And finally, there is a children’s book that addresses the latter, in amazing detail!

There are very few good (or even bad) children’s books about evolution, and far fewer about human evolution. And when a children’s book touches on human evolution, it is usually just about Neanderthals.

When We Became Humans: The Story of Our Evolution by Michael Bright with illustrations by Hannah Bailey is a very good book on human evolution. The book is over 60 pages long in large format, and my copy is cloth bound. The production quality of the book is outstanding. (That is generally the case with this publisher.)

I am am impressed with this title, and I strongly recommend it for anyone looking for a book for a kid of a certain age to read, or a younger kid to get read to.

What is that certain age? I’m thinking 10 plus or minus 2, depending on the kid. The publishers say 8-11. So somewhere around there. A 10 year old who absorbs the material in this book will do OK on an intro college human evolution midterm that focuses on the fossil and archaeological record. Or at least, the child will be able to effectively challenge the professor in a grade grubbing situation.

When We Became Humans: The Story of Our Evolution covers primate evolution, key moments in hominin history, bipedalism, early tools, brain evolution, the origin of fire (nice to see my research embodied as fact in an actual children’s book!), Homo erectus and Neanderthals, modern humans, foragers, early agriculture, holicene history, language, art, early burial, and other things such as hobbits.

There are only four places where I would take issue with the facts as presented here. The root hypothesis for the human-chimp split is left out, I would discuss early tools differently, the author embraces the scavenging hypothesis too kindly, and the great global diversity and overall craziness of the agricultural transition is glossed in favor (mostly) of the old Fertile Crescent story, which is not wrong, just limited. Given that this book presnets roughly 165 facts or perspectives, me disagreeing with this small number is rather remarkable.

The art is great, the typefaces well chosen, the layout is artful and foregrounds the aforementioned are and the facts.

You can preorder this book now; it will be out mid July.

Here is the public summary of the work in question:

It has been suggested that Neandertals, as well as modern humans, may have painted caves. Hoffmann et al. used uranium-thorium dating of carbonate crusts to show that cave paintings from three different sites in Spain must be older than 64,000 years. These paintings are the oldest dated cave paintings in the world. Importantly, they predate the arrival of modern humans in Europe by at least 20,000 years, which suggests that they must be of Neandertal origin. The cave art comprises mainly red and black paintings and includes representations of various animals, linear signs, geometric shapes, hand stencils, and handprints. Thus, Neandertals possessed a much richer symbolic behavior than previously assumed.

This is from a paper by Hoffmann, Standish, Garcia-Diez, and a gazillion other authors (14 total) called “U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art” in the current issue of Science.

The “art” in question is in three caves in Spain, La Pasiega (Cantabria), Maltravieso (Extremadura), and Doña Trinidad (or Ardales; Andalucía).

At La Pasiega, the rock art comprises mainly red and black paintings, including groups of animals, linear signs, claviform signs, dots, and possible anthropomorphs. Maltravieso was episodically used by hominin groups during the past 180 ka; it contains an important set of red hand stencils, which form part of a larger body of art that includes both geometric designs (e.g., dots and triangles) and painted and engraved figures. Ongoing excavations have shown that Ardales was occupied in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. Its walls feature an impressive number (>1000) of paintings and engravings in a vast array of forms, including hand stencils and prints; numerous dots, discs, lines, and other geometric shapes; and figurative representations of animals, including horses, deer, and birds.

Uranium-Thorium dating was used to estimate the age of the pigment used to make the art in several cases. The short version is that the stuff painted on the walls is likely to be at least ca 65 thousand years old, which the authors note is 20 thousand years older than the earliest modern humans in Europe.

What is art?

1) Of all the expressive output of humans today, we will happily argue over what is art, and what it means.

2) Humans or their close relatives engaging in expressive behavior tens of thousands of years ago do not escape that fascinating nexus of questions.

See Iain Davidson’s work for a much more detailed discussion of “art” (paintings and engravings) prior to the recent era. For example, this.

What is a human vs. a Neanderthal?

An argument has been made that the two groups are roughly equivalent. The argument has also been made that they are nothing like the same. I would make this argument: The range of variation in important traits across all Homo sapiens sapiens and the range of variation in important traits across all archaic Homo sapiens (to which Neanderthals belong) are each large, and there is some overlap in morphology. But, the behavioral variation does not track morphological variation in the human lineage very well at all until we get to very recent times (when agriculture seems to cause a reduction in brain size and an increase in various disease syndromes). Therefore, to me, it is possible to argue that the morphological non-overlap does not signify a behavioral non-overlap. Or, maybe it does.

Putting this a slightly different way, archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have almost always been more certain of what they are talking about with respect to Neanderthals and the Neanderthal-human difference than they’ve had a right to be. Nothing about this finding changes that.

Also, modern humans predate Neanderthals generally. Therefore, it is still possible that modern humans made this art, because they existed then. It is, however, probably difficult to make the argument that they lived in this part of Spain then. But not impossible.

How does typical Neanderthal or Human behavior emerge?

Elephants and apes can make art. Bonobos can communicate somewhat linguistically. It is possible to induce sorta-kinda- human behavior in other animals that are not that closely related to us, if they are predisposed and the proper context for this development is set up.

The following is therefor almost certainly true. Imagine a group of humans that live very far from the nearest Neanderthal, across a great desert you can’t cross, or a sea. Correspondingly, there is a Neanderthal group on the other side of that divide, with no contact with humans. Of course, both came from a common population of ancient times, but assume that these two hypothetical groups were separated from each other in the very earliest days of that phylogenetic (family tree) split.

Gilbert Tostevin of the University of Minnesota has done interesting work that might indicate that when two groups of humansish creatures encounter each other, they may imitate observed products of technology without getting the same chain of physical operations that lead to that outcome. So when you see the physical evidence of making a certain kind of stone tool differ on two different sites where humans and Neanderthals overlapped or encountered each other, you may be seeing one group imitating the other group’s products, but inventing their own process to achieve that product. That is about as cool as paleolithic archaeology gets. I mention this because it is an example of the thought experiment I’m dragging you through.

Now, move the two up to now distant hypothetical groups of humans and neanderthals near each other so that, at the edges of each group, they can interact for a thousand years. Assume most of the interaction is friendly, but they never mate (just to make this simpler). There is zero chance in the world that they groups will not meld culturally (if at the same time they differentiate culturally as well). Neanderthaly things will be found among the nearby humans, and humany things will be found among the Neanderthals. They will, culturally, contaminate each other.

Over time, this contamination will spread across both groups, so in five or ten thousand years (if not much sooner) there may well remain major differences between them, but there will be things that are found pan-Homo, across both groups. Like, they will all adopt hand shaking as a greeting, or kissing as a way of showing affection, or a particular kind of sharp stick. Or the putting of expressions on walls using pigment.

The world in which modern humans lived 65,000 years ago (plus or minus a few thousand years, so we can get them, maybe, to Australia) is huge. It runs from the southern tip of Africa across the African continent in all directions, to somewhere in the Middle east, across southern Asia to southeast Asia, and into Australia. The only reason modern humans did not simply exist all the way across Europe is probably because there were already Neanderthals there. Considering that huge arid regions that exist now across Africa and Asia were probably wetter at that time (plus or minus) it is possible that the total land area across the Old World occupied by modern humans grew to a near-maximum point then, and has not increased in total amount since then, or nearly so, outside of the sparsely occupied tundra and taiga.

Then there were the Neanderthals, in a shrinking zone in Central and Western Europe. They had also been in the Middle East, and sort of in North Africa. (Our best evidence of Neanderthals in North Africa may be an atavistic Neanderthal behavior found among the humans there in ancient remains, interestingly). But the whole cool thing about Spain (where the art in question is found) is that Spain is where the Neanderthals made a sort of last stand, that is where the last ones lived before they ceased to be as a palaeontological entity.

