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Human Ancestors: Readings from Scientific American
Introduction By Glynn Isaac and Richard E. F. Leakey. Some of the articles in the book are Tools and Human Evolution by Sherwood L. Washburn, The Early Relatives of Man and Ramapithecus by Elwyn L. Simons, The Evolution of the Hand and The Antiquity of Human Walking by John Napier, The Hominids of East Turkana by Alan Walker and Richard E. F. Leakey, The Casts of Fossil Hominid Brains by Ralph L. Holloway, Homo Erectus by William W. Howells, Stone Tools and Human Behavior by Sally R. And Louis R. Binford, The Functions of Paleolithic Flint Tools by Lawrence H. Keeley, and The Food-Sharing Behavior of Protohuman Hominids by Glynn Isaac.
- GenresAnthropologyScience
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Published January 1, 1979
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January 18, 2025
A COLLECTION OF ARTICLES DEALING WITH PALEOANTHROPOLOGY AND LATER CULTURE
Coeditors Glynn Isaac and Richard Leakey wrote in the Preface to this 1979 collection, “This collection of articles from ‘Scientific American’ describes various aspects of the search concerning human origins and development. Descriptions of 10- to 30-million-year-old fossils, which were definitely not human, provide clues to the nature of the ancestors that we share with our closest living relatives, the apes. Proto-human beings, like us in body form but lacking our mental capabilities, established patterns of life that have passed without leaving living counterparts. The collection deals both with the paleontological record of successive changes in anatomic form and with the archaeological record of early stages in the development of technology, economy, and cultural elaborations.
“The articles suggest the ways in which environmental opportunities, behavior, body form, and brain function have all interacted in the process of change. The collection shows how the growth of knowledge has accelerated over the past two decades and shows the excitement of the searches and discoveries, but it also demonstrates how very incomplete our understanding yet remains. The theory of evolution profoundly changes the specifics of our beliefs about our origins, but it does not allow us to escape the question ‘what kind of creatures are human beings?’ What traits have we inherited from our past? Are we an inherently violent species… or do we have in our natures …deep-rooted propensities for cooperative endeavor?”
They add in the Introduction, “This anthology illustrates well that what was the terra incognita of human ancestry only 120 years ago has now been partially explored. However, it should also be understood that there are gaps, and many interpretations should be seen as tentative. For instance, from the time range 15-9 million years ago no definitely human form has yet been discovered, but very humanlike teeth have been found that seem to belong to ground-dwelling creatures that were not necessarily familiar apes or humans… Ramapithecus, has particularly ‘human’ dentition, and it is tempting to identify this taxon as an ancestor…. This debate can probably not be resolved until evidence is found from the gap… But the hunt is on for fossil-bearing localities to fill in the gap, and in coming years we can expect the excitement of such discoveries.” (Pg. 7)
Sherwood Washburn wrote in this article, “A series of recent discoveries has linked prehuman primates of half a million years ago with stone tools. For some years investigators had been uncovering tools of the simplest kind from ancient deposits in Africa. At first they assumed that these tools constituted evidence of the existence of large-brained, fully bipedal men. Now the tools have been found in association with much more primitive creatures, the not-full-bipedal, small-brained near-men, or man-apes… Now it appears that man-apes---creatures able to run but not yet walk on two legs, and with brains no larger than those of apes now living---had already learned to make and use tools. It follows that the structure of modern man must be the result of change in the terms of natural selection that came with the tool-using way of life.” (Pg. 9)
Elwyn Simons states, “When … other fossils of Ramapithecus are used to reconstruct the jaw, complete with palate, the result is surprisingly human in appearance… The proportions of the jaw indicate a foreshortened face… The arc formed by the teeth is curved as in man, rather than being parabolic, or U shaped, as in the apes.” (Pg. 34)
Alan Walker and Richard Leakey argue, “Another example of bias in the hominid fossil collection is the disproportionate representation of different parts of the skeleton. Teeth are by far the hardest parts, and so it is not surprising to find that teeth account for the largest fraction of the East Turkana sample. In contrast, vertebrate and hand and foot bones are rarely found. Can this be attributed to the destructive process associated with burial and exposure alone? It seems only logical to take into account a third process: carnivore and scavenger feeding on the hominid bodies before the sediments covered them. What fraction of the hominid population in East Turkana more than a million years ago might our fossil collection represent? The answer… is that the fraction is extremely small… the collection represents two ten-thousandths… of the original population… [This is] the equivalent of someone’s selecting two individuals at random to represent entire population of the U.S. today.” (Pg. 66-68)
