The Caveman’s Corner

I should really blog on other blogs more, because I read some things that I immediately admire a lot in some of the ones I frequent and that I think would benefit my two or three readers and the random people that find this site through a Google Images search for one of the pictures I’ve poached off somewhere else on the Internet, but get higher ranked on my site for some reason. Maybe because I label them better.

Anyway, I’ll start with this article I read on one of my favorites, John Hawks Anthropology Weblog, back on my birthday, June 18:

Don’t ask the experts if they can’t agree on the question

The post is about a conference convened as part of the World Science Festival to discuss “what it means to be human.” Predictably, most of the discussion centered around this trait or that trait, but as Dr. Hawks points out, no one trait can really include all humanity while excluding all other animals we wouldn’t call ‘human.’ What makes us human?

One thing is shared by all humans, and cannot be taken away: our evolutionary history. Each of us bears some — but none has all — of the marks of this history.

It is our history that connects us to our distant relatives, not our genes. Even with a close relative like a twentieth cousin, there is a decent likelihood that you will share no genes at all because of your shared kinship from your most recent common ancestor. By the fiftieth generation, it is a virtual certainty. You are a genetic stranger to your ancestors.

Within the span of fifty generations, a selected gene may completely transform a species, going from less than one percent to ubiquity. Indeed, a single genetic mutation may make you radically different from the rest of humanity, perhaps by restoring a thick coat of body fur, or making your tissues age at many times the average rate — both characters that some people would make part of the definition of “human.” Indeed, many such changes actually have happened in the past few thousand years.

Only history defines humanity, and will continue to define us no matter what we become in the future. We have not severed the genetic links between maize and teosinte, but they are tenuous enough to make the relationship difficult for the layman to see. We have intertwined several inbred strains, more than doubling grain production in a few decades. We regularly add genes from other organisms to our maize, subtly changing its phenotype. Yes, a good part of our corn now shares a history with Bacillus thuringiensis. But that does not deny its shared history with teosinte, or its unique history as a human domesticate. History is additive, inclusive — not subtractive.

Read the whole essay, it bears it.

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.

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Yet again, I’m contemplating embarking forth on a research project. Who knows how far this one will go, as my last… several… have died after I got overwhelmed by the preliminary reading. I do think this project has some distinct advantages, however: A) I now have access to the UT database at home on my computer, B) I can do this project without getting approval ahead of time (like with a zoo study), C) I won’t need too much math, I hope, and D) The study might be one that is fully within my resources to carry out.

What I was thinking of is a genealogical study to test the ‘Grandmother Hypothesis.’ For those not familiar, the grandmother hypothesis holds that the long human female post-reproductive lifespan evolved because grandmothers would aid their offspring in raising their children and thus increase their own reproductive success. Was this process active in recent societies? Well, to answer that, my plan is to examine genealogical records from Sevier and surrounding counties where I live. Fortunately, Appalachian people have a taste for this sort of thing, so genealogies aren’t excessively hard to come by. There are a lot of families with very long histories here as well that can be tracked back centuries in a single county. As for the specific methodology of analysis… I’ve found one other study of this type down in a Japanese city, and I’m planning to see how much I can apply from it. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

This is a concept that reading Dennison’s Nash A Little Anthropology, 3rd ed has acquainted me with, and its extremely interesting. I don’t believe I’ve ever specifically considered it before.

Such a stoic.

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I finished Amir Aczel’s The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man today, and I decided to write up a review/reflection sort of thing. I haven’t decided exactly which yet. I’ve thought about adding a feature like this before and I enjoyed doing it, so you might conceivably see more reviews.

From Amazon, obviously

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I recently read the statement, “I don’t know about anyone else, but I find the entire idea of an ‘instinctive morality’ highly disturbing. If we are to shrink and over-simplify our entire moral code down to the existence of a single instinct, we do great harm to its purpose and application,” and I found it disturbing, especially considering the intelligence of the fellow who wrote it.[1]

Not because I disagree. Indeed, the notion that moral codes are nothing more than lists of “goodness genes” is quite disturbing and inaccurate to basic observation. A simple instinct should not vary in the manner that human morality does in its basic constitution from culture to culture. Knocking down this strawman, however, should certainly not mean that morality is necessarily supernatural in origin.

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I wrote a poem. It’s beautiful.

‘O noble brow from Neander!
Fuhlrott knew thee first.
King would call thee neanderthalensis,
Huxley proclaim your worth.

You were another sort of man:
First among the fold.
You were the first appreciated,
Though other men might be as old.

Your ridges arch so handsomely,
Your form so gracefully bowled.
Your face we may not gaze upon.
But your neurocranium we do behold.

In the year of 1997,
Your age the C14 did show.
You stalked the forests of Germany,
Two score millennia ago.

So to you we tender a laurel,
Ancient Neanderthal!
Whose kind braved two-hundred-thousand winters,
Before ours saw one at all.

This is (abridged) a 2 year old essay that I wrote for fun. (That’s what I used to do in lieu of a girlfriend. Now I mostly just cry. And blog!).

The Kow Swamp series consists of the fossilized remains of at least 40 individuals recovered from Kow Swamp, a lake near the Murray River in Australia (Johanson & Edgar, 1996). The finds vary slightly in age, from around 9,000 to 13,000 years old (Larsen, Matter, & Gebo, 1998). Of this series, only two individuals posses crania complete enough to be of significance here, Kow Swamp 1 and 5 (Larsen et al., 1998).

What is striking about the Kow Swamp crania is the fact that they seem to posses a mix of traits characteristic of both Indonesian Homo erectus (the Sangarin series) and modern Australian Aborigines. The two crania both possess the long, low foreheads typical of erectus, as well as thick cranial bones and a rounded lacrimal. However, the large cranial capacity, relatively gracile jaw, and fully modern post-cranial skeletons of the two finds are all typical of Homo sapiens (Johanson & Edgar, 1996). Multiregionalists claim that this population is an example of a transitional form between Indonesian H. erectus and Australian H. sapiens.

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