve their stone tools, and sometimes bone tools.

Let me be clear: the main tools were stone, but the tools used to make the stone tools frequently included bones or certain kinds of bone fragments. This reminds me of the time I was a machinist. I was taught by a real master. Once he showed me a tool he was making—from scratch, beginning with a block of metal—that was intended to enable him to make the parts he had been assigned to produce. Then he showed me one of the tools he was using to make the new tool, saying, "First I had to figure out how to make this, so I could make the other one." We see that level of creativity in the stone tools Neanderthals made, in the stone and bone "retouchers" used to sharpen them, and in the tools used to produce the retouchers.

Tools made of less durable materials, such as wood used for spears, doesn't preserve well, so we have very, very few non-stone and non-bone artifacts. Examining the stone "points" and "blades", however, and analyzing traces of adhesives on certain ones, we can surmise that Neanderthals had both thrusting and throwing spears, and also arrows. For example, a tiny 2 cm (3/4") point is no good on a spear; it had to be an arrow point. And the varying shapes indicate that Neanderthals were experimenting with the best way to make a small point that caused maximum loss of blood after penetrating; you want the struck animal to weaken quickly.

Secondly, what they did with the dead. The tremendous variety here indicates multiple groups of Neanderthals had cultural differences. In all cases, just as for us, the tragedy of a death, particularly an early death, is a hugely emotional period. The earlier assumption that they ignored their dead is dramatically off base. However, their responses to death ranged from apparently tender burial to dismemberment and the retention of "memorial pieces", and also consumption of portions of the deceased.

Thirdly, compassion. They also clearly helped those injured or ill among them, who sometimes survived terrible traumas by months or years; they could not have survived so long on their own.

Fourth and finally, food. Neanderthals were omnivores, as are all apes. They were perhaps more intensively carnivorous than the usual ape; this is true of certain human cultures also. We all know a Redneck or two who react to being offered a salad, "That's food my food eats!" But Neanderthals didn't just chase down woolly mammoths and spear them. They were much more likely to target horses in one part of Eurasia, cave bears in another, and deer and elk in another. They also ate birds, but the remains are ambiguous: were they killing birds to eat, or to use their feathers and claws symbolically (I could have gotten into Art, but I must refrain)? Coastal Neanderthals ate fish and mollusks and other offerings of the sea. Considering that most of the places they frequented near the coastlines are now 10-50m under water, it will take a lot of risky SCUBA archaeology to learn more in that direction. They also ate their vegetables. Because veggies don't have bones, researchers learn of the Neanderthal diet by analyzing the tartar on their teeth! Just as it is for us, a diet of exclusively lean meat is so imbalanced it can kill.

These are just a few of the subjects in the 16 chapters of Kindred. Do get this book and meet your kindred!

Afterword: I do have a quibble about language usage. Dr. Sykes is prone to writing sentences such as this one about weapons and the wounds they cause:

"Rather than being thrown, both wounds match experimental damage from being rammed in with a lunging action."

I don't recall ever throwing a wound, do you? Adding two words would save this dramatic solecism:

"Rather than being from thrown spears, both wounds match…"

Such mismatches of subject and predicate occur frequently. Dear Dr. Sykes, do spend some time with a grammarian. A couple of hours will do.

More on continued human evolution

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, paleoanthropology, evolution, human evolution

In March I reviewed The 10,000 Year Explosion, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, which presents convincing evidence and discussion about how the human species continues to evolve. In one chapter they refer to a colleague's work and his book, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. Naturally, I obtained the book and read it carefully.

To be up front here: Though I am a Christian, of a very evangelical and Biblical tradition, I am also a scientist, with perhaps way too much education in all the physical sciences; I finished my formal education at age 37. I wrote software for scientists for forty years. In retirement, I work for a natural history museum part time, both as a computer scientist and a biologist. At a young age I learned the "Gap theory" of interpreting Genesis and other parts of the Bible that refer to prehistory such as Job 38:4-7, Zechariah 12:1, and Isaiah 45:18. By careful study I determined that cosmology and deep time (13+ billion years of it), plus the facts of evolution and the theory of natural selection that describes how it operates, are no threat to Biblical faith nor to any revelation in the Bible.

Therefore, concerning people, the extreme Biblical literalist view is that humans (and all other living species) were created ex nihilo less than 10,000 years ago, and are the same now as they were then, barring various kinds of catastrophe and degeneration. Their creation was very shortly after that of the universe and Earth.

The scientific view is that once life on Earth began, natural selection operated for about two billion years to produce multicellular life from unicellular life, then the multicellular creatures continued evolving until all living forms we see today were produced, along with some ten, to 100, to even 1,000 times as many species that went extinct in past eons; then among the tiny twig on the "tree of life" known as Great Apes, one ape species split into three species, which continued to evolve and adapt to different environments to become humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos; along the way other species such as H. erectus and Neanderthals arose and later became extinct.

The combined view I have (following G.H. Pember and others) is that Genesis 1:1 occurred "in the dateless past", to quote C.I. Scofield, and that the first verb in Genesis 1:2 is "became": "The earth became waste and empty", where Isaiah 45:18 tells us the original formation of the planet was "not waste". Prior to historical time, "anatomical" humans, that were not "behaviorally modern", experienced a big change. Their worldwide spreading from a homeland in Africa began during a warm spell between ice ages about 50,000 years ago. That behavioral change probably marks a point in time that God intervened, as recorded in Genesis 2:7, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." (King James Version). The grammatical emphasis is on the word "living". This does not describe a creation ex nihilo. "Dust of the ground", a metaphor for humanity, existed already, but when God breathed a spirit into "the man", the animal soul became a "living soul," a soul that is now able to contact God. The rest of the Bible describes contact after contact between God and various people. The Septuagint translates "living soul" as ψυχὴν ζῶσαν , "psuchen zosan", which refers to divine life, not biological life. 

