Abstract
Even as paleoanthropology becomes increasingly sophisticated in revealing both the broad contours and the details of the deep evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, it continues to be informed by lingering pre-evolutionary residues. Specifically, the goal of prior research was to demonstrate that the influence of the ancient Scala Naturae as an organizing principle significantly contributed to the scientific community’s delayed acceptance of Australopithecus (sensu lato) as a plesiomorphic member of the Hominidae. The present study extends this research through a selective examination of non-primary source material reporting on significant early hominid discoveries over the last century, beginning with Australopithecus africanus (1925) and ending with Ardipithecus ramidus (1995/2009). It is argued that these accessible sources reify to varying degrees the perception among the non-expert public that human beings are an inevitable culmination of the evolutionary process. This culturally transmitted schema of human exceptionalism continues to impact other life on Earth in profound ways, in some cases with calamitous results.
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Notes
The Chain of Being, Great Chain of Being, or Scala Naturae are terms used more or less interchangeably to reflect a facile teleological worldview, whose roots have been traced at least to Ancient Greece (Lovejoy 1936).
Throughout this paper I am using the term primitive in an evolutionary sense, i.e. retaining character states present in a last common ancestor (cf. derived).
Many researchers now distinguish modern humans and their extinct bipedal ancestors at the level of a tribe, the Hominini, or colloquially hominins. For consistency with historical source material I will continue to use the taxonomic family Hominidae (hominids) in reference to the human evolutionary lineage distinct from that of Pan.
It is possible that Darwin himself eschewed the use of the term evolution for this very reason, in favor of “descent with modification” which eliminated any connotation of progressive (= predetermined) development.
Although the nearby town was known as Taungs when the fossil was discovered, from this point on I will use the more familiar Taung, excepting direct quotations.
Some trees did allow placement of extinct species on the main trunk (i.e. direct ancestors, not evolutionary “failures”) however Australopithecus was rarely afforded such a location. See Delisle 2007 for an excellent overview of human phylogenies spanning a lengthy time period from 1860 to 2000, in which he argues that these images reflect each author’s underlying epistemology of human origins.
This study relies on English-language sources, so is therefore limited in that respect. See Delisle (2007), and the source therein, for discussion of some of the primary literature in other languages, particularly French & German.
Acknowledging that there is ongoing discussion on the generic status of fossils often lumped into early Homo. (e.g. Wood and Collard 1999).
Referring to an extinct species as transitional is problematic since ALL species that don’t go extinct (i.e. continue to reproduce in adequate numbers and hence evolve) are ipso facto transitional forms. Common usage of the term among paleontologists, and the one adopted here, is more circumscribed in referring to species that show demonstrable intermediate morphology between a more primitive ancestor and a more derived descendent. This usage of the term “transitional” is still problematic in the sense that it can be seen as simply replacing the convenient but misleading “missing link” term, itself a vestige of a Scala Naturae perspective. Nonetheless, transitional forms can perhaps be usefully contrasted with the notion of a “living fossil” which within an evolutionary context signifies an evolutionary lineage that shows little morphological variation over sometimes vast expanses of deep time. For example, horseshoe crabs (actually more closely related to spiders and scorpions) today display remarkable similarity to fossils dating as far back as the Ordovician Period (~ 450 mya).
The Taung fossil displayed a full set of deciduous teeth accompanied by the first adult molars. This puts the individual at about 6 years of age at the time of death using Homo sapiens as a standard. It is likely, however, that the developmental maturation period from infant to adult was less extended in this species so 3–4 years old at time of death is a better estimate. In any case, “child” rather than “baby” would be the appropriate descriptor.
Keith continued to share some of Dart’s observations of the Taung specimen over the subsequent years, but became increasingly hostile to Dart’s overall conclusion that it represented an “intermediate” form between apes and humans. When the tide of scientific opinion turned in Dart’s favor in the late 1940s, Keith was left with no choice but to capitulate. His mea culpa plainly stated “I am now convinced, on the evidence submitted by Dr. Robert Broom, that Prof. Dart was right and that I was wrong; the Australopithecinae are in or near the line which culminated in the human form” [italics mine] (Keith 1947, p. 377). Here again is a not so subtle reference to a Chain of Being with humans firmly atop, marking the cessation of the evolutionary process.
This quote is also noteworthy in that it parallels the conclusion drawn by Edward Tyson in 1699 who, in providing the first detailed description of a chimpanzee, situated his “pygmie” between apes (actually tailless monkeys, possibly Barbary macaques) and humans (Tyson 1699).
Elliot-Smith was perhaps the most influential mentor to Raymond Dart while in London, given their shared interest not only in primate neuroanatomy, but Dart was also an advocate of Elliot-Smith’s “hyper-diffusionist” model of cultural transmission (Crook 2012).
In fairness to these authors, the Taung fossil was a singular discovery, and was a juvenile individual. Still, some mention might have been anticipated given the fossil’s then unexpected provenience in South Africa.
Pithecanthropus from Java and Sinanthropus from China were eventually lumped into the cosmopolitan taxon Homo erectus (Mayr 1951).
It is important to acknowledge other factors that contributed to the “establishment’s” incredulity regarding Dart’s claims (e.g., Madison [2019] argues that Dart’s “practice” of conducting human origins research led to the unenthusiastic reception from his colleagues in England, and Tobias et al. [2000] discusses the impact of the discovery of “Sinanthropus” at Zhoukoudian, China starting in 1929).
Not only was his main conclusion, arguing for the inclusion of the Taung species among the hominids, dismissed, his full manuscript completed in 1929 was formally rejected in 1931 by the English scientific establishment, although the rejection was actually made in July 1930. This rejection was possibly related to the imminent publication of Keith’s 1931 book (see Falk 2011, pp. 47–54). Although the reviewers expressed interest in publishing the chapter on the dentition, Dart seemingly adopted an all or nothing position. For whatever reason, that very chapter on the dentition is the only component of his monograph that Dart formally published, albeit in a less widely circulated journal (Dart 1934). The full unpublished monograph now resides in the Dart collection at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Broom later elevated the species from the site of Sterkfontein to a new genus, “Plesianthropus”, which was subsequently sunk back into Australopithecus later on.
Although Gregory and Hellman published several professional papers over the ensuing decade discussing the South African australopithecines, I was unable to locate anything in the non-primary literature.
By this time all of the various South African fossils were combined within a subfamily, Australopithecinae, or simply australopithecines. As this subfamily is almost certainly paraphyletic, especially when including the more ancient eastern African specimens recently discovered, researchers have used an informal category, australopiths.
Current research investigating the possibility that some epigenetic markers, acquired during an individual’s lifetime, may remain intact during meiosis and therefore have the potential of manifesting in subsequent generations suggests that Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics hypothesis may not be completely in error (Heard and Martienssen 2014).
The Oldowan lithics were named after the Tanzanian site that was initially called Oldoway, later Olduvai Gorge.
Even before Zinj was found and declared the maker of the many Oldowan tools, at least until Homo habilis was discovered soon after, Raymond Dart had been collecting faunal remains at the South African site of Makapansgat. In 1957 he published his monograph describing what he called the osteodontokeratic culture, claiming that the purported ecofacts represented evidence of tool manufacture on the part of Australopithecus (Dart 1957). It is apparent that during this period researchers believed that evidence of tool making would bolster claims of hominid status.
A slight digression, if I may. Science fiction films of the 1950s, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, were thinly veiled cold war propaganda, and further reified the notion that our species was inevitable. Extraterrestrials were almost invariably shown as being humanoid in form, suggesting that even on other planets the evolutionary process resulted in a highly intelligent being that bore a strong resemblance to Homo sapiens (1958’s The Blob is an interesting exception). This trend continued to some extent in the original Star Trek series in the 1960s, and also in subsequent popular films such as Alien (1979) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).
The documentary is a product of its time, and is highly androcentric, particularly in the area of cooperative hunting by male hominids, then seen as a central driver of human evolution and the centerpiece of the “Man the Hunter” paradigm. Had Mary Leakey not been a part of the research team, one wonders if females would have been mentioned at all.
Remarkably, including real-time video footage of the still in situ fossil not long after discovery.
Similar to Keith’s use of the evolutionary “march” towards modern humans, the use of a war metaphor in this passage invokes the hyper-competitive process of evolutionary change as characterized by Anglo-American writers, consequently minimizing the role of cooperation as adaptive. Genetic drift, an evolutionary mechanism developed as part of the synthesis that supplements natural selection and that highlights random and potentially non-adaptive change was disregarded entirely.
Note the possibly strategic avoidance of the term “evolving” toward, but once again describing evolution as a forward looking process, perhaps akin to historians’ caution against presentism.
The term “Man” to include all humans persisted not only in the title, but throughout the article itself.
Physical Anthropology was set against Cultural Anthropology as part of an early 20th century four-field disciplinary model unique to the United States, with Archaeology and Linguistic Anthropology being the other two sub-disciplines. Physical Anthropology is increasingly being replaced by Biological Anthropology, acknowledging the sub-disciplinary expansion beyond traditional comparative morphology and physiology into primatology, genetics, evolutionary psychology, etc.
Based on the discovery of additional remains permitting a more robust differential diagnosis, the subspecies was elevated to species status (Haile-Selassie et al. 2004).
Even high impact scientific journals such as Science & Nature supplement primary research articles with summaries written by science writers. An exception to this general pattern is Scientific American, which continues to publish articles for popular consumption written by the researchers themselves. This is redolent of the Leakeys publishing in National Geographic in the 1960s and 1970s.
This is not to minimize in any way the extraordinary effort that went into the recovery and analysis of the Aramis fossils, but rather to place the interpretation in the specific historical context addressed in the current study.
To speak of transitional forms infers the benefit of hindsight, i.e. knowing what came later. This has the potential to distract from viewing a species as existing in a particular geo-temporal moment and can easily result in lapsing into progressive, even teleological thinking.
Or “ex-ape” according to the inimitable non-scientist Jon Marks (2015).
With gratitude to my PhD Committee Chair and mentor, Dr. Andrew Hill, for planting the seed of a simple yet profound insight many years ago, and paraphrased thusly: we are fortunate to have any direct evidence at all documenting our ancient past. Indeed.
In the case of publications that center phylogenetic analysis, the subtext becomes the text.
Such exposure may be especially critical for young people who are still assembling their ideas about how the world works.
Obviously not all individuals who hold a deeply held religious faith are inimical towards the notion of evolution in general and human evolution in particular. Many individuals have transcended the artificial binary between science and religion, including Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who was actively engaged with the search and interpretation of fossil hominids in the first half of the 20th century. Compare, for example, the phylogeny on page 209 of Teilhard de Chardin (1952) with the phylogeny on page 192 of Teilhard de Chardin (1959), the latter of which modifies the former to combine both paleontological AND theological elements.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my home institution, William Paterson University, whose Assigned Release Time (ART) program made this manuscript possible. Sincere thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers; there is no doubt in my mind that this is a better paper as result of their feedback. Finally, this paper could not have been written without the tireless effort of the many field and laboratory scientists whose research directly informs our knowledge of our deep evolutionary history.
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Gundling, T. Ineluctably us: early hominid discoveries, mass media, and the reification of human ancestors. HPLS 42, 41 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00339-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00339-6