The Caveman’s Corner

The Anthropoid Origins series is taking longer than I anticipated, largely because I’m lazy and rediscovered Civilization IV there briefly (ironically, while taking a break from working on my paper on Adapoid Theory), which destroyed a few days of my life. I’ve also made a few false starts at blog posts that never ended up getting published. But, because I’m feeling guilty about neglecting my poor blog, I bring you a review of the book I just finished, Lucy’s Child: The Discovery a Human Ancestor.

Lucy’s Child is the second paleoanthropological narrative from Lucy discovery Donald Johanson, this time co-authored with James Shreeve. The book’s focus is the discovery of a partial Homo hablis skeleton by Don Johanson, Tim White, and company in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, legendary stomping ground of Louis and Mary Leakey. This story device is generally less dramatic and less intrinsically interesting than that of Johanson’s first book, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, written with Maitland Eddy, and indeed as a story it isn’t quite up the standard of the first.

Don Johanson

Nevertheless, it shares with Lucy stretches of beautiful prose describing African landscapes past and present and the life of paleoanthropologist, which makes me strongly suspect that Johanson himself is a better word smith than his seeming reliance on popular science writers as co-authors would suggest. Johanson also does a good job of weaving the many elements of his story–scientific politics, the excavation of OH 62, and the evaluation of theories of human evolution–into a single intellecutal thread. This is a book about measured, patient scientific investigation, injected with a streak of sober skepticism.

Lucy’s Child practically has a third co-author: Lewis Binford, who joined Johanson on his trip to Olduvai. Binford is a legendary figure in archaeology, practically the father of the modern field, and he established his New Archaeology precisely in the intervening years between the publication of Lucy and of Lucy’s Child. His influence on the later work is palpable. Lewis Binford’s zeal is in attacking assumptions. One of my favorite quotes from the book summarizes his position:

[W]hat you know about things is much less important than what you don’t know. Put another way, the first, crucial task of any scientist is to deliberately and unsparingly stock of his own ignorance–because only when he knows the level of his ignorance can he begin to carve away at it, leaving the truth behind like a sculpture brought forth from raw stone. Instead of wasting time building theories we have already assumed to be true, let us cast a critical eye on those assumptions and see if they hold up to the facts.

p. 229-230

Binford laid all this out in his seminal and deeply controversial Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths, published the same year as Johanson’s Lucy, 1981. In it he took aim at cherished images of early human behavior, especially hunting. Binford’s assault on all the fanciful interpretations of life at the Frida Leakey Karongo in the Olduvai Gorge (the site where Zinj the Australopithecus boisei skull was discovered) was particularly central to Johanson’s book, but its a bit to complicated to be related in a review. Instead, I’ll give you the story of Torralba, Spain.

Torralba was a site discovered by archaeologist (and Johanson’s graduate adviser) Clark Howell, a revolutionary in his own right for bringing sophisticated site development techniques into paleoanthropology. Torralba was once a large swamp, and in it Howell discovered the remains of thirty elephants and other large mammals, some in queer arrangements like leg bones placed in perpendicular lines, along with charcoal and Acheulean stone tools, associated with Homo erectus. His conclusion was that the Homo erectus had used torches to drive the mammals en masse into the swamp and then butcher them, using the lines of elephant legs as a causeway to port out the massive quantities of meat. The story was compelling, seemingly impenetrable, and became the crown jewel in the argument that by Homo erectus at least, man was an accomplished, coordinated big game hunter.

Acheulean tools from Torralba

Binford disagreed. He surveyed the concentrations of stone tools with elephant bones at the site, and actually found an inverse correlation, not what you’d expect if they tools had been dropped after having been used to deflesh carcasses. The charcoal was indistinguishable from that caused by lightening fires. The arrangements of bones could be explained by running water and the site by all appearances had been filing up with pachyderms over a long period of time, perhaps hundreds of years. Instead of a great hunt, the site rather appeared to be a great drainage basin-turned-graveyard. I’d heard the Torralba story a few places before, but this is definitely the most forceful retelling I’ve encountered as part of a general celebration of scientific skepticism. That spirit is probably the biggest thing I took away from Lucy’s Child.

Lewis Binford

Lucy and Lucy’s Child also share a somewhat more dubious distinction: Tiring reiteration of the Leakey/Johanson feud, and Lucy’s Child is the worse offender. A good 50% is given up to politics, and some of the stories, although entertaining, are a bit uncomfortable to read. Johanson could have made his point with better taste, it seems, but then paleoanthropologists aren’t known for pulling punches. The book is also a relatively old one , published in 1991. Needless to say, paleoanthropology has changed a bit in the intervening 17 years. The conclusions that it comes to on OH 62 are also pretty light, although the descriptions of painstaking recovery and analysis in the field are intriguing. If you ever wanted to know what deplorable shape most hominids come out of the ground in and what researchers go through to make them presentable, this is your book. In the end. we basically just learn that it’s a Homo habilis female that is unusually small and had surprisingly long arms with respect to the length of its legs. Neat-o.

OH 62, Lucy’s child, figuratively, as Johanson believes H. habilis to be a descendant species of Australopithecus afarensis.

I shouldn’t be facetious, it is an important discovery that tells a lot about the body proportions of H. habilis, an important species in human evolution, but, Lucy it ain’t. And that might be a good way to describe Lucy’s Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor. A good story with a lot to say and a lot of merit, but, Lucy it ain’t.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Archaeology, Book Reviews, Human Evolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.