Ralph L. Holloway explains, “one reason---perhaps the main reason---students of human evolution were so slow to accept Australopithecus africanus as a hominid… was that its estimated cranial capacities were so small. The brains of some apes, particularly … gorillas, were known to be larger. In fact… the brains of the gracile species of Australopithecus are even smaller than was originally thought… what are we to make of their surprisingly small size? The answer, it seems to me, is that in all likelihood the size of Australopithecus’ brain bore the same proportional size to its body that modern man’s brain does to his body. This contention cannot be proved beyond doubt on the basis of the Australopithecus fossils known today…” (Pg. 80)
William W. Howells observes, “two questions come to the fore. First, to what degree did the fossils really differ? Second, what was the difference among them over a period of time? The fossil men… who had lived between roughly 100,000 and 30,000 years ago---were Neanderthal man, Rhodesian man, and Solo man… if Neanderthal and Rhodesian populations had come in contact, they would probably not have interbred. Such a conclusion is difficult to establish on the basis of fossils… Today’s general view is a contrary one. These comparatively recent fossil men, it is now believed, did not constitute separate species. They were at most… variant populations that had developed in widely separated parts of the world but were still probably able to breed with one another or with Homo sapiens.” (Pg. 86)
He continues, “From this accumulation of finds… there emerges a picture of men with skeletons like ours but with brains much smaller, skulls much thicker and flatter and furnished with protruding brows in front… This picture suggests an evolutionary level… occupying half a million years of human history and now seen to prevail all over the inhabited Old World. This is the meaning of Homo Erectus. It gives a new foundation for ideas as to the pace and the patterns of human evolution over a critical span of time.” (Pg. 90)
Sally R. Binford and Lewis R. Binford suggest, “Although we have no idea how prehistorical human groups were socially preconditioned, it seems reasonable to assume that these societies were organized flexibly and included both family and work groups. If the assumption is correct, we would expect this organization to be reflected in differences both between stone-tool assemblages at a given site and between assemblages of different sites.” (Pg. 92)
Glynn Isaac notes, “Listing the contrasts between human and nonhuman subsistence strategies is inevitably an exercise in oversimplification… field studies of various great apes and of human beings… [who] still support themselves without farming [show] there is a far greater degree of similarity between the two subsistence strategies than had been previously recognized, for example… involving meat-eating and tool-using... the differences between ape and man are differences of degree rather than of kind. Some scholars have even used the data to deny the existence of any fundamental differences between the human strategies and the nonhuman ones. It is my view that significant differences remain. First… apes do not regularly postpone food consumption until they have returned to a home base… Second, human beings actively share some of the food they acquire.” (Pg. 113)
He observes, “What… do these East African studies teach us about the evolution of human behavior?... they provide unambiguous evidence that two million years ago some hominids … were carrying things around, for example stones. The same hominids were also making simple but effective cutting tools of stone and were at times active in the vicinity of large animal carcasses, presumably in order to get meat. The studies strongly suggest that the hominids carried animal bones (and meat) around and concentrated this portable food supply at certain places.” (Pg. 120)
This book will be of keen interest to students of human evolution and development.
Coeditors Glynn Isaac and Richard Leakey wrote in the Preface to this 1979 collection, “This collection of articles from ‘Scientific American’ describes various aspects of the search concerning human origins and development. Descriptions of 10- to 30-million-year-old fossils, which were definitely not human, provide clues to the nature of the ancestors that we share with our closest living relatives, the apes. Proto-human beings, like us in body form but lacking our mental capabilities, established patterns of life that have passed without leaving living counterparts. The collection deals both with the paleontological record of successive changes in anatomic form and with the archaeological record of early stages in the development of technology, economy, and cultural elaborations.
“The articles suggest the ways in which environmental opportunities, behavior, body form, and brain function have all interacted in the process of change. The collection shows how the growth of knowledge has accelerated over the past two decades and shows the excitement of the searches and discoveries, but it also demonstrates how very incomplete our understanding yet remains. The theory of evolution profoundly changes the specifics of our beliefs about our origins, but it does not allow us to escape the question ‘what kind of creatures are human beings?’ What traits have we inherited from our past? Are we an inherently violent species… or do we have in our natures …deep-rooted propensities for cooperative endeavor?”
