Anthropology.net

It has been almost two years since Lee Berger and I shared a few words on Anthropology.net about his small people of Palau. Since then, a TKO paper, published in the summer of 2008, basically thwarting Berger’s claims. Thankfully, we haven’t heard much of his sensationalist research since…

But his documentary is still floating around. It recently aired on Australia’s public broadcaster channel ABC. ABC journalist and presenter Jonathan Holmes wasn’t too pleased his network aired this less than admirable documentary. On his show, Media Watch, he explains why. Check out the entertaining excerpt or watch the scathing clip here.

For all you aspiring paleoanthropologists and scientists out there, take this tragic case into heart and don’t make the same mistakes. You’ll leave only behind a legacy of fail.

October 2nd 2009 Cover of Science Magazine

There’s more than 11 citations here, but the others are associated news and media covered by Science. They’ve even dedicated a special issue to it. Very impressive thorough volume of information. Now you have a some understanding why it took so long to publish… Anyways get to reading.

News Focus

Gibbons, A. (2009). A New Kind of Ancestor: Ardipithecus Unveiled Science, 326 (5949), 36-40 DOI: 10.1126/science.326_36

Gibbons, A. (2009). Habitat for Humanity Science, 326 (5949), 40-40 DOI: 10.1126/science.326_40

Gibbons, A. (2009). The View From Afar Science, 326 (5949), 41-43 DOI: 10.1126/science.326_41

Introduction & Video

Hanson, B. (2009). Light on the Origin of Man Science, 326 (5949), 60-61 DOI: 10.1126/science.326_60a

N/A (2009). Video: The Analysis of Ardipithecus ramidus–One of the Earliest Known Hominids Science, 326 (5949), 60-60 DOI: 10.1126/science.326_60b

Research Articles

White, T., Asfaw, B., Beyene, Y., Haile-Selassie, Y., Lovejoy, C., Suwa, G., & WoldeGabriel, G. (2009). Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids Science, 326 (5949), 64-64 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175802

WoldeGabriel, G., Ambrose, S., Barboni, D., Bonnefille, R., Bremond, L., Currie, B., DeGusta, D., Hart, W., Murray, A., Renne, P., Jolly-Saad, M., Stewart, K., & White, T. (2009). The Geological, Isotopic, Botanical, Invertebrate, and Lower Vertebrate Surroundings of Ardipithecus ramidus Science, 326 (5949), 65-65 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175817

Louchart, A., Wesselman, H., Blumenschine, R., Hlusko, L., Njau, J., Black, M., Asnake, M., & White, T. (2009). Taphonomic, Avian, and Small-Vertebrate Indicators of Ardipithecus ramidus Habitat Science, 326 (5949), 66-66 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175823

White, T., Ambrose, S., Suwa, G., Su, D., DeGusta, D., Bernor, R., Boisserie, J., Brunet, M., Delson, E., Frost, S., Garcia, N., Giaourtsakis, I., Haile-Selassie, Y., Howell, F., Lehmann, T., Likius, A., Pehlevan, C., Saegusa, H., Semprebon, G., Teaford, M., & Vrba, E. (2009). Macrovertebrate Paleontology and the Pliocene Habitat of Ardipithecus ramidus Science, 326 (5949), 67-67 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175822

Suwa, G., Asfaw, B., Kono, R., Kubo, D., Lovejoy, C., & White, T. (2009). The Ardipithecus ramidus Skull and Its Implications for Hominid Origins Science, 326 (5949), 68-68 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175825

Suwa, G., Kono, R., Simpson, S., Asfaw, B., Lovejoy, C., & White, T. (2009). Paleobiological Implications of the Ardipithecus ramidus Dentition Science, 326 (5949), 69-69 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175824

Lovejoy, C., Simpson, S., White, T., Asfaw, B., & Suwa, G. (2009). Careful Climbing in the Miocene: The Forelimbs of Ardipithecus ramidus and Humans Are Primitive Science, 326 (5949), 70-70 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175827

Lovejoy, C., Suwa, G., Spurlock, L., Asfaw, B., & White, T. (2009). The Pelvis and Femur of Ardipithecus ramidus: The Emergence of Upright Walking Science, 326 (5949), 71-71 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175831

Lovejoy, C., Latimer, B., Suwa, G., Asfaw, B., & White, T. (2009). Combining Prehension and Propulsion: The Foot of Ardipithecus ramidus Science, 326 (5949), 72-72 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175832

Lovejoy, C., Suwa, G., Simpson, S., Matternes, J., & White, T. (2009). The Great Divides: Ardipithecus ramidus Reveals the Postcrania of Our Last Common Ancestors with African Apes Science, 326 (5949), 73-73 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175833

Lovejoy, C. (2009). Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus Science, 326 (5949), 74-74 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175834

Ardipithecus ramidus

I want to be the first to break news to you that Science has published White’s contentious 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus! I caught news of the release on the internet. The link is not live yet, but when it is I’ll fill you in.

Owen Lovejoy is one of the authors of the paper, and he says that the fossil changes the notion that humans and chimps, our closest genetic cousins, both trace their lineage to a creature that was more like today’s chimp and we’ll have to be rewriting our text books soon. This is big folks. What this means is that our common ancestor was a bipedal forest forager and that chimps were an evolutionary offshoot.

White, the lead author, describes the fossil with flexible hands and a brain about a quarter the size of a human’s,

“We can’t say this species was a direct ancestor of modern humans, so we have to be careful. But it suggests that the direction of early hominids was away from the chimp.”

There are a lot of other implications that I won’t get into just yet, but keep checking us out from time to time as we get more!

Here are some of the press releases/news coverage that have come out since I’ve published this post:

• Kent State University Professor C. Owen Lovejoy helps unveil oldest hominid skeleton
• Fossil finds extend human story
• Before ‘Lucy,’ there was ‘Ardi’: First major analysis of early hominid published in Science
• Oldest hominid skeleton provides new evidence for human evolution
• Humanity Has a New 4.4 Million-Year-Old Baby Mama
• Ancient Skeleton May Rewrite Earliest Chapter of Human Evolution
• Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy
• Ethiopian desert yields oldest hominid skeleton
• Ardi displaces Lucy as oldest hominid skeleton
• Fossil Primate Ardipithecus Ramidus Described (Finally)
• Oldest “Human” Skeleton Found–Disproves “Missing Link”
• ‘Ardi,’ Oldest Human Ancestor, Unveiled

The latest issue of the Proceedings from the National Academy of Science journal hosts a Out of Africa: Modern Human Origins special feature for free online. I recommend you check it out.

September 22nd, 2009 Cover of the PNAS Out of Africa: Modern Human Origins Special

• Editorial by Richard G. Klein, “Darwin and the recent African origin of modern humans.”
• Perspective by Ian Tattersall, “Human origins: Out of Africa.”
• Perspective by Timothy D. Weaver, “The meaning of Neandertal skeletal morphology.”
• Research Article by J. J. Hublin, “The origin of Neandertals.”
• Research Article by Michael P. Richards and Erik Trinkaus, “Isotopic evidence for the diets of European Neanderthals and early modern humans.”
• Research Article by John F. Hoffecker, “The spread of modern humans in Europe.”
• Research Article by G. Philip Rightmire, “Middle and later Pleistocene hominins in Africa and Southwest Asia.”
• Research Article by Francesco d’Errico, et al., “Additional evidence on the use of personal ornaments in the Middle Paleolithic of North Africa.”
• Research Article by Michael DeGiorgio, et al.,”Explaining worldwide patterns of human genetic variation using a coalescent-based serial founder model of migration outward from Africa.”

Unfortunately, I have not yet had the time to read any of these papers but they I reckon they should be somewhat enlightening.

Speaking of the Johansons and fossils …

Earlier this year, I’ve blogged about the 2009 Human Evolution Leakey Symposium at Stony Brook that I went to. For more about that blog post, click here.

The symposium, entitled “Hobbit in the Haystack: Homo floresiensis and Human Evolution” can now be streamed live through the Stony Brook website. The website also includes previous Human Evolution Leakey symposia. Click here to watch.

Thanks to Afarensis: Anthropology, Evolution and Science for the heads up!

Originally posted on The Prancing Papio

Scientific American recently published a spineless attack on the state of access to paleoanthropological specimens. They titled it, “Fossils for All: Science Suffers by Hoarding,” and John Hawks lend it credibility with a nod in his post. Aside from being spineless, it reeks of ignorance and is tactless. In this post I’ll be discussing why this is not a honest criticism but rather a sloppy slam.

If you read the piece, you’ll notice that Tim White is in the cross hairs of the editors of Scientific American. Why? Tim White discovered Ardi­pithecus ramidus fifteen years ago and continues preparing the specimens. For the editors, that’s enough to pull the guns out and start shooting — claiming he’s sitting on his golden egg far too long and damaging the field as a whole. The cowards at Scientifc American decided to make this bold claim behind a wall of anonymity… publishing this piece simply as the editors. And here in lies the drama and the conflicts of interest.

