HENRY

Today’s Nature covers the controversy about the recent paper Small-bodied humans from Palau, Micronesia by Berger et al. Last month, Berger and colleagues claimed that they’d found a collection of small bodied humans dating back between 940 and 2890 years (cal bp) in a burial cave in Palau:

Preliminary sampling of two burial caves in Palau, Micronesia has produced the remains of small-bodied recent H. sapiens, possibly representing a case of insular dwarfing. Individuals in this sample exhibit, in addition to small body size, reduction of the absolute size of the face, distinct supraorbital tori (in some individuals), a weakly developed mental eminence, relatively large dental dimensions, and dental dysplasias and agenesis.

Some of these features may be considered primitive for the genus Homo (or trending towards the primitive condition), thus the human fossils from Palau may provide important insights into the relationship between small body size and the expression of morphological features generally considered to be taxonomically diagnostic in our genus.

Given the scarcity of skeletal samples of small-bodied modern humans, and their importance for resolving taxonomic and phylogenetic issues in genus Homo paleontology, we provide here a brief description of the more salient specimens and a preliminary analysis of the material relative to small-bodied modern humans and to the holotype specimen of one small-bodied member of our genus, H. floresiensis (LB1).

(I’m not sure what “trending towards the primitive condition” means, so I’ll ignore that).

The Nature paper by Rex Dalton (Bones, Islands and Videotape) discusses a few of the technical - and rather vicious - criticisms of the Berger paper:

“The more I read their paper, the more I am convinced it is complete nonsense and cannot be accepted as serious science,” says Michael Pietrusewsky

and:

Berger, charges Fitzpatrick, “hasn’t made adequate comparisons to other skeletal material from Palau. And I don’t think he understands variance in human populations”.

That is - those bones aren’t small people and this ain’t island dwarfing. Dalton suggests that a large part of the problem is how this research is funded by the National Geographic Society. Berger features in a TV show Fossil Hunter, with the slogan “entertainment first, science second”. Now, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue of entertainment-based funding and science, and certainly I think Nat.Geo. does some really good work. However, the paper does raise the issue of how science and entertainment tend to get in each other’s way:

the Palau story illustrates how science can get caught up in the entertainment process. Like many palaeoanthropologists, Berger has long worked with film crews to document discoveries. But sometimes the demands to catch a significant finding on tape can clash with the slow, rigorous nature of the scientific process. The question anthropologists are asking now is: did entertainment needs in Palau overwhelm the evidence from field research

William Thurston on the role of humor in language change in his 1987 book “Processes of Change in the languages of North-Western New Britain”:

Many linguistic innovations arise in the context of humor, a common mechanism for mediating interpersonal relationships. For example, in 1978, during my second trip to work with the Anêm, but Goulden’s first, we had passed weeks without eating an egg. One morning, an Anêm woman proudly presented Goulden with one, and carefully enunciated the phrase nilŋêm texik ‘chicken-egg’ (nil-ŋ2 ‘egg/testicle’, texik ‘chicken’) for Goulden to repeat. (The Anêm apply Pavlovian principles to language teaching.) At this stage, Goulden’s knowledge of Anêm was at the wordlist level. He graciously accepted the gift, but in his fluster to be polite and repeat what he thought he had heard, he uttered biŋêm texik ‘chicken vulva’ instead. Both bi-ŋ2 and nil-ŋ2 belong to the genital class of nouns.

No sooner had the slip left his tongue than he knew his mistake, but it was too late. Goulden’s obvious discomfiture only accentuated the hilarity of the event. Acutely embarrassed, he returned to the house with the egg in hand. In subsequent weeks, Goulden was the recipient of all available eggs in Karaiai and Pudeling villages; each one was presented as biŋêm texik, a lexeme temporarily reassigned a new meaning for the duration of the gag. (pp. 66-67)

“if you cared about money you wouldn’t be a scientist at all would you?” — John Womersley, head of the Science and Technology Facilities Council

A quote from Rod Page, on “The Past and Future of Systematic Biology“:

Beyond my own hobbyhorses, it seems foolish to try and predict the future. Obviously we will have more data, faster computers, clever methods of analysis, and - sadly - fewer taxa left extant to study. My own perceptions of systematics are inevitably colored by events at the time I started to join the field. Rather like stereotypically lumbering dinosaurs unaware of the small mammals scurrying about their feet, arguments about cladistics versus phenetics rumbled on while all about them statistical methods started to blossom. The early work of Joe Felsenstein and others on topics such as maximum likelihood models and simulated annealing has given rise to modern descendants such as fast maximum likelihood methods, and Bayesian approaches, now among the most popular tree building methods.

