New Species of Hominin Found in Phillipines

From a story in UPI:

At the completion of excavations on the island of Luzon, scientists had unearthed several teeth, part of a thigh bone, and a few hand and foot bones. The fossils comprise the "the earliest direct evidence of a human presence in the Philippines," according to the latest study.

The fossilized bones, dated to between 67,000 and 50,000 years ago, feature a mix of anatomical characteristics, some that recall more primitive hominins and others similar to those of more modern human species.

Callao Cave is toward the northern tip of Luzon. The corresponding article from Nature seems to indicate that the fossil remains from this cave are “all over the map.”  The premolars indicate size and shape affinities to later Homo, while some of the characteristics are australopithecine (!).  This is also true of the hand elements. 

Although we have found human fossil remains in East Asia for some time (1896 on), there are large gaps in our knowledge, especially from the first appearance of Homo erectus to the advent of modern humans.  These fossils, while giving us more  information than we had, muddy the waters a bit.  Once upon a time, Grover Kranz (RIP) tried to convince me that australopithecines could be found in East Asia, but his evidence was based on a badly crushed occipital bone. 

It is clear from the presence of H. floresiensis and the current evidence that primitive traits were being retained in some groups but, as the authors point out, we need quite a bit more fossil material to make any definitive assessments. 

The Brain of Little Foot

Science Daily had a story just a bit back about research done on the new information surrounding the Little Foot australopithecine remains from South Africa.  They write:

MicroCT scans of the Australopithecus fossil known as Little Foot shows that the brain of this ancient human relative was small and shows features that are similar to our own brain and others that are closer to our ancestor shared with living chimpanzees.

While the brain features structures similar to modern humans -- such as an asymmetrical structure and pattern of middle meningeal vessels -- some of its critical areas such as an expanded visual cortex and reduced parietal association cortex points to a condition that is distinct from us.

One of the things that comes out in the paper is how much reorganization of the cranium we share with the higher primates, suggesting that quite a bit of brain evolution occurred prior to the Last common ancestor. The paper is currently free (at least I had no trouble accessing it) at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2018.11.009. If not, the abstract is.

New Chinese Material Pushes the Exit From Africa to 2.1 mya

Nature is reporting research on new Chinese material that strongly suggests that the Georgian site of Dmanisi is not the earliest location to which migration out of Africa went.  Here is the abstract:

Considerable attention has been paid to dating the earliest appearance of hominins outside Africa. The earliest skeletal and artefactual evidence for the genus Homo in Asia currently comes from Dmanisi, Georgia, and is dated to approximately 1.77–1.85 million years ago (Ma)1. Two incisors that may belong to Homo erectus come from Yuanmou, south China, and are dated to 1.7 Ma2; the next-oldest evidence is an H. erectus cranium from Lantian (Gongwangling)—which has recently been dated to 1.63 Ma3—and the earliest hominin fossils from the Sangiran dome in Java, which are dated to about 1.5–1.6 Ma4. Artefacts from Majuangou III5 and Shangshazui6 in the Nihewan basin, north China, have also been dated to 1.6–1.7 Ma. Here we report an Early Pleistocene and largely continuous artefact sequence from Shangchen, which is a newly discovered Palaeolithic locality of the southern Chinese Loess Plateau, near Gongwangling in Lantian county. The site contains 17 artefact layers that extend from palaeosol S15—dated to approximately 1.26 Ma—to loess L28, which we date to about 2.12 Ma. This discovery implies that hominins left Africa earlier than indicated by the evidence from Dmanisi.

For the new site sequence data, we don't have any hominin remains so we don't know exactly what these folks looked like but the tools are very primitive.  A section from a companion piece reads thus:

The identity of their makers is, for now, unclear: no hominin bones have been recovered at Shangchen. “We would all love to find a hominin — preferably one with a tool in its hand,” says Dennell. Homo erectus is one possibility, because some of the earliest members of this species were found at Dmanisi. But Dennell thinks that the Shangchen toolmakers belonged to an earlier species in the genus Homo.

Petraglia and Rezek both say that the age of the tools — not to mention the possibility that hominins arrived in China even earlier than the 2.12-million-year mark — suggests that the toolmaker was a species such as Homo habilis. This relatively small-brained hominin is thought to have been confined to Africa between around 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago.

Jungers holds open the possibility that the Shangchen toolmaker was a species of Australopithecus, a group of more ape-like hominins to which the iconic fossil Lucy belongs. So far, all Australopithecus fossils have been discovered in Africa.

Before his death, Grover Krantz argued for the presence of Australopithecus in East Asia but could never get anyone to come on board with him. Everyone was pretty content to label what was coming out of the ground as Homo erectus.I think it would be a stretch if the hominins from Shangchen were australopithecines since we don't see any advanced species of Australopithecus in East or North Africa between 2 and 2.5 mya.  In fact, Au. boisei drops out around 2.1, likely out-competed by early Homo.

Nonetheless, something was making stone tools in China at 2.1 mya and that is “Yuuuuge” news. 

Australopithecus sediba Voted Off the Island

This does not surprise me.  Science Magazine has a short story which suggests strongly that the characteristics in Au. sediba render it unsuitable for a possible ancestor to the genus Homo. 

