Between a hundredth and a twenty-fifth of those of us non-Africans is Neandertal! (Modern Africans as a race have little or no Neandertal DNA.)

The report issued today in Science radically changes our view of ourselves. It was only one year ago this week that Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania reported that essentially all people alive today were more or less pure ancestors of a small band of hominins that crossed over from Africa 50,000 years ago.

Not necessarily so.

Quite likely that band prospered, moved north and interbred with another type of hominin, the Neanderthal. Or maybe that band went extinct or was absorbed by a group of hominins already living in Europe that had already interbred with Neandertal!

Maybe… Neandertal and we, homo sapiens, are one and the same species, after all?

This is great, joyous science! How different, for example, it is from the secretive, arrogant paleoanthropology of Ardi announced not too long ago.

This is open to us all, to the world, and it is breath-taking!

At this point I should direct all of you not to the report itself, but to those brilliant and affable scientists who can translate it into terms we can all understand. There are many of these wonderful individuals, but my favorite is the University of Wisconsin’s John Hawks.

Today’s report in Science is probably the most exciting research on close-to-modern hominins ever seen. And not a single element of that report came from the field.

It all came from… DNA.

You remember that the human genome project started in 1990 and took about 13-14 years to complete, and that by 2004 we had a nearly complete working blueprint of our genes.

They did it with Neandertal in about two years. The Max Planck Institute mapped the genome of Neandertal from five species found in Europe from a bone powder weighing less than an aspirin.

To come to the amazing conclusions they did, they had to compare the Neandertal genome not only to our genome, but also to chimp’s.

And by simultaneously looking at the sections of the Neandertal and modern man genome that differ from a modern chimp’s, the most groundbreaking science was achieved: some of us modern humans have more divergence from Neandertal DNA than others. Modern Asians carry more Neandertal DNA than modern Africans.

That means our common modern human ancestors, the guys who previously we thought wiped out the Neandertals when they met them… didn’t. They absorbed them into the population and probably before migrating east to Asia. (There’s no evidence, yet, that Neandertals got themselves to Asia.)

The report also took a first look at some of the genes we now carry that likely came from Neandertals. (It will take much longer, and may never be possible to find them all.) And reexamined genes of importance that we absolutely don’t have from Neandertals.

Why would that be? Why do we carry some of the genes and not others?

Because some worked and some didn’t for evolving us. We’ve known for some time, for example, that really important genes, ones that effect energetics, longevity, and our brain, don’t come from the Neandertal. These are the dynamite genes carried in the mitochondrial DNA that has been available for examination for more than a few years.

Genes relating to our brain functions, stamina and life span didn’t come from Neandertal. It’s a stretch but not entirely unfair to conclude that may be some of the reasons Neandertal went extinct: because they didn’t share these important characteristics with our ancestoral lineage.

And genes relating to diabetes and a few rare diseases did come from Neandertals. As did certain genes relating to “cognition.” But since we still don’t really know how these genes even in modern humans translate into the workings of diabetes, these rare diseases or “cognition”, we don’t of course know how to determine if this was useful or not in our own modern evolution.

There is so much science left to do! And what’s amazing is that this type of science is done mostly in front of a computer screen, not out brushing pumice away from fossils.

And finally one of the most awesome aspects of this science, which continues from the genome project itself, is that it is all PUBLIC. Everything, every discovery, every postulate, every tool and method is on the internet.

It’s there for every cerebral scientist to use to further his own intricate theories, as it’s there for an 8th grader to create a science project.

Kudus to these guys: University of California’s Richard E. Green and a host of others, and Max Plank’s Hernán A. Burbano and a host of others.

Yesterday evening PBS’s NOVA series aired its second of three parts on “Becoming Human.”  Entertaining, yes.  Enlightening? … no.

Those of us passionate about early man would stop all other work to review the newest Far Side cartoon, and not because we didn’t have good, steady work demanding our attention.  It’s just … well, he was so good!

Same with grand productions like NOVA and the BBC.  But in contrast to Far Side and last month’s Discovery Channel production of Ardi (see earlier blogs), NOVA’s “Becoming Human” series doesn’t tell us much new and actually takes a few too many liberties in order to make short sentences.

Much of the footage, in fact, can be found in earlier NOVA productions, especially those about Asian and Indonesian early men.