Yet, the 1980s was also a period of great interest in large-scale patterns in biogeography, diversification, coevolution, palaeontology, morphology, and development. Whereas some of these areas, notably development, have gone from strength to strength, others have not fared as well. Perhaps this is because they are hard, or perhaps they were not posed in tractable ways. But I hope the current generation of systematists will occasionally step back from the animated cursors and Beowolf clusters, and revisit some of the big questions that so engaged the discipline 20 years ago.

No doubt you’ve all seen some of the hype surrounding the new book, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. The book argues that a long-extinct hominin species, the “Boskops”, were much smarter then we are:

Our big brains, our language ability, and our intelligence make us uniquely human. But barely 10,000 years ago–a mere blip in evolutionary time–human-like creatures called “Boskops” flourished in South Africa. They possessed extraordinary features: forebrains roughly 50% larger than ours, and estimated IQs to match–far surpassing our own. Many of these huge fossil skulls have been discovered over the last century, but most of us have never heard of this scientific marvel.

Prominent neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger compare the contents of the Boskop brain and our own brains today, and arrive at startling conclusions about our intelligence and creativity. Connecting cutting-edge theories of genetics, evolution, language, memory, learning, and intelligence, Lynch and Granger show the implications of large brains on a broad array of fields, from the current state of the art in Alzheimer’s and other brain disorders, to new advances in brain-based robots that see and converse with us, and the means by which neural prosthetics– replacement parts for the brain–are being designed and tested. The authors demystify the complexities of our brains in this fascinating and accessible book, and give us tantalizing insights into our humanity–its past, and its future.

It seems to be getting glowing reviews all over the place - Cognitive Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga says it’s “like mixing gas with fire. In this book there are big, explosive ideas by two ingenious brain scientists”.  William Calvin reviews it in New Scientist (”I’ve been waiting for someone to write this book for years“). Discover Magazine tells us that the Boskops probably had “an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine“.

….and unsurprisingly it’s all crap. John Hawks discusses the anthropological evidence for these Boskops and, well, it ain’t that good:

This category became untenable as further information about the archaeology of South Africa came to light. Ronald Singer (1958) reviewed the “Boskop race” evidence as it existed by the 1950’s. He concluded that there was no reason to maintain that any “big-headed, small-faced group” had existed in prehistory, separate from the current biological variability of “Bushman, Hottentot and Negro.” But that view is unsupportable — in fact, what happened is that a small set of large crania were taken from a much larger sample of varied crania, and given the name, “Boskopoid.” This selection was initially done almost without any regard for archaeological or cultural associations — any old, large skull was a “Boskop”. Later, when a more systematic inventory of archaeological associations was entered into evidence, it became clear that the “Boskop race” was entirely a figment of anthropologists’ imaginations.

Dr Tatiana Olivia Judson continues her series on mutations. This week, beneficial ones:

Adaptation is the “wow!” factor of nature: when we see something spectacular or exquisite, we are typically looking at an adaptation. And what underpins adaptation is the appearance and spread of beneficial mutations: the process is not possible without them. Yet despite their central role in adaptive evolution, beneficial mutations have — until recently — received surprisingly little attention.

Alexander Small reviews On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail in the New York Times:

Taking Paleolithic man seriously, Smail argues, requires us to understand that history and biology always shape each other — there is no ascent from the tyranny of brute instinct to the freedoms of civilization. Some evolutionary theorists stress that cultural innovation allows human beings to overcome the blind stumblings of natural selection: we deliberately solve a problem and pass on that solution to our descendants, who improve on it in turn. Smail takes a different tack. The imperfect copying of past behavior and small, often unconscious preferences can push a society in a new direction, even without anyone aiming toward a particular goal. It’s possible, for instance, that early men decided to make sharper spear points with the intent of drawing more blood from their prey; Smail would rather suppose that these spear points were created by accident, and then spread because the hunters who used them proved to be better hunters, even if they didn’t know why. Cultural evolution can be rapid and it can help human beings adapt to their environment, but it needn’t be intended or progressive.