With its fossils dated to 1.98 million years ago, Au. sediba is too young to be directly ancestral to all members of the genus Homo. But Berger and his colleagues proposed in 2010, and again in 2013 in six papers in Science, that given the many humanlike traits in Au. sediba’s face, teeth, and body, the Malapa fossils were a better candidate than Lucy or other East African fossils to be ancestral to Homo erectus, a direct human ancestor that appeared 1.8 million years ago.

In a talk here, though, paleoanthropologist Bill Kimbel of Arizona State University in Tempe analyzed the most complete skull of Au. sediba and systematically shot down the features claimed to link it to early Homo. Kimbel noted that the skull was that of a juvenile—a “7th grader”—whose face and skull were still developing. In his analysis, with paleoanthropologist Yoel Rak of Tel Aviv University in Israel, he concluded that the child already showed traits that linked it most closely to the South African australopithecine Au. africanus, a species that lived in South Africa 3 million to 2.3 million years ago. And had it survived to adulthood, its humanlike facial traits would have changed to become even more like those of Au. africanus.

For example, the breadth of the young Au. sediba’s cheekbones appears narrow, as in early Homo. But by studying other australopithecine, ape, and Homo fossils to see how features of the cheekbones change as individuals grow and chewing muscles develop, Kimbel and Rak could predict how the boy’s face and skull would have looked if he’d grown up to be an adult. The resemblance to Au. africanus is so striking, in fact, that Kimbel thinks Au. sediba is a closely related “sister species” of Au. africanus—and not a long-lost human relative. “We don’t believe … that Au. sediba has a unique relationship to the genus Homo,” says Kimbel.

At this point, it is pretty hard to tell where a precursor might be found. We know that there was considerable variability in australopithecines throughout the Plio-Pleistocene but, as of yet, no good candidate has arisen.What seems to be clear, however, is that there is a general trend toward more modern morphology in the pelvis and hands, as exhibited by Au. sediba.  Whether or not these characteristics are present in other specimens of Au. sediba is, however, unknown.  As Kimbel notes, we need an adult one to see for sure. 

Lucy Fell From a Tree?

New research from John Kappelman suggests that the australopithecine specimen known as Lucy, the famous find from the 1970s that put hominins on the map, died from a fall from a tree.  Jen Viegas writes:

In order to assess Lucy's cause of death, Kappelman and his team studied her remains, which include parts of her skull, hand, axial skeleton, pelvis and foot. The scientists used computed tomographic scans to analyze these parts in detail, and then compared the findings to various documented clinical cases where the cause of death is clearly noted.

In addition to discovering that Lucy's cause of death is consistent with a fall from a high place -- presumed to have been from a tall tree due to where her remains were found in the Afar region of Ethiopia -- the fossil clues presented another key piece of evidence.

Fractures in Lucy's upper arms suggest that she stretched out her arms in an attempt to break her fall. This tells us that she was very much alive when she toppled to her demise, and did not die of a heart attack or from some other cause beforehand.

Somehow, given the important role that she has portrayed in the pantheon of human evolution, and the lightning rod she has been for creationists, it seems sad that she came to such an ignominious end. Oh well, we all have to die somehow. 

Humans and Meat

New research by Dan Lieberman and Katherine Zink strongly supports what we have suspected for quite some time, that a substantial change in diet of early hominins led to rapid evolution in brain size and social structure.  Brian Handwerk of Smithsonian writes:

After measuring chewing and biting in modern humans, scientists found that a diet that includes one-third raw meat requires far less chewing and bite force exertion than meals of tubers alone. The researchers suggest that with the advent of stone tools, ancient human relatives were able to tenderize their food and make it far easier to chew and digest.

“An important step was just using a simple stone tool to cut our meat and bash our vegetables,” says Harvard University evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman.

The idea that fire allowed humans to cook their food and soften it that way has been around for quite some time and arguments usually point to the widespread use of fire toward the end of the Middle Pleistocene as the point where this begins to happen. This is the first time I have seen this argument extended to the early Pleistocene.The article continues:

“If I gave you a piece of raw goat, you would just chew and chew it, like a piece of bubble gum,” Lieberman explains. “Human teeth don't have the kind of shearing ability that, say, dogs' teeth have, and that is necessary to break down meat. With human chewing it just stays in a clump, and studies have shown how that makes digestion far less efficient.”

Cooking makes it easier to chew meat, but evidence suggests that the regular use of fire for cooking didn't pop up until perhaps half a million years ago—far later than the changes to H. erectus. Also, evidence from archaeological and paleontological research points to a spike in human meat consumption by at least 2.6 million years ago.

However, we have plenty of evidence that hominins had begun making stone tools some 3.3 million years ago. Those tools could have been used as pounders to tenderize foods, a practice seen in modern chimps. Flaked tools can also slice foods into easily chewable pieces or remove skin, cartilage and other bits that are harder to chew.

“It's not a coincidence that the oldest evidence for eating meat shows up around the same time as tools,” Lieberman says. “We know that the evolution of meat-eating basically required stone tools. And that had a huge effect on our biology.”

When my wife makes a dish involving chicken breasts, the first thing she does is pound them.  This makes it much softer and easier to eat. 

This is one of the principle reasons I tend to regard arguments in favor of vegetarianism somewhat warily. It is simply not in our nature or physiology to be that way. You can be one, if you wish, but that is not the natural state of things.