With all that in mind, I consider two questions:

1. Do the mechanisms of natural selection still operate on humans?
2. Do any changes thus wrought continue to improve our adaptation to modern environments, or are they only degradations from a formerly more perfect humanity? (as many Christians believe)

I look for well-researched books like Before the Dawn and The 10,000 Year Explosion to find answers to those two questions. With new genetic tools made available in the past twenty years, there is evidence aplenty that humans are still evolving, and that we continue to become better suited to the environments into which our travels have taken us. Further, genetics has led anthropologists and archaeologists to look more keenly at their own studies for things that were overlooked under an older paradigm that stated, "once humans developed culture, physical evolution came to a halt." It most assuredly did not!

I'll begin by discussing a few items I bookmarked. I can tell which chapter these are in, but the "page" numbers of the eBook don't correspond to printed pages. In the first chapter, after defining two periods of prehistory, the 5 million years since pre-humans split from other apes, and the 45,000 years between the time some left Africa and the development of writing, they ask,

"Why should the human genome, specifically shaped for survival in the present, have so much to say about the past?" (early in Chapter 1, "Genetics & Genesis")

I immediately thought, "Only if 'the present' means 'the past 500-1000 years' can this question be meaningful." Actually, as the author goes on to discuss, our genome contains material that supported survival over the entire span, including some important genes that have been kept nearly unchanged for tens or hundreds of millions of years; also others that arose in the past few thousand and even the past few hundred years, and some that are "works in progress" right now.

More to the point, an allele (a specific form of a gene) that arose and became frequent long ago will contain "silent mutations" that can inform us of our history. Time for a side trip.

The Central Dogma of Genetics states that DNA is copied to RNA, and RNA is transcribed to chains of amino acids, which are peptides and proteins. Transcription takes place in a molecular machine called a ribosome. There are 64 3-letter codons of DNA or RNA. There are 20 amino acids. Thus, the "translation table" to convert an RNA codon into an amino acid has multiple entries for each amino acid. Only one amino acid, methionine, has a single code. The other 19 have two, three, or four codons that "mean" them. Thus, the codons GGU, GGA, GGC, and GGG all code for glycine. If something changes a GGG in your DNA to GGA, it won't change the amino acid that results. That is an example of a silent mutation. 

We won't get into any of the many things that can cause such a change, but we all accumulate many in each of our cells in our lifetime. There are also other kinds of mutations, and some lead to new proteins. A mutation that is helpful in any way will be kept; one that is harmful will usually cause the death of the cell. Mutations that wind up in our gametes (sex cells), that didn't cause them to die already, can get into our children. We typically pass on about 50 mutations to each child. In a genome of a billion codons, 50 is not many.

The studies of what might have happened in the past depend on the rate at which silent mutations accumulate. Of course, it is possible for a silent mutation to re-mutate back the way it was, but the number of these will be very small, since point mutations are rare to start with (50 out of a billion per generation, per person). This principle is brought out numerous times in the book. End of side trip.

If we first look back 5,000,000 years or so, to the ancestor of humans, chimps, and bonobos, what would we see? There is scant fossil evidence. Central and east-central Africa were warm and humid then as they are now; there were no ice ages yet. In conditions like that, even teeth rot too quickly to leave fossils for us to find today. What little we know matches what we can infer by taking an "average hominin": the size of a chimp or smaller (males 50-100 kg, females 30-60 kg), furry like modern chimps, brain size similar to a chimp (450 cc) or maybe a bit smaller, promiscuous in sexual habits, possibly patriarchal but maybe not, and probably violently territorial and xenophobic. Today, bonobos are a little smaller than chimpanzees, equally furry, with a brain the same size, even more promiscuous, matriarchal, but less xenophobic and much less violent. Humans have become a little larger overall, and a foot or two taller, mostly hairless, but with much larger brains (1,400-1,600 cc), sexually more private but not necessarily less promiscuous, usually patriarchal (sorry, feminists), and with a great range of xenophobia and territorial aggression.

While chimps and bonobos are so physically similar that they were thought to be the same species until a generation ago, they are behaviorally very different. Further, humans are very, very different from both in many ways, but we can see our behavior reflected in theirs. It is almost as if we have a range of cultural expressions that encompasses all the variations found in bonobos and chimps.

Now look back 50,000 years, to the "behaviorally modern humans" (BMH) who left Africa to spread the world over. The archaic human species they encountered and what happened as a result are stories for another day. What were these "moderns" like? Between 100,000 (maybe 150,000) years ago and 50,000 years ago, the species (still called Homo sapiens) is called "anatomically modern humans" (AMH), and is physically very similar to "us, today", but with more archaic behavior. We will set aside for the moment the theological implication I made earlier about what may have happened 50,000 years ago. What is the difference between AMH and BMH? As I found upon reading later chapters, it's probably best to not consider us, today as BMH, but just "modern humans", MH, after another transition between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. Both behavior and anatomy changed after that.