When you look at textbook maps of humans vs Neanderthals, there are almost always two biases, or mistakes. One is to avoid filling in the vast regions where humans must have lived even if evidence is lacking in the form of bony remains (much of Africa, for example). The other is maximizing Neanderthal range to include all of it, at its maximum, in every map, as though it was never smaller than that maximum. Rarely do you see a map that tries to show the vastness of modern human distribution in relation to a realistic distribution on Neanderthals near the end of their existence.

So I did a quick sketch demonstrating the assumption that around the time of the paper in question plus or minus ten thousand years or so, modern humans had traversed Asia, at least the warm parts, are were either in Australia or nearly so, while at the same time, Neanderthals were shrinking from their former distribution which maxed out (east-west wise) at Spain through West Asia.

I call this a “reverse bias” map because it is intended to wind back the usual biases mentioned above using only a small bias in the opposite direction, or possibly no bias at all.

Given this, while it is quite possible that Neanderthals were making this early we’ll-call-it-art, it is probably just as likely that what they were doing was a modern human thing that had been picked up by them, and then traversed the remaining geographical range of their species.

One other thing

I am not entirely convinced that I personally understand the exact physical relationship between the samples taken and the art observed well enough to argue that there are no problems with it. Also, I’ve not evaluated the U-Th dates directly. The material needed to do that is in the supplementary material, and I’m having trouble with my Science subscription, and don’t have time to dig in to this right now. Others will, I’m sure, and eventually this will be refuted, accepted, argued about, confirmed or not or whatever. As per usual.

There are two chronologies proposed for the early occupation of Europe, for the time before these branches are clearly visible. The “long chronology” has human relatives in Europe perhaps as far back as two million years, and the “short chronology” has these human relatives at around a half million years ago or later.

The truth is probably this:

There could be occasional and not permanent (in an archaeological sense) of Mediterranean region occupation, off and on, perhaps a million years ago but north of the great mountain range known locally as the Pyrenees or the Alps, and perhaps east of the Rhine, only the short chronology is overwhelmingly evident. Even here, there is a longer and a shorter part to the short chronology. Over the longer term, perhaps as far back as 700,000 years ago, there is human occupation represent by late Early Stone Age (or what the Europeans call Lower Paleolithic) artifacts, in the form of Acheulean hand axes and such. After around 350,000 years ago, there is a greater number of sites across a larger area and, likely, longer term occupation. But even this is not necessarily a fully established continental or regional occupation. The continuation and intensification of the previous 1.5 million years of climate shifts — the coming and going of “ice ages” — forced these folks to contract their ranges, perhaps going locally extinct at times, often likely replaced by new groups coming in fresh from Africa.

But there is Untermassfeld and a few other sites suggesting a more geographically expansive and earlier chronology.

Untermassfeld is a an archaeological site in Schmalkalden-Meiningen district, Thuringia, Germany. The site was purported to include Lower Paleolithic (Early Stone Age) Oldowan (or Mode I) technology in association with animal remains dated to just over one million years ago. Hammer stone marks and cut marks were also reported for some of the bones, which if believed confirms a direct human involvement with the bone remains. This was reported by researchers Landeck and Garcia Garriga in the Journal of Human Evolution as “The oldest hominin butchery in European mid-latitudes at the Jaramillo site of Untermassfeld (Thuringia, Germany).” The abstract of that paper reads:

The late Early Pleistocene site of Untermassfeld, dated to the Jaramillo subchron (ca. 1.07 millions of years ago), is well known for its rich Epivillafranchian fauna. It has also recently yielded stone artefacts attesting hominin occupation. Now, we report here, for the first time, evidence of hominin butchery such as cut marks and intentional hammerstone-related bone breakage. This probable subsistence behaviour was detected in a small faunal subsample recovered from levels with Mode 1 stone tools. The butchered faunal assemblage was found during fieldwork and surveying in fluvial riverbanks (Lower Fluviatile Sands) and channel erosion sediments (Upper Fluviatile Sands). The frequent occurrence of butchery traces on bones of large-sized herd animals (i.e., Bison) may imply a greater need for meat in seasonal habitats characterised by a depletion of nutritive plants in winter. Early access to carcasses, before their consumption by carnivores, provided hominins with sufficient quantities of meat. This access was acquired with a Mode 1 lithic industry, to ensure food procurement and survival at high latitudes in Europe. Stone tools and faunal remains with signs of anthropic intervention recovered at Untermassfeld are evidence of the oldest hominin settlement at continental mid-latitudes (50° N).

There are other papers on this site as well, making parallel claims.

Such a phenomenon, a site that is an island unto itself, with evidence not matching anything nearby, sitting by itself in time and space, is always suspect, always provisional, until more is known about the site itself, and the region, and the overall suggested human activity and occupation. Or, until it is shown to be in some way bogus. We appear to be going through the latter transition now. A non-peer reviewed paper was just published making the following claim:

Here we evaluate these claims and demonstrate that these studies are severely flawed in terms of data on provenance of the materials studied and in the interpretation of faunal remains and lithics as testifying to a hominin presence at the site. In actual fact any reference to the Untermassfeld site as an archaeological one is unwarranted. Furthermore, it is not the only European Early Pleistocene site where inferred evidence for hominin presence is problematic. The strength of the spatiotemporal patterns of hominin presence and absence depend on the quality of the data points we work with, and data base maintenance, including critical evaluation of new sites, is crucial to advance our knowledge of the expansions and contractions of hominin ranges during the Pleistocene.

There is no question that Untermassfeld is an important paleontological site. In fact, it is possibly the most important site in the region for that time period. This is one of the largest assemblages of bones and has revealed several previously unknown species since work started there in the late 1970s.

Here’s the thing. The human evidence, which consists of hundreds of modified animal bone fragments and human altered stone tools, reported by a team of researchers and presented in papers such as the one cited above, were studied by a team that seems to have never visited the site other than as tourists. The new, as yet unreviewed paper, suggests that these researchers may have accessed Untermassfeld surreptitiously (to obtain at least one photograph they used in publications). Otherwise they were not involved in the site directly.

The moment I learned that, an alarm went off in my head. Several different alarms, actually. Was this academic poaching? A team of researchers doing work on material they had not been granted permission to see? Was it researchers liberating material that has been held by the only instition that has officially worked on this site, for several years, that should have been published year ago? Is this some sort of academic rivalry that is developing into a fight over the provenience of bones? Again? (I’ve seen all this before in Southern Africa and elsewhere).

Or, is it possible that the new unreviewed paper has uncovered either some sort of misconduct or, as many seem to be suggesting, not misconducted research (as it were) but misguided research, whereby legitimate conclusions have been based on evidence that does not actually exist. (Which would make the conclusions non-legit, of course).

The new paper notes that the team suggesting human activity here, Landeck and Garcia Garriga, had written of the bones that they were ‘assembled during “archaeological rescue operations at the Untermassfeld site in the late 70s and early 80s”.’ Yet, apparently, no such rescue operations or collection occurred, according to everyone else. They further suggest that of these several hundred bones and stones, most are simply not from this site.

One bone with an interesting and complex history, studied by Landeck and Garcia Garriga, can be traced to Untermassfeld, and it was known to have been stolen from the site in late May or early June 2009 (during the Pentecost weekend). The bone had been pried from a concretion of bone, leaving part of it in situ, thus confirming its origin. Apparently this sort of vandalism, including removing material, has occurred at his site numerous times between 2002 and 2012.

In 2014, two parcels were delivered to the museum that contained material from this site, origin of the packages unknown. They contained bone and rock that an unsigned letter claimed to be from the site. Part of the bone that had been pried from the excavation in 2009 was among them. Parts of the same bone are still missing.

The origin and history of the lithic material (stone tools, or supposed stone tools) is even less clear.

The authors conclude that the majority of the material used to link human ancestors and 1 million year plus site is of dubious origin at best.

But, there are some bones and stones that are linked to the site and that can be studied to test the idea that human ancestors lived here, and butchered up animals. The authors of the new paper examine this material and find it unconvincing.

