Transcript Early Man - Naturalism and The Theory of Evolution

Sean Pitman, MD
December 2008
 Earnest A. Hooten, Harvard
professor of Anthropology,
“Reconstructions?” Up from the
Ape, pp. 332
 William W. Howells, Harvard
professor of Anthropology, Mankind
so Far, pp. 138
 Eanthropus dawsoni or
“Dawn Man”
 “Discovered” by Charles
Dawson in 1912 (an ape-like
mandible with human-like teeth
and a human-like piece of skull)
 In 1953 Oakley, Weiner and
Clark exposed Piltdown Man as
a deliberate hoax
 Interesting because this rather
obvious hoax was accepted by
the scientific community as real
evidence of human-ape
ancestry for over 40 years
 Hesperopithecus haroldcookii
 Mr. Harold Cook discovered one
tooth in 1922 in the Pliocene
deposits of Nebraska
 An attempt was made to use
Nebraska Man as evidence in
the Scopes “Monkey Trial”
 Drawing published in Illustrated
London News, 1922
American Museum of Natural History
Wolf J. and Mellett J.S., The role of "Nebraska man" in the creationevolution debate. Creation/Evolution, Issue 16:31-43., 1985
London Daily
News, 1922
 Little did Osborn know Just how inaccurate this
drawing was
 Turned out to be a tooth from an extinct type of pig
(peccary)
 I wonder how the history would remember the
Scopes trial if this little bit of information had
become available during the trial?
 Pithecanthropus erectus
 Found by Eugene Dubois between
1891 and 1892
 Association of a human-like femur
with a very large gibbon-like
skullcap, found 12 meters apart
 The false association was eventually
recognized and Java Man was
removed from the American
Museum of Natural History and the
Leiden Museum (1980s)
Sort of . . .
Evolutionary Sequence
from ape to human
 In 1932 Louis Leaky discovered a
fragmented maxilla and some teeth in
southwest Kenya
 Assembled to form a parabolic shape
similar to the human condition
 Presented as the first branch of ape to
evolve into humans 12 to 14 million
years ago
 Problem:
 A full jaw (mandible) was discovered
 In 1977 a full Ramapithecus jaw bone
was
discovered but was U-shaped
 Zilman and Lowenstein attempt to explain
the reason for the earlier thinking of most of
the worlds most prominent
paleoanthropologists:
 “Ramapithecus walking upright has been
reconstructed from only jaws and teeth. In 1961
an ancestral human was badly wanted. The
prince's ape latched onto position by his teeth
and has been hanging on ever since, his
legitimacy sanctified by millions of textbooks and
Time-Life volumes on human evolution.”
Evolution of Ramapithecus
Gorilla Skull
 Discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson
 Angle of knee joint matched that of
humans
 The joint angle also matched that of tree
climbing apes
 Also had curved toes bones, high arm to
leg length ratio, and many other features
identical to tree climbing apes
 Was Lucy just a tree climbing ape or did
she walk upright?
 Stern and Susman detail many features consistent
with tree-climbing apes for A. afarensis
 Yet, they believe that A. afarensis spent much time
running around on two legs? Why?
“The most significant features for bipedalism include
shortened iliac blades, lumbar curve, knees approaching
midline, distal articular surface of tibia nearly
perpendicular to the shaft, robust metatarsal I with
expanded head, convergent hallux (big toe), and
proximal foot phalanges with dorsally oriented proximal
articular surfaces.” (McHenry 1994)
 The perpendicular tibia, lumbar curve, and angled knee
joints that are "approaching midline" are seen in modern
tree-climbing monkeys
 The "robust" first metatarsal with an expanded head is
also consistent with Stern and Susman's comment that
the hand bones (and reasonably the foot bones as well),
"have large heads and bases relative to their parallel
sided and somewhat curved shafts, an overall pattern
shared by chimpanzees" and that this, "might be
interpreted as evidence of developed grasping
capabilities to be used in suspensory behavior."
 3.6 million year old
footprints with modern
human features, adult
and child
 Happen to be about
as old as Lucy
 How can Lucy be a
“missing link” if
modern human
posture and gait were
already evolved?
“As I kneel beside the
large print and lightly touch
its sole, I am filled with quiet
awe. It looks perfectly
modern. ‘I thought that at
three and a half million
years ago their prints might
be somehow different from
ours,’” says Latimer. “But
they aren’t. The bipedal
adaptation of those
hominids was full-blown.”

