Dave Frayer: Who’re You Calling a Neanderthal?

Palaeoanthropologist Dave Frayer has written a nice piece in—yes, I know I said would not post from here but I have to, just this once—The New York Times, on the Neandertal in modern society. Interestingly, he uses the "th" spelling, which is uncommon among palaeoanthropologists who deal with this area.  He writes:

The “Neanderthals are inferior” attitude traces back to their earliest descriptions in the mid-1800s when the first Neanderthal was labeled as “freak” or an “idiot” or “incapable of moral and religious conception.” For many, the discoveries after 1865 confirmed these labels. Even the majority of human paleontologists supported this view.

As many palaeoanthropologists have pointed out, the principle reason for this is that they did not want to consider the fact that the Neandertals might be ancestral to modern humans.  Aside from mentioning the recent genetic studies that find Neandertal gene markers in modern humans, Frayer mentions something not explicated in recent news stories about Neandertals: language:

Another key to the language question is brain lateralization. Language is mostly on the left side, in the ear region. Someone who has suffered a stroke in this region often has impaired language ability, as well as paralysis on the right side of the body, because the left side of the brain controls that, too.

This lateralization is a hallmark of modern humans and is reflected in handedness. All humans have a right-hand-to-left-hand ratio of 9 to 1. Our nearest ape relatives lack this hand laterality, along with the modern FOXP2 sequence, but Neanderthals had both. Their 9-to-1 ratio was identical to all modern humans. The implication for all this is that Neanderthals could speak.

This is critically important to the idea of Neandertals being like us.  We often think of the hallmark of humanity is a fully-formed complex language that we do not share with other primates or prehistoric hominin species.  This is, it seems, in error.  As Frayer notes, there is no way to know what they talked about but it is clear that they did.  He finishes with an admonishment for all of us:

Neanderthals lived much richer lives than ever presumed. They were not exactly like us, but they bred with us and their genes and behavior are part of our heritage. So, be careful when you call someone a Neanderthal. You’re speaking about part of yourself.

Alan Thorne Has Died

Alan Thorne, one of the principle architects of the multiregional evolution model of modern human origins has died. ABC News reports:

Dr Thorne is best known for his research on the Mungo Lake skeletons found in western New South Wales, and his theories on the regional development of early humans.

The research on 'Mungo man' dated the skeleton to 40,000 years ago.

ANU research colleague Colin Groves says the death of Alan Thorne is a big loss for Australian archaeology.

This is a very sad loss and a big one for the palaeoanthropological community.

Ida May Not Be Related to Humans After All

The Guardian is reporting work being published in Nature suggesting that Ida is not on the line that gave rise to the higher primates. The story, by Ian Sample states:

"Our analysis and results have convinced us that Ida was not an ancestor of monkeys, apes, or humans, and if anything has more relevance for our understanding of lemur and loris origins," said Erik Seiffert, a fossil hunter at Stony Brook University in New York who led the Nature study.

Researchers behind the Ida fossil, known formally as Darwinius masillae, immediately defended their own interpretation, which is based on two years of meticulous measurements of the remains.

"We expected a challenge like this and it's interesting it has taken five months for the first attack to come," said Jørn Hurum, a palaeontologist at Oslo University's Natural History Museum where the fossil is now lodged. "What we claim about Ida is really quite controversial."

So controversial, in fact, that it might be wrong. Which ever way this one goes, it will be a classic example of science in action. Palaeoanthropologists have no vested interest in whether or not Ida is an ancestor to humans. This research will, however, provide us with a good example of a primate that was running around c. 50 million years ago. Hopefully, more discoveries will allow us to see how she fit into the grand scheme of things.

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Ardipithecus ramidus in Science Magazine

Science Magazine has a series of articles on the Ardipithecus ramidus remains that have been fully described. The articles are behind a subscription wall, so I cannot link to them. I will hit the high points, though. These quotes are necessarily short in order to conform to fair use guidelines. From Owen Lovejoy et al's Careful Climbing in the Miocene: The Forelimbs of Ardipithecus ramidus and Humans Are Primitive¹:

This discovery ends years of speculation about the course of human evolution. Our ancestors’ hands differed profoundly from those of living great apes, and therefore the two must have substantially differed in the ways they climbed, fed, and nested. It is African apes who have evolved so extensively since we shared our last common ancestor, not humans or our immediate hominid ancestors. Hands of the earliest hominids were less ape-like than ours and quite different from those of any living form.