That paper states:

In summary, the studies claiming an early hominin presence at Untermassfeld are severely flawed in terms of data on provenance of the materials said to have been studied and in terms of (absence of) information on where the material is deposited. At least one of the faunal remains does come from the site, but the provenance of the lithics is completely unknown. The sample of faunal remains and lithics that we were able to study does not show any traces of hominin interference, and does not testify to a hominin presence at the site: we have no idea where the rest of the assemblage allegedly studied by Garcia Garriga and colleagues is stored and hence what it looks like, but based on the published finds that we were able to evaluate, Untermassfeld is not an archaeological site. As mentioned above, the Untermassfeld project has from the very beginning taken into consideration a possible presence of traces of hominin activities [42, 43], but more than three decades of fieldwork at the site, with 90 months of excavations there, as well as subsequent laboratory analyses by a wide range of specialists, so far did not yield any indication of a hominin presence in the fossil bearing deposits, not in terms of lithic artefacts, nor in hominin modifications of faunal remains. To clean up the record of the Early Pleistocene occupation of Europe, Untermassfeld should not be considered an archaeological site.

So, does this destroy any hope of a significant European “early chronology.” No. There are other bits and pieces of evidence that suggest … hold on a second, the new unreviewed paper has something to say about that too. Without going into detail (as the paper does) this evidence is weak as well.

… solid evidence for a hominin presence in the Early Pleistocene is indeed rare, suggestive of an intermittent presence, with the earliest sites located at most 40 degree North – as is the case across much of Eurasia, from northern Spain (Atapuerca), toDmanisi in the Georgia all the way to the Nihewan Basin in northern China [87]. In the very final part of the Early Pleistocene hominins, at around 800-900 ka, may have expanded their range temporarily northward, following the European coastal areas, when conditions permitted. It is only much later, around 600 ka, that the record changes significantly, with an increase in site numbers all over western Europe, suggestive of changes in the character of hominin presence in this part of the world. These archaeological changes occur around the time period of the emergence of the Neanderthal lineage, which can be seen as independent – palaeontological- evidence for continuity of hominin occupation from that time period onward, minimally at the scale of Europe. Neanderthal populations expanded their range eastward, into the central parts of Europe from the middle part of the Middle Pleistocene, ~350 ka, onward, incorporating more challenging continental environments, an expansion that has been related to the development of new cultural and possibly biological
adaptations.

This is not the last word on this issue, as you may have already suspected.

According to a write-up in Nature,

Expressions of concern published on each of the three papers note that the location of the Untermassfeld material “was not stated accurately in the publication”, and that the authors have been unable to adequately clarify where it is now. Landeck and Garcia Garriga declined to comment to Nature on the specific details of the notes but said that they plan to publish a response.

Sarah Elton, … an editor at the Journal of Human Evolution, says that an investigation into the accusations is ongoing….

New finds of fossils and stone tools from the archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, push back the origins of our species by one hundred thousand years and show that by about 300 thousand years ago important changes in our biology and behaviour had taken place across most of Africa.

In order to understand the significance of this research, and it is indeed very significant, you need to have a detailed history of archaeological research in Europe, the Near East, and Africa. But since there isn’t time for that I’ll give you the following bullet points. Each of these bullet points reflects the general understanding of prehistory at a certain point in time, in order from oldest to newest.

In the 70s and before, we thought this:

As humans evolved they went through stages where the morphology would change, usually involving an enlargement of the brain, along with the behavior, usually indicated by changes in stone tools. So, Homo erectus used acheulean tools (hand axes), Neanderthals used Mousterian tools (Levallois technology) with prepared platforms, and modern humans (“Cro Magnon”) used upper paleolithic technology and they had nice art too. The transition from Neanderthal times to Modern Human times happened 40,000 years ago.

Also in the 1980s and continuing into the early 1990s, African archaeologists realized something. Well, they realized two things. Most of us realized that at a certain point of time, which Sally McBreardy and Allison Brooks estimated to be about 250,000 years ago or a bit earlier, a “middle paleolithic” world with a lot of handaxes and some other bifaces (Sangoan-Lupemban technologies, that sort of thing) gave way to a “Middle Stone Age” technology. This MSA technology was essentially the same as but somewhat more advanced than what the Europeans called “Middle Plaeolithic” based on the Levallois technique, a prepared platform technology.

The second thing we all knew about but not every body liked was an idea by Peter Beaumont, which is that a certain technology had emerged earlier than the Acheulean-MSA transition of 250K, which was called Fauersmith. This was a … wait for it … prepared platform technology of sorts.

Classically, the handaxe based technology of the early stone age was replaced with the prepared platform technology. This meant throwing the handaxes one last time and moving on to blades and points made with the levallois technique. But in the Fauersmith, an industry found mainly in the Cape Province of South Africa and nearby areas (I think I’ve seen it in Namibia), uses … wait for it … prepared platform technology to make handaxes! This industry is thought to be just older than the MSA, so just older than 250K, going back maybe to 350K, or maybe 400K or even 500K, no one is sure.

The Africanists also realized that the Europeans were pretty messed up in their thinking. The species/subspecies link to technology never went away in Africa. While such a thing is never expected to be perfect, it seemed to hold there. The reason the Europeans were confused is this: When it comes to new species and new technologies, Africa is the donor and Eurasia the occasional recipient.

I liken it to figuring out the chronology and technology of trade beads, those little glass beads, still in use, that were carried by Dutch and English (and other) ships around the world mainly in the early 17th century, to trade with the locals and buy things like, say, Manhattan Island. If you look at the trade beads found here and there on colonial sites around the world, and I’ve personally done this, you can figure out a chronology of style and design of those beads that we assume reflects realty in the two or three places they were consistently made. But only by going to the factory neighborhoods in the Netherlands and Italy, and South Asia, can you actually figure out what was going on.

Putting it another way, trying to describe human evolution, substantively, by observing only Europe and West Asia and ignoring Africa is like, oh hell, I don’t know what the heck, why would you ever do that?

Anyway, here’s what many of us have been thinking all along, following the insights of folks like Peter Beaumont and Alison Brooks. Once upon a time there were these Homo erectus doods, and they have some moderate game in the brain department but were definitely not humans. They may have lacked some serious human mind tricks, though they were capable of making and using fire, and their handaxes were very nice, when they wanted them to be. They were also very tough and strong and probably somewhat dangerous. Oddly, the most common cause of death, when we can estimate cause of death, is that they ate something that killed them. So, there is some kind of deficit or something behind that.

Then, some time after about a half million years ago, a subset of these guys, and I know where they lived because I have sat on the exact rock chairs they themselves sat on while making their tools, added something to their hand ax technology. They had probably added other things to their culture, and/or their brains, and this hand ax technology thing merely reflected this, but it also opened the opportunity for developing this technology further, and that may have been actually contributory to the subsequent evolutionary process. Anyway, they added this thing where instead of just whacking a flake off a big rock, with the intention of then flaking that big flake into a handaxe, they would make a few smaller specially and carefully done flakes on the big rock, literally a giant piece of bedrock in some cases, that made the prot-handaxe flake they were about to produce more predictable (and, actually, larger in many cases, I think).

The prepared platform. It made making hand axes better. But, taken to the next step, which seems to have happened in this region probably before the Great Transition in 250K, it actually allowed the production of stone tool doohickies never before seen, never before possible. this eventually developed into the full on prepared platform technique that eventually became common all across Africa, Europe and West Asia.

Now, let me tell you a little story you won’t hear, likely, from somewhere else. I was once visiting my friend Peter Beaumont, and he showed me a skull, that was unfortunately unprovenienced, i.e., no one could be sure of where it came from, that looks a lot like the Jebe Irhoud skull and others of that general form and age range. He did have it dated using a technique that, without knowing more about the context of the skull (it has been collected in antiquity by a farmer, supposedly, in the region) could not be fully reliable, but the date was somewhere between 300K and 400K, closer to the latter, if I recall correctly.

Now, go out in that thought experiment landscape and imagine looking for both artifacts and diagnostic skull bits, so you can put the story together of a few different hominins over time, one evolving into the other, and their material culture, especially their stone tool technology.

You will figure out the boundaries in time and space of the technologies long before you verify the species or subspecies by the remains of their actual heads. the reason for that should be obvious, but if it isn’t, just go around the city and look at all the litter you find. Look carefully at all the litter. Call me as soon as one of the pieces of litter is a human head. Actually, call 911 first, then me.

