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October 10, 2013

Paleo-politics continues to affect field, lecturer says

Mysteries of Evolution series

Dean Falk is a senior scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University.

Dean Falk is a senior scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University.

“Paleo-politics” —infighting among paleoanthropologists — has affected the reception of new ideas and discoveries in anthropology since Charles Darwin published “The Origin of Species” in 1859 and persists strongly today, Dean Falk demonstrated to a packed Frick Fine Arts auditorium on Oct. 1.

Falk is a senior scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University. She is the author most recently of “The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution.” Her talk was the first in the three-part Mysteries of Human Evolution lecture series cosponsored by the Department of Anthropology.

The publication of Falk’s recent brain scans of a small Indonesian fossil find nicknamed Hobbit, which helped confirm its place among ancestors of Homo sapiens, or hominids, showed her that paleo-politics have not ceased their influence on the field. Scientists adhering to the past continue to promote the linear portrayal of human evolution in textbooks, from a stooped, ape-like creature straight to a fully upright, modern man — a progression that Falk disputes.

She notes that Darwin steered clear of mentioning human evolution in his first book, since he realized it countered the biblical story of creation and thus would be too controversial. Instead, he theorized about evolution in plants and animals.

“What’s remarkable to me,” said Falk, “is how much he anticipated what would follow, and even what is going on now. He realized he would apply those same principals to humans.”

In 1871, Darwin published “The Descent of Man” in two volumes. There was not much of a fossil record at that time, apart from a Neanderthal specimen, but “Darwin speculated that we would have evolved from an ape-like ancestor,” and that this evolution would have taken place in Africa, Falk said. “He said he wasn’t bothered by the lack of fossil record — people hadn’t been looking in the right places.”

When the fossil record began to be uncovered, paleo-politics had an even stronger influence on what was accepted in the line of man’s descent and what was deemed a dead end or misinterpretation.

“There is a tendency for the discoverer, when they find a hominid, to say, ‘We have found the oldest hominid in the human lineage — forget those other hominids.’”

Discoveries, disses and debunkers

In 1891, Pithecanthropus erectus was found on Java by Eugène Dubois and dubbed Java man, placing man’s origins in Asia, something that was unacceptable to Western scientists. The find had a smaller brain than modern humans and a larger jaw. Dubois received a great deal of scorn from his fellow anthropologists: This “ape-man” was untenable as an ancestor.

Then in 1912 a group of Britons claimed they had discovered Piltdown Man. Piltdown actually was a fraud, perpetrated by combining a human brain case, a sufficiently human-like orangutan jaw and other animal bones, their surfaces stained and worn to resemble ancient fossils, with some parts removed to make discovery of the truth less likely. It was even accompanied by fake bone tools.

“But it fit with our conception that our ancestors must have been brainy,” Falk noted. “It was accepted gleefully and hopefully,” amplifying the belief that our ancestors “were British gentlemen. It was celebrated by the public.”

Charles Dawson, attorney and amateur archaeologist, was “most likely the perpetrator of this fraud,” Falk said, along with Martin Hinton, who worked at the top levels of London’s Natural History Museum.

Dawson perhaps was motivated by a wish to be accepted at the highest level among scientists in his day: the Royal Academy. But Piltdown wasn’t debunked until 1953. “That’s a long time to have this specimen as the most ancient specimen on the line to humans,” Falk said.

Nearly a decade into Piltdown’s reign as evolution’s best specimen, Raymond Arthur Dart heard Grafton Elliot Smith lecture on the evolution of the human brain. Dart soon entered University College London in Smith’s department, studying medicine and anthropology. Then, in 1922, Dart joined the faculty of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. Smith had pushed him toward the post, but Dart accepted only reluctantly.

Said Falk: “He didn’t know that within two years he would discover what would be one of the most famous and important fossils of the century”: Australopithecus africanus.