Part II repeated nearly 10 minutes of footage I originally thought was specific to Part I, and the background music sounds like a single-tracked hominid grinding a street organ.  Another 5-6 minutes came from earlier NOVA footage of the story of Toumai.

Well, so what, eh?  Well… there are a few too many simplicities.  Like the near complete ignoring until the end of Part II of Homo habilis, and prior to the admission that this “human” species preceded erectus (the star of Part II), endless repeating that Homo erectus was the “first human.”

Carefully without saying so, the repetitious and too quick presentation of NOVA’s chart of early man could be easily interpreted as linear rather than branching as it really is.  This unearths a debate that was put to rest a generation ago.

I can’t wait for Part III to clarify that no, Part II didn’t really mean we evolved directly from Homo erectus.

And then there’s the curious way the producers present a not new theory that evolving brain size was an adaptation to climate change.  And how “fast” that climate change was.  (One or two or maybe three hundred thousand years.)   However you cut it this remarkable simplicity can be easily transformed into acceptance of our current climate change crisis.

Here’s how the NYTimes TV critic, Neil Genzlinger, put it:
“Here’s some cheery news: that global warming thing everyone is so worried about is actually going to make us all a lot smarter. Unfortunately, it’s also going to leave us with heads the size of basketballs.”

Genzlinger goes on to positively review the series, but I think he might also be under the spell of big, public TV.

One really good feature almost redeems the entire presentation: the discussions of aging and dating.

Dating is so crucial to early man finds, and both the graphics and explanations especially of the Afar finds were done masterfully.  The explanation of how DNA corruption can pinpoint the time that two species diverge was magnificent.

And for the first time I can recall, the brilliant way scientists study fossilized teeth was described in detail, explaining how a specimen can be aged.  My goodness what a blast it was to hear how dental examination showed Turkana Boy to be 8 not 14 years old, and Lucy to be 3 not 12!

The older ages of Turkana Boy and Lucy that have been presumed for years had been derived from more classic anatomical analysis, specifically in the state of fusion between limbs.  So what the dental analysis shows was that early man was growing up much faster than had previously been speculated by his slowly growing brain.

This is enlightening.  Let’s hope Part III has more of this.  So far, though, Discovery 1 – NOVA 0.

Last night Discovery Channel ratings skyrocketed with a two-hr documentary on Ardi. Ardi is a big, very big paleontology story. But when newer (older) finds are discovered in the future, Ardi’s lasting story will be something quite different from paleontology.

To me the unchangeable story about Ardi is the remarkable way it was told. Enough of Ardi was found in 1994 to give it a name and place in the tree of early man. But jealous scientists held the bulk of the data secret for nearly 15 years, until – in their words – they could tell the whole story.

This should be criminal. Essentially a handful of scientists molded Ardi almost as successfully as 4 million years burial by mother Earth.

Last night’s Discovery Channel two-hour prime time show was Ardi’s coming out party. It was grand, but way overblown. The University of Minnesota biologist, P.Z. Myers, remarked during his real-time blogging while watching the show, “So far this program is taking longer to watch than it took me to read the original papers.”

The two-hour show had so many commercials, and so much repetition, that the real talking-head substance was less than 35 minutes.

Ardi is an amazing paleontological find for several reasons. First, it’s a complete-enough skeleton to render science on an entire individual. There are only three other such cases (Lucy, Turkana Boy and Small Foot).

Second, so much excavation has been completed over these 15 years at the Middle Awash site in Ethiopia where it was found that an entire environment surrounding the creature has also been reconstructed.

Third, Ardi is truly bipedal, but retains anatomical features – particularly in the foot – that are more chimp-like than man-like. Ardi may have been as comfortable living in the trees as on the ground.

But the grand conclusions that the project’s two lead scientists, Tim White and Owen Lovejoy, headlined in HD, were simply premature if not silly.

Ardi has not completely rewoven the theories of early man, as Tim White repeatedly suggested. It is a single, albeit magnificent find, but it does not alter good foundations that hominids evolved 6-7 million years ago into a multiple branching line of creatures.

White’s hidden agenda is to return to a long ago discarded notion of a single line of hominid evolution. That’s what’s silly. Clearly, White has been focusing too much time on Ardi and not enough on his fellow scientists’ discoveries.

And Lovejoy’s outrageous claim that Ardi’s reduced canines suggests a more gentle, more “moral” human social organization is absurd.

