Lone Survivors Read online

  Map showing early human sites.

  In the early 1900s, evidence continued to accumulate in favor of a non-African origin for humans, and the focus returned to Europe. Further Neanderthal remains were found in Croatia and France, and a more ancient and primitive fossil jawbone was unearthed in the Mauer sandpit near Heidelberg in Germany in 1907. As enough material began to accumulate, scientists started to build evolutionary trees from the fossil evidence. These tended to fall into two main categories: ones where the fossils were arranged in a linear sequence leading from the most primitive form (for example, Java Man or Heidelberg Man) to modern humans, with few or no side branches (like a ladder); and others (like a bush) where there was a line leading to modern humans, and the other fossils with their primitive features were placed in an array of side branches leading only to extinction.

  The combination of Darwin’s and Wallace’s publications on the transmutation of species and a proliferating Pleistocene fossil human record led to the expectation that there must have been many more ancient species of humans (the Pleistocene is a recent geologic epoch, poorly dated during Darwin’s time, but now believed to stretch from about 12,000 to 2.5 million years ago). William King had named the first fossil-based species Homo neanderthalensis in 1864, from the skeleton discovered in the Neander Valley in 1856. Within fifty years, the new European finds were being assigned to dozens of new human species in an unfortunate tumult of typology, where trivial differences were elevated to assume real biological significance. Thus, the completely modern-looking remains that had been found in the sites of Cro-Magnon, Grimaldi, Chancelade, and Oberkassel became the human species “spelaeus,” “grimaldii,” “priscus,” and “mediterraneus,” respectively, while the remains from Spy, Le Moustier, and La Chapelle-aux-Saints became “spyensis,” “transprimigenius,” and “chapellensis,” despite their resemblance to the remains already designated H. neanderthalensis from the Neander Valley. This trend for what we can call extreme “splitting” continued up to about 1950, when the pendulum swung back to the opposing tendency to “lump” fossils together in just a few species.

  A replica of the jawbone unearthed in the Mauer sandpit near Heidelberg in Germany in 1907, together with one of the Boxgrove incisor teeth.

  Suggestions that Europe may have hosted even more primitive human relatives started to emerge from a gravel pit at Piltdown in southern England in 1912, giving rise to yet another species called “Eoanthropus dawsoni” (“Dawn Man of Dawson”—Charles Dawson being the principal discoverer). Parts of a thick but large-brained skull, coupled with a distinctly apelike jaw, turned up there with ancient animal fossils and primitive stone tools, suggesting an age as great as that of Java Man. Africa had nothing to compare with these burgeoning finds, but that finally began to change in the 1920s. However, circumstances were such that these first finds still failed to switch the focus of human origins to Africa.

  The Broken Hill (Kabwe) skull, discovered in 1921, was the first important human fossil from Africa, but it was a puzzling find. Although it was assigned to the new species “Homo rhodesiensis” by Sir Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum, the Czech-American anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička dubbed it “a comet of man’s prehistory” because of the difficulty in deciphering its age and affinities. The skull was found in cave deposits that were being quarried away during metal ore mining, in what is now Zambia (then the British colony of Northern Rhodesia). It’s one of the most beautifully preserved of all human fossils, but it displays a strange mixture of primitive and advanced features, and its face is dominated by an enormous brow ridge glowering over the eye sockets. And because it was found during quarrying, which eventually destroyed the whole Broken Hill mine, its age and significance remain uncertain even today (but see the final chapter for the latest developments).

  Three years later an even more primitive find was made in a limestone quarry at Taung, South Africa—a skull that looked like that of a young ape. It was studied by a newly established professor of anatomy in Johannesburg, named Raymond Dart, and in 1925 he published a paper in the scientific journal Nature, making some remarkable claims about the fossil. He argued that it showed a combination of ape and human features, but that its teeth, brain shape, and probable posture were humanlike. Dart named it Australopithecus africanus (“Southern Ape of Africa”), and he declared that it was closely related to us, and even a potential human ancestor. Dart’s claims were treated with great skepticism by the scientific establishment, particularly in England. This was partly because of judgments about Dart’s youth and relative inexperience, and partly because the fossil was that of a child (young apes may look more “human” than adult apes). Others thought that the finds from Java, Heidelberg, and Piltdown provided much more plausible ancestors than Australopithecus africanus. And finally, the location and estimated age of Taung also counted against it.

  No one (not even Darwin and Huxley) had considered southern Africa as a location for early human evolution, and as the Taung skull was guessed to be only about 500,000 years old, it was thought too recent to be that of a genuine human ancestor. Instead, it was considered to represent a peculiar kind of ape, paralleling humans in some ways. We now know, of course, that the australopithecines represented a long and important phase of human evolution that lasted for over 2 million years, and which is recognized at sites stretching from Chad in the Sahara to many more in eastern and southern Africa. And we have also known since their exposure in 1953 that the misleading Piltdown remains were fraudulent and had nothing to do with our ancient ancestry.