His discovery, nicknamed Taung, was several pieces: A face and lower jaw as well as a natural cast of the brain case, called an endocast, stemming from its preservation in a lime-filled cave.

Dart thought his Australopithecine was 5-6 years old; today, we think it no older than 3. It has human- and ape-like features, including a small brain, in a combination not seen before in the fossil record, and was determined to be bipedal. Where Java was an ape-man, Taung was a man-ape.

Although Dart didn’t use the words “missing link,” he thought and wrote that his find helped fill a gap in the human lineage.

Dart’s mentors back in England, including Smith, were not happy with the younger man’s find. Piltdown’s “discoverers” also were quick to show their disdain.

Dart countered with a lengthy monograph, which also hit a wall erected by the other scientists; when peer-reviewed by the Royal Academy, “they were brutal to him,” Falk said. It was published only in Japan.

Ten years later, more Australopithecines began to turn up. Dart, meanwhile, had quit the field.

“It was revolutionary,” Falk says of Dart’s discovery. “He said Darwin was right.” Dart died at 95 “a happy man.” He had been vindicated. But his discovery led to the linear depiction of one species evolving into other species, resulting in man.

Hobbits and the future

“It’s always the same story with every major discovery of a fossil,” Falk said. Paleoanthropologists with a vested interest in previously celebrated fossils cry, “‘It’s an aberrant ape. It’s a pathologic human.’”

In October 2004, when the discovery of Homo floresiensis on Flores Island in Indonesia was revealed on the cover of Nature, discoverer Mike Moorwood called Falk to create a virtual endocast from a CT scan of the most complete skull found. The aim was to determine the brain structures of this female, nicknamed Hobbit, who was slightly more than 3 feet tall but fully adult. “It’s a hodgepodge of features from head to toe,” she said of each Hobbit, including extra-long feet.

Dated to just 18,000 years ago, nine-14 Hobbits were found together in a cave alongside tools “that looked very reminiscent of the oldest stone tools known in Africa,” Falk said. The site also had signs of fire and other evidence that these hominids had hunted the island’s giant Komodo dragons and some small elephant-like creatures.

While creating the endocast, Falk, said, “I was terrified it was going to be chimp-like because it was chimp size — but it’s not.” In fact, two large swellings in the frontal lobe indicate that the species had developed human abilities. “It’s the part of the brain we use to think ahead, to make plans,” she noted.

“Paleo-politics entered as soon as the announcement was made,” she recalled. “‘We know only Homo sapiens lived at that time. What’s it doing in Asia? And that brain is so small.’”

Falk and colleagues have since had to debunk charges that the Hobbits were suffering from microcephaly and other disabilities. They still are working to counter such suppositions.

Today, she said, Homo floresiensis “has gained remarkable acceptance. Not universal, [but] I think we’ll be hearing more about this pretty soon.

“Now we have research going on in molecular genetics and it is suggesting there weren’t just Homo floresiensis and Homo sapiens but other kinds of Homo running around at the same time.” In Siberia, scientists recently have found the teeth of a girl whose genetics “has been described as a genome in search of a fossil record,” Falk said.

“We need to rethink the overall shape of hominid evolution,” she concluded: It should be a bush with multiple branches coexisting instead of a line leading straight across. “I think we’re going to have a dramatic reinterpretation of what hominid evolution looks like.”

*

The other two lectures in this series are Oct. 22, when University of New South Wales faculty member Darren Curnoe will speak on “Fossils Reveal New Species of Late-Occurring Human in China: Did Our Species Kill It Off?” and Nov. 12, when David Lordkipanidze, director general of the Georgian National Museum in Russia, will talk about “The First Representatives of Homo out of Africa.” Both lectures will be held at 8 p.m. in the Frick Fine Arts auditorium.

In addition to the Department of Anthropology, the lectures are sponsored by the University Honors College, the Asian Studies Center, the Humanities Center and the Center for Russian and East European Studies.

—Marty Levine

Filed under: Feature,Volume 46 Issue 4

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