See, most anthropological editorials on Scientific American are authored by Kate Wong, a twelve year veteran editor for magazine. She is their anthropology editor. Her authority on the subject matter come from a Bachelor’s degree in physical anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. University of Michigan is home to Milford Wolpoff, the man who supports multiregional evolution hypothesis… You know the one that claims the origins of Homo sapiens happened in multiple places around the world and not from a common African origin. He’s known for not being a field scientist. Furthermore, within the discipline, the rift between Wolpoff and White is pretty well known and deep. White got his PhD from the University of Michigan. And Wolpoff holds a ~50 year grudge against White in regards to his stance against his single species origin of humans.

Wong has worked closely with another large anti-Tim White camp, the Hadar folks, during the lead up to the Selam news frenzy that we talked about several years ago. The Hadar camp is more or less a Donald Johanson territory as he was there when Lucy was discovered and published the findings. Where Wong may not have an immediate connection to Wolpoff, aside from earning her Bachelor’s from the department Wolpoff teaches in, she does have a clear one with Johanson. She was a coauthor with Donald Johanson on a book published this year, Lucy’s Legacy.

As you may know, there’s also sour grapes shared shared between Johanson and White. I won’t get into those details… But its clearly out there and is exemplified by a passage in Lucy’s Legacy,

“Tim is a very exacting scientist who is not about to be pressured into saying more about ramidus until he is good and ready. But his unwillingness to share more information about the fossils – not to mention access to the remains themselves – in a much more timely way has drawn criticism. (So secretive are he and his team about the fossil that it has been referred to as the Manhattan Project of paleoanthropology.) In fact, spurred in part by Tim’s actions, some researchers have even proposed that funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation establish a limitation on how long the discoverer of a fossil has exclusive access to that material before having to share it with other investigators.” p. 155-156 Lucy’s Legacy

There’s no way to know if Johanson or Wong wrote this particular passage but they both share authorship and royalities of the book and ultimately agree on the points raised in the text.

This is a clear conflict of interest for Scientific American and their anthropological editor, Kate Wong. As an editor of Scientific American, for Wong to be an author of a book which conveys the same criticisms as published under anonymity in their magazine and on their website, shows that she exploited her professional capacity for personal benefit.

In addition to egregious political move by Scientific American, the piece is ignorant of the whole process involved in finding, cleaning, documenting a fossil. Fossils don’t come out of the ground perfect. Believe me, I know. Some of the time these findings are as delicate as a ball of dust and require a great deal of care to preserve them during which time it is the primary investigator/discoverer’s responsibility and privilege.  I’ve actually discussed this before, very thoroughly in this comment thread.

For the editors and other supporters to suggest there should be a limit to how long it takes to prepare a fossil show how they really have no idea to what it takes to curate a fossil. There’s no way to put a time limit on this process. Aside from a select few, most field scientists are professors at universities. Again, as I’ve said before, their time in the field is limited, several months a year, of which time is split between finding new fossils and curating old ones. Field scientists, like White, can’t leave their teaching positions at places like UC Berkeley and dedicate years to preparing the specimen. They do as much as they can and they do it with quality. The Middle Awash, White’s stomping ground, has an impressive record of impactful, frequent fossil discoveries and publications which can’t really be said for Wolpoff and Johanson.

You may consider this a defense of White. I admit this is. This was a shameless jab at White and a despicable, cowardly, and haphazard move by Scientific American. Science is not about quantity. I shouldn’t have to tell freaking Scientific American that. Science is about quality. Editorials like this don’t advance the field. They completely ignore that science is a process and not a product. In doing so they damage the discipline.

One last thing… To the editors of Scientific American, grow some balls next time you wanna put out crap like this and publish your full names along side your criticism. Stand behind your words.

New analysis by a team led by Australian National University doctoral student Debbie Argue showed that Homo floresiensis, nicknamed hobbits, were early hominin and walked out of Africa to Flores. Their findings supports the argument that Homo floresiensis had a unique wrist anatomy that originated from a lineage that lived long before the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

With Mike Moorwood from University of Wollongong and Thomas Sutikna from Indonesian Center for Archaeology, Debbie Argue compared 60 skulls and skeletal features from two individual hobbits to those of hominins, chimpanzees and gorillas using cladistic analysis. The result shows that Homo floresiensis “probably took one of two evolutionary paths from Africa to Flores. One began 1.66 million years ago, the other 1.9 million years ago”.

Read more here: Hobbits Walked Out of Africa

Originally posted on The Prancing Papio.

Over at Primatology.net, I’ve written about a new ‘missing link’, Anoiapithecus brevirostris (IPS43000) from Abocador de Can Mata, Spain. I’m cross posting it here for two reasons, one to generate traffic and interest in that post but also to let you know that the specimen which is 11.9 million years old has a wide array of modern and derived characteristics that the authors argue suggest that the origin of our family is a phenomenon that took place on the Mediterranean region during the time span comprised between their arrival from Africa by about 15 Ma, and about 13 Ma. Wacky.