Elizabeth Mitchell, Homo naledi and the Straw Man

Elizabeth Mitchell, of Answers in Genesis, has written the rebuttal to the eLife Science paper on the new hominin find from South Africa, Homo naledi.  Sadly, her opening premise suffers from a fatal logical error, and all that follows proceeds from this premise. She writes:

Berger’s team believes the bones paint a mosaic picture of a species mixing human-like “Homo” and australopithecine ape features. Composites constructed from four partial skulls in the assemblage have small brain capacities—560 cc and 465 cc—that overlap the usual brain capacities of australopithecines. Such braincases are much smaller than those seen in most archaic humans1 and less than half the average for modern humans.

Hidden in this paragraph is a theme which runs throughout the post: that australopithecines were apes.  Compare, for example, these passages.  First, what Berger et al. write about the shoulder girdle:

The shoulders are configured largely like those of australopiths. The vertebrae are most similar to Pleistocene members of the genus Homo, whereas the ribcage is wide distally like Au. afarensis.

Now, what Mitchell writes:

Homo naledi’s shoulder joints and curved finger bones are typical of tree-swinging apes. Its flared hips are typical of australopithecine apes. The lower ribcage widens just like the ribcage of australopithecine apes.

When Raymond Dart discovered the first australopithecine specimen, in 1924, the first thing he noticed was that

it was not an ape.

As I wrote in more detailed fashion here, the find had several characteristics simply not found on any ape. First, the foramen magnum, the hole through which the spinal cord exits the head, was not at the back of the head, as in apes, but was on the bottom of the skull. Second, the teeth were not those of an ape, but had the dimensions of human teeth. In apes, even infant apes, the canines extend beyond the tooth row. In this skull, they did not. Third, the skull was simply too large to be that of an infant ape, based on the development. Fourth, there had never been found any apes in South Africa. Dart was a good anatomist and knew that what he had was not quite human—the skull was too small for that and the front of the face was too ape-like, but he also knew he did not have an ape.  That is why Dart gave it the name he did: Australopithecus africanus, “Southern Ape-Man from Africa.”   

Since this discovery some ninety one years ago,  the validity of this genus has only been reinforced, with the additional discoveries of more than ten different species of Australopithecus, all with variations on the same theme, and all with the following non-ape characteristics:

• human-like teeth (although quite large in some species)
• modern double-s shaped vertebral column
• short, wide hips that resemble humans and not apes
• a valgus knee, with the femoral-tibial articulation at an angle, instead of straight up, as in apes
• a laterally-bending proximal femur to accomodate the wide hips and the connexion to the tibia and
• a modern gait (reflected in preserved 3.6 million year old footprints at Laetoli)

There are countless other small anatomical characteristics that separate apes from these early hominins but the ones outlined above are enough to demonstrate that the initial premise of Dr. Mitchell is, simply, incorrect.

But there is something deeper at work here.  Pick up a paper on australopithecines, any paper, written in the last sixty years and you will find discussions of how these forms differed from each other and, more importantly, how they differ from apes.  Are they human?  Manifestly not.  In some early species, there are characteristics that are, indeed, intermediate between apes and early humans. But even that gives rise to the concept of transitional traits and forms in the fossil record.  That is where the problem lies.  If australopithecines can be painted as apes from the outset, then the task of showing that the new Homo naledi specimen is not different from australopithecines, and therefore, apes, becomes easier.

Then she writes something startling:

The question then is what is Homo naledi? Even the evolutionary anthropologists are not in agreement on that point, though most seem to have jumped on the Homo bandwagon. Yet while the fossil record contains many legitimate examples of extinct varieties of humans, such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis, after assessing the published reports, we beg to differ with Berger’s assessment of Homo naledi. We do not believe Homo naledi deserves its Homo designation. [Emphasis Mine]

When did they these fossil forms go extinct? There is no evidence of extinction in the accounts in the Bible. Other writers do not seem to think they went extinct during the flood.  David Menton is firm in his conviction that Homo erectus represents a post-Babel population:

Neanderthals buried their dead and may have worn jewelry. Homo erectus seems to have divvied up jobs to prepare food and sailed the high seas. Even with little to go on, we can be fairly certain the Denisovans wore jewelry, and the much-maligned “hobbits” left tools useful for dicing up lunch. All uniquely human traits—traits that show creatures made in the image of God.

Which one of the biblical patriarchs had an angular torus, large brow ridges, thick cranial bones and a cranial capacity of 900 cubic centimeters? All of these traits would have stood out in any population. The variation present that Menton squeezes into one happy family vastly exceeds that present in any other naturally-occurring genus on the planet, let alone species. 

She finishes her post with the same, time and time again rebutted argument that the reason that Homo naledi is not a human is similar to australopithecines and, therefore, is nothing more than an ape.  This is the vacuum chamber/wind tunnel that AiG operates within.  Despite clear, decisive anatomical evidence to the contrary, the writers keep telling themselves that australopithecines were nothing more than apes.  The argument still has no credibility.