So, to get a BMH person, start with a very well-conditioned person, not quite an Olympic athlete, perhaps…or, what the heck, let's go with a couple of Olympians. We can pick the runner Usain Bolt (6' 5", 207 lb/195 cm, 94 kg) for the male, and gymnast Kylie Dickson (5' 6", 110 lb/167 cm, 50 kg) for the female. The BMH's were bare-skinned and lived in Africa, so the skin would be black. Shorten the male by several inches while leaving his weight the same. Double the strength of his muscles and bones, and add 20% to the thickness of his skull. Add 10-20 kg to the weight of the female, and make her bones and muscle proportionally greater. Both this man and this woman would look like modern weightlifters (the ones who don't use steroids). You wouldn't want to meet either one in a dark alley, unless perhaps you had a 5th degree Black Belt in Aikido. I have a Korean friend who is a 4th degree black belt; he doesn't need a weapon, he is a weapon. But he might not prevail against an average BMH male.

What else might be different? "Modern" behavior, to an anthropologist, is the more sophisticated late paleolithic toolkit that showed up about 50,000 years ago, along with sophisticated art (cave paintings being a stellar example), and more group interaction, including some tolerance of strangers so trading could be carried out. The story told by their bones, however, is of frequent and persistent combat and warfare. Although the women were also stronger than we'd find usual today, they didn't engage in combat, but had harder domestic work (like pulling hides off animals), than would have been usual later on.

So, back to, what differed between AMH and BMH? Not the anatomy, except perhaps in fine details. From 100,000 (or so) years ago until 15,000 years ago, the anatomy remained very similar. But better group dynamics, probably fostered by the development of language, seems to be a crucial step. It seems to me that sophisticated art had to follow language; once symbolic representation of thought was possible, other symbolisms including artistic artifacts could follow. The 10th chapter "Language" goes into this very comprehensively. Language seems to have appeared shortly before 50,000 years ago, and much else followed.

Chapter 7, "Settlement", brought out something that surprised me: the author's contention (he is far from alone in this) that people began to settle down into communities as much as 5,000 years before agriculture. I'd thought it was the other way around, and I've read that numerous times. I can't debate the point, so I'll leave it to you to read what the author has to say. But it convinced me. Starting before 15,000 years ago, a few thousand years of warming were followed by more cold, that broke about 11,500 years ago. The coldest bit was the Younger Dryas period, which lasted 800 years. Settling down apparently marks the major psychological transition between BMH and MH. People had to learn to tolerate the presence of unrelated strangers, and not try to kill them on sight; some cultures today are still prone to do that! They could then engage in long-range trading.

Midway in the chapter I find the statement, "Specialization in roles may have occurred for the first time." I think not. Even in a kinship group of 50-150 persons, someone will be a little better than most at making tools, and another will be a little better than most at accurate throwing of weapons, or at climbing of trees. One woman's more nimble fingers might weave a better, stronger basket more quickly than others'. So intrafamily trading probably began way, way back. Once you are able to converse peaceably with people in the family nearby, interfamily trading can get rolling, and that will naturally grow into trade networks that span continents.

Looking through my notes, I find a number of interesting items about settlement and socialization. But I'll skip a few to get to the critical point. How much of all this has genetic underpinnings? The author thinks, quite a lot. We can see in our more slender skeletons, compared with "Cro-Magnon" of 10-12,000 years ago, that MH's have changed over that time. We aren't quite as likely to club one another over the head. It makes me wonder, how warlike were BMH's? The Dani in New Guinea and the Yanomami in Brazil, until the past few decades, were used to losses of around 30% of each generation to inter-village warfare. What was warfare like 40,000 years ago, when skulls were thicker and bones twice as robust (muscles also, one must presume)? Shudder!

But what is happening now? Human skin changed from pale to black after hair was lost from the body. [Just by the way, my personal notion is that hair loss had to soon follow the domestication of fire. Think of a furry month-old baby falling into the fire, or an ember blowing onto it. In my twenties I had a beard; it caught fire once, and only very quick thinking by my father kept me from suffering disfiguring burns (I still have a couple of tiny scars). I have read that the most popular theory for hair loss is running. Humans can run down anything except a thoroughbred horse; and maybe over a day or two, the horse would also get too tired to keep going. Perhaps both influences played a part.] The people that made their way from Africa to northern Europe and northern Asia became pale again. This seems to have happened primarily in the past 5,000 years. Europeans and north Asians have different genetic mechanisms for skin coloration, so paler skin evolved at least twice. Lactose tolerance evolved at least four times, at different times in different places. Our jaws are smaller than was average for earlier MH's, which is why so many of us have to have our wisdom teeth pulled. Suffice it to say, the sore back many of us wake up with is also evidence that 2-3 million years has not been enough for a truly functional and robust erect spine to finish evolving.

The author has numerous added examples. Physically we are still evolving, and those of our behaviors that have a strong genetic element are evolving also. Where will it all take us? The presence of five "races" (we need a better word now; this one is too political) indicates that the human species is partway along a path toward splitting into multiple species. If sea-spanning ships and jet planes had never been invented, in another 50,000 years, would there be three or four or five species of human? It's possible. If we plant a colony on (better, underground) Mars, how long will they remain the same species? Since there would be a much smaller number of them, genetic drift, along with a very few novel genetic alterations (mutations), could render them genetically incompatible with "the folks back home"; that is, a new species of human. Homo arensis?

Are humans evolving faster than ever?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, evolution, anthropology, human evolution, civilization

Consider a plant of the desert southwest of the U.S., the creosote bush, Larrea tridentata. It is host to several species of insects that can live nowhere else. One is the creosote bush walkingstick, Diapheromera covilleae. You can read at arizonensis.org that, while the creosote bush has inhabited North American deserts for less than 12,000 years, these species endemic to it, including the walkingstick shown here, evolved their special adaptations to life only on this plant within that time frame. The image is from that article.

