The book "Skeletons in the closet. The dramatic evolution of man "
Hello! We have replenished our “New Science” series with a great book by Ian Tattersal :
Get acquainted with the results of more than half a century of work of Ian Tattersal, the largest modern specialist in human evolution and paleoanthropology. The dramatic story of the human race told by Tattersal will not leave you indifferent. This book is about how different types of people coexisted and fought with each other. The author traces the development of the science of man from the works of Charles Darwin to the discoveries of the Lika dynasty, completing the book with a story about the last amazing discoveries made in the Caucasus.
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I (Ian Tatters) devoted many years to paleoanthropology - the science of human evolution - and would never trade my work for anything else. She always brought me satisfaction, and a lot of events (both desired and random) did not let me get bored.
Over the past 50 years, so many important changes have taken place in paleoanthropology that it has become an incredibly interesting science. Among them is the huge number of archaeological finds that have replenished the "paleontological chronicle" of mankind - a kind of archive telling about our evolutionary past. In addition, archeology has competed with powerful molecular and genetic technologies that allow us to take a different look at human biological history. Many other innovative approaches have given us the opportunity to find out the age and explore the lifestyle of the ancient hominids. More developed views on the evolutionary process allowed us to take a new approach to our biological history.
However, despite all the achievements, paleoanthropology in many respects remains more static than other paleontological disciplines. Modern paleoanthropologists are not far ahead compared with their colleagues who worked in the middle of the XX century. This is not surprising, because for those who are engaged in the history of our very self-centered species Homo sapiens and its extinct ancestors, it is difficult to avoid bias. In addition, all the details of our past require much more careful study than the history of other species.
The science of human evolution continues to experience the oppression of the past, our ideas of yesterday have a tremendous impact on what we think today. I especially realized this a few years ago when I wrote Masters of the Planet . In the book, I tried to consistently tell about the fast-moving path of a person from a two-legged, but more unremarkable monkey to the amazing creature that he is today. As I worked on the book, I realized that in order to create a meaningful picture of human evolution, I would have to omit the story of the confusing and not always consistent history of ideas and discoveries in paleoanthropology. Given the importance of history for paleoanthropology, this would mean a huge failure in my work. I decided to fill this gap with a book that you are now holding in your hands. In fact, it complements my previous story. This is a strange and tangled history of paleoanthropology, showing how every new fact about human evolution casts doubt on everything we knew before, even if there is often a lot of convincing counter arguments against it. For 50 years, devoted to paleoanthropology, I tried to emphasize this by describing the development of my own ideas about the evolutionary process and its paleontological chronicle and reviving my story with funny sketches from my experience. I hope that I will be able to convince you how important it is to study the process of becoming a person, because it is of great importance for our perception of ourselves.
New theories appeared and disappeared, but the fossils remained unchanged. Thanks to discoveries made in South Africa, by the middle of the twentieth century, the fossil record of humankind began to take on the form that still exists. Early bipeds with a small brain volume and large faces lived in Africa during the Pliocene. Chinese and Javanese forms, exceeding them in growth and brain size, developed later. Neanderthals who possessed a large brain (and the owners of skulls that were found a little earlier, found in the English Swanscombe and the German Steinheim) coexisted in Europe with the first modern people. True, soon at the closest to the present end of this timeline, ambiguities were revealed. In the early 1930s, English archaeologist Dorothy Garrod found a number of fossil hominid remains in the Shul and Tabun caves, located next to each other on the side of the Carmel mountain, which belonged to Palestine, facing the sea. Both caves were formed during the last interglacial period, and in both were found stone tools of the Llevalua and Moustier cultures, similar to those that were made at the same time by Neanderthals in Europe. The female skeleton and a fragment of the massive jaw from the Tabun cave looked quite Neanderthal, but here are a few hominids from the burial in Schule had a completely different appearance. Their skulls were taller and rounded than Neanderthals, they had a unique structure of the brow ridges, and their faces, although stretched forward, did not have a bloated middle part typical of Neanderthals.
Hominids from both caves were described in 1939 by Berkeley anthropologist Theodore McCown and anatomist Sir Arthur Keith. From their completely contradictory conclusions, it is obvious that both scientists evaluated the findings in different ways, but in the end agreed on their affiliation to one very selective form, to which they gave the name Palaeoanthropus palestinensis. Climbing further and further into the wilds of their own reasoning, they claimed that the completely incredible degree of variability of the Carmel population could be explained by "evolutionary agony", during which "the genetic composition of hominids remained unstable and plastic." As another explanation, the proposed "hybridity, that is, the merger of two distinct nations or races." These two versions still remain basic when discussing hominids from Skhul (and sometimes from Tabun). However, differences of opinion between McKown and Keith confirm how important it is to take into account in analyzing fossils other factors besides anatomical ones (in this case, stone tools played the role of such factors). It would seem that scientists should have learned this important lesson, but many paleoanthropologists still forget about it.
Three more human fossils. Top left: skull
from Steinheim, Germany. Bottom left: Neanderthal skull from Tabun cave, Israel. Right: V skull from Skhul cave, Israel. In scale. Don McGranagan Illustrations
Population thinking
The high rate of discovery and description of new fossil hominid remains in the first half of the twentieth century, combined with the complete disinterest of paleoanthropologists in observing the norms of taxonomy, led to the emergence of a huge number of specific and generic names. It seemed as if each new bone to be found had to be assigned its own generic and species name, as a first and last name, to an ordinary person. By the end of the 1940s, the fossilized remains of hominids were described using 15 different generic names, which created the impression of an incredible diversity in this still relatively little known family.
One of the scientists who did not buy this trick was Theodosius Dobrzhansky. His intellectual brainchild, a new synthetic theory of evolution, was based on a concept that his colleague Ernst Mayr called population-based thinking. Many early genetics considered species as merely groups of characters whose heredity could be studied. On the other hand, traditional taxonomy considered the species a certain type of organisms. Population thinking was a third approach, within which a species was defined as a group of individuals with reproductive integrity. At the same time, it didn’t matter how representatives of the species look in human eyes. In other words, as we discussed earlier, individuals did not belong to the same species because they looked the same. They looked the same because they belonged to the same species. Moreover, many species were polytypical, that is, they were divided into different geographic options that could potentially interbreed with each other, but did not have this possibility due to the peculiarities of the environment. Such local variations, or subspecies, were the basis of evolutionary changes and the raw material from which new species were formed.
In 1944, Dobrzhansky used the same approach to analyze the remains of hominids (despite the fact that he hardly ever saw at least one bone of a fossil man) and came to very convincing conclusions. In particular, he stated that "the differences between the Peking and Javanese people are in the range of differences that exist between the modern human races." In addition, he explained the findings on Mount Carmel with hybridization between Neanderthals and modern humans, a subspecies that existed in different regions, but eventually came into contact in Palestine. From here, Dobrzhansky had only one step left to conclude that "the morphological difference between Neanderthals and modern people in the hominid family is more equal to the difference between races than between species." Having established this fact (at least for himself), Dobzhansky turned to a comparison of the two, in his opinion, basic models of human evolution.
The "classical" model (based on the senseless multiplication of the number of new genera and species) was a "tree with many branches, in which fossil remains known to science represented the trunk." The second model was the “parallel development of races” by Weidenreich. As a result, Dobrzhansky concludes — the expected one, considering his willingness to incorporate a wide variety of morphological variations into a single species — that both models have no scientific value, since the entire human evolution since the times of the Javanese Australopithecus occurred within the boundaries of one polytypic species. In particular, Dobrzhansky suggested the existence of a large number of complex regional variations and hybridization in the Pliocene era. Combing all the morphological diversity with the same brush, he created the basis for a delusion that will be pursued by paleoanthropologists for many years.
More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
Table of contents
Excerpt
For readers of this blog 25% discount coupon - Skeletons in the closet
Get acquainted with the results of more than half a century of work of Ian Tattersal, the largest modern specialist in human evolution and paleoanthropology. The dramatic story of the human race told by Tattersal will not leave you indifferent. This book is about how different types of people coexisted and fought with each other. The author traces the development of the science of man from the works of Charles Darwin to the discoveries of the Lika dynasty, completing the book with a story about the last amazing discoveries made in the Caucasus.')
Introduction
I (Ian Tatters) devoted many years to paleoanthropology - the science of human evolution - and would never trade my work for anything else. She always brought me satisfaction, and a lot of events (both desired and random) did not let me get bored.
Over the past 50 years, so many important changes have taken place in paleoanthropology that it has become an incredibly interesting science. Among them is the huge number of archaeological finds that have replenished the "paleontological chronicle" of mankind - a kind of archive telling about our evolutionary past. In addition, archeology has competed with powerful molecular and genetic technologies that allow us to take a different look at human biological history. Many other innovative approaches have given us the opportunity to find out the age and explore the lifestyle of the ancient hominids. More developed views on the evolutionary process allowed us to take a new approach to our biological history.
However, despite all the achievements, paleoanthropology in many respects remains more static than other paleontological disciplines. Modern paleoanthropologists are not far ahead compared with their colleagues who worked in the middle of the XX century. This is not surprising, because for those who are engaged in the history of our very self-centered species Homo sapiens and its extinct ancestors, it is difficult to avoid bias. In addition, all the details of our past require much more careful study than the history of other species.
The science of human evolution continues to experience the oppression of the past, our ideas of yesterday have a tremendous impact on what we think today. I especially realized this a few years ago when I wrote Masters of the Planet . In the book, I tried to consistently tell about the fast-moving path of a person from a two-legged, but more unremarkable monkey to the amazing creature that he is today. As I worked on the book, I realized that in order to create a meaningful picture of human evolution, I would have to omit the story of the confusing and not always consistent history of ideas and discoveries in paleoanthropology. Given the importance of history for paleoanthropology, this would mean a huge failure in my work. I decided to fill this gap with a book that you are now holding in your hands. In fact, it complements my previous story. This is a strange and tangled history of paleoanthropology, showing how every new fact about human evolution casts doubt on everything we knew before, even if there is often a lot of convincing counter arguments against it. For 50 years, devoted to paleoanthropology, I tried to emphasize this by describing the development of my own ideas about the evolutionary process and its paleontological chronicle and reviving my story with funny sketches from my experience. I hope that I will be able to convince you how important it is to study the process of becoming a person, because it is of great importance for our perception of ourselves.
Excerpt from the book "Outside Africa"
New theories appeared and disappeared, but the fossils remained unchanged. Thanks to discoveries made in South Africa, by the middle of the twentieth century, the fossil record of humankind began to take on the form that still exists. Early bipeds with a small brain volume and large faces lived in Africa during the Pliocene. Chinese and Javanese forms, exceeding them in growth and brain size, developed later. Neanderthals who possessed a large brain (and the owners of skulls that were found a little earlier, found in the English Swanscombe and the German Steinheim) coexisted in Europe with the first modern people. True, soon at the closest to the present end of this timeline, ambiguities were revealed. In the early 1930s, English archaeologist Dorothy Garrod found a number of fossil hominid remains in the Shul and Tabun caves, located next to each other on the side of the Carmel mountain, which belonged to Palestine, facing the sea. Both caves were formed during the last interglacial period, and in both were found stone tools of the Llevalua and Moustier cultures, similar to those that were made at the same time by Neanderthals in Europe. The female skeleton and a fragment of the massive jaw from the Tabun cave looked quite Neanderthal, but here are a few hominids from the burial in Schule had a completely different appearance. Their skulls were taller and rounded than Neanderthals, they had a unique structure of the brow ridges, and their faces, although stretched forward, did not have a bloated middle part typical of Neanderthals.