Darrel Falk's Post on Homo naledi

Darrel Falk has a short post on Homo naledi, in which he discusses the nature of the science and misconceptions that we have had with regard to human evolution.  He writes:

Interestingly, besides all the PR associated with the discovery, it is documented by likely the finest Nova/National Geographic production I have ever seen on human evolution, which is available to view online here. I've watched the first hour of the two hour special which will appear next Wednesday evening (Sept 16) on PBS. I love it because it shows in absolutely exciting detail how the science is done. It also shows how wrong earlier paleontologists were regarding the nature of our early ancestors—they weren't 'killers' as depicted in early film and scientific literature. They were plant eaters with likely the occasional meat meal. The natural forces associated with the evolution of the human body were NOT selection for the fittest killers. Indeed, although not specifically discussed in the film (I've not quite finished it), cooperation was likely a much more important shaper of the distinctively human mind than competition.

As was outlined in the Nova special, it was the work of Bob Brain, who discovered that marks in the skull that had been attributed to interpersonal violence on the part of australopithecines, were, in fact, created by large cat predators.

My BioLogos post on Homo naledi will be out shortly.

BioLogos Blurb about Australopithecus deyiremeda

My blurb about the new australopithecine is included in the Saturday Science Links at the BioLogos site.  There will be a longer piece next week.

New Hominin Species Coeval with Au. afarensis

A new hominin has been announced by Haile-Selassie and colleagues.  Here is the abstract from the Nature paper¹:

Middle Pliocene hominin species diversity has been a subject of debate over the past two decades, particularly after the naming of Australopithecus bahrelghazali and Kenyanthropus platyops in addition to the well-known species Australopithecus afarensis. Further analyses continue to support the proposal that several hominin species co-existed during this time period. Here we recognize a new hominin species (Australopithecus deyiremeda sp. nov.) from 3.3–3.5-million-year-old deposits in the Woranso–Mille study area, central Afar, Ethiopia. The new species from Woranso–Mille shows that there were at least two contemporaneous hominin species living in the Afar region of Ethiopia between 3.3 and 3.5million years ago, and further confirms early hominin taxonomic diversity in eastern Africa during the Middle Pliocene epoch. The morphology of Au. deyiremeda also reinforces concerns related to dentognathic (that is, jaws and teeth) homoplasy in Plio–Pleistocene hominins, and shows that some dentognathic features traditionally associated with Paranthropus and Homo appeared in the fossil record earlier than previously thought.

The Washington Post has a write-up of the new find, which they glibly refer to as “An Ethel for Lucy.” Rachel Feltman:

Haile-Selassie and his co-authors believe the find should encourage reexamination of other possible instances of pre-Homo cohabitation.  Two other species have been proposed as living at the same time as Australopithecus afarensis -- Australopithecus bahrelghazali and Kenyanthropus platyops -- but both remain controversial, with some scientists saying they aren't different enough from A. afarensis to constitute a new species. And in a previous expedition, Haile-Selassie himself found a partial foot that he believed was from the same time period -- but not the same species -- as Lucy. Unlike the jaw reported in Nature, the foot didn't provide enough evidence to name a new species.

As noted with the Ledi jaw, there seems to be quite of a bit of morphological variability and experimentation going on at the Plio-Pleistocene boundary.   

¹Haile-Selassie, Y., Gibert, L., Melillo, S.M., Ryan, T.M., Alene, M., Deino, A., Levin, N.E., Scott, G., Saylor, B.Z. (2015) New species from Ethiopia further expands Middle Pliocene hominin diversity. Nature. 521(7553): 483-488.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14448

BioLogos, Ken Ham and David Menton—A Response, Part VI: The Conclusion

This concludes my response to David Menton's post on human origins, which has been a chore to read and respond to. Menton's conclusion is so short, I will post it in its entirety:

Why then are there continued efforts to make apes out of man and man out of apes? In one of the most remarkably frank and candid assessments of the whole subject and the methodology of paleoanthropology, Dr. David Pilbeam (a distinguished professor of anthropology) suggested the following:

Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories. Rather the theories are more statements about us and ideology than about the past. Paleoanthropology reveals more about how humans view themselves than it does about how humans came about. But that is heresy.

Oh, that these heretical words were printed as a warning on every textbook, magazine, newspaper article, and statue that presumes to deal with the bestial origin of man!
No, we are not descended from apes. Rather, God created man as the crown of His creation on Day 6. We are a special creation of God, made in His image, to bring Him glory. What a revolution this truth would make if our evolutionized culture truly understood it!

First, David Pilbeam wrote that almost forty years ago, and yet Menton appears to hold it up as current scholarship.  You wouldn't do that in any legitimate scientific discipline.  It may be a good example of “look what we thought back then,” in a historical sense and as compare and contrast but not current thought.  This is a typical young earth creationist tactic: find a useful quote and keep using it, long after it is no longer true or has been debunked.  As such, it is no different than using (or abusing) Solly Zuckerman's quote from the early 1970s.  I saw Duane Gish at the University of Tennessee a few years back he used Zuckerman's quote as well.  Once a quote is found, it makes the rounds.

