The Caveman’s Corner

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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So the whole weekly thing is pretty much out the window. I’ve been experiencing some technical difficulties for a while and I’ve had other matters to attend to/lacked motivation. But, you may unbate your breath, we have Meet an Ancestor entry number two: Propliopithecus chirobates.

A reconstruction of Propliopithecus

Woohoo, we finally got our super-obscure species that Google hasn’t heard of (Did you mean: propliopithecus chorobates). It is, however, a member of a quite famous and extremely important lineage.

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We have a rant today.

I’ve been doing the research for my next “meet an ancestor” today, and I keep coming across one word, “Cebidae.” Apparently, the ecology of our ancestor’s genus was similar to that of the Cebidae. Well, that’s quite interesting, or at least it would be if I knew at all what the authors meant by Cebidae.

The debate we’re getting into here is over the macrotaxonomy of the New World Monkeys. Some authorities like to split it up into lots of little families, as many as seven, while some prefer to refer it in its entirety to one family, incidentally the Cebidae.

Thus, Walker’s Primates of the World, Stein and Rowe’s Physical Anthropology 8th ed., and the Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates give the Cebidae as 11 genera ranging from squirrel monkeys to spider monkeys; everything but marmosets and tarmarins. The Encyclopedia of Human Evolution prefers to exclude only the spider monkeys from the Cebidae and include the marmosets. Animal Diversity Web lumps in all the New World Monkeys. And finally, Wikipedia authoritatively states that the Cebidae is “one of the four families of New World monkeys now recognised,” and is a combination of marmosets, squirrel monkeys, and capuchins (the actual genus Cebus).

Cebus, about the only member of the Cebidae everyone agrees on

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Sorry I haven’t been being terribly faithful with these “Meet a …” things, but I’ve been otherwise engaged for the past week or so. Our very first Meet a Contemporary is at once easy and hard to compose a profile on: Easy because it’s an orangutan and you can find about anything you want on it, but hard because it’s an orangutan and anyone who’s ever watched a nature show knows all the basics already, so it might be a bit difficult to make this interesting.

Meet, the Sumatran orangutan (or orang-utan for our Commonwealth readers).

A P. abelii in the type of suspensory posture typical of the orangutans.

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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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As I rather suspected would be the case, our very first “Meet an Ancestor” ancestor isn’t strictly a human ancestor. More of an extinct, collateral cousin. It is, however, a fairly well known species on which there is a good amount of information. I was afraid I’d get some obscure Plesiadapid that didn’t even register on Google.

T. oswaldi reconstruction from DKimages

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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 will have the same idea as Meet an Ancestor, except I’ll use A Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates. So, look forward to that too.

In a feeble attempt to perhaps make someone want to come back to my blog more than once, I’ll be doing some serialized features. More-or-less weekly, I’ll use a random number generator to come up with a page number and another generator to select on that page a fossil species from Fleagle’s Primate Adaptation and Evolution, 3 ed. Following from this will emerge a short summary with as much information as I have means to dig up and present succinctly. So, look forward to that.

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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