Hominids from both caves were described in 1939 by Berkeley anthropologist Theodore McCown and anatomist Sir Arthur Keith. From their completely contradictory conclusions, it is obvious that both scientists evaluated the findings in different ways, but in the end agreed on their affiliation to one very selective form, to which they gave the name Palaeoanthropus palestinensis. Climbing further and further into the wilds of their own reasoning, they claimed that the completely incredible degree of variability of the Carmel population could be explained by "evolutionary agony", during which "the genetic composition of hominids remained unstable and plastic." As another explanation, the proposed "hybridity, that is, the merger of two distinct nations or races." These two versions still remain basic when discussing hominids from Skhul (and sometimes from Tabun). However, differences of opinion between McKown and Keith confirm how important it is to take into account in analyzing fossils other factors besides anatomical ones (in this case, stone tools played the role of such factors). It would seem that scientists should have learned this important lesson, but many paleoanthropologists still forget about it.
Three more human fossils. Top left: skull
from Steinheim, Germany. Bottom left: Neanderthal skull from Tabun cave, Israel. Right: V skull from Skhul cave, Israel. In scale. Don McGranagan Illustrations
Population thinking
The high rate of discovery and description of new fossil hominid remains in the first half of the twentieth century, combined with the complete disinterest of paleoanthropologists in observing the norms of taxonomy, led to the emergence of a huge number of specific and generic names. It seemed as if each new bone to be found had to be assigned its own generic and species name, as a first and last name, to an ordinary person. By the end of the 1940s, the fossilized remains of hominids were described using 15 different generic names, which created the impression of an incredible diversity in this still relatively little known family.
One of the scientists who did not buy this trick was Theodosius Dobrzhansky. His intellectual brainchild, a new synthetic theory of evolution, was based on a concept that his colleague Ernst Mayr called population-based thinking. Many early genetics considered species as merely groups of characters whose heredity could be studied. On the other hand, traditional taxonomy considered the species a certain type of organisms. Population thinking was a third approach, within which a species was defined as a group of individuals with reproductive integrity. At the same time, it didn’t matter how representatives of the species look in human eyes. In other words, as we discussed earlier, individuals did not belong to the same species because they looked the same. They looked the same because they belonged to the same species. Moreover, many species were polytypical, that is, they were divided into different geographic options that could potentially interbreed with each other, but did not have this possibility due to the peculiarities of the environment. Such local variations, or subspecies, were the basis of evolutionary changes and the raw material from which new species were formed.
In 1944, Dobrzhansky used the same approach to analyze the remains of hominids (despite the fact that he hardly ever saw at least one bone of a fossil man) and came to very convincing conclusions. In particular, he stated that "the differences between the Peking and Javanese people are in the range of differences that exist between the modern human races." In addition, he explained the findings on Mount Carmel with hybridization between Neanderthals and modern humans, a subspecies that existed in different regions, but eventually came into contact in Palestine. From here, Dobrzhansky had only one step left to conclude that "the morphological difference between Neanderthals and modern people in the hominid family is more equal to the difference between races than between species." Having established this fact (at least for himself), Dobzhansky turned to a comparison of the two, in his opinion, basic models of human evolution.
The "classical" model (based on the senseless multiplication of the number of new genera and species) was a "tree with many branches, in which fossil remains known to science represented the trunk." The second model was the “parallel development of races” by Weidenreich. As a result, Dobrzhansky concludes — the expected one, considering his willingness to incorporate a wide variety of morphological variations into a single species — that both models have no scientific value, since the entire human evolution since the times of the Javanese Australopithecus occurred within the boundaries of one polytypic species. In particular, Dobrzhansky suggested the existence of a large number of complex regional variations and hybridization in the Pliocene era. Combing all the morphological diversity with the same brush, he created the basis for a delusion that will be pursued by paleoanthropologists for many years.
More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
Table of contents
Excerpt
For readers of this blog 25% discount coupon - Skeletons in the closet
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/394739/
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