Pilbeam's quote comes from a review of Richard Leakey's book Origins and is found in the American Scientist (Vol. 66, No. 3, May-June 1978).  Let's see what Pilbeam thinks about palaeoanthropology as of 1995:

The discovery of an australopithecine mandible together with a middle Pliocene fauna 2,500 km west of the Rift Valley considerably extends the known range of these early hominids and raises several interesting issues. The Chad specimen is most similar to its East African contemporary A. afarensis. Nevertheless, in certain features-mandibular morphology, premolar roots and enamel thickness- it differs from the described hypodigm of A. afarensis . Given the genetic and morphological differences now recognized between allopatric populations within, for example, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, Pongo pygmaeus and Papio hamadryas as well as other African mammals, it is not surprising that contemporaneous hominid populations as geographically distant as Chad and Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania would differ in morphology, regardless of whether they are classified as species or subspecies. Here we do not choose to name a new species, recognizing that more detailed comparisons are necessary before the taxonomy of this Bahr el Ghazal hominid can be resolved.¹

Here, he and the other authors of the paper clearly feel that the state of the discipline is sound enough to make educated pronouncements about the fossil record.  In all of Pilbeam's papers, it is clear that he is committed “evolutionist.” As with all palaeoanthropologists, he accepts that there may be aspects of the study that are not known or poorly understood but, of the central tenet: that humans have evolved, there is clearly no doubt.  Thirty six years is a long time in the history of a scientific discipline.

How good is our understanding of the human fossil record now?  Here is what another distinguished professor of anthropology, Richard Klein, has to say:

In the absence of fossils, Darwin could not have predicted the fundamental pattern of human evolution, but his evolutionary theory readily accommodates the pattern we now recognize. Probably the most fundamental finding is that the australopithecines, who existed from at least 4.5 million to 2 million years ago, were distinguished from apes primarily by anatomical specializations for habitual bipedalism, and it was only after 2 million years ago that people began to acquire the other traits, including our unusually large brains, that readily distinguish us from the living apes. The greatly expanded fossil record shows that the australopithecines comprised multiple species, and it suggests that our own genus, Homo, descended from one of these about 2.5 million years ago.²

Note the phrase “the greatly expanded fossil record.” Recall the two compendia on this fossil record I mentioned in the first part of this response. Menton clearly is unfamiliar with this record and his attempts to discredit it are shallow, as a result.

To recap:

• He claims that “evolutionists” just accept similarities between fossil bones of living men and fossilized apes as evidence of ancestry. Such a statement betrays a lack of understanding of homology, functional morphology and the modern study of evolutionary systematics. It glosses over important skeletal structures that arose during our ancestry and which separate our direct ancestors from all apes, fossil or otherwise.
• He massively under-emphasizes the size of the human fossil record and the complexity of it, simply dismissing it with no examination or explanation.
• He suggests that research projects cannot be undertaken based on pictures and measurements of fossil hominins.  This is absurd.  There is no scientific discipline that does not rely on published reports.  Moreover, this is a peculiar statement coming from a professor of anatomy, who must have, during his tenure as a professor, read countless articles on aspects of anatomy in which there were published measurements and pictures.  What was he to make of those?  Did they not constitute real research on which he based his own?
• He mistakenly calls a spider monkey an ape, bringing into question his understanding of basic primate taxonomy.  Further, while his anatomical specialty seems to have been at the cellular level, he betrays a peculiar lack of understanding of human morphological functional interrelatedness by suggesting that the carrying angle of hominins can be dissociated from hip, limb and cranial morphology.  While it may be true that some apes have a similar carrying angle to humans, not a one of them has a foramen magnum at the base of the skull, angled femoral condyles, or a flat, wide pelvis.  Further, these derived traits show up in the fossil record around 3.7 million years ago.  How did he miss these things?  When I took gross anatomy and physiology, I was required to learn not just developmental biology, but functional and comparative morphology.  Has he forgotten his?
• He writes that Ardipithecus, Orrorin, Sahelanthropus, and Kenyanthropus all have “obviously ape skulls, ape pelvises, and ape hands and feet” despite the fact that only one of these finds preserves the skeletal parts he references. This suggests that he never even bothered to look at the reports detailing these finds.  To make such errant, blanket statements about them is incompetent and sloppy. 
• He cherry-picks quotes that support his position and ignores ones that do not.  While he calls A. afarensis “long-armed knuckle-walkers” and suggests that palaeoanthropologists Stern and Susman³ argue that it is an ape, he carefully ignores other paragraphs from their article, in which they clearly argue that it is transitional between apes and humans, even using the phrase “missing link.”  He then (again, oddly for an anatomist) ignores other critical morphology of A. afarensis that clearly indicates its transitional status.
• He writes that Neandertals were considered human but have recently been denigrated to non-human status, when in fact, that is precisely backwards.  From their initial discoveries, Neandertals were considered subhuman^4,5 and it has only been within the last thirty years that their relationship to modern humans has been reassessed, inviting claims by some that they represent simply an earlier version of us and incorporating new genetic knowledge of interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans⁶.  

This is a badly written post that shows little in the way of actual research.  He seems to misunderstand basic anatomy, gets fossil descriptions wrong, quote-mines to show only what appears to support his position and seems to show no understanding of basic evolutionary biology.  His demeanor is pompous and contemptuous and his treatment of the subject matter invites scorn.

I have absolutely no doubt that Dr. Menton is a bible-believing Christian and that, as such, he is an asset to the kingdom.  I also believe that, like so many other young-earth creationists I am familiar with, he treats the fossil material and the discipline of evolutionary biology with dishonesty and lack of integrity.  This saddens me since it, as with all of creation, reflects the goodness, glory and, importantly, the awesomeness of God.  Further, it is a bad witness and pushes people away from God. 