This new find is a head butting, perhaps, against the early time range for this species, previously expected from the Fauersmith theory.

I fully expect the key points in the article to be ignored and for Sub Saharan Africa to be broken off from the rest of Africa so that this find can be European/West Asian in stead of Africa, but to address that I’ll quickly tell you this; The Sahara may not have even existed then, so there may not have been a Sub Saharan Africa. Just an Africa. Where modern humans arose.

I quickly add, for a 3 year old human, he’s pretty darn good at it. Amanda’s family is very aquatic, as tends to happen when everyone spends several weeks per year (or longer) on the edge of a lake. They can all ski really well, they can all swim really well, etc. etc. So, very soon after my son was born, his grandfather started to bring him to age-appropriate swimming lessons. He is now 37 months old and has been to a swimming lesson almost every week. In addition to to that, Amanda brings him to the pool pretty close to once a week, often more. In addition to that, during the summer, he has spent several days at the lake and gone in once or twice almost every day the conditions allowed. In short, he should be about as good a swimmer as any 3 year old.

But still, this means he can drag himself underwater for several bananas (the unit of time used by swimming instructors, apparently), and he can thrash around moving his body across the surface several inches in a predetermined direction. He can get himself to the bottom of a pool as deep as he is tall and easily pick up a ring or some other object, and he can float around in various positions comfortably.

So he swims better than a new born through 1 month old hippo (they can’t swim at all, really) but he’s nowhere near as good as dolphin. But the thing is, this is after three years. Had Amanda and I been aquatic apes, my son would not have survived to this ripe old age. The diving reflex, proffered as evidence for an aquatic stage, during which we spent considerable time in (not near, in) water, happens in mammals generally and alone is not enough to count as a retained adaptation suggesting an earlier evolutionary stage. If human ancestors subsequent to the split with chimpanzees went through a significant aquatic phase (not just living near water, which is one of the backpedaled versions of the AAT) then our children would probably … not necessarily but probably … be much better at swimming than they are.

This does not disprove the Aquatic Ape Theory. Nor does a single nail secure a coffin. But it certainly does not inspire confidence in the idea.

My son tells me that he plans, someday, to teach me to swim.

Where we see physical evidence suggesting morbidity or even mortality among those humans, which included “archaic Homo sapiens” and Neanderthals and their kin, we often see violence. Some have suggested that this violence is from close quarter combat between individuals, while others have suggested it is from a hands-on approach to hunting where animals were wrangled to the ground and dispatched. Among the technologies used by these early humans we see evidence for some hand held weapons but no good evidence for projectiles.

It is possible that projectiles became widespread at some point and that this changed everything. Many scientists have suggested something like this, and each of those ideas is different and relates to a different set of evidence. We know for sure that projectiles didn’t exist then later they did, and we know for sure that high degrees of physical robusticity existed, later replaced by physical gracility. Regardless of the details, there was a time when humans needed to get up close and personal to intimidate, wound, or kill each other placing themselves at risk at the same time, and later, it became possible for a smaller, less robust person to kill pretty much anyone (with skill and luck) without taking that immediate personal risk.

I’m oversimplifying here, but this would mean that the social dynamic involved in interpersonal conflict would be very different under these two different conditions. A thrown spear, or more effectively, a bow and arrow would bring more of this dynamic into the broader social context. One might not be as likely to get killed or seriously injured if one decides to plug an enemy with a well placed arrow, but the slain enemy’s family and friends have the same separation from immediate injury when they come for you later to even things up. One could think of the social dynamic of interpersonal violence as becoming more meta, and the most likely result of this is that day to day interpersonal violence would be significantly reduced. (Larger scale conflict including warfare is a different matter we’ll skip for the present discussion, but intergroup raiding is still pertinent.)

This is where the NRA comes in. The National Rifle Association’s argument is that if many people are armed with deadly projectile shooting weapons, there would be less violence because the social dynamics of violence would change. In a society of archaic Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, this argument may work very well. The available evidence for modern humans living in Western society, however, is that more guns generally means more injury, not less. What may have been a good argument during the Paleolithic does not seem to apply today. However, even though the NRA’s argument is not valid, the principle underlying it may have been a major force in the transition of Homo sapiens away from a nasty, brutish, and short-lived species to one where death is more a product of disease than damage inflicted by enemies and frenimes, a species more heavily engaged in the food quest (made harder without projectiles) and more often engaged in the more leisurely and artistic pursuits.

The irony is this: The very thing that may have shepherded the human lineage to a state where diplomacy is an option, and even a good option, has seemingly stopped us from moving forward to the next potential state of being. We are on the verge of being a peace-loving species. But we’re stuck. We’re stuck with all these damn guns and this gun loving culture.

But seriously … I’d like to do something today that I’ve been meaning to do, quite literally, for years. I want to run down a selection of readings that would provide any inquisitive person with a solid grounding in Behavioral Biological theory. At the very outset you need to know that this is not about Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology is something different. I’ll explain some other time what the differences are. For now, we are only speaking of fairly traditional Darwinian behavioral theory as applied generally with a focus on sexually reproducing organisms, especially mammals, emphasis on humans and other primates but with lots of birds because they turn out to be important.

I’m not going to give you the science; Here I’m just going to give you the books. In all cases I’ll provide links to the Amazon page, because that has become a sort of default quick and dirty way of recognizing a book (you often get to see a picture). In many cases, however, these books are not available new, so you’ll have to find them in your local library or used book store, or on-line somewhere. There are only a few that, if found used, should be expensive owing to rarity or some other value-enhancing feature. Some have been so widely used in classrooms that they are readily available at used book stores near campuses, if you can find such a beast.

You will notice that most of these books are old. That is because Behavioral Biology reached a point a few years back when two things happened: 1) It had matured to a standard academic discipline so things like anthologies of the hottest new papers or “oh wow” books by key writers in the field were no longer as common and 2) It started to be eclipsed, in trade publication, by Evolutionary Psychology, which is unfortunate.

OK, I said this was about the books and not the science, but I’ll give you a little bit of science as a framework for the literature bomb I’m about to explode.

Darwin’s Natural Selection has genomes evolving due to differential fitness of specific alleles. There is co-evolution among genes, some of which are in the same bodies, some not, some in the same species, some not, so we get Sexual Selection and various other co-evolutionary phenomena.

Behavior happens, and is facilitated in tetrapods and fish and so on by neural systems which have some basic capacities. Neural and sensory systems, information processing systems, etc. can be shaped by Darwinian selection on the genome or by selection (still likely Darwinian more or less) on the behavior itself when said behavior is passed on extra-genetically, as extended phenotype, culture, memes, whatever you want to call it. This applies mainly to mammals, and within mammals, more in primates and within primates, more some apes. So there is parallel evolution in some species between genes and behavior, which are always interacting with each other.

Neural and sensory systems should evolve to enhance fitness. But fitness can be extended beyond alleles of genes, and include, just like co-evolution does, genes in other parts of the genome, others of the species (the other sex, other ages, etc.) and other species. So, things like Kin Selection can emerge whereby individuals act in the interest of their gene-sharing kin, not just themselves. Perhaps there are higher levels of selection as well.

As behavior evolves, Darwinian influences on it are limited. The degree to which genes can determine behavior in a given species is not determined by adaptive design, but rather, by phylogenetic constraints, developmental issues, and yes, to some extent, adaptive design. No matter how cool it would be to have a brain programmed by genes to recognize when another person is telling you a lie, the genetic coding for this behavior does not exist in humans mainly because it did not exist in primordial mammals or other vertebrates, where the basic brain system we have today was first developed by evolutionary processes. No matter how cool it would be to be born able to produce language, we are not born this way because our ancestors were not born this way and our brains do not develop this way. Many, perhaps most, important behavioral features of brainy primates can’t be coded into genes because of the way brains evolved over tens of millions of years. So Natural Selection, Kin Selection and other kinds of selection on behavior work through a variety of proximate means in humans, including fine tuning of things like “drives” or other psychological features that can be somewhat adapted during development as well as the culture we require to be human and a fair amount of reinvention of roughly the same wheel again and again and again.

