Review: The humans who were and who might have been

Review of: Walking with Cavemen: Eye-to-Eye with Your Ancestors

Authors: John Lynch and Louise Barrett

Publisher: DK Publishing, Inc.

Source: Dallas Public Library

Grade: B

Once there were myriad branches on the evolutionary tree of humans. So how did those wildly fruitful beginnings become whittled down to a single sprout – the one we modern humans call Homo sapiens? In Walking with Cavemen, the book spin-off of a popular BBC television series, BBC Science Unit head John Lynch and biological anthropologist Louise Barrett introduce readers to several of those early human species and even more species who might have had a shot at human status if only the evolutionary breaks hadn’t gone against them.

Lynch and Barrett divide Walking with Cavemen (few of whose subjects actually lived in caves) into four parts – First Ancestors (3.5 million years ago); Blood Brothers (2.0 million year ago); Savage Family (1.5 million years ago); and The Survivors (250,000 years ago). Following in the footsteps of the TV series, the authors narrate scenarios to draw readers into the worlds of these early beings. 

 

The First Ancestors section deals with the earliest known (as of the publication date) hominids to branch off from the last common ancestor whose progeny became both human and apes. These include not only the well-known such as Australopithecus afarensis (including the iconic “Lucy” fossil) and but lesser-known Australopithecus species and others.

Blood Brothers deals with an explosive evolution of hominid species, including the appearance of the first to carry the genus designation Homo, a species termed “habilis” – “handy man” – whose combination of “dexterity and inventiveness” gave rise to the production of tools specialized for particular purposes. In Savage Family, we are introduced to perhaps the first group of we would recognize as human if they time-traveled to a 21^st century metropolis.

Walking with Cavemen is lavishly illustrated with still from the TV series. And though the costumes and masks are impressive, the modern human reenactors have not been able to disguise their essentially modern body dimensions, including our long, slender, decidedly unape-like legs. As a result, in the First Ancestors and Blood Brothers sections, the photos look like extras from a Planet of the Apes movie.

Not until the section labeled Savage Family do modern human proportions emerge (along with hairless skin, a possible adaption to enhance sweating, and therefore cooling of the expanding hominid brain). Finally, in The Survivors, Walking with Cavemen turns its attention to those beings who truly did live in caves, the now-extinct Neanderthals and Homo sapiens -- us – the last branch left on humanity’s tree of life.

Some elements of the narratives are, admittedly, speculative. Thoughts and emotions, Lynch and Barrett note, do not fossilize. But they back their imaginings with enough hard-scientific data – bones, stone tools and other artifacts, even fossilized footprints – to ground the narratives.

In addition to the species narratives, Lynch and Barrett include engaging sidebars – discussions of related subjects – from how fossilization occurs, to theories about the emergence of language, to the hoax of the English “fossils” designated Piltdown Man (and whose much-vaunted “discovery” was a major setback to acceptance of humanity’s African origins). 

All of which leaves open the question: at just which point did humans become, well, human? Was it when protohumans began living in social groups? When they (almost we) became technological beings, able to make and harness fire, to shape stone tools? When they became eaters of meat (both scavenged and hunted) that gave their brains the extra energy boost needed to enlarge? Possibly when, much later, they developed the rituals, including those surrounding death, that presaged a leap into abstract thought?

And given the plethora of might-have-beens, readers are left to ponder what the world would be like if those who left lighter footprints had been the survivors instead.

Review: Meeting the human ancestors, face to face

Review of: Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins

Author: John Gurche

Publisher: Yale University Press

Source: Library

Grade: A

I’m with Alice (the girl of Wonderland fame) who wondered what the use was of books without pictures. Or conversations. And paleoartist John Gurche provides plenty of both in his magnificent coffee table-sized book of anthropological art, Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins.

Gurche’s sculptures and paintings of humankind’s ancestral species (hominins) are on view in the Smithsonian Institution’s Hall of Human Origins, as well as the pages of National Geographic and other publications and television specials.  In Shaping Humanity, he walks readers through his process in creating the sculptures for the Smithsonian, starting with skull and skeleton casts through the making of their eyeballs.

Yes, he makes his own eyeballs, explaining “I used to purchase artificial eyes, and when I would sometimes ask for a size outside the range common in living humans the response on the other end of the phone would first be silence, and then, in a somewhat suspicious tone, the question ‘Who is this eye for’?

“The eyes, more than any other area, must carry the illusion of life, or the sculpture will be dead, a silicone and acrylic anatomical model with no life or magic,” he writes. "There must be a sentience in the eyes, a feeling that there is someone in there.”

And although casting the acrylic eyes is a time-consuming project, full of room for mistakes, the results are worth the effort. Any defective eyes, he notes, make great Halloween decorations!

Neadertal: wikipedia

A regular at fossil excavations, with extensive dissection experience, Gurche uses the most current scientific available for his reproductions. But science can only go so far, leaving the artist to make judgments about details such as skin color, hair covering, even ear lobe placement, for which no fossil information is available.