The state of Ardi’s mouth is anomalous with other time-lined hominid mouths. In other words, other early hominids around that time and after that time, had bigger canines. Chimps have bigger canines, and Lovejoy’s presumption of theory by contrasting these two situations is a real stretch, and in fact, worrisome. It’s less science than religion.

Lovejoy is right to refresh the question, why bipedalism? And he provides at least one renewed and exciting thesis: to better carry food longer distances. But from that he leaps to the notion this allowed male Ardi’s to woo female Ardi’s with gifts, and allowed Ardi’s to carry food back to their children.

Soon, Lovejoy is going to discover a florist selling corsages 4.5 million years ago.

And there is nothing to suggest that baby Ardi’s didn’t travel on their mother’s back or held to their bosom like baboons and chimps and didn’t need to have food brought to them.

But the greatest disservice to science is the way the lead scientists, and the Discovery program suggests Ardi’s bipedalism revolutionizes prior theories.

The discovery that an early, bipedal hominid probably spent a good amount of time in the trees is extremely important and wondrous, too. But it does not in its single instance suggest that bipedalism was not somehow related to the developing savannah ecology, a view at least until now widely held. This will be the science to watch in the coming months.

University of Wisconsin anthropologist, John Hawks, summed it up beautifully in his blog today,
“I don’t think the anatomy supports the film’s representation of the locomotor behavior. The film shows Ardi walking just as if she were Lucy. She didn’t walk that way.”

I’m sure there’s much more intricate science I’ll never understand that will be of major dispute, and I presume this for the simple reason that science withheld is science uncertain.

Years from now there will be new finds and even older hominid discoveries. Ardi will remain important, but its persistent story will be how guarded its discoverers were, and how successful they were from keeping Ardi from the greater community for the better part of a human generation.

And analysis will shift from bipedalism to why, a long time ago when Ardi was discovered, scientists had to guard their finest discoveries to carefully construct outrageous claims about them.

Fifteen years ago one of the most important early man fossils was found in Ethiopia. Is this really the discovery of the century?

Yesterday what is arguably the most important discovery of an early hominid since Lucy in 1974 was officially reported in the journal, Science, by a team of 7 researchers that have jealously guarded their findings for almost a generation.

Personally, I look forward to a wonderful weekend of dissecting the voluminous information about Ardipithecus ramidus. But over the last 15 years a lot has leaked out, and what struck me in the great fanfare yesterday, was that where was some really weak science as the rekindling of personal fights between scientist celebrities gets into high gear.

If there is a team chairman, it’s Tim White of the University of California – Berkeley. Throughout his imminent career White has almost always been Number Two. He’s now Number One. And this despite the fact that it was actually Yohannes Haile-Selassie, the curator of the Cleveland Natural History Museum who actually made the find.

White moved north to Ethiopia from Kenya in the mid 1990s when he was shunned by his former Number One, Richard Leakey, who was admittedly turning the rich fossil grounds of East Africa into a personal dynasty. Time and again White was passed over in conferences and by scientific journals for the much less academic and probably less scientifically acute, Leakey.

Haile-Selassie is a gentle man, one of those scientists really consumed by his work. His interest in the media is minimal. He really is the lead scientist in this discovery, but he makes a poor front man, and White saw his chance.

Much of Ardi’s skull was found in 1994, but scientists knew at the time that the area in which it was found was rich with more of crushed Ardi, plus all of Ardi’s real time surroundings. That’s a bit unusual. Often fossil finds are separated from their “homes” either by geological or current weather forces. The fifteen years of excavations produced not only 110 Ardi pieces, but ten times as many other animals that lived at the same time.

This led to a reconstruction of an Ardi skeleton, and Ardi’s “home.” That’s really the biggest news. There are only three other skeleton finds of early man. And it’s very rare to be able to create an entire environment for the fossil found. There are some exciting finds: that this early man, for instance, lived mostly in the trees.

For the last 15 years, White was a bit obsessed for fear he would lose control. It’s not really congenial or useful science to keep your finds reserved to your own team for so long, but he managed to do so. We’ll let him try to explain why.

Here’s the first indications of poor popular science. These are the sound bites, newspaper articles and television spots that will win these scientists fame and grants. It’s always a dumming down of science, but I find two of these really flabbergasting.

FIRST, no one is mentioning Toumai. Toumai doesn’t really have a scientific name, yet, because there is such quibbling between its discoverer, Michel Brunet, and especially, Tim White. Brunet