Human Evolutionary Theory In Tatters: Proof From the 2012 CALPE Conference in Gibraltar

A tip o' my hat to Bob Muckle, who tweeted about this BBC story. It tells of Ian Tattersall's extraordinary comments, made Thursday, September 13, 2012, about the One True Force underlying all of the evolution of bipedal apes, of which the only living exponent is us, and which includes everything from Sahelanthropus through Ardipithecus and Australopithecus to the Neanderthals. That Tattersall's hypothesis takes center stage at a prestigious global conference demonstrates to me just what a confused state in which human evolutionary theory finds itself in the early twenty-first century. [I'm being fair--at best Tattersall's is a suggestion about how things might have been, and as such doesn't rise above the level of a startling, but untestable, hypothesis.] Let us go then, you and I. Like Ardipithecus ramidus I'm gonna go out on a limb--my favourite place, evah.  

Ardipithecus ramidus

This weekend in Gibraltar marks the triennial renewal of the CALPE Conferences on human evolution, begun in 1998 on the sesquicentennial of the Forbes Quarry's skull. According to this story in the Gibraltar Chronicle, 

The theme of this year’s conference is 'The Human Niche: Ecology, Behaviour and Culture in the Genus Homo.' As customary, the conference brings together some of the world’s leading specialists but this year there is a difference. As Professor Clive Finlayson, organiser of the conference will put it in his introductory remarks on Thursday, ‘in selecting the speakers for this conference I went for a mix of established leaders in their field and young researchers who are making important contributions.’ So novelty is the order of the day in this conference which, for the first time, offers a platform for new talent. The programme has been structured in such a way that the conference will have an appeal to specialists but also to the general public interested in this fascinating subject. Public interest in the Gorham’s and Vanguard Caves excavations, which this year ran for six weeks and ended last Friday, has been great. Now they have the opportunity of hearing, first hand, the results of such work and that of others all over the world. Professor Finlayson describes this year’s conference as a landmark, one in which he hopes the current human evolution paradigm will be replaced by a new approach, one that puts ecology in the forefront. It has attracted important media coverage with several reporters from important journals and news channels flying out to Gibraltar from as far as the United States. Gibraltar is fast becoming one of the world’s major centres for such studies and conferences such as this one will help to reinforce the message of the Rock’s vital role. With a bid for World Heritage Status for the Gorham’s Cave Complex now in preparation, this year’s Calpe Conference is a major cog in the build up process. 

 With that kind of hype, it's hard to imagine any of the major invitees trotting out a really smelly red herring. But out one came, just the same. And from Ian Tattersall, no less! It seems that Ian has intuited the single behavioural factor underpinning the rapid evolution of the bipedal apes. Competition. He calls it something else, and he adds some behavioural qualifiers, like 'violent' and 'intergroup,' but at bottom it's plain old competition. Nothing new there, except that he's positing our more rapid evolution based on presumably grander-scale conflict, or, well, see for yourself.
     Granted, none of us but those lucky enough to have been there will have heard the whole story, so we'll just have to rely on the usually reliable BBC coverage to illuminate us. Apparently Ian Tattersall thinks that, as a group, the bipedal apes have come a long way in a comparatively brief span of time. He cites physical characteristics such as brain size and dental changes as part of our unusually rapid evolution. However, to make his point, Tattersall must do a little muddying of the waters of human evolution--a bit of palaeoanthropological sleight of hand, as I see it. 

WT 15000, Homo erectus/ergaster

     The first of the author's overly broad overviews is apparent in this quote/paraphrase from the BBC article: 

The increase in brain size seems to have coincided with a modern physique characterised by a linear shape, long legs and relatively narrow hips. These features can already be seen in the skeleton of the 'Turkana boy' [WT 15000] from Kenya, who lived about two million years ago. This contrasts sharply with the short legs and long arms of the Turkana boy's antecedent 'Lucy' (Australopithecus afarensis), who lived in Ethiopia about one million years earlier. 

Wait a second! Have I missed something? Or is this eminent scholar downplaying not only modern human variation, but also the variety of leg/arm ratios in our fossil ancestry when you look beyond the two forms he mentions above? Neanderthal and modern human One wonders at Tattersall's rather unfairly phrased comparison in support of his premising argument--like comparing apples to oranges and being surprised when they're found to be different. And since when is 'linear' a discipline-appropriate descriptor for the skeletal differences between early and late bipedal apes? 