Foundations of Behavioral Biology

The basics are to be found most efficiently in some excellent textbooks. If you do not know all the in formation provided across most of the chapters of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s textoobk Sex, Evolution and Behavior, then you simply need to read that book. Some of it is outdated, but really, where there are studies that have been supplanted by more recent work, those studies are not usually wrong, just classic. Obviously, you would read a book written 20 something years ago as a book … that is not current. But it is basic. This book must be supplemented with the material in Robert Trivers Social Evolution. It was Trivers that took basic stuff like Natural Selection and Kin Selection and made them part of a larger toolkit of behavioral science, and in particular, introduced the all important Parental Investment Theory, which turns out to explain a fair amount of the patterning we see in bird and mammal behavior.

Here, I will pause for a bit more theory. Kin Selection theory explains why bees commit suicide, but worked (in our minds) initially with bees where there was a single queen mothering all the offspring and not too many male drones. But then suicidal and other behaviors was observed in bees without this social pattern, and lots of insects (and mammals) with the same peculiar pattern of genetics that bees and ants have were found to have bee-like patterns of behavior. Co-evolutionary patterns are often found in one or two species, make total sense from a Darwinian point of view, but then the young turks (graduate students usually) find numerous counter examples showing that the predicted patterns don’t hold up. Since I just made a huge statement (above) about patterns, I’d better point out that it may well be that most cases, or at least many cases, do not fit the rules! Does this mean that the rules are invalid, that there is no Natural Selection or Kin Selection, or Parental Investment, etc. etc.? No, usually not. What it usually means that when people discovered, for instance, an explanation for sex bias in Red Deer offspring (high ranked females have male offspring, other females have female offspring) they assumed that this adaptation was so cool that it must occur in all mammals, and then they discovered that it is actually rather rare in primates and may occur in the end in only a few mammalian species, and seemingly not in humans. For instance. But this does not mean that the so-called Trivers-Willard hypotheses (which you will find described in Social Evolution and elsewhere) is wrong. Rather, this subset of parental investment theory is expected to work only under certain circumstances. And this is true of all of these behavioral models.

Think of these evolutionary models as being like currency behaving in a rather straightforward economy, but where that economy is only a subset of a larger economy involving barter, coercion, bribery, some very intense marketing and with con artists everywhere. Under many conditions the money will change hands in predicted patterns, following the rules, but under most conditions, while the expected values and directionality of exchange is a force, it is only one of many forces. And, the system is likely very dynamic. It may turn out that we don’t live in a world where evolutionary stable strategies … co-evolutionary systems that are stable over the long term are maintained because there is no “better” (more fitness enhancing) alternative … are very rare because, in fact, conditions are constantly changing. ESS’s may be rare, but that does not mean that the evolutionary forces and the definition of what is “stable” are non existent. They are just living the life of Sisyphus.

Advanced Behavioral Biology

I would start the next phase of learning with one of my favorite books, one I’ve used many times in classes: Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution and Cognition) by, as it turns out, Robert Trivers. This volume includes many of the key papers that were behind the literature cited above that you’ve just finished reading, along with interesting introductory material by Trivers, giving context. You will be more than prepared to read the source material, to understand it better than most people will if encountered on its own, and to see its strength’s and shortcomings. Do report back.

You can read Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution and Cognition) either before or after the following two items, which are by the authors of one of the above mentioned textbooks, and which provide excellent empirical studies of human behavioral biology using strict Darwinian approaches. Both of these books may be fairly hard to find: Homicide: Foundations of Human Behavior and The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (Darwinism Today series) by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson.

Proximate Mechanisms: Hormones and Neurons Galore

Now that you’ve got a good exposure to the basic theory and to some empirical species-wide studies (of humans) let’s step back for a moment and look at the biology a bit more closely. First, you have to understand endocrinology and related neurobiology at several levels, and you also need to entertain yourself with some excellent writing. So, read Mel Konner’s The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit followed by Robert Sapolsky’s The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament.

To put this in the most important context (as it relates to the most important human adaptation) now read Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, or watch the documentary Childhood (at least the first hour of it).

At this point you are ready to explore the human brain, it’s evolution, and the evolution of language. You’ll want to start with Terry Deacon’s The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain.

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h3>It’s People!!!

Now that you have the basic behavioral biology, the proximate mechanisms related to hormones, development, neural systems, etc. under your belt, and a bit of real life application to human culture and society, it is time to explore the women and the men of the species. You might want to glance first at the infanticide literature. It turns out, despite protestations by Men’s Rights Advocates, that a lot of what happens in human culture and related human evolution has to do with the fact that men are dicks, and male committed infanticide is a big part of that. You’ve already explored that with Daly and Wilson and Cinderella, above. Now have a look at Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression against Females or a selection of the papers therein. Or skip that part and take my word for it.

Either way, your next stop should be with Sarah Hrdy and these two books by her, in order: Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Then, on to the boys with Richard Wrangham: Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. When you are done reading that, you’ll need some Frans DeWaal to calm down.

Report back!

Personally, I think that most biological drives, maybe all, produce extreme or pathological behavior if unchecked, and that therefore all drives are repressed to some degree in almost all individual humans. There is considerable evidence that things like anger, thirst, or fear (to use highly generalizable terms) are manifest as a balance between limbic circuits that are excitatory or inhibitory; Experimental interference with one or the other circuit produces extreme results such as a rat that will not stop eating or a cat that will maintain an arch-backed bristle-haired stance until it falls over in exhaustion.

Also, I think that what I’m calling drives (again, as a convenience … you won’t find what I am thinking on Wikipedia) are a basic mammalian trait. Therefore, it is reasonable to ask if some of the evolutionary events related to the rise of new species of mammals are related to changes in drives, or more interestingly (and more commonly, I suspect) changes in how drives are on one hand repressed and on the other hand re-configured to work with each other.

Thus, one could say that since humans are behaviorally derived with respect to many traits in comparison to African apes in general, a major feature of the human brain must be mechanisms telling the rest of the brain, to some extent every minute of the day, “Don’t be a chimp …. Don’t be a chimp. Seriously, dood … don’t be a chimp.”

At the individual level, and I’m oversimplifying a great deal here, one might imagine drives being enhanced or repressed to a degree that makes an individual very different from others. The fictional character “Brennan” on the TV series Bones comes to mind. She seems most of the time to have no drives at all, or to be intellectually in denial of them. Social and psychological pathologies may often be associated with drives that are inappropriately strong or weak.

So, is it really true that behaviors are not “caused by genes” if there are these drives? Yes, and I say this because the average person who is thinking that behaviors are caused by genes is not thinking at all about intermediate mechanisms, and if they are, they are assuming that the intermediate mechanisms are little more than a transparent ether through which genes operate on the behavioral phenotypes we observe. Also, “genetic determinism” is not about whether or not one or more genes are involved in a trait, but rather (and this is very important so if you’ve got a yellow highlighter uncap it now) “genetic determinism” is about the close correspondence between variation across individuals in the genetic code they carry and the ensuing variation across individuals in the phenotype they express. Moreover, “genetic determinism” as usually conceived is presumed to average out within categories such as “race” or “sex” with very little variation within, but enough variation between these categories to be measurable. Which is why the concept is almost always racist or sexist or both.

But in reality, variation in the way limbic and other brain functions as well as closely related endocrine systems are manifest in humans and probably many other mammals is only to a small extent a function of genes, and is otherwise a function of what we may loosely call development. This relationship is not a post-hoc observation, or a liberal excuse, or a politically motivated bit of rhetoric. It is, rather, the explanation for why we have large brains that mostly develop, in detail, on the basis of experience rather than genetic coding for how they are hooked up. (And, while this applies mainly to mammals, something like it might be going on in some birds.)