In the book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, authors Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending use this insect and others endemic to the creosote bush to demonstrate that evolution can happen on scales that correspond to recorded history. About the time that humans began farming in the Middle East, members of a species of American walkingstick already present began to prowl the newly-invasive creosote bushes for prey. While people were learning to live with agriculture, and developing it over and over again around the world, these insects evolved better and better camouflage, and habits better suited to the way the plant's twigs move in the wind, so that they are now unable to live elsewhere.

The aim of these authors is not, however, to provide a catalog of rapidly-evolving insects, but to set a few of them, and other creatures including birds and mammals—all of which show evidence of rapid evolution—alongside humans, to indicate that we, also, can evolve on such time scales.

Accepted dogma among most scientists has been that humans stopped evolving when they developed civilization. Civilization is thought to protect humans from the selective pressures that drive evolutionary changes. People who once would have died from many causes now live because of better sanitation, medical care, and a richer food supply. For me at least, long ago, a moment's thought was sufficient for me to realize that this just changed the style of selective pressure we experience. I concluded that in the past several thousand years, humans have most likely been evolving in a direction more dependent on such systems of care than before. These authors reach the same conclusion.

When I was young, the early humans just prior to the modern era were called Cro-Magnon, and I got the impression that if you put one is a suit or dress, it would be hard to distinguish that person from anyone else. Cro-Magnon humans are now called "Early Modern Humans" (EMH's), which encompasses a wider array of fossils than those that were known in the late 1800's through the early 1900's, when the textbooks I read were published. I have since learned that the average EMH was stronger than 99.9% of us (even the women were stronger than most modern men!), with heavier bones, thicker skulls, and a brain about 10% larger than the modern average. They had slightly larger jaws, with teeth of very similar size to ours, so they would not have had problems with wisdom teeth, as so many of us have. (FYI: I had no trouble with wisdom teeth, but more than half of my classmates in high school had to have theirs removed).

We have been taught that it takes a few hundred thousand, or millions of years, for significant evolution to take place. But some scientists, including one of my favorite science authors, Stephen Jay Gould, promoted "punctuated evolution": as long as the environment is comparatively stable, the species that live within it don't change, but when environment changes, such as at the beginning or end of an ice age, species then evolve rapidly so that new species develop which are better adapted to the new situation. I read almost everything by Gould, and I don't recall that he put a time frame on "rapid". The authors of this book come closer to doing so, contending that measurable changes in various human groups have taken place in "a few" thousand years, probably less than 5,000.

What could drive evolution at a more rapid pace? How could new and favorable mutations be gathered at a rate that would allow a group of humans to adapt to something new and different, in just 50-100 generations, and perhaps much less in some cases? One key factor that these authors stress repeatedly is the great expansion of population that resulted from agriculture. A larger number of people means that the little, random mutations that happen in every one of us are equally larger in number. Apparently, this is not too hard.

Consider lactose tolerance. The default condition is that adults and adolescents don't drink milk, so they don't need to digest lactose. Thus the enzymes needed to do so aren't produced in most adults and teens. But the domestication of cattle by various groups of people made quantities of cow milk available, and other animals' milk, such as horse or goat, were also available among other groups. At least four times, in different places, a mutation or two occurred that allowed the continued production of enzymes that carry out digestion of lactose throughout life. All occurred within the past 10,000 years.

Think about it. A herder might gather some milk to nourish an orphaned calf or kid. He might taste it himself; it would be a little sweet and taste good. But he would usually suffer discomfort or indigestion soon after, and would not try that again. But maybe not. Initially, scattered families here or there would be able to digest milk. This added source of nutrition would result in larger families for such folks. Over time, such a favorable genetic trait would become widespread and could even dominate a population. However, populations that never developed ranching or herding have very few members who can digest lactose. All of my relatives are milk drinkers. My wife is Japanese, and she and her family also drink milk. Most Japanese don't, and they can't without discomfort. My wife's family must have ancestors that were herders. The primary milk used in Japanese households is soy milk, and most people of the generation that is now in their 60's and older know how to make it. Younger folks buy it at the store because they are too busy earning a salary to learn traditional skills.

Lactose tolerance is one of many examples of recent evolutionary changes in many human populations. And this matter brings up a wider view: If a large cohort of people look distinctive, there is a genetic reason for it. Although the human species is one species, and there are no "breeding barriers" between any human groups, the concept of "race" is really an oversimplification of a blatant reality. Any cohesive group ("Tribe" is a common term) that doesn't outbreed with other groups will become a distinctive group (better adapted to a different environment, perhaps), and it isn't hard for people in "Tribe A" to recognize people of "Tribe B" on sight alone, even if all cultural accouterments and accessories are removed.

The last chapter touches on a sensitive subject: can there be a "Tribe" of humans that are smarter than average? Consider the controversy that erupted over The Bell Curve, by Herrnstein and Murray. This is a very non-PC subject! But, face it, folks, facts are facts and truth is truth. There does happen to be a group of people whose average IQ is 12-15 points above the average for all people. Though they number only about 11 million worldwide, about 1/7th of a percent of the human race, their members have earned more than 20% of all Nobel Prizes. Of course, an average implies a range of values. There are dumber ones also, just not as many of them. The proportion of them that are smarter than average is larger than that proportion in humanity generally.

Who are these people? The Ashkenazi Jews, usually just called "European Jews". They comprise 3/4 of the total Jewish population of the world. Einstein was one. So was Stephen Jay Gould.

The authors present the case for a history that could have produced such a result. One key element is almost total in-group marriage; they strongly discourage marriage to non-Jews. They experienced nearly a thousand years of persecution in Europe. For much of that time they were forbidden from engaging in most trades. They were allowed to have certain "professional" occupations, and money-lending was but one. Those who were most adept at managerial and accounting skills prospered and had larger families. Both the Jews and their neighbors favored large families, but a more prosperous family will raise more children to adulthood than a poor one, even if the number born is the same. This factor alone could result in a "smartening" of the European Jews over those centuries.