Gore, R. National Geographic, Feb.
1997
 Johanson insisted strongly that the Laetoli
footprints simply would have to have been made
by his A. afarensis (i.e. Lucy):
“The foot prints would have to be from A.
afarensis. They substantiate our idea that
bipedalism occurred very early, and our contention
that the brain was too small to master tools.”
 Problem:
 The foot bones and lower leg of A. africanus (Lucy)
have been recently found (in Hadar)
 These foot and leg bones are apelike
 KNMER1470 found in 1972 with a
modern human femur
 More human-like skull than Lucy
 Ash atop 1470 originally dated (1969)
by K-Ar at ~220 Ma by multiple labs
 This dating done before 1470 found
 After 1470 found ash redated over and
over again until the “best” date was
placed at 2.61 Ma
 Lucy originally dated at 2.9 Ma
 KNMER 1470 re-dated using Basil
Cook’s pig teeth sequences to less than
2 Ma and Lucy to more than 3 Ma
 Richard Leakey, June of 1973, in an interview
with National Geographic:
"Either we toss out the 1470 skull or we toss
out all our theories of early man. It simply fits
no previous models of human beginnings.
1470 leaves in ruin the notion that all early
fossils can be arranged in an orderly sequence
of evolutionary changes."
 Discovered in 1959 by Mary Leakey
 Found with stone tools and evidence
of “butchered” animals
 Given name of “Handy Man” or
Homo habilis – supposedly evolved
after/from Lucy (Australopithecines)
 Does Zinj look at all like KNMER
1470? (Both are Homo habilis)
 Fossil and living Coelacanths that were
given different genus and species names
yet look far more similar than Zinj and
KNM-ER 1470

discussed in lecture on the Fossil Record
Dr. Spoor’s research on semicircular canals of H. erectus,
Australopithecus, and many other hominids indicates that
H. habilis, "relied less on bipedal behavior than the
australopithecines." And yet, H. Habilis is supposed to be
more advanced than australopithecines?
Leakey, 1990 PBS documentary:
“If pressed about man's ancestry, I would have
to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge
question mark. To date, there has been nothing
found to truthfully purport as a transitional specie to
man, including Lucy, since 1470 was as old and
probably older. If further pressed, I would have to
state that there is more evidence to suggest an
abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process
of evolving.”
 Matt Cartmill, Duke; David Pilbeam, Harvard; Glynn Isaac,
Harvard, American Scientist, July-August 1986, p.419
 Neandertal (Neanderthal) Man (Homo neanderthalensis)
 Thought to have died out over 20,000 years ago.
 First found in 1856 in Neander Valley, Germany

Johann Fahlrott (a school teacher)
 Dozens of skeletons have since been found
 In 1908, Professor Boule of The Institute of Human Paleontology in
Paris declared Neanderthal an ape-man because of his low eyebrow
ridges and the stooped over posture of some of the specimens
 Neanderthals had bigger brains (>200cc)
 Lived a long time (stooped by osteoarthritis)
 Dr. Rudolph Virchow argued in 1872 that
Neanderthals were modern humans with rickets
and arthritis
 The Chicago Field Museum has since put in a
newer exhibition of Neanderthal man looking
more fully human
 What’s the latest “scientific” explanation?
 Neanderthal man was an “evolutionary dead-end”
 What about DNA?
 July 11, 1997, Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA
(mtDNA) successfully recovered and
sequenced by Svante Pääbo et. al. (Cell)
 mtDNA recovered three times
 Pääbo’s Conclusion: Evolutionary divergence
from modern humans some 550,000 to 690,000
years ago
 Max difference between human and human:
 Ave. Human Difference: 8 ± 3.0
 Intra-Human Range: 1 – 35 differences (1999)
 Ave. Human-Neandertal Difference: 25.6 ± 2.2
 Human-Neandertal Range: 20 – 34
 Ave. Human-Chimp Difference: 55.0 ± 3.0
 Human-Chimp Range: 46-67
 Intra-Chimp Range: (1-81)
 Overlaps between humans and Neandertals
 Might be 35 differences from the guy sitting next to you
and only 20 differences from a Neandertal
 A human-chimp “relationship” might be closer than a
chimp-chimp “relationship”
 Human-chimp difference might be only 46 while a chimp
might be 81 differences from another chimp
 Further confusion from Pääbo’s article:
 Neanderthal mtDNA was actually
farther away from chimp mtDNA than
that of modern humans
 We “modern” humans are therefore
more chimp-like than Neanderthals?!
 Or, within the range of ethnic variation?
 mtDNA as a Molecular Clock:
 Recently called into question by articles in
several well-known journals like Science
 Clock off by as much as “20-fold”
 Mitochondrial Eve, once thought to be 100,000
to 200,000 years old, might now have to be
revised to as young as “6,000 years old”
(Parsons et al)
 A more recent 2007 study:

“Comparisons suggest large differences: the
mutation rate estimated from pedigrees of humans
is a hundredfold higher than the substitution rate
for the primate mitochondrial DNA control region. .
. We await the more rigorous type of assessment
with some nervousness, given that we suspect
they might reveal that many past studies placed
too much confidence in simple molecular clock
analyses, and that their conclusions should thus
be revisited.”
 Mario J.F. Pulquerio and Richard A. Nichols, Dates from the molecular
clock: how wrong can we be? Science Direct, Trends in Ecology and
Evolution, Vol. 22, No. 4, 2007
 A mathematical model:

“These analyses suggest that the genealogies
of all living humans overlap in remarkable ways
in the recent past. In particular, the MRCA of all
present-day humans lived just a few thousand
years ago [~3-4000 B.C.] in these models.
Moreover, among all individuals living more than
just a few thousand years earlier than the
MRCA, each present-day human has exactly the
same set of genealogical ancestors.”
 Douglas L. T. Rohde, Steve Olson & Joseph T. Chang, Modeling
the recent common ancestry of all living humans, Nature 431,
Accepted 14, July 2004
 In 1937, Germaine Henri-
Martin, a very well respected
archeologist, began
excavations in a cave in
southwestern France
called Fontéchevade and
continued her work here until
1954, removing over 900
cubic meters of sediment
 Discovered “first Frenchmen”
older than Neanderthals
 Many layers found
 The topmost layers:
"Aurignacian" (modern)
 Underneath the Aurignacian:
"Mousterian" layers, laid
down during the time of the
Neandertals
 Below the Mousterian:
"Tayacian" layers within
which she found several
human skull fragments and
evidence for the living
conditions of these “first
Frenchmen”
 Germaine found lots of evidence of how the first
Frenchmen lived
 The site is full of flint, which was interpreted as being
worked into tools
 Various "hearths" were also found throughout the site
where the first families cooked, prepared their food,
and ate
 Evidence of meals, in the form of animal bones, were
everywhere
 Bones of the hominids themselves
 The evidence for a rather complete an intricate
life for the earliest French people seemed rather
obvious and fairly easily interpreted
 In the 1970s Shannon McPherron




and Harold Dibble decided to do
some reinvestigation
Laser mapped of thousands of stone
objects and bones
Everything in the cave was oriented
horizontally or vertically with respect
to the cave walls and there was
evidence of water sorting
The stone “tools” turned out to be no
different than naturally carved stones
Source of water found – an opening
at the back of the cave that drained
water and sediments from above
The narrator of the 2002 PBS documentary,
"Neanderthals on Trial" concluded:
“What made it look real to the archaeologists was an
overwhelming desire to see the past in a certain way.
The urge to distance ourselves from Neanderthals or to
pull them closer to us is a surprisingly powerful force.
Archaeologists Jean Philippe Rigaud and Jan Simek
are well aware of the problem."
[Jan Simek added], "I think that we're as guilty of it
today, of that kind of preconceived approach to our
data, as anybody has been in the history of
archaeology or anthropology. It's almost inevitable that
our own views of the world will be brought to bear. . .
. . . So it appears that Fontéchevade was
an elaborate illusion and not a human
habitation site at all. What made it look real
to the archeologists was an overwhelming
desire to see the past in a certain way”
It is also interesting to consider
comments made by the journalist,
Mark Davis, who investigated this story
on Neanderthals for NOVA.
"I spoke with many Neanderthal experts in the course of making
this film, and I found them all to be intelligent, friendly, welleducated people, dedicated to the highest principles of scientific
inquiry. I also got the impression that each one thought the last one
I talked to was an idiot, if not an actual Neanderthal. . . The more
people I spoke with, the more confusing it got. . . Listening to the
archeologists and anthropologists talk about their work (and their
colleagues' work), I heard the same frustrations voiced again and
again: People are driven by their preconceptions. They see what
they want to see. They find what they're looking for. . .
. . . I learned that what people see in Neanderthals
often has as much to do with philosophy as it does
with science. What does it mean to be human? Some
definitions are broad and inclusive, others are narrow
and exclusive. Scholars have been known to attack
one another's views on Neanderthals as "racist" or
"politically correct." . . .
What I found most interesting in all this is that
every scientist I talked to encouraged me to explore
the issue of self-delusion, and no one claimed to be
immune. They are all aware that the history of the
field is littered with brilliant scholars who completely
missed the boat because of the power of their
preconceptions."
"A five million-year-old piece of
bone that was thought to be a
collarbone of a humanlike creature is
actually part of a dolphin rib...
The problem with a lot of
anthropologists is that they want so
much to find a hominid that any
scrap of bone becomes a hominid
bone."
- Dr. Tim White
(anthropologist, University of
California, Berkeley). As
quoted by Ian Anderson
"Hominoid collarbone exposed
as dolphin's rib", in New
Scientist, 28 April 1983, p. 199
 3 feet tall with brain the size of a
grapefruit - Bones discovered in a cave
on Flores (Indonesian island) in 2003
Homo floresiensis
 Claimed to be a new “species” of
human due to unique features of the
skull and a chimp-like wrist bone
compared to modern humans
 The excavation work was partially
funded by the National Geographic
Society, which premiered a film about
the work March 10, 2008
 Days later Lee Berger (U. of Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg) published a find of least 26 other
individuals of similar size in caves on Microneasian
islands.
 “Islands overrun by diminutive humans as recently
as 1,400 years ago - but despite their size these
people clearly belonged to our species.” - i.e.,
modern pygmies
 As far as the chimp-like wrist bones, modern humans
can have a mutated gene (PCNT) that produces 3-4
ft stature, proportionate body size with normal or
near normal intelligence… and bony wrist anomalies.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13441-new-bones-suggest-hobbits-were-modern-pygmies.html?feedId=online-news_rss20
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/3320502/%27Hobbits%27-not-a-different-species,-say-scientists.html