And then, of course, there are toes, those small bones that are apt to get lost over the millennia that passed between the death of the hominin and the time its remains are discovered by modern humans.

Exactly what did the toes of Homo erectus, for example, the first hominin species known to have left the ancestral African homeland, look like? Following the scientific literature, Gurche made a best guess during the creation of his bronze statue of a female Homo erectus for the Smithsonian.

Lacking direct evidence, he used examples from what was believed to be a related species to construct feet with the big toes slightly shorter than the rest, only to have new research upset that model. The statue’s toes got chiseled to make way for a thoroughly modern-looking foot for a more than one million-year-old woman.

Gurche leads readers through both science and art in his reconstruction of nearly a dozen human ancestral and related species. And although the language of Shaping Humanity is among the most accessible I have found in books on human evolution aimed at lay readers, he includes a helpful glossary, as well as extensive bibliography for those interested in further research. In all, it’s a book both gorgeous and thought-provoking.

Review: The life after death of celebrity fossils

Review of: Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils

Author: Lydia Pyne

Publisher: Viking

Source: Library

Grade: A

What does it take to turn a handful of anonymous bones into a personality? And not just any personality, but a celebrity with a worldwide following and century-long notoriety? A great discovery story helps. So does a catchy nickname. Add being in the right place at the right time, stir in a whole lot of luck, and those bones may rock the world, as science historian Lydia Pyne explains in Seven Skeletons, an examination of the after-lives of famous (and sometimes infamous) fossils that have changed our thinking about the course of human evolution.

The story opens with a jaw-dropping (literally) introduction to the Taung Child, who (or rather, whose skull) Pyne met on a winter morning in a human paleontology classroom in South Africa.

“(The professor) had pulled out several well-known fossil specimens from the university’s fossil vault,” Pyne writes, “setting them on flat wooden trays atop red velvet, showing them off like rare gems awaiting our appraisal as we filed into the room to take our seats. As students, we all had seen casts of these fossils before, but these were The Real Thing.”

Then, to the students’ amazement, the professor, one who had long been the Taung Child’s advocate in the face of paleontological skeptics of the 1920’s, “moved the little mandible up and down, clicking the fossil’s tiny front teeth together, and launched into a well-rehearsed comedy act of sorts that had the Taung Child telling a few jokes, commenting on the weather, and offering some insights about the early days of paleoanthropology. . . ” to its audience.

It was as if the bones of a hominin child, dead for millions of years, had a life of their own. As in a way, they did.

And they had a story to tell, as do the other bones in Pyne’s celebrity fossil ensemble – the Old Man of La Chapelle, representing the Neanderthals; Australopithecus Lucy, the show’s acknowledged diva; “hobbit” hominin Flo; the mysteriously absent Peking Man; and ingénue newcomer Sediba, also from South Africa, discovered in almost Hollywood style by a young boy and his dog.

The story even has a villain, the piece of fakery known as Piltdown Man, whose finding in the early 20^th century initially upstaged the Taung Child. Although no less a figure than Charles Darwin had suggested Africa as the original home of humanity, European chauvinism rejected the possibility of ancestors from the dark continent. By the end of the 19^th century, France and Germany could lay claim to a near-missing link between apes and humans in the form of Neanderthals. But Great Britain longed for a missing link of its own – an “earliest Englishman,” as newspapers would proclaim.

Paleologists expected a large brain to be the first indication of pre-human origins. The discovery of an apparently big-brained near-human fossil in an English gravel pit in 1912 fit expectations as if made to order. As in fact, it was.

Piltdown image: wikipedia

How could the Taung Child, a “moppet” of a bipedal but small-brained hominin discovered in South Africa in 1924, compete? Not until scientific work in the 1950’s revealed Piltdown to be a hoax did the Child take its proper place in prehistory as a human ancestor on a par with Lucy and her like.

(One of the illustrations of this post is a 1915 painting of Piltdown's finder and proponents. On the wall behind them, a portrait of Charles Darwin looks on, perhaps in horror.)

“The story of the Taung Child is practically apocryphal in paleoanthropology,” Pyne writes. “These stories function as part of the science’s own identify and values (‘good science wins out over detractors’), but the stories also serve to create a heroic persona around (the discoverer) and the fossil itself. . . Just as sagas and epic journeys are ways for audiences to become invested in the hero’s quest, the journey of the Taung Child was embraced into a cultural narrative.”

As significant as the fossils’ stories is the trend begun by the Taung Child’s discoverer, Dr. Raymond Dart, of making fossils and knowledge about them, more accessible. The change only accelerates as the newest South African fossils, including Sediba, are made available through new methodologies such as 3-D scanning and printing, as well as timely publication of results and more open access to the fossils themselves. It’s becoming a whole new way of doing science.

I’ve been a fan of Pyne and her writing since I read her first book, The Last Lost World, co-written with her science journalist father, Stephen J. Pyne. Seven Skeletons is a smaller and more accessible volume, but it lives up to the stature of its sibling book with an equally thought-provoking look at the nature of science, history, culture, and, yes, celebrity.