There is another factor that the authors don't touch (maybe they avoided it purposely): the Holocaust under Nazism. Many, many Jews left Nazi-controlled, areas, or countries they were soon to control, before the end of the 1930's. I reckon they tended to be the smarter, better-educated ones. Of those left behind, half or more were murdered by the Nazis and left no descendants. This probably boosted the average IQ even more.

Whether or not such processes were the deciding factors, the fact remains that worldwide IQ testing has shown that average IQ and the spread of IQ scores are practically universal, with the glaring exception being the Ashkenazi Jews. (Just by the way, the letters n-a-z-i "Ashkenazi" are in no way related to "Nazi", which is an acronym formed from German words meaning National Socialism.)

For those who think there is no evolution anyway, don't sweat it. I'd be surprised if you read this far anyway. But for those who accept evolution as "the way biology works", this book helps us understand that humans haven't been somehow extracted from Nature, but still form a part of it. The environments that we have built for ourselves haven't made us "not natural", just natural in a different way. We continue to evolve, and it would be interesting to be able to look forward another 10,000 years, to see what directions have been taken by the various tribes of mankind.

Yes, we are still evolving

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, paleoanthropology, evolution, human evolution

The history of life is incredibly more complex than we ever thought. Just the history of this little cluster of twigs on the tree of life that we can call "humans, hominins, and their close kin" is incredibly complex. I truly enjoy reading essays by someone who knows these things deeply and tells us our stories with grace and wit. Close Encounters With Humankind: A Paleoanthropologist Investigates Our Evolving Species, by Sang-Hee Lee with Shin-Young Yoon, is just such a book. Dr. Lee is an anthropologist and department dean at U.C. Riverside. Mr. Yoon worked with her to prepare essays for the popular press in Korea and the U.S., and for this book.

One root question people have is this, "Are Neanderthals our ancestors, our cousins, or something else?" Simply put, they were "kissing cousins" when the species we call "modern humans" was being formed. Neanderthals are one of at least two ancestral species, and we are hybrids!

The book doesn't start there. The first chapter is titled, "Are We Cannibals?" I would put it this way: We cannot include human meat as a major part of our diet because that's too much like a perpetual motion machine. However, some human cultures have included small amounts of carnivory for primarily ritual purposes. Read the chapter for the gory details.

Dr. Lee doesn't sidestep controversies. Chapter 3 asks, "Who Were the first Human Ancestors?" We could thus ask which species represents the first Hominin. A Hominin (note the final "n") is a member of a species characterized by upright walking, a larger brain than a Hominid (note the "d") of similar size, and sophisticated tool use; probably also complex language. The Hominids are the great apes—Gorillas, Orangutans, Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Gibbons, and Humans—and all their ancestors back to the first great ape that split from the lesser apes and monkeys. The recognized Hominin genera are Homo, Australopithecus, Ardipithecus, and Paranthropus. Species in the genus Homo are H. sapiens (ourselves), H. neanderthalensis, H. habilis ("handy man"), possibly H. rudolfensis, and H. erectus. Homo erectus, "upright man" is probably the first, but various scientists argue for other possibilities, and the chief ones are discussed in this chapter.

Along the way to tracking down our Neanderthal (and other) roots, matters are discussed such as the incredibly painful birth experience, because of a combination of large brains in newborns and narrow hips due to upright walking (waddling is wasteful of energy); when different skin colors arose (I was surprised to find it was primarily 5,000 years ago); the biggest of the apes, the half-ton Gigantopithecus; and why we still have sore backs.

Once we get to the time period from 100,000 to 40,000 years ago, we find that our twig of the tree of life is actually braided, or networked. Perhaps half a million years ago some people left Africa for Europe and Asia. At present it seems two groups followed similar but distinct evolutionary tracks to become the Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. Later, some time before 70,000 years ago, another group left Africa. They are called by various names; the most neutral is "early modern humans" or EMH. They are considered early members of H. sapiens, and they must have had better teamwork and better tools, and perhaps a different breeding schedule with close spacing of offspring, because they multiplied until they outnumbered their cousins who already lived there.

Now that a genetic sequence has been produced for both Neanderthals and Denisovans, it is clear that they interbred with the EMH people. Whether the N's and the D's were wiped out or subsumed into the larger group is not known. What is known is that European DNA includes about 4% Neanderthal DNA and a lesser amount of Denisovan DNA, while for Asians it is the reverse, and Australians may have 6% Denisovan DNA.

At this point I wonder, was there perhaps yet another species out there, not yet discovered, that contributed to the modern gene pool? And I find another matter even more interesting: All three of these types of humans were more robust, and had a little larger brains (5%-8%) than modern humans. We don't know enough about the Denisovans to be sure how strong they were. An average Neanderthal was twice as strong as an EMH, and the average EMH was at least twice as strong as modern humans.

Not all of that is because so many of us have sedentary lifestyles (Most people living outside the West have more active lives). I live near a large population of Amish. They work hard and are all very strong. A typical EMH would be even stronger. They were genetically prepared to become stronger.

The last chapter asks, "Are Humans Still Evolving?". The answer is, "Of course!" Just because we invented culture and science and technology with all their conveniences, doesn't mean there are still no selective pressures for natural selection to work on. Remember, 2/3 of the world has only a fraction of the conveniences and medical infrastructure that an American or European would consider normal. I certainly hope that we are evolving toward having less lower back pain! But considering that it has been with us for about two million years, I suppose it will be a good while yet. I point out wisdom teeth, and our shrinking jawbones, as evidence of continuing evolution. Dr. Lee thinks we have removed that matter from selective pressure because of low-cost dental surgery. However, there are still large numbers (the 2/3 mentioned above) who have little or no dental care, but whose jaws are also shrinking as food sources change. In whatever measure infected impacted wisdom teeth reduce reproductive potential, there will be benefit to having a mutation that reduces or eliminates them.