"The question that I and my colleagues have
asked ourselves is how anyone could possibly
believe this, [that the hobbits are a new species of
hominids and not simply a modern ethnic human
variation]. There was such a will to believe in the
story that critical faculties were suspended on the
part of many people.”
 Robert Eckardt at Pennsylvania State University, who co-
authored the critique of the hobbit theory in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/aug/22/uknews
F. Spoor, M. G. Leakey, P. N. Gathogo, F. H. Brown, S. C. Antón, I. McDougall, C. Kiarie, F. K. Manthi & L. N. Leake, Implications
of new early Homo fossils from Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya, Nature, Vol. 448 (7154), pp. 688 (August 9, 2007)
Notice that it is ok to put this or that aspect of the theory of evolution to
the test as long as the overall theory itself is “not questioned” or
subject to potential falsification.
F. Spoor, M. G. Leakey, P. N. Gathogo, F. H. Brown, S. C. Antón, I. McDougall, C. Kiarie, F. K. Manthi & L. N.
Leake, Implications of new early Homo fossils from Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya, Nature, Vol. 448 (7154),
pp. 688 (August 9, 2007)
 Humans, rats, and rice plants: Same number of genes
 The key: Non-coding DNA formerly known as “Junk DNA”
 Examples: microRNAs, Pyknons and pseudogenes
“‘Indeed, what was damned as junk because it was not
understood may, in fact, turn out to be the very basis of human
complexity,’” Mattick suggests. “Pseudogenes, riboswitches and
all the rest aside, there is a good reason to suspect that is true.
Active RNA, it is now coming out, helps to control the large-scale
structure of the chromosomes and some crucial chemical
modifications to them—an entirely different, epigenetic layer of
information in the genome.”
Wyatt Gibbs, “The Unseen Genome: Gems among the Junk”,
Scientific American, November 2003, pp 45-53
“The different miRNA repertoire, as well as differences
in expression levels of conserved miRNAs, may contribute
to gene expression differences observed in human and
chimpanzee brain. . . For example, miRNAs recently have
been implicated in synaptic development and in memory
formation. As the species specific miRNAs described here
are expressed in the brain, which is the most complex
tissue in the human body, with an estimated 10,000
different cell types, these miRNAs could have a role in
establishing or maintaining cellular diversity and could
thereby contribute to the differences in human and
chimpanzee brain… function.”
Berezikov et. al., Nature Genetics 2006
Oliver
Originally captured
in the 1960s from
the African Congo.
Thought, even by
scientists, to be a
possible humanchimp hybrid.
“My reservations concern not so much
this book but the whole subject and
methodology of paleoanthropology. But
introductory books - or book reviews - are
hardly the place to argue that perhaps
generations of students of human
evolution, including myself, have been
flailing about in the dark: that our data
base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be
able to mold our theories. Rather the
theories are more statements about us
and ideology than about the past.
Paleoanthropology reveals more about
how humans view themselves than it does
about how humans came about. But that
is heresy.”
Dr. David Pilbeam, an
anthropologist from
Harvard, making some very
interesting comments in a
1978 review of Richard
Leakey's book, Origins
DetectingDesign.com