My favourites!

The author is quick to bring culture into the frame, but even then he downplays its valence as an engine of 'rapid' evolution in bipedal apes. The BBC article continues...

Human culture was probably the special, consistently present ingredient that drove the continuing fast pace of change in our lineage after we left the forests, said Prof Tattersall, but not in the way that some other researchers have proposed. But Prof Tattersall said the way our technology transformed in fits and starts, along with the way these changes were often separated from biological evolution, meant this idea was not as good a fit for what is seen in the archaeological and fossil records. Aggression between small, distinct human groups in the past is one of the major remaining agents of such changes, he said. 'Inter-group conflict would certainly have placed a premium on such correlates of neural function as planning and throwing,' Prof Tattersall explained. Chimps also have culture, but have not experienced such accelerated evolution. 'If we were somehow able to implicate conflict among groups as a selective agent for increasing intelligence within groups, this might explain the otherwise quite mystifying independent increases in brain size that we see in several different lineages within the genus Homo.' Such conflict could be seen as a form of predation. And, predation is regarded as a classic example of the 'Red Queen' hypothesis whereby prey and predator become faster or more cunning in a self-reinforcing way. 

When Ian says 'if we were somehow able to implicate blah, blah, blah' he's really tanking. Talk about trying out wacky new ideas in a conference setting! Except. This ain't no trial balloon--not if you remember Robert Ardrey's African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, or Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape. Tattersall's isn't a novel suggestion even if you strip it of the sensationalism, and ignore his naïve view of the cultural tool-kit of our fossil relations. 

[I guess it's a no-brainer that I can't mutely stand by while this author, like so many others, invokes the holy trinity of human evolution: clothing, fire and shelter as a means by which our 'relatively frail bodies' managed to cope with the climatic and other environmental vicissitudes of palaeolithic life.] 

At bottom, this author's major thesis is that competition brought about evolutionary change. I didn't feel the earth shake. I doubt that you did. 
     Allright! Allright! Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe the BBC took what Tattersall said out of context. But if this is what Tattersall is thinking in 2012, and if this is the epitome of human evolutionary theory--as the conference organizers seem to think--I have to say that it proves something I've long believed, that the discipline of human palaeontology is in crisis and human evolutionary theory is in tatters.

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A Human Evolutionary Battle of the Technological Titans for the Undisputed World Heavyweight Championship of Nest Building: Castor Canadensis VS. Pongo pygmaeus

Round 1: In which Pongo makes a nest (Credit)

In the world of ethology one group stands head and shoulders [well, head, anyway] above the rest--primatologists. Unlike their scholarly kindred primatologists can make a claim that's unique among those who study animal behaviour. That is, they can always justify their days spent grunting, hooting and chest beating, and walking about on all fours so as to acclimatize their subjects to their presence by arguing that they are investigating behaviours that might [a mighty might, that] have a bearing on our understanding of how humanity dragged itself up out of the primordial muck savannah dust to stand erect and eventually to free its hands for tool making or rickshaw pulling and in the process enslaved its feet, qua pedal extremities, qua locomotory appurtenances, forever [credit goes to my old acquaintance Gary Richards for that bit of podial insight].

Jane Goodall in the early 1960s

     Indeed, since the time Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall removed herself from her (probably girlie) English roots to insinuate herself into Pan trogolodytes (chimpanzee) society on the shores of Lake Tanganyika at Gombe, revelations about the human-like behaviour of the great apes [other than humans] have punctuated an otherwise brutally hot, sometimes deadly, but always physically and emotionally difficult vocation. 

Gombe (© 2003 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.)