There is reason to believe that the great increase in human population that followed the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago has led to an increased rate of evolution among us. This is just touched on in this book, but we are referred to another, The 10,000 Year Explosion, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. I got a copy right away. Stay tuned!

This review just skates on the surface of Dr. Lee's offerings. What a joy to read!

We really are much different

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, paleontology, human origins, surveys

This is one of the most familiar images related to human history, and one of the most misleading. Most of us used to think of human evolution as this kind of regular progression from a chimp-like ape to modern human; others denied it was possible.

Let me be clear, I am an evangelical Christian. My view is definitely not in line with the "young earth special creation" theology that is a most vocal viewpoint, but not the most widespread one. Most Christians, if they think about it at all, accept some form of evolution and assume God intervened somehow, to create the human spirit. So let me just say that I understand evolutionary science very well, and I accept natural selection as the best biological explanation for all the life on Earth. Whether life, and humans in particular, arose biologically is really up to God, and He has so far declined to express a public opinion.

Accepting for the nonce a biological origin for human life, we must learn a better way to understand the process. I have read a few times from various authors that evolution does not proceed in a straight line from less advanced to more advanced, but that the "tree of life" is rather like a branching bush, and the fossils and archaeological material we are able to gather give us a glimpse here and there about our biological and social history.

This is a better image. The red circles represent fossils that have been found, except perhaps for the rightmost, which represents "us". The leaf at far left represents the first "non chimp" species that arose some 6-7 million years ago. The number of hominid (Genus Homo) and hominin (related genera such as Australopithecus) species described so far exceeds 20, not just the 10 that are highlighted here. But in time we may find that the number of species in and around the "human line", over the past few million years, might be something closer to the 130 or so leaves in this diagram.

In Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins, Ian Tattersall probably discusses every one of the species so far known that either led to the origin of humans, or were related species that our ancestors would have occasionally encountered. It is becoming clear from the fossil record that there were usually several species of hominin in existence at any one time. The fact that many of us can now get a genetic test to determine how many of our genes are actually Neanderthal or even Denisovan, attests that there was indeed contact between early human and human-related creatures. For a Euro-American such as myself, the Neanderthal contribution is about 3%.

A major, major theme of Dr. Tattersall's is that in our behavior, and particularly the complex language skills that underlie our symbolic mode of thinking, we differ dramatically from other apes and from the related and ancestor species for which sufficient anthropological information can be discerned. We literally cannot imagine a non-symbolic inner life. I was speaking to my French professor many years ago, about the "breakthrough" experienced by French students when they first dream in French. At some point she asked, "Don't you ever dream without words?" I said I didn't think that is possible. At least, it never happens for me; some parts of a dream may be "observation", but if another person is present in the dream, there is always speech. Even the more, I told her, I have an inner dialog running at all times, and frequently, when I close my eyes, I can hear it.

The chapters of the book follow a rough time sequence, outlining hominin development from "bipedal apes" through more and more modern body types, plus a number of variations. There were always a few various, related species present simultaneously. For example, just under two million years ago, when the "Turkana boy" lived, that youngster represented a gracile (slender) body style very similar to ours, though his bones were thicker-walled indicating great strength. Another species present around that time was a more robust hominid: Homo ergaster, if that name still applies. This name, by the way, is being used for a kind of grab-bag of fossils that almost surely represent several species. There are also fossils that overlap this era that are termed "hyper-robust". So the Turkana boy was kind of like a basketball player, with others which lived at the same time that would be more at home among the Philadelphia Eagles (and might be able to carry two of them down the field!), plus some of more middling robustness…truck driver types?

The success of the species that led to us, and related species, was by no means assured. There had to be a compelling reason for upright stance, for example, because the grasslands that began to develop a few million years ago were dangerous places. Social organization must have been the key attribute that allowed a weak, hairless biped, that couldn't yet run the way we can, to traverse open country and not be eaten posthaste.

The last four chapters cover in detail the transition from "archaic human" to "anatomically modern" humans, and finally to "behaviorally modern" people. The last step is the hardest. Homo sapiens of the Cro-Magnon variety had a big brain, but so did their Neanderthal cousins and perhaps another 2-3 species. But starting about 80,000 years ago, and culminating some 60,000 years ago, that brain began to work a lot differently. Cultural artifacts show the difference. The first decorated objects are 75,000-77,000 years old. Paintings in caves as old as 41,000 years have been found. Furthermore, when African humans entered Eurasia, probably along the north edge of the Sinai peninsula, they soon spread to all corners of the earth, including areas the Neanderthals apparently considered too cold for them, and into Australia, which no other hominids seem to have entered.

Dr. Tattersall discusses how and whether this change was something waiting to happen because of other characteristics that had developed, called exaptations by evolutionary scientists. It is hard to imagine that the sudden symbolic flourishing arose by a series of closely spaced special mutations. Brain functions that arose for other reasons must have facilitated the development of language.

We don't yet know very much about it. How much more we might learn, it is hard to say. On one hand, we are "naked apes" (per the 1967 book by Desmond Morris). On the other, we have a symbolic inner life that no other creature has been shown to have, and we have ultra-complex social organizations that are different not just in size but in kind from anything found elsewhere among other animals.