Anoiapithecus Brevirostris (IPS43000)

Of course every paleoanthropologist wants to say their fossil find is the origin of humanity. Apparently there’s no shame in doing so… But given that one of Anthropology.net’s most popular posts discussed an origin of humans for apes and that I’ve researched a bit about Eurasia hominoids last year, I think you should be interested in this being at least a new fossil in the paleoanthropological/primatological record.

I’ll be closing the comment thread on this post so as to carry the discussion over on Primatology.net, so hop on over and discuss where you think humans evolved and what you think about Lluc, Anoiapithecus Brevirostris (IPS43000) — a fossil that deserves more ‘human evolution’ centered discussion than Ida, a.k.a. Darwinius massillae.

Moya-Sola, S., Alba, D., Almecija, S., Casanovas-Vilar, I., Kohler, M., De Esteban-Trivigno, S., Robles, J., Galindo, J., & Fortuny, J. (2009). A unique Middle Miocene European hominoid and the origins of the great ape and human clade Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811730106.

Viktor Deak's reconstruction of Homo heidelbergensis (Stage 5)

About a year and half ago I enrolled in an anthropology seminar even though I was getting a Master’s in Biology. I did so just to keep some sanity amongst the molecules, reactions and abstract names for genes I was immersed in. I thoroughly enjoyed it and wrote up a review on the evolution of human skin color for my final.

One of my classmates, I remember, decided to focus his term paper on the intersection between science and art in paleoanthropological reconstructions. Reconstructing faces and bodies from paleoanthropological samples takes an intimate knowledge of comparative anatomy and a healthy dose of artistic imagination to fill in the gaps and fragmentations in the fossils. I don’t know what became of his paper, but having taken a science illustration class as an undergraduate, his curiosity in investing paleolithic and anthropological reconstructions sparked my personal interests.

Viktor Deak, one of the world's top paleoartists (Erik Olsen/The New York Times)

Fast forward to today’s New York Times, featuring an article on Viktor Deak’s work. I don’t remember my classmates name but if you’re out there, or to anyone else interested in how this is done, you should check out this entertaining article. Deak is among the world’s leading paleoartists. Chances are you’ve seen his handy work when looking at a reconstruction of Homo habilis, Australopithecus afarensis or Paranthropus boisei. He answers many questions, one of the biggest being how he got into the field,

“One of his first sculptures was done at a family barbecue, a human skeleton from chicken bones. Other defining moments, he said, included a book of dinosaur illustrations his Budapest grandfather bought for him, seeing Luke Skywalker get a robotic hand and watching an eighth-grade science film of Mr. Gurche playing Pygmalion to a fossil skull. (Mr. Deak was born in Hungary but grew up in Connecticut.) His big break came when he was a School of Visual Arts student sketching in the natural history museum…”

Seems like he and I have many similar interests. I too was fascinated with dinos, robots (especially in Star Wars) and bones as a child. There’s a lot of multimedia linked with the article, such as video and this exceptionally cool 360 degree panorama of his studio in New York City. I like the corner above his monitors, full of toys! I think I could get lost in that place for weeks.

Viktor, if you stumble upon this post. Keep up the great work!

The upcoming issue of Science will be publishing the announcement of a newly discovered 1.2 million-year-old female Homo erectus pelvis. The fossil was found in 2001 at the Gona Study Area in the Afar region Ethiopia. Excavations were completed in 2003.

The 1.2 million year old female Homo erectus pelvis from Gona, Ethiopia

Sileshi Semaw, the leader of the Gona Project, said that the birth canal of this pelvis is 30% larger than earlier estimates based on the 1.5-million-year-old juvenile male pelvis of KNM-WT 15000 (Turkana Boy) found in Kenya. I don’t have an early copy of the paper, but if this is true, this find will make us reevaluate our estimations of Homo erectus growth and development. Current theories, based upon estimations of the existing male skeleton from Kenya, suggested Homo erectus produced babies with only a limited neonatal brain size, and experienced rapid brain growth while still developmentally immature. But as you may know, male and female primate pelvic girdles are extremely different. This new pelvis also tells us of some interesting differences in stature and gait.

Early hominid female pelvic anatomy is basically unknown, in fact we don’t really have much data, really only Lucy’s fragmented pelvis, the 3.2 million year old Australopithecus afarensis. So I’m interested in reading more about this fossil and what it has to tell us of Homo erectus anatomy and early human evolution. I guess I gotta wait until the paper appears in Science. Expect a post about it as soon as I get my hands on the paper.