¹Brunet, M, Beauvilain, A, Coppens, Y, Heintz, E, Moutaye, A, Pilbeam, D. (2014) The first australopithecine 2,500 kilometres west of the Rift Valley (Chad). Nature 378, November 16, 1995
²Klein, R. G. (2009). Darwin and the recent African origin of modern humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(38), 16007-16009.
³Stern Jr, J. T., & Susman, R. L. (1983). The locomotor anatomy of Australopithecus afarensis. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 60(3), 279-317.
⁴Boule, M. (1913). L'homme fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints: Masson.
⁵Virchow, Rudolf. Untersuchung der Neanderthal Schädels. 1872.
⁶For example: Sankararaman S, Patterson N, Li H, Pääbo S, Reich D (2012) The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans. PLoS Genet 8(10): e1002947. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947
⁷Krings, M., Stone, A., Schmitz, R. W., Krainitzki, H., Stoneking, M., & Pääbo, S. (1997). Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans. Cell, 90(1), 19-30.

BioLogos, Ken Ham and David Menton—A Response, Part III

This is the third part of my response to David Menton's post on human origins, cited by Ken Ham in his swipe at BioLogos.  Part One his here, Part two is here.We have been proceeding, point by point.

Point 6.  Menton writes:

Evolutionists are particularly interested in the angle at which the femur and the tibia meet at the knee (called the carrying angle). Humans are able to keep their weight over their feet while walking because their femurs converge toward the knees, forming a carrying angle of approximately nine degrees with the tibia (in other words, we’re sort of knock-kneed). In contrast, chimps and gorillas have widely separated, straight legs with a carrying angle of essentially zero degrees. These animals manage to keep their weight over their feet when walking by swinging their body from side to side in the familiar “ape walk.”

Evolutionists assume that fossil apes with a high carrying angle (humanlike) were bipedal and thus evolved into man. Certain australopithecines (apelike creatures) are considered to have walked like us and thus to be our ancestors largely because they had a high carrying angle. But high carrying angles are not confined to humans—they are also found on some modern apes that walk gracefully on tree limbs and only clumsily on the ground. 

Living apes with a high carrying angle (values comparable to man) include such apes as the orangutan and spider monkey—both adept tree climbers and capable of only an apelike bipedal gait on the ground. The point is that there are living tree-dwelling apes and monkeys with some of the same anatomical features that evolutionists consider to be definitive evidence for bipedality, yet none of these animals walks like man and no one suggests they are our ancestors or descendants. 

Let's leave aside the fact that the spider monkey is not an ape, although it speaks to Menton's understanding of primate taxonomy.  Menton follows the above quoted passage with some of the differences between the human feet and hips and, largely, gets them right.  But that makes his comments about the carrying angle all the more peculiar.  In hominin biomechanics, the legs do not operate independently of the hip, or of the feet.  He comments that there are apes that seem to have similar carrying angles and yet can't walk bipedally to save their lives.  He even writes that, given the ape pelvis, there is no way to walk like a human.  He is right about their hips, they are long and narrow.  He is right about their feet, they have opposable halluxes and the toes are not straight and narrow.  These features, in combination would keep anyone from walking upright like a human, no matter what their carrying angle was.  Walking gracefully on tree limbs is not the same thing as walking gracefully on the ground.  He isolates the carrying angle and seems to think that, because it might be similar in apes and humans, our analyses of the gait differences between the two are suspect.  That is absurd. 

And this brings up another problem.  He states that australopithecines were considered bipeds because of their carrying angle.  What he doesn't mention is that we have many fossil finds that indicate that not only did they have high carrying angles, they had all of the other adaptations for bipedalism.  They had human-like hips, and feet that are mostly human-like and, unmentioned by Menton, STS-14, an almost complete australopithecine vertebral column, shows that they had the double-s curve of the spine that we have and that are critical to bipedal locomotion.

Further, in his discussion of the skull, he ignores the placement of the foramen magnum, which is critical to understanding primate morphology.  The foramen magnum is the hole in the skull through which the spinal cord descends into the body.  In non-human primates (all non-human primates!) the hole is at the back of the skull, to facilitate quadrupedal locomotion.  In all hominins, fossil or otherwise, the hole is at the bottom of the skull, reflecting a bipedal gait.  This is yet another thing that raised a red flag with Raymond Dart on the Taung skull—the hole was at the bottom of the skull, as in humans, not the back, as in baboons—and he noted it accordingly.  This is a critical difference between apes and humans and Menton fails to mention it. 

Point 7: The second major section of Menton's article is “Only Three Ways to Make an Ape-Man.” He writes:

Knowing from Scripture that God didn’t create any apemen, there are only three ways for the evolutionist to create one:

1. Combine ape fossil bones with human fossil bones and declare the two to be one individual—a real “apeman.”
2. Emphasize certain humanlike qualities of fossilized ape bones, and with imagination upgrade apes to be more humanlike.
3. Emphasize certain apelike qualities of fossilized human bones, and with imagination downgrade humans to be more apelike.

These three approaches account for all of the attempts by evolutionists to fill the unbridgeable gap between apes and men with fossil apemen.