The last chapter focuses on speech, using the opening phrase from the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the word." It really is words that make us what we are. Cute Geico commercials aside, Neanderthals and all other hominids didn't speak as we do. None of their cultural artifacts show evidence of the kind of symbolic thought that we take for granted. They were clever and capable, and functioned quite well for tens of thousands of years, and their extinction is still a bit mysterious (no, our ancestors probably didn't eat them; more likely, they ate everything else and left nothing for them).

Lest we fall prey to hubris, just because we can think symbolically, doesn't mean that we all are great thinkers. People are lazy, and most folks prefer to avoid thinking too much. Not everyone reports a continuous inner voice. There is a reason that many jobs such as factory assembly line work are called "mindless": It isn't hard to learn the task, and in very little time a person is doing it over and over without noticing much of anything along the way. The fact that so many such tasks are now being performed by industrial robots shows how mindless they are. No robot has yet achieved the smarts of the average cockroach.

I'll wind this up. The book is fascinating, it conveys a ton of information, and it sets a foundation for anyone reading it to evaluate future discoveries by hominid paleontologists. It is a must, even if you happen to believe in "young earth special creation." It is never wrong to learn the stories the rocks tell.

What is it like to be a cave man?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, archaeology, neandertals

A prefatory note: The moniker "Neanderthal Man" was coined in the late 1800s. In 1901 the Germans reformed the spelling of their language, and since then (111 years already), the appropriate term has been Neandertal. No matter how it is spelled, the word has never included a "TH" sound. In old high German, "th" was pronounced "T".

In a group sitting around a camp fire, would a Neandertal stand out? Would he or she seem odd in any way? Probably. Physically, the person might seem a little short and stocky, but not much out of the ordinary. The behavior, though, might eventually give the game away. He or she would probably quietly watch the fire, take no part in banter or storytelling, and simply look befuddled at most of the jokes. Let someone bringing a load of wood trip and drop it, though, and our friend just might erupt in the loudest laughter of the group.

In How to Think Like a Neandertal, Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge discuss in detail ten aspects of Neandertal life and what they reveal about the way they must have thought. Did they have language? Most assuredly. The common ancestor species, Homo heidelbergensis, is thought by most researchers to have had language and, most importantly, a "Language Acquisition Device", or syntax organ, in their brain, at a level not matched by any ape, even though it was probably less complex than the language and language learning facility in modern humans.

Let's compare us modernized Cro-Magnons with Neandertals, physically; not in detail but just gross anatomy. Average height and weight for Neandertal males would have been an inch or two (2-5 cm) shorter, but 30-50 lbs (14-22 kg) heavier, with a distinct barrel chest. A few "Mr Universe" types can lift one end of an automobile; the average Neandertal male could do so. Average height and weight for Neandertal females was very close to average female C-M height, but 20-40 lbs (9-18 kg) heavier. Whether a Neandertal female would have similar secondary sexual characteristics is not known (and this is not discussed by the authors); she may have had a flat chest when not lactating, and maybe not. Though the average Neandertal had heavy brow ridges and a somewhat receding chin, so do a goodly number of modern folk. In the last chapter, the authors speculate that C-M's were dark skinned and Neandertals more pale. Perhaps. Chimpanzee skin is usually pale under their pelt.

You'd be bored by their diet. "What, mammoth again? At least cook it a bit longer so I can chew it!" Neandertals did not have throwing spears, just thrusting spears. They seem to have fought mammoths close-up, skin-to-skin, where the mammoth could not make effective use of its natural weapons. They had to be fast; getting that last five feet closer is the most dangerous moment. The authors mention just once that many spears were sharpened at both ends. I suspect they were also rather long, perhaps two meters or more: You run in close, jab the mammoth to get it to rear up, and jab the butt into the ground so the mammoth will fall on the tip as it tries to come down on you (you gotta be fast!).

Neandertals, like their ancestor species, were expert flint knappers. This took a lot of repetition to learn, so they were probably more focused than most of us. The chapter on toolmaking has fascinating material that shows just how precise they had to be to strike of those big flakes from a "core". But once expertise is gained, making stone tools was cheap and easy, so the availability of good stone was the only thing that limited how many tools someone could make. They seem to have found it easier to make a new tool than to sharpen an old one. There are millions and millions of Neandertal and earlier tools held in museums and scientists' labs around the world.

Did they tell jokes? Could they understand a joke? Maybe, but it is unlikely. They were not innovators to the extent that we are. It takes an innovative mind to balance the incongruity of a typical joke or pun and see its humor. They'd more likely have appreciated physical humor (Three Stooges?). But their ability to focus and learn by watching would have made them formidable mechanics. If you were to raise a Neandertal baby in the modern world, he or she would probably excel at a number of skills that are learned by apprenticeship, including medicine! Calculus 101 might be a hurdle, though… Take someone with great focus, poor to middling social skills in groups larger than about five, and tremendous ability to learn from repetition: A Neandertal might make a very good computer programmer. Just keep them supplied with mammoth-meat pizzas!

Did they dream? Every other mammal does, so why not? But what did they dream? Probably similar dreams to ours: falling, being chased, forgetting something, looking for something. Many dreams seem to be rehearsals for coping with misfortune, or reminding us not to forget something.

I once read that when tribesmen in New Guinea meet in the forest, they first discuss whether they have any common relatives or powerful friends. They are trying to establish if they can afford to extend friendship, or must strive to kill one another. About half the time, there is a fight to the death. This is probably true of many societies called "primitive", for lack of a less pejorative word. Not all the world's cultures are as comfortable with meeting strangers as the typical Westerner. Neandertals would have been a bit more taciturn and xenophobic, suspicious of anyone outside a family group that seldom numbered more than fifteen. They had to have some tolerance for strangers, or some way of establishing trust, because it is likely that adolescents, either males or females but not both, left their home group to "marry out" into another group. There is little evidence that they carried a gift, which is more common among some modern societies (dowries and bride price customs).