  Other finds made at this time continued to keep the focus outside of Africa, and those made in cave deposits at Zhoukoudian near Beijing from 1921 onward began to reveal a Chinese counterpart to Java Man initially dubbed “Sinanthropus pekinensis” (“Chinese Man of Peking”). Systematic excavations carried out from 1927 until the present day have yielded many skull and body parts of humans who lived there about half a million years ago, people who resembled the growing collection of fossils from Java closely enough for them to be eventually grouped in the single species Homo erectus. This species is a crucial one for studies of our origins, because it’s at the heart of radically different views of our evolution that have emerged over the last seventy years or so. Most anthropologists recognize the existence of at least two human species during the last million years—the extinct Homo erectus and our own species, Homo sapiens—but there are very different views on how these species are related.

  Franz Weidenreich and some of the “Peking Man” fossils of Homo erectus that inspired him to create an early version of the Multiregional model of human origins.

  What is now known as the Multiregional model of modern human origins was first proposed in the 1930s by Franz Weidenreich, a German anthropologist, who based many of his arguments on studies of the Zhoukoudian Homo erectus fossils. Weidenreich suggested that Homo erectus gave rise to Homo sapiens across its whole range, which, about 1 million years ago, included Africa, China, Indonesia, and perhaps Europe. In his view, as the species dispersed around the Old World (it’s not known from regions such as Australia and the Americas), it developed the regional variation that lies at the roots of modern “racial” differentiation. Particular features in a given region persisted in the local descendant populations of today. For example, he argued from the fossils that Chinese Homo erectus specimens had the same flat faces and prominent cheekbones as modern oriental populations, while Javanese Homo erectus had robustly built cheekbones and faces that jutted out from the braincase, characteristics argued to be especially marked in modern Australian Aborigines.

  At the other extreme from Weidenreich’s Multiregional model was the view that the special features of modern humans (such as a high forehead, a chin, and a slender skeleton) would have required a long time to evolve, and hence the line leading to Homo sapiens (the “pre-sapiens” lineage) must have been very ancient and developed in parallel with large-browed and robust forms such as Homo erectus and
the Neanderthals. This is an old idea, which came to prominence early in the twentieth century through influential researchers like Marcellin Boule (France) and Arthur Keith (United Kingdom), and aspects of it were taken up later by Louis Leakey, working in Kenya and Tanzania. The supporting evidence came and went through the last century, including at times specimens like Piltdown and the modern-looking Galley Hill skeleton from Kent—the former now known to be a fake and the latter wrongly dated.

  Between the extremes of Multiregionalism (which potentially included every human fossil in our ancestry) and the Pre-sapiens model (which excluded most of them), there were intermediate models, ones which featured early Neanderthals in the story. The critical fossils this time were from Mount Carmel in what was then Palestine. They were discovered by an international expedition excavating a series of caves near Haifa during the late 1920s and 1930s. In two of the caves, Skhul and Tabun, they found human fossils that had apparently been intentionally buried. Moreover, they were associated with the kinds of stone tools that in Europe were associated with the Neanderthals. And yet the fossils seemed to show mixtures of Neanderthal and modern characteristics, so how should they be interpreted? In the 1930s there were no accurate methods of dating available, and so the Tabun and Skhul fossils were assumed by their describers, Theodore McCown and Arthur Keith, to be roughly contemporaneous with each other. Some suggested that the finds might represent hybrids between moderns and Neanderthals, but McCown and Keith preferred to regard them as members of a single but variable ancient population, perhaps one close to the divergence of the Neanderthal and modern lines. (In fact Keith could not quite abandon his pre-sapiens leanings and thought that they were still probably off the line leading to us, because of their Neanderthal features.)

  Louis Leakey with the Olduvai Gorge “Zinjanthropus” skull, which his wife, Mary, discovered in 1959. It was the first important fossil to be dated by the potassium-argon method.

  But others saw them as evidence for a pre-Neanderthal rather than pre-sapiens ancestry for modern humans, with the late or “classic” Neanderthals subsequently heading off the main line to the sidings of extinction. Following this line of argument, the American paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell developed a neat scenario during the 1950s where “unspecialized Neanderthals” about 100,000 years ago became isolated in Europe by the last Ice Age and evolved away from Homo sapiens. At the same time, those in the Middle East (such as Tabun) evolved toward modern humans via forms like those found at Skhul. Then, to complete the story, about 35,000 years ago these Middle Eastern “proto–Cro-Magnons” migrated into Europe and replaced their European Neanderthal cousins.

  In contrast to this Early Neanderthal model of modern human origins, which gave the Neanderthals at least a bit part in our evolution, there were two developments out of Weidenreich’s Multiregionalism after his death in 1948 that returned the Neanderthals to a central role in our evolution, and in one case even extended their role globally. The American anthropologist Carleton Coon used new fossil material to develop a comprehensive global scheme of the evolution of five different lineages of Homo erectus, two in Africa, and one each in Europe, China, and Australia. These five lineages evolved largely independently to become what Coon regarded as the modern races of Homo sapiens: “Capoid” (the Bushman of South Africa and related peoples), “Negroid,” “Caucasoid,” “Mongoloid,” and “Australoid.”