Consider long term habituation. When endocrinologists (those who study hormones) measure hormone levels, they generally adjust the numbers to account for individual baselines, because while two individuals may have very different baselines they can have the same range of behaviors and responses. Two men may have androgen hormone levels that vary between them by a factor of 2X or 3X, but have the same basic behavioral repertoire. This is because of two things: First, the number of receptor sites and their sensitivity matters as much as, if not more than, the serum hormone levels; and second, most hormone systems are some sort of feedback loop that relies on changes in concentration against set points that are individually established, not species-specific. Putting it another way, if a hormone system is like a thermostat in your house (a homeostatic equilibrium system) then each individual has a personally established and potentially unique “room temperature.” This variation between individuals could be genetic, but is it just as likely, or even more likely, to be developmental. A related example is the mechanism by which we become “cold” or “warm” (with respect to comfort). This is not innate, but rather, a function of exposure to environmental conditions in early life (thigh there are body-shape related variations that probably are genetic that matter to thermoregulation in a non-industrial population).

Given huge piles of evidence for individual variation in behavior as a function of context, conditioning, and development and relatively little evidence that has not been made up, cooked up, or otherwise tainted or damaged for straight forward genetic determination of behavior, I’m going to go with the model that humans vary mostly on the basis of their biological and cultural experiences post-conception. For example, the single largest factor in variation in human intelligence in a given population can easily be prenatal alcohol exposure, or variation in folic acid in the maternal diet. Given the amount of post-conception stuff the brain does in development, and how much of that depends on experience, it is very unlikely that brain function varies across individuals on the basis of genes (other than individuals with genetic disorders, but we need not count broken individuals in considering normative development).

From what we know about “drives” and from what we know about brains and development, it is very reasonable to hypothesize that variation across individual human males in something like violence levels, likelihood to carry out rape, or other widespread and usually male-associated behavior is environmental. Yet, these behaviors at the base, the systemic potential for these behaviors, is a mammalian feature or a primate feature or a great-ape feature, depending on level of analysis.

This is not the place to discuss this in detail, but a quick digression regarding comparison among mammals is probably useful at this point in order to stem unnecessary direct comparisons that may come up in discussion. Maybe mammalian males in general have certain traits leading them towards violent or icky behavior, but the details are important. The fact that big horn sheep butt heads in contests sometimes to the death, taken as an extreme male-male competitive trait, can not be linked to similar behavior among human males (and such behavior does seem to happen in humans). The basal bovid-type organisms from which the big horn sheep derive was probably a small bodied monogamous forest dwelling animal in which males probably did not have a much greater tendency to butt heads than females, though both males and females would likely have employed some sort of “violence” in defending young or territories. Among primates, Old World Monkeys include a lot more examples of violent male behavior than do New World Monkeys. The latter group, in fact, have many cases of distinctly non-violent males as typical of the species. We don’t know the nature of the basal primate, but we cannot assume that it was like a baboon, which is the primate often taken as prototypical in thinking about primate social behavior. In fact, we can guess that it was probably NOT like a baboon for a number of reasons. Therefore, what might be thought of as “over the top” male behavior (butting heads to the death) is NOT a basal mammalian trait that may be found in humans because we are mammals. The phylogenetic link between big horn sheep and human football players is non-existent. (This is why many of us cringe with the latest “evolutionary psychology” finding!) Rather, violence in human males is either derived in our species or in a set of species closely related, including perhaps the great apes, or apes in general, or some other subset of Old World primates.

And, this would be a matter of evolution of drives in a very general sense which are then shaped in a maturing individual by other developmental tendencies and in social beings with large brains, buy culture.

Which brings us to the famous YanSan comparison.

There is an intellectual and pedagogic tradition that comes from people working out of a handful of American Universities (originally, Berkeley, Chicago and Harvard, but then other places such as Madison) having to do with the study of both primates and human foragers. The details are interesting but this is not the place for them. What is important is this: A lot of us (and I’m part of that tradition) learned some of our best metaphors, for doing both research and teaching, from Irv DeVore, who either came up with them himself or consolidated them from people with whom he overlapped or worked, such as Sherwood Washburn, George Gaylord Simpson, and others. And one of those tidbits, which is a comparison and a set of stories much larger than your average metaphor, is the YanSan comparison.

It runs like this. Imagine a Yanomamo village in the Amazon. The Yan (short for Yanomamo) live in a society that for various reasons incorporates a fair amount of violence among men. Men who have killed other men are given a special name of respect, tend to have more children than other men, and often have two wives (in a society in which while polygyny is allowed, it is rare). Then, in contrast, imagine a “San” (Busheman) community in southern Africa. The San live in a society of hunter-gatherers where variation in status among men, for any reason at all, is discouraged, and interpersonal violence is frowned upon. Among the Yan, disputes are settled with chest pounding duels or axe fights, while among the San, disputes are settled by endless discussion during which there might even be hugging.

That’s the background. The YanSan comparison itself goes like this:
In the day to day course of events, a Yan child may become upset or agitated as children occasionally do, perhaps in relation to another child. The good Yan father steps in. He brings his son to the center of the community courtyard and calls over the other child with whom the conflict has arisen, and that child’s’ father tags along. The two Yan dads equip the children with poles about the length of their bodies and set them up to whack at each other until one of them succumbs to injury. Or perhaps, instead of using the poles (because that can be dangerous … you can poke your eye out with one of those things) the dads teach the 6 year olds the rudimentary form of the chest pounding duel, in which each participant gets one free shot at the other’s chest, and you can use one fist or two to pound on your opponent. The participants go back and forth taking fee shots at each other’s chest until one falls to the ground. The one still standing wins.

Meanwhile, over in the San society which is entirely different, a perturbed child is treated differently. If a toddler or youngster is very upset, yelling, having a tantrum, any nearby adult who knows the child, often but not always a relative, will hold the child in both arms until he calms down (this can take considerable time), and then spend some time soothing the boy and telling him thoughtful thoughts.

In both cases, there is a set of drives typical for men, and there is a society in which there is expected, normative male behavior. But since the expected behavior is very different between the two societies the developmental process has a lot of work to do. Boys will not on their own grow up to be Yanomamo warriors with the proper kind of fierceness, and boys will not on their own grow up to be San hunters with a proper cooperative attitude, unless a great deal of cultural energy is expended.

And this is facilitated by the existence of childhood, which may well be Homo sapiens most important adaptation. The YanSan comparison exemplifies how humans transit from blastosphere to adult with respect to behavior, and demonstrates that there is a great deal of potential variation in what the result is, and thus, there is great potential variation in the sorts of societies that Homo sapiens can come up with.

But males are still demonic.

What I mean by that is this: Across all human societies, even when there is relative equality between males and females in power or other measures, males are the more violent sex on average. When human societies range into more violent normative behavior, it is males who are in the vanguard virtually all the time. There are plenty of cases where females are also violent, but they are comparatively rare and less extreme.

And, there are patterns to this behavior seen across society, and interestingly, there are even patterns of male behavior when males are viewed across species, as per the above discussion, among the great apes and in particular comparing chimps and humans. Those patterns may be accidental, they may be nothing more than basic mammalian behavior (or the behavior of an internally fertilizing lactating creature, on whatever planet it is found) and thus almost too basic to be meaningful, or they could be patterns around the specific nature of ape social systems, of which chimpanzees and humans have their own similar yet different versions.

Some years ago, Richard Wrangham, emerging as a leading primatologist, was woo’ed away from his home in Michigan by Harvard to do research and teach interesting courses. One of the courses he developed in his new milieu and taught to advanced undergrads in bioanthropology was about male behavior in apes, looking at the behavioral biology and culture of this behavior, seeking patterns, similarities, contrasts, etc. Over a short period of time this course became very popular. Knee-jerk feminists responded to the course with great disdain because it seemed to be biological determinism, but then some went ahead and took it anyway and found out that it was not. And eventually the course became a book: Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

Many have criticized Wrangham’s book for suggesting that simple underlying genetic systems determine things like gang violence in humans, but few who have read the book have come away thinking that. It may well be that Wrangham’s view is somewhat deterministic, but that is hardly the point of the study. And, if you bring to the discussion, as Wrangham does, the concept of “drives” or similar psychological phenomena as I’ve described above, the genetic determinism that might be inherent in many comparisons between species’ behavior rather fades away. More interesting, though, may be the political nature of the problem of determinism, and this relates to the ongoing discussion of male privilege as well as to a previous discussion we’ve had on this blog about rape. Is it possible to attain the ideal feminist society (towards which we all strive) if male and female drives are somewhat different, and male drives are (or at least some of them are) so … dickish?