Contrary to some depictions, the authors find no evidence that Neandertals had complex burial practices. They seem to have deposited a fresh corpse in a low spot, perhaps scooped out a bit deeper, and covered it with dirt and stones. More of an "out of sight out of mind" maneuver. They didn't always do so, and often lived among the bones of their ancestors, treating them like sedimentary stones, as they treated the bones of their prey; something to be kicked aside when you sit down. And there is no evidence they expected an afterlife.

Could a baby Neandertal learn a modern language? Could a baby C-M learn a Neandertal language (there were probably a great many languages)? Possibly with ease, in both cases, but more likely, with some difficulty. The brains of Neandertals and Homo sapiens sapiens were somewhat different shapes. So were their thought patterns. In either case, there would be concepts that could not be grasped. The authors think it likely that a Neandertal baby would do better growing up among us, than the opposite scenario.

Neandertal life may have been brutal, but they were not brutish. These were not knuckle-dragging ape-men. They were men and women, they stood upright, and in a suit of modern dress, one of them would not seem unusual. The authors have delivered a great contribution to our understanding of a cousin species, which may also have added a little to our genetic endowment.

Chimp like me?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, chimpanzees, anthropology

Are we just smarter Chimpanzees, who have managed to master language and fire, and lost our hair? Or are we more like Bonobos (formerly called Pygmy Chimpanzees), or another of the great apes? Or are we wholly unique?

For all the "monkey acts" and movie chimps, very, very few people have seen a mature chimpanzee, on film or face to face. The cute performers that everybody loves are all little more than toddlers. By the time they are eight or nine years old they are much too dangerous to appear with human actors. While the "common wisdom" that an adult male chimp is five times as strong as a human is overblown, the fact is that the average chimp is twice as strong as a well-conditioned human body-builder (Y'know, I'm not well-conditioned, so the chimp probably is five times as strong as I am!).

Also, the notion that chimps, or any of the great apes, are a "good" model animal for the ape progenitor of hominids is simply wrong-headed. Since the hominid line split from the common ancestor that also led to chimps and bonobos, the humans and the chimps have both evolved similar amounts. Call our common ancestor George. Tarzan's pal Cheetah is as different from George as Tarzan is, or we are.

Since Robert Yerkes published Almost Human in 1925, it has become fashionable to humanize chimps. In the view of many we are some mix of unstable, violent, patriarchal chimpanzee and conciliatory, sexy, matriarchal bonobo (the "hippie chimp"). It is simply rampant confusion. Amidst it all, science writer Jon Cohen undertook to find out what is the same, and what is different, about chimpanzees and humans. Because there is so much written about similarities, he chose to lean toward the differences, though he was warned to "be careful" by more than one researcher in the field.

The result of his travels and interviews and investigations is Almost Chimpanzee: Searching for What Makes Us Human, in Rainforests, Labs, Sanctuaries, and Zoos. Throughout the book's twelve chapters, the differences abound. Starting with a possible hybridization episode about five million years ago, genetic differences have accumulated, leading to different markers on our blood (and body) cells, different responses to viruses, and certain markedly different biochemical patterns: a human would starve on a chimp diet of 5-7 kilos of raw leaves and fruits daily and only 1-2% of calories from meat.

While it may be possible for any of the great apes to hybridize, because all have 48 chromosomes, humans have only 46, making hybridization next to impossible. A Russian named Ivanov tried to breed a humanzee, but failed. Our chromosome 2 is cobbled together from 90% of the 12th and 90% of the 13th ape chromosomes, appended end to end. The missing 10% of each has no function yet known, but something is surely missing.

Of course, what people most want to know is how apes think. Efforts to teach them to speak, or use sign language, or use symbolic languages such as Yerkish, have gone on for a century or more. I remember reading a touching article by a deaf woman who reported meeting Koko, the gorilla who knows sign language: "I was communicating with another species in my mother tongue!" Since the longest "sentence" Koko has used is three words ("you tickle Koko"), it must have been a rather limited "conversation". No discussion of Plato or the meaning of existence. The most level-headed researchers seem to have all concluded, a chimp really lives a day-to-day existence. There just isn't much to learn from talking to one. You can exhaust their cognitive repertoire in a half hour or so.

The other thing many people want to know (but are afraid to ask) is how sexy are they, really? A chapter on penis size and sexual habits debunks the notion that ape penises are tiny. The average "hang" for chimp and for human is almost exactly the same, but the testicles differ greatly, because of those "habits". When receptive females are available, a dominant male chimp might have intercourse five to eight times a day, for day after day. Most human males run dry after three days of twice a day (some persistent hedonists might be able to still "get it up", but they're shooting blanks by the third or fourth day). A quick look at the scrotum tells the story: chimp testicles are golf ball size or larger, with five times the volume of human ones.

Yet in the end, the author reports that there is a similarity, even a sameness, that he could feel. Near the end of years of travel and interviews, he had the opportunity to "visit" a group of wild chimps in a research area in Africa. After a few hours of watching them quietly feeding, he simply felt he knew what was going on, the way you or I might feel at a family gathering, where nobody may be saying much, but there is a comfort and kinship there, and you know what is going on. Chimps are social, and people are even more social, and that sociability overlaps in a way that we cannot experience with any other species.

We and chimpanzees, chimps and us: we are too different to be the same, but we're too similar to be wholly alien.