From Combining Prehension and Propulsion: The Foot of Ardipithecus ramidus²:

One of the great advantages of our more rigid foot is that it works much better as a lever during upright walking and running (as it also does in monkeys). However, Ar. ramidus still had an opposable big toe, unlike any later hominid. Its ability to walk upright was therefore comparatively primitive. Because it had substantially modified the other four toes for upright walking, even while retaining its grasping big toe, the Ardipithecus foot was an odd mosaic that worked for both upright walking and climbing in trees. If our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee had not retained such an unspecialized foot, perhaps upright walking might never have evolved in the first place.

From The Pelvis and Femur of Ardipithecus ramidus: The Emergence of Upright Walking³

Ardipithecus ramidus now unveils how our skeleton became progressively modified for bipedality. Although the foot anatomy of Ar. ramidus shows that it was still climbing trees, on the ground it walked upright. Its pelvis is a mosaic that, although far from being chimpanzee-like, is still much more primitive than that of Australopithecus.

From The Great Divides: Ardipithecus ramidus Reveals the Postcrania of Our Last Common Ancestors with African Apes⁴:

The hominid descendant of the last common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees (the CLCA), Ardipithecus, became a biped by modifying its upper pelvis without abandoning its grasping big toe. It was therefore an unpredicted and odd mosaic. It appears, unlike Au. afarensis, to have occupied the basal adaptive plateau of hominid natural history. It is so rife with anatomical surprises that no one could have imagined it without direct fossil evidence.

The takeaway message here is that just as human evolution has proceeded by fits and spurts, the science behind it has done the same, like most other scientific endeavors. Five years ago, we were looking for an ancestor that looked something like a primitive chimpanzee. Now we know that is not how it went. The other cherished model that will go by the wayside is that bipedalism was an adaptation to the expansion of the savanna and grasslands and the retreat of the forests. The morphology of Ardipithecus seems, instead, to strongly suggest that bipedalism arose while our ancestors were still living in a forest environment. When the forest retreated, however, it is clear that Ardipithecus ramidus or something like it had the necessary adaptations to survive the changes and thrive in the new environment.

Some will say that because we were so wrong about our early hominid models, we don't know much about evolution. Those arguments have been put forth before. A cursory look at Marvin Lubenow's dreadful book Bones of Contention shows that. Ardipithecus doesn't tell us that human evolution didn't happen. It tells us that some of our models were wrong. In any scientific field, each new discovery ought to result in a slight rewrite of some cherished theories. If it doesn't, the science is stagnant. This is the critical difference between science and creationism. creationism cannot change its theories or models. It has only one explanation for how things happened, which must be correct. Any evidence that does not comport with those models must be explained away, no matter the cost to intellectual or scientific integrity. We found this out first-hand with the RATE project. The discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus should be fascinating and exciting to any evolutionary biologist. It not only shows us where we were wrong, it shows us what we got right and where our models need to be adjusted. More importantly, though, it shows us a glimpse of our deep past in an breathtakingly new and exciting way.

¹Lovejoy, C.O., Simpson, Scott, White, Tim, Asfaw, B, and Suwa, G. (2009) Careful Climbing in the Miocene: The Forelimbs of Ardipithecus ramidus and Humans Are Primitive. Science 326: 70

²Lovejoy, C, Latimer, B., Suwa, G., Asfaw, B., and White, T.D.(2009) Combining Prehension and Propulsion: The Foot of Ardipithecus ramidus. Science 326: 72

³Lovejoy, C., Suwa, G., Spurlock, L., Asfaw, B., White, T.D. (2009) The Pelvis and Femur of Ardipithecus ramidus: The Emergence of Upright Walking. Science 326: 71

⁴Lovejoy, C., Suwa, G., Simpson, Scott W., Matternes, Jay H., White, T.D. (2009) The Great Divides: Ardipithecus ramidus Reveals the Postcrania of Our Last Common Ancestors with African Apes. Science 326: 73

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