… a new philosophy has emerged in the last decades, an evolutionary brand of feminism that sees the emergence of patriarchy as an intimate part of human biology. Evolutionary feminists, writers like Patricia Gowaty, Sarah Hrdy, Meredith Small, and Barbara Smuts, agree with traditional feminists about the evils of patriarchy, but they do not disconnect humans from their biological past. The logic of evolutionary feminists appreciates the rich details of patriarchal history as recounted by historian Gerda Lerner, but it simultaneously rejects the notion of plumbing the human condition through reading merely the last 6,000 years of history.

Evolutionary feminists … would insist that people can think about the evolutionary pressures that elicit rape, for example or other forms of violence, without necessitating any absurd pronouncement that because rape is “natural” it is in any way forgivable. After all, no one considers the case of the black widow spider, who kills and eats her male counterpart after mating, to mean that murder and cannibalism are okay. …

Patriarchy is worldwide and history-wide, and its origins are detectable in the social lives of chimpanzees. It serves the reproductive purposes of the men who maintain the system. Patriarchy comes from biology in the sense that it emerges from men’s temperaments, out of their evolutionarily derived efforts to control women and at the same time have solidarity with fellow men in competition against outsiders.

(Wrangham 1996 pp 124-125)

It is interesting to consider the commentary emerging (mainly in comments but also in a few blog posts) around Rebeccapocalypse in light of this discussion. Most commenters are either on board with giving women the right to set their own level of concern about potentially dangerous men (those are the feminists) or they re busy making excuses or denying the demonic nature of male Homo sapiens. While many of the former are men (it might be about 50:50 men:women) the vast majority of the latter are men.

Just sayin’

In homage to an inspiration of this post, I provide this link to the secret, generally unseen obituary of Professor Irven Boyd DeVore.

Anyway, the following is the abstract of a 1998 paper by M. Henneberg that is still relevant of some interest:

1. The hominid brain has increased approximately three times in size since the Pliocene, but so has the brain of equids. The tripling of hominid brain size has been considered as an indicator of increased mental abilities, as it coincided with the production of tools, weapons and other artefacts of increasing sophistication. No indicators of the increase in equid intelligence are known. Intraspecific correlation between brain size and variously measured ‘intelligence’ is, in modern humans, very weak if not completely absent. With the exception of size, there are no major differences between the anatomy of ape and human brains.

2. A study of 297 estimates of body height, 626 estimates of bodyweight and 276 estimates of the cranial capacity of hominids dated at various periods over the past 5 million years shows that the increase in hominid brain size was paralleled by an increase in body size.

3. In a sample of 45 variously dated fossil hominids, brain size correlates isometrically with body size.

4. Since the Late Pleistocene (approximately 30 000 years ago), human brain size decreased by approximately 10%; yet again, this decrease was paralleled by a decrease in body size.

5. Therefore, it may be concluded that the gross anatomy of the hominid brain is not related to its functional capabilities. The large human brain:body size ratio may be a result of the structural reduction of the size of the gastrointestinal tract and, consequently, its musculoskeletal supports. It is related to richer, meat-based diets and extra-oral food processing rather than the exceptional increase in the size of the cerebrum. The exceptional mental abilities of humans may be a result of functional rather than anatomical evolution.

There are earlier and later papers that indicate or support similar ideas, but this is the nicest summary.

Here I want to do two separate but related things. I want to discuss certain aspects of the nature of fieldwork in my area in the 20th century that have had a strong effect on the way women have pursued their careers (or not). Although I characterize this as the situation of the 20th century, this does not mean that the situation has or has not changed substantially since then. Simply put, I’m not discussing the current career related situaton for women in field paleoanthropology here in this post.

The second thing I want to do is to talk about a successful female social scientist with a strong connection to fieldwork in palaeoanthropology, as well as theoretical and administrative contributions. This person is also someone who straddles the boundary between classic mid- to late-Twentieth Century patterns of professional activity (in these field sciences) and more recent patterns. I’m speaking here of Barbara Isaac.

The link between these two topics is a bit tenuous but it is also meaningful. There is nothing stereotypical about Barbara Isaac’s career, and there is nothing short of admirable about her as a person and a scholar. My intention here is to not make strong links between these two parallel topics.

Maybe most scientists are labrats, but just as majority rule in defining normalcy and typicality is damaging in matters of gender fairness and diversity, majority rule in matters of sub field should be viewed with a critical eye. In particular, it may be the case that field sciences are fundamentally different from lab sciences in important ways. Consider the fields of Palaeoanthropology and Primatology. Well known women in these fields include Jane Goodall, Alison Brooks, Sara Hrdy , and Mary Leakey, to name just a few. The significance of these women is not simply that they have been successful. It is much larger than that. People get the “Leakeys” confused, but in my experience with 20 years of teaching introductory classes in human evolution, if you mention Mary Leakey, the average person (students, members of the press, people I’ve just run into) knows that you are speaking of one of the main Africanists who have studied human origins. Many Americans are aware of Sara Hrdy because her books Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species and The Woman That Never Evolved: With a New Preface and Bibliographical Updates, Revised Edition have been read so widely, and assigned in so many intro or mid level classes covering the biology of women, or intro bioanthropology. Indeed, people often ask me about her, having read the book at some point in time. The average American may not know who Alison Brooks is, but Africanists acknowledge her as one of the leaders, if not the leader in African Paleolithic archaeology.

For many years I have had the impression that Jane Goodall is one name that is often recalled when students are asked to name a living famous scientist. In an earlier “edition” of this blog post I made the claim that this was well known, and many individuals objected to this. Since I don’t have the time to investigate further I’ll assume that it might not be the case that Jane Goodall comes to mind when people are asked to name a scientist. (But in my heart of hearts I think her name DOES often pop up.) Surely, dear reader, YOU have heard of Jane Goodall.

My point is that there may be something about the field studies of which I speak that is different from other areas of science. The list of physisists who have contributed to our modern understanding of cosmology includes many women, but the list of people who come to mind when the average American (for instance) is asked to a name famous physicist is (it is my impression) mainly male. I’m arguing here based mainly on my own impressions that the opposite is true with palaeoanthropology and primatology. I could be wrong. But I don’t think so.

Does this mean that these fields are contributing in an important way to perceptions of diversity in the sciences generally? Well yes.

I would now like to make a carefully worded statement about the difference between men and women in traditional 20th century academia in the roles they played in both the professional and personal setting. Listen carefully.

All else being equal, most men in 20th century field sciences had the assistance of highly capable spouses … the proverbial woman behind the man, while most women did not. Women did not typically have this resource available to them. Numerous other barriers to women’s success existed, of course, but this differential is especially interesting in the context of field bioanthropology because of the nature of the pursuit itself. It is quite possible that some areas of science (or other endeavors) had more opportunities for a spouse (usually a woman) to assist the career professional (usually a man) than other fields. For various reasons, field Palaeoanthropology is probably one of these areas.

It is interesting to survey the primary African Palaeoanthropologists of the latter part of the 20th century. I can do part of this informally in my own mind as I recall various conferences, biographies, and obituaries of the day, and collate (again, this is all in my head….) these with acknowledgment sections of major monographs. Bill Howells acknowledged his faithful wife, Muriel, who traveled around the world with him measuring skulls and keeping him in line. C. Loring Brace never forgets, in a public talk to note the contributions Mrs. Brace made to his research efforts. Betty Clark was always there for her husband Desmond, in the field or in the lab. And so on and so forth. You get the picture.

Now, here comes a statement about this observation that is meant to be dripping in sarcasm and over the top in cynicism. But, some people (owing perhaps to their own biases) will not understand that this is a cynical statement about the patriarchy and how it operates. So, remember, the following statement is not what I or anyone with even a modicum of political enlightenment would ever think. If you do not understand what I am saying in the paragraph you are reading now, then GO BACK AND READ IT AGAIN! And if you still don’t get it, then PLEASE LEAVE NOW. OK, ready? Here goes:

That is, indeed, what every scholar needs: A wife (or two) who knows how to type, edit, wield a caliper, and still have time to do the grocery shopping, have lunch ready at noon, and give birth to and raise the kids.

But the women who are well known in this field come from a slightly different background. Either they powered ahead into the field of study along side their husband (about whom … the husband … I make no claims in this post) in a similar area, as with the archaeologist Mary Leakey, who’s husband was a palaeontologist or primatologist and naturalist Jane Goodall, who’s husband was director of the Gombe chimp field site and a film maker/naturalist, and/or they worked in a field setting for much of their career whereby they actually lived in-country, or both.

Living in-country provides a significant career advantage for anyone. The basic cost of transport and scheduling of research is different, and easier. When Ofer Bar Yosef was visiting Harvard from Israel, prior to being hired at the Ivy League college, he told me “I’ll never take a job here. In Israel, the sites I work on are in my back yard. Nothing is more than an hour drive away!” (Apparently Harvard made him an offer he could not refuse a year or so later.)

Another advantage of in-country work (meaning you LIVE IN THE COUNTRY IN WHICH YOU WORK), when the country is a developing (or in some cases, unraveling) nation, is the basic cost of doing business. Dianne Fossey , Jane Goodall, Shirley Strum (to name a few highly successful women) and a number of men as well have probably benefited significantly from having inexpensive household and professional staff while working in the Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, and so on. An academic ex patriot’s (an ex patriot is someone who has moved to and works in a country other than their native land) household can be a very easy place to get things done. Excellent libraries may be far away, but you may have a driver and a cook and a cleaner and, as was the case with the Leakeys and many others, a number of technical staff who do not cost much but who can work with the fossils or carry out data collection better than any passing graduate student. Everyone knows, and the people involved readily acknowledge (to their credit) that the big names … Leakey, Walker, and so on, hardly ever actually found a hominid fossil. A hominid fossil found in Kenya is more likely to have been found by Kenyan Kimeu Kimoya than by anyone else.

For the present, I’ll just skip over the part about the subaltern contribution to the career of the privileged. Not because that is not important, but rather, because it is too important to address as an aside. I will save that for another time.

I have two reasons for mentioning all of this. One is simply to point out the nature of these field studies, and to note the fact that some of the successful women in these fields were successful in part because they had the equivalent (more or less) of a spouse, just like all the men in these fields did. (Keep in mind, this all primarily applies to a 20th century context.) The second reason is to mention that Barbara Isaac’s career involved being the spouse (for several years) and being independently successful without the aid of a spouse or minions as highly skilled low-salaried field workers.

Barbara’s career has been fairly low key. She contributed in all the usual ways, as part of a team, working with her husband, Glynn Isaac. Following Glynn’s untimely and tragic death, Barbara edited a volume of his major papers, and shepherded (a mild word compared to the reality) the production of the Koobi Fora monograph. At the same time, she continued work on an important research project that I’ll shift the focus to momentarily, on the role of throwing in human evolution.

Very few people know this, and I’m not going to go into any details here because they would necessarily be too vague, but Barbara Isaac was instrumental in the process of opening up international research in the Republic of Georgia, where the Dmanisi site has yielded important hominid fossils. Barbara stepped aside from that work early on, but it continues today. Barbara also oversaw the repatriation of Native American materials at the Peabody Museum, and served for ten years as assistant director of the Peabody.

I’ve always thought, but some may argue that I’m wrong, that Barbara was also responsible for the branding of African Stone Age archaeology, in a visual sense. Barbara did many of the illustrations for the work at Koobi Fora and for Glynn’s theoretical contributions. The fanciful rock art-inspired figures that play out the various theories of bipedalism, or central place foraging, or acheulean activities of one sort or another seem to have come from her imagination, although they’ve been imitated subsequently many times.

Barbara’s work with throwing is especially important and underscored a number of her excellent intellectual and personal skills. Here is the basic question: Did throwing things, as weapons, play any role in hominid evolution? It turns out that many of the earliest considerations of this idea, and some of the investigations carried out contemporaneously with Barbara’s interest in this, were kinda nutty. One ‘researcher’ took the opportunity of being a tourist at Olorgesailie — a site excavated by the Isaacs in Kenya at which thousands of hand axes are seen still on the ground, with the tourists walking over them on a wooden catwalk — to pick up an actual hand axe from its place in situ and wing it across the landscape to see what would happen. Crazy people with crazy ideas totally ruined the whole throwing thing, simply because taking a look at throwing would be received like launching an expedition to find Bigfoot. Crazy.

But, the idea is not really so crazy, and Barbara Isaac recognized this because of some work she had done on the question. So, despite the Bigfoot like nature of the throwing hypothesis, she went ahead and assembled a large amount of information in an effort to have a run at the idea. This is how many ideas in palaeoanthropology are addressed scientifically. You can’t run lab experiments for most of these things. So instead you work out a model that described the putative phenomenon, and then apply several lines of evidence to the model to see how stupid the model turns out to be. This evidence can include some experimental work, but it also includes seeking patterns in the archaeological records (objects that can be thrown) looking at medical, physical, or anecdotal evidence (cases of successful homicide by throwing, sports related research), and ethnographic evidence where available. After numerous attempts to make the idea look stupid, if it ends up not looking too stupid, then you may be on to something!

The point here is that Barbara had the cachet in the field, among her peers, to look for Bigfoot and be taken seriously. And when she looked, fully prepared to reject the idea, she ended up making a reasonable argument that throwing was a plausible technique for interpersonal conflict, defense, and hunting. She would not and did not go beyond plausibility, but that is all she attempted. The idea of her work was to demonstrate the implausibility of the throwing hypothesis, and she ended up essentially unable to do so, leaving the idea standing at the end. As plausible. That is good paleoscience.

“Ability to throw was probably achieved at an early stage in human evolution but has received little scholarly attention. Although this ability is poorly developed in apes, anatomical studies suggest that the hand of Australopithecus afarensis was adapted to throw with precision and force. Archaeological evidence and early ethnographic observations are cited in order to demonstrate the importance of the throwing skill in human evolution.”

This of course applies to the use of thrown spears but Isaac looked beyond this to the idea of any deadly projectiles, including basic rocks or the famous Middle Stone Age “spheroids” (rocks shaped by hominids to be round) and such contrivances as bolas. Even to this day, the validity of any claim that a particular artifact is a throwing spear or something similar is very questionable prior to the Upper Paleolithic.

Isaac reviews the ethnographic record and there are a number of examples of cultures in which throwing relatively simple objects for hunting is documented. Most of these are cases of people throwing rocks (as a regular practice) at small things like hyraxes . But there are more extreme cases. The Portuguese encountered natives in the Canary Islands who were able to keep the Portuguese at bay using thrown stones and horn tipped wooden lances.

“In hardly any time at all they had so badly beaten us that they had driven us back into shelter with heads bloodied, arms and legs broken by blows from stones: because they know of no other weaponry, and believe me that they throw and wield a stone considerably more skilfully than a Christian; it seems like the bolt of a crossbow when they throw it…”

(Notice the passive-aggressive “that’s all they know” along with the “They kicked our arses.”)

In addition to the ethnographic record, Isaac reviews the archaeological, human and more broadly hominid anatomical evidence, and looks at chimps. Again, there is general support for the idea.

She concludes, among other things: Stone throwing can be highly lethal, and is widespread in areas where there are no firearms, in the ethnographic record; The anatomy allows for this practice, and there is evidence of this ability in early hominids as distinct from ape models.; The archaeological evidence is suggestive but equivocal to date, owing mainly to a lack of consideration of the nature of the evidence. She also briefly discusses observed sex differences in throwing behavior.

Isaac, Barbara (1987). Throwing and Human Evolution The African Archaeological Review, 5, 3-17