Dame Goodall has shown us that chimps pull the leaves off of twigs to enable them to reach into termite mounds to attract termites for consumption [or did some oblivious ranch-hand inadvertently show one of them how to do it, resulting in a new 'tradition' amongst the group?]. Crumpling leaves to make sponges to extract water from puddles also emerged from the studies at Gombe [so, too, did brutal rape, torture and cannibalism of fellow anthropoids, but we won't dwell on that. At least we can be certain that it wasn't the same oblivious ranch-hand that taught them those things...].
     And yesterday comes fresh news of the startling cognitive capabilities of a great ape--Pongo pygmaeus, the orangutan. This animal is, by all accounts, something of a nest-building, evolutionarily precocious, civil engineer! van Casterena et al.'s 'Nest-building orangutans demonstrate engineering know-how to produce safe, comfortable beds' [published online before print April 16, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1200902109, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)] brings us face to face with ... ourselves [albeit about 12 million years in the past]. Like the good anthropologists the authors are, they've thoroughly anthropomorphized this animal's actions by deeming it 'engineering' and saying as much in print, in a scholarly journal [albeit one about which there are serious questions as to the seriousness of the review process]. This adds to the long list of claims made in behalf of science [the list I've just alluded to] for the other members of what's come to be known as the Homininae,* the Linnaean Family that includes you and me.
But, before you get too caught up in the weltanschauung of willy-nilly anthropomorphizing that permeates higher primate studies, let me bring you back down to the ground. Remember this little furry rodent? Castor canadensis? They build 'nests' too! Only theirs are permanent, unlike those of primates [which are constructed from scratch at least once a day], and are sometimes fairly large structures. Did I say 'fairly' large?
One recently observed in Alberta is an incredible 850 metres long! That's about half a mile! Have a look! Like the Great Wall, you can see this thing from space (thanks to Google Earth). These piccies are from a MailOnline article touting the [ahem] 'engineering' capabilities of this relatively small-brained, furry creature.

The brown area has been denuded by Beaver logging. The water flow is toward the top of the picture. The arrows point to two beaver lodges (themselves quite elegant feats of 'engineering'). There must be myriad smaller ones, considering these ones, too, can be viewed from a satellite orbiting the Earth!

Giving credit where credit is due, the lead author of the orang nest article did say this in an interview.

'We think the skills you'd need to build such a sophisticated nest are on a par with those you'd need to make and use tools, so require a similar cognitive ability. In this context, it would be interesting to investigate nest-building by other animals like beavers and birds,' says van Casteren [click here for the full story of this quote].

I wonder what they'd conclude from a 'study' of the other nest builders. Chances are it won't be that our closest relatives are on a par with beavers and bower birds. Nuh-uh. They'll be lumping beavers and beaked dinosaurs with humans and the other great apes! I mean, really, what else can you say, on present understanding, than that most mammals are capable of some very complex behaviours, that are often, in part, learned from conspecifics. So, it seems, are birds. So are bees and mud wasps. So, too, are web-building spiders! If you wanted to take this whole anthropomorphic engineering meme to its logical conclusion, you could probably see evidence of cognition on a par with humans in the colonial habits of some single-celled organisms. Where does it stop?? 
     If I had my 'druthers it would stop here, with the sensible conclusion that our closest relations are clever mammals. Full stop. Let's face it, the nesting behaviours we're witnessing amongst, for example, Pan and Pongo were probably extant at the time of the last common ancestor, so we're not talking about some inevitable trajectory from nest building (however 'clever' it might seem to us primatologically impoverished humans) to modern human cognitive abilities--such as the ability to understand what these pixels are meant to mean to you. And even if we could possibly understand what it takes in the way of brain function to make a bloody orangutan nest, all we'll have done is identify an ability that's (conservatively) about 12 million years old. So. What!
     I think the study of our primate relations is important (if only 'cause they might not be around forever). But let's get serious about the implications of what we observe.
     I'll now go back to my torpid state.


* I, however, will continue to refer to this small group of extant and fossil forms as belonging to the Superfamily Hominoidea, and to the Families Pongidae, and Panidae, Gorillidae and Hominidae. Unlike so many of my siblings in the biological/physical anthropology clade of the academy, I'm not taken in by the vocal claims of the primatologists that certain behaviours amongst our closest genetic relatives makes them any more human than they were before Johnny Weismüller and Cheetah cavorted in the treetops together before Jane came along [all churlish innuendo intended!] Thus, I am not convinced by the recent, arbitrary revision of the Superfamily Hominoidea, and I will cleave to the taxonomy I've just outlined until either a) someone persuades me to think otherwise, or b) I expire.

NewsSpotting Again! Gorilla My Dreams

Oh, I want a girl just like the girl that married Dear Ol' Dad! 
(Credit: San Diego Zoo Safari Park)

I can't resist drawing your attention to the news that now the gorilla genome has been sequenced. Elizabeth Pennisi writes in Science Now, 'A Little Gorilla in Us All.'

Word is that we're more like gorillas in some ways than we are like chimps, even if we are more like chimps and bonobos, overall, than we are like these wonderful creatures. Make of that what you will, the achievement is, still, quite awe inspiring.