This is the hallmark of modern young earth creationism: to jettison all of modern science in favor of a particular and peculiar hermeneutic involving biology and its evolutionary history.  He reasons that since God would not have ever created a transitional form like an “ape-man,” humans must have fabricated them. How exactly does he know that God didn't create “ape-men?”  It is difficult to be charitable toward Menton regarding this section because he is, at once, so pompous, so insulting and engages in so much obfuscation that one is left wondering if he displays any intellectual integrity whatever. For his first point, he dredges up the Piltdown hoax, writing: 

The whole thing turned out to be an elaborate hoax. The skull was indeed human (about 500 years old), while the jaw was that of a modern female orangutan whose teeth had been obviously filed to crudely resemble the human wear pattern. Indeed, the long ape canine tooth was filed down so far that it exposed the pulp chamber, which was then filled in to hide the mischief. It would seem that any competent scientist examining this tooth would have concluded that it was either a hoax or the world’s first root canal! The success of this hoax for over 50 years, in spite of the careful scrutiny of the best authorities in the world, led the human evolutionist Sir Solly Zuckerman to declare: “It is doubtful if there is any science at all in the search for man’s fossil ancestry.”1

The Piltdown hoax celebrated its one hundredth anniversary two years ago, in 2012.  Far and away (in my opinion) is Frank Spencer's account of the hoax, called Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery. Here are details that Menton conveniently leaves out of the account.  When the Piltdown remains were found, there were no dating methods and very few fossil human remains of any kind.  Nonetheless, it sparked controversy when it was discovered by Charles Dawson and, as initially reconstructed by Grafton Elliot Smith, looked remarkably modern in appearance.  It was not until the jaw was found, conveniently missing the ascending ramus, and incorporated into the find that it took on a more ape-like morphology.  Once Piltdown was described, however, it was locked away in a vault and access was very limited. That is where the problems began.  At this point, a critical thing happened.  Dawson died, in 1915.  Common consensus is that Dawson was the perpetrator and took  this information with him to the grave.

As I noted here, as time went by, more and more human ancestor remains were discovered in Africa, Asia and continental Europe.  As this happened, two things became clear: Nothing even remotely resembling Piltdown was found elsewhere and nothing remotely resembling Piltdown was found in England.  As human lineage trees were constructed throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Piltdown's peculiarity grew and researchers struggled to place it within any context.  Franz Weidenreich, in his excellent monograph on the Homo erectus remains from Zhoukoudian, questioned the dating of the find and had mused, even since the 1920s,  that it might be a combination of human and ape parts.  Ales Hrdlicka, the head of the American Museum of Natural History, actually uttered the dreaded word “fake.”

Owing to all of these concerns, in 1949, Kenneth Oakley, then in possession of the ability to use a brand-new dating method, fluorine analysis, was successful in getting access to the skull on the condition that he not damage it in any way.   This analysis suggested that the bones were less than 50,000 years old.  On the strength of this, and since nobody could believe that a fossil ape had roamed the English countryside at this time, further, more in-depth analyses were undertaken.  In addition to using fluorine, he and Wilfred Le Gros Clark were able, for the first time, to use a powerful electron microscope, which had been invented in 1926 but was not in widespread use until around 1939.  It was only then that they could discern what Menton seems to think anyone could have seen: that the teeth had been filed down and the jaw stained and fractured.

Was this embarrassing?  Yup, sure was.  But Menton also fails to mention that the hoax was uncovered by scientists using the scientific method and that the primary reason it was uncovered in the first place is that we knew, even then, enough about human evolution, based on the fossil record, to tell that there was something wrong with Piltdown.  He also fails to mention that the quote by Solly Zuckerman is 44 years old (!) and that Zuckerman even admits that his view was soon in the minority.  Zuckerman, additionally, is remarking on why Piltdown escaped notice, and it is quite clear from his other writings that he accepted human evolution without question.  Menton, once again, fails to include these facts in his post. 

Part IV here.

BioLogos, Ken Ham and David Menton—A Response, Part II

Point 3:

Because of the rarity of fossil hominids, even many of those who specialize in the evolution of man have never actually seen an original hominid fossil, and far fewer have ever had the opportunity to handle or study one. Most scientific papers on human evolution are based on casts of original specimens (or even on published photos, measurements, and descriptions of them).

So?  Menton seems to think that there is a problem with performing analyses based on measurements that other people have taken.  That is nonsense.  A few years back, I was at a conference where a paper was given in which the author was attempting to show the differences between subtle details on various fossil crania.   The striking criticism of the study was that it was based on casts, not on original fossils and, because of this, the analysis was questionable.  When I did my dissertation on the origins of modern human crania, I had measurements of almost all of the original crania that had been taken either by my advisor or by other researchers in the field, who had then published them.  Almost every paper done on human evolution is based on measurements from the original fossils.  The only examples where this is not happening is where the original skulls are missing, as with the Homo erectus remains from Zhoukoudian, which vanished during the run-up to the second world war, or the European Mladec remains, which were destroyed when the allies bombed the castle in which they were housed.  Even in those cases, copious measurements were taken of the originals and, in the case of the Zhoukoudian remains, comprehensive photos were taken. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing analyses based on measurements from the original fossils, especially where the photos are clear and detailed. Bill Howells took detailed measurements of the Near Eastern Qafzeh 6 cranium and then kindly sent me the measurements for it.