  In this respect, Coon differed fundamentally from his mentor, since Weidenreich considered human evolution to consist of a network of lineages constantly exchanging genes and ideas, whereas Coon was quite frank about the divided lineages and the implications of their inferred different rates of evolution: “Wherever Homo arose, and Africa is at present the most likely continent, he soon dispersed, in a very primitive form, throughout the warm regions of the Old World … If Africa was the cradle of mankind, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principal schools.”

  The American paleoanthropologist C. Loring Brace gave Weidenreich’s ideas a distinctly Neanderthal twist by arguing that Homo erectus evolved to modern humans in each part of the populated world by passing through a “neanderthaloid” phase. In essence, according to Brace, the Neanderthals and equivalent ancient people across the inhabited world used their front teeth as tools for manipulating food and materials, and this is what produced their especially prominent midfaces, large incisor teeth, and distinctive skull shape. When more advanced tools of the Upper Paleolithic (Upper Old Stone Age) were invented about 35,000 years ago, demands on the teeth and jaws were lifted, and so the face and skull were transformed into the shape we have today.

  These were the main ideas about the origin of modern humans that I set out to test when I began my studies for a Ph.D. at Bristol University in 1970: the global Multiregional model and its Braceian development, the Early Neanderthal model, the Pre-sapiens model (with no place for erectus or Neanderthals), and one rather vaguer scheme developed by the anthropologists Bernard Campbell and Joseph Weiner called the Spectrum Hypothesis. This argued that ancient humans had different blends of what would become modern human characteristics, and they contributed in part, and differentially, to the evolution of Homo sapiens. So in a sense the Spectrum Hypothesis was multiregional, but some lineages had a much greater contribution to our ancestry than others. A bit of a revolution was under way around 1970, as computing power started to increase and began to influence the biological sciences. Most analyses of human evolution up to 1970 were based on direct observation, and where measurements of a fossil were taken, these were usually compared individually or through an index of just two measurements. However, multivariate programs were becoming available that could look at large numbers of measurements and specimens simultaneously, allowing more sophisticated studies of differences in size and shape. Such analyses were at the center of my studies for a doctorate, and in July 1971 I left the United Kingdom on a trip to museums and research institutes in ten European countries. The aim was to gather as many data as possible on the Neanderthals and their modern-looking successors in Europe, the Cro-Magnons, to see whether the evolutionary pattern was one of continuity or rupture. I only had a modest grant from the Medical Research Council for a four-month trip, and so I drove my old car, sleeping in it, camping, or staying in youth hostels—in Belgium I even spent one night in a shelter for the homeless. I survived many adventures, including several border confrontations and two robberies, but by the end of my 5,000-mile trip I had collected one of the largest data sets of Neanderthal and early modern skull measurements assembled by anyone up to that time.

  Chris Stringer on his 1971 research trip around Europe. It’s washing day at a campsite in Yugoslavia.

  Over the next two years I analyzed this information, adding comparative data on non-European fossils and modern human populations (the latter generously supplied by the American anthropologist William Howells). The measurements were transferred to data cards and fed into a computer the size of several rooms, but which had less processing power than my last mobile phone! Nevertheless, the results were instructive. Neanderthal skulls were no more similar to those of recent Europeans than they were to Africans, Eskimo, or Native Tasmanians, and Cro-Magnon skulls did not neatly slot between the Neanderthals and recent Europeans. Early modern skulls from around the world seemed to cluster with their modern counterparts rather than with any archaic skulls from the same regions. The former results provided no support for a Neanderthal ancestry for the Cro-Magnons, and the latter results contradicted Multiregional and Spectrum expectations. Studying the sequence in Europe before Neanderthal times also gave no support to the Pre-sapiens model either, because very early European fossils could not be divided into modern-like and Neanderthal-like; they seemed to show the gradual development of only Neanderthal features through time.

  Things were not quite as clear in the Middle East, although there did not seem to be any “intermediate” fossils between Neanderthals and moderns there either. Skulls f
rom Tabun and the Israeli cave of Amud seemed to be basically Neanderthal, while those from Skhul Cave seemed much more modern. But because none of these finds were well dated in the 1970s, I couldn’t exclude the possibility that, given enough time, the Israeli Neanderthals could have been transformed into early moderns, in line with the Early Neanderthal model of scientists like Clark Howell. However, a surprising alternative ancestor for the Skhul and Cro-Magnon early moderns did emerge from my results. A skull discovered in 1967 in the Omo Kibish region of Ethiopia, by a team led by Richard Leakey (the son of the famous prehistorians Louis and Mary Leakey), looked very modern in my skull shape analyses, confirming the first studies by the anatomist Michael Day; yet preliminary dating work suggested it could have been as much as 130,000 years old, more ancient than most Neanderthals. And there was an enigmatic North African skull, found in the Moroccan site of Jebel Irhoud in 1961. In skull shape it seemed Neanderthal in some ways, yet its facial shape was non-Neanderthal, partly primitive and partly modern. With an age thought to be only around 40,000 years, it was difficult to fit Jebel Irhoud into any scenario, but it and the Omo skull provided clues that Africa was going to have its own story to tell, when more data came in.