They add in the Introduction, “This anthology illustrates well that what was the terra incognita of human ancestry only 120 years ago has now been partially explored. However, it should also be understood that there are gaps, and many interpretations should be seen as tentative. For instance, from the time range 15-9 million years ago no definitely human form has yet been discovered, but very humanlike teeth have been found that seem to belong to ground-dwelling creatures that were not necessarily familiar apes or humans… Ramapithecus, has particularly ‘human’ dentition, and it is tempting to identify this taxon as an ancestor…. This debate can probably not be resolved until evidence is found from the gap… But the hunt is on for fossil-bearing localities to fill in the gap, and in coming years we can expect the excitement of such discoveries.” (Pg. 7)
Sherwood Washburn wrote in this article, “A series of recent discoveries has linked prehuman primates of half a million years ago with stone tools. For some years investigators had been uncovering tools of the simplest kind from ancient deposits in Africa. At first they assumed that these tools constituted evidence of the existence of large-brained, fully bipedal men. Now the tools have been found in association with much more primitive creatures, the not-full-bipedal, small-brained near-men, or man-apes… Now it appears that man-apes---creatures able to run but not yet walk on two legs, and with brains no larger than those of apes now living---had already learned to make and use tools. It follows that the structure of modern man must be the result of change in the terms of natural selection that came with the tool-using way of life.” (Pg. 9)
Elwyn Simons states, “When … other fossils of Ramapithecus are used to reconstruct the jaw, complete with palate, the result is surprisingly human in appearance… The proportions of the jaw indicate a foreshortened face… The arc formed by the teeth is curved as in man, rather than being parabolic, or U shaped, as in the apes.” (Pg. 34)
Alan Walker and Richard Leakey argue, “Another example of bias in the hominid fossil collection is the disproportionate representation of different parts of the skeleton. Teeth are by far the hardest parts, and so it is not surprising to find that teeth account for the largest fraction of the East Turkana sample. In contrast, vertebrate and hand and foot bones are rarely found. Can this be attributed to the destructive process associated with burial and exposure alone? It seems only logical to take into account a third process: carnivore and scavenger feeding on the hominid bodies before the sediments covered them. What fraction of the hominid population in East Turkana more than a million years ago might our fossil collection represent? The answer… is that the fraction is extremely small… the collection represents two ten-thousandths… of the original population… [This is] the equivalent of someone’s selecting two individuals at random to represent entire population of the U.S. today.” (Pg. 66-68)
Ralph L. Holloway explains, “one reason---perhaps the main reason---students of human evolution were so slow to accept Australopithecus africanus as a hominid… was that its estimated cranial capacities were so small. The brains of some apes, particularly … gorillas, were known to be larger. In fact… the brains of the gracile species of Australopithecus are even smaller than was originally thought… what are we to make of their surprisingly small size? The answer, it seems to me, is that in all likelihood the size of Australopithecus’ brain bore the same proportional size to its body that modern man’s brain does to his body. This contention cannot be proved beyond doubt on the basis of the Australopithecus fossils known today…” (Pg. 80)
William W. Howells observes, “two questions come to the fore. First, to what degree did the fossils really differ? Second, what was the difference among them over a period of time? The fossil men… who had lived between roughly 100,000 and 30,000 years ago---were Neanderthal man, Rhodesian man, and Solo man… if Neanderthal and Rhodesian populations had come in contact, they would probably not have interbred. Such a conclusion is difficult to establish on the basis of fossils… Today’s general view is a contrary one. These comparatively recent fossil men, it is now believed, did not constitute separate species. They were at most… variant populations that had developed in widely separated parts of the world but were still probably able to breed with one another or with Homo sapiens.” (Pg. 86)
He continues, “From this accumulation of finds… there emerges a picture of men with skeletons like ours but with brains much smaller, skulls much thicker and flatter and furnished with protruding brows in front… This picture suggests an evolutionary level… occupying half a million years of human history and now seen to prevail all over the inhabited Old World. This is the meaning of Homo Erectus. It gives a new foundation for ideas as to the pace and the patterns of human evolution over a critical span of time.” (Pg. 90)
Sally R. Binford and Lewis R. Binford suggest, “Although we have no idea how prehistorical human groups were socially preconditioned, it seems reasonable to assume that these societies were organized flexibly and included both family and work groups. If the assumption is correct, we would expect this organization to be reflected in differences both between stone-tool assemblages at a given site and between assemblages of different sites.” (Pg. 92)
Glynn Isaac notes, “Listing the contrasts between human and nonhuman subsistence strategies is inevitably an exercise in oversimplification… field studies of various great apes and of human beings… [who] still support themselves without farming [show] there is a far greater degree of similarity between the two subsistence strategies than had been previously recognized, for example… involving meat-eating and tool-using... the differences between ape and man are differences of degree rather than of kind. Some scholars have even used the data to deny the existence of any fundamental differences between the human strategies and the nonhuman ones. It is my view that significant differences remain. First… apes do not regularly postpone food consumption until they have returned to a home base… Second, human beings actively share some of the food they acquire.” (Pg. 113)
He observes, “What… do these East African studies teach us about the evolution of human behavior?... they provide unambiguous evidence that two million years ago some hominids … were carrying things around, for example stones. The same hominids were also making simple but effective cutting tools of stone and were at times active in the vicinity of large animal carcasses, presumably in order to get meat. The studies strongly suggest that the hominids carried animal bones (and meat) around and concentrated this portable food supply at certain places.” (Pg. 120)
This book will be of keen interest to students of human evolution and development.
February 3, 2019
A good primer to early paleontological study.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews