First off, some good news. My Ubuntu is back up and running! Now onto the book analysis I promised:



(http://faculty.clintoncc.suny.edu/faculty/michael.gregory/files/Bio%20102/Bio%20102%20lectures/Motor%20Systems/infant_skull.jpg)

Overall, the book was great and excellent for the lay reader as well as the expert. Once again it is What the Bones Tell Us by Jeffrey H. Schwartz (link to Amazon). The introduction to the book give a nice overview, with examples, of what we can know from bone. But, he does not just tell us of how we can sex skeletons or know what ages these individuals were. He tells the wonders of bone and teeth through engaging stories and the experiences he has been through. When necessary, he does throw out some technical language and dispels techniques, though. He begins with mentioning that we rarely find intact and complete skeletons but are much more often fragmentary and even in very small, hard to distinguish pieces. The rest of part one of the book, focusing on the recent past and the present, is a collection of stories and the work that anthropologists in this day and age are brought to work on: forensics and historical archaeology like identification of remains and ancient Carthage. This part of the book was certainly interesting, but I was much more interested in the second part of the book: the evolutionary past and present.

This half of the book is like taking a class in Human Paleontology. I took one of those as an undergraduate at Indiana University, so I guess I would be qualified in saying that. Anyway, the discussion begins with Dart, Darwin, and Huxley. Three of the key players in the beginnings of Human Paleontology and evolution. Raymond Dart, everyone who reads this blog should know, is the discoverer of Australopithecus africanus and the famous Taung child and limestone endocast of South Africa. This specimen is still being analysed for information! I received a paper from the November/December 2005 issue of the South African Journal of Science recently where they were discussing the weaning, dental hypoplasia, and age of the Taung individual. Very cool. When Raymond Dart published his specimen in the journal Nature, no one really took the find seriously, and many even were against him. Why would humans have evolved in Africa? Why would a human ancestor look like an ape? These were questions asked by his colleagues. Anyway, the specimen would soon be accepted, but not until other people had their time to play. Charles Darwin, who came before Dart, never really mentioned humans in his works. He pretty much avoided the topic as much as possible, but sort of circumlocuted a lot. He mentions that humans as animals have evolved but never really goes into any detail. But, after all, his theory of evolution was the backing of what was later to come. Modern day evolution is not like Darwinian evolution; it has changed quite a bit, but the foundation started with Darwin. Now Huxley was the man behind what Darwin was saying. Huxley's ideas are what gave The Descent of Man its backing and provided the groundwork on which to build. Huxley saw humans as animals, as we are, and although working with gorillas as our closest relatives, he expounded on why we are the closest to the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans). Huxley thrust in a mindset that would change the world, with Darwin's help. Raymond Dart was cool, too.

Now, I would like to discuss something that has bothered me for some time. The Great Chain of Being and missing links. You hear a lot of people in the news and even scientists using the term missing link, when in fact, they are completely mistaken. The idea of missing links is well in our past and is no longer a valid assessment of phylogeny or paleontology. Our ancestors used to believe that God created everything in the world from the lowest to the greatest along a continuum, or as it was called the Great Chain of Being. Everything that exists presently and in the past was somewhere on that chain with humans at the top as the pinnacle of Creation. If dinosaurs existed as fossils then God must have made them and they had to fit somewhere. So, basically, evolution never happened. Everything stayed the same and nothing changed. Our taxonomic forefather, Carolus Linnaeus, believed wholeheartedly in this Chain and set out to find and place every species in Creation on that continuum. Now, we use Linnaean taxonomy to show evolution. Oh how times have changed! Anyway, missing links were those things that should be there in the Chain but are not known. The term missing link is not synonymous with transitional form, even though it is used that way today. That is why the term bothers me; it should never be used, because it is archaic and we no longer believe in the Great Chain of Being. It is out of date and useless, but scientists and lay people continue to use it. It really bothers me. Scientists are promoting misconceptions and myths of evolution. Now let's turn back to the book.

The bulk of the rest of the book deals with Neanderthals, but it really bounces around to get all sides of what was going on through time. In other words, the rest of the book has a core interest in how Neanderthals are related to us, but it uses the history of human paleontology and other things to deepen the discussion and make it more whole. In order to understand all of this, you really have to read it, because I cannot faithfully reproduce it here. That is why there are like 150 pages in the book dealing with Neanderthals and relevant discussion. It is detailed and in depth, so I will just highlight what struck me as interesting. As I mentioned before, prominent scientists at the time believed that Africa could surely not be the place where humans evolved. It had to be Asia, because Homo erectus was there and it was a center of commerce, trade, and civilization that went beyond what was seen in Europe. Therefore, Asia is where humans evolved. Scientists at the time, including Blumenback, believed that the races seen in the world were due to various people splitting off at different times and migrating to Europe, Africa, and Australia. That resulted in the Mongoloids, Negroids, Caucasoids, and Australomelanesians (modern term). The Mongoloids remained in East Asia but also spread into the Arctic and into the Americas (the New World), the Negroids went to Africa, the Caucasoids spread into the Levant and Europe, and the Australomelanesians went to the islands of Southeast Asia and Australia. Really, they focused more on the Australian Aborigines, but you get the gist of what I am getting at here. Now, how do you think they arranged these peoples? Europeans on top, right! Clearly, Caucasians are superior. They moved toward the Caspian sea and the Caucasus mountains and were part of the "Original Perfection" from which the Negroids and others were lower. Caucasoids had white skin, so they showed perfection as white is good and black is evil (in terms of colors as showing emotion). They had high and short skulls which were "beautiful" compared to the long, low skulls of Australians and Neanderthals. See, I told you Neanderthals were in there! Neanderthals were thought of as the stupid and brutish being that was primitive and not like a modern human. They were looked down on, somewhat, as being inferior to modern humans, so when the Caucasians came in from the East, they completely supplanted the Neanderthals. Modern humans replaced them completely...no overlap really, just gone.



(http://planet.uwc.ac.za/nisl/biodiversity/karen/images/pic034.jpg)

The cave sites of Tabun and Skhul, though, showed that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted for quite some time. Other sites in the Levant and Europe, nowadays, have shown that the Neanderthals lasted for quite some time beyond when modern humans rode in. Well, they didn't ride in but walked in. Now, we know that Neanderthals were completely upright and not hunched over as typically shown, they were intelligent and not necessarily cruel and violent. They were just as human as we are, but we as modern humans had something that the Neanderthals did not and they died out. Neanderthals are known to have buried their dead and probably had some sort of religion. They may have also been able to speak, not like us exactly, but something similar, I guess. Our anthropological forefather, Ales Hrdlicka, believed that Neanderthals were like what I described above: Neanderthals and modern humans had a gradual transition, but eventually the Neanderthals just couldn't survive. I believe that Neanderthals are distinct from us, but not too far away. I like both types of classification, but prefer to use Homo neanderthalensis instead of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, because I do not think they were close enough to us to warrant a subspecies classification. As far as I know, anatomically modern Homo sapiens did not interbreed significantly with Homo neanderthalensis. If they had, I would prefer the latter classification and make them a subspecies. My definition of a species in human evolution (short and simple) is the set of individuals whose offspring is fertile. In other words, humans and Neanderthals may have interbred, but possibly, their offspring was not fertile, so no Neanderthal genes were passed on.

As I said before, the book was excellent and an eye opener for me. I recommend it to all who read this blog, especially if bones and teeth are your thing!

Jason