All of science is built on what came before and the observations of the those scientists are absolutely invaluable.

Point 4:

Since there is much more prestige in finding an ancestor of man than an ancestor of living apes (or worse yet, merely an extinct ape), there is immense pressure on paleoanthropologists to declare almost any ape fossil to be a “hominid.” As a result, the living apes have pretty much been left to find their own ancestors. 

More nonsense.   There are palaeoprimatologists that spend their entire lives researching the prehistory of non-human primates.  A check of Google Scholar revealed over forty-nine thousand papers dealing with non-human fossil primates.  One of the most productive and exciting aspects of fossil primate studies is the search for the last common ancestor (LCA).  This involves an in-depth study of Miocene apes.  Another area of important study is the origin of the large-bodied primates and the split between the Old World and New World monkeys.  When Menton states that the living apes have been left to find their own ancestors, he forgets the media circus that surrounded the find of the fossil primate Ida, which shed light on the origin of primates as a group. 

Point 5:

In contrast to man, apes tend to have incisor and canine teeth that are relatively larger than their molars. Ape teeth usually have thin enamel (the hardest surface layer of the tooth), while humans generally have thicker enamel. Finally, the jaws tend to be more U-shaped in apes and more parabolic in man.

The problem in declaring a fossil ape to be a human ancestor (i.e., a hominid) on the basis of certain humanlike features of the teeth is that some living apes have these same features and they are not considered to be ancestors of man. Some species of modern baboons, for example, have relatively small canines and incisors and relatively large molars. While most apes do have thin enamel, some apes, such as the orangutans, have relatively thick enamel. Clearly, teeth tell us more about an animal’s diet and feeding habits than its supposed evolution. Nonetheless, thick enamel is one of the most commonly cited criteria for declaring an ape fossil to be a hominid. 

Menton may be correct in his statements about enamel thickness.  Enamel thickness may be a better indicator of dietary adaptations than of morphology, but, where primates are concerned, that is only true of enamel thickness.  It is not true of tooth morphology.  Primatologists have no trouble telling baboons from humans.  They do not have the same features.  Fossil and modern baboons are quite different from humans, even human ancestors.

In 1924, when the well-trained anatomist Raymond Dart was given the deposits that had the Taung child in them, he knew immediately that the teeth did not belong to any fossil baboon.  It wasn't the thickness of the enamel that tipped him off.  The dimensions were similar to those of an infant human and the morphology of the canine and the premolars was like that of humans. Remember, at this time, there were very few other prehuman ancestors with which to compare it, and no australopithecines.

Teeth are, actually, one of the most conservative features on a skeleton and change very little over time.  For example, the Y-5 molar pattern that we have in our mouths is first found in Aegyptopithecus, from the Oligocene epoch, some 30 million years ago. Furthermore, one of the ways we can tell the new world primates from the Old World primates is the number of teeth they have.  New World monkeys have two incisors, one canine, three premolars and three molars in each quarter of the mouth.  All Old World monkeys and apes are lacking the extra premolar (bicuspid, if you are a dentist).  We have this same pattern. 

These differences are either glossed over or not mentioned by Menton, who simply declares, based on enamel thickness, that the teeth are similar and completely disregards information that doesn't fit his narrative. 

Part III here.  

Science Daily: "Anthropologists Confirm Link Between Cranial Anatomy and Two-Legged Walking"

This sort of fits under the category of "gee, who knew" but it is nice to finally have confirmation of something that has been tacitly understood for almost ninety years.  Science Daily writes:

The study, published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, confirms a controversial finding made by anatomist Raymond Dart, who discovered the first known two-legged walking (bipedal) human ancestor, Australopithecus africanus. Since Dart's discovery in 1925, physical anthropologists have continued to debate whether this feature of the cranial base can serve as a direct link to bipedal fossil species.

Okay, first, the controversial nature of this is being massively overstated. There is very little doubt, based on comparative anatomical studies, that the placement of the foramen magnum is directly indicative of the kind of locomotor pattern that a given animal employs. That is what clued Dart in to the whole idea that the Taung child represented a biped in the first place. Its foramen magnum was not in the place that you would have expected it to be if the individual had been either a quadrupedal baboon or extinct ape (of which there were none in South Africa). It was, however, located in the same place as in bipedal humans. Further studies demonstrated that if you placed the Taung skull on a quadrupedal animal, it didn't work. The animal would have its face pointed down all of the time, instead of out, like your average quadruped. Put simply, the Taung child was an early biped and there was no reason to think anything differently.

Once again, comparative anatomical studies to the rescue!

As part of the study, the researchers measured the position of the foramen magnum in 71 species from three mammalian groups: marsupials, rodents and primates. By comparing foramen magnum position broadly across mammals, the researchers were able to rule out other potential explanations for a forward-shifted foramen magnum, such as differences in brain size.

According to the findings, a foramen magnum positioned toward the base of the skull is found not only in humans, but in other habitually bipedal mammals as well. Kangaroos, kangaroo rats and jerboas all have a more forward-shifted foramen magnum compared with their quadrupedal (four-legged walking) close relatives.

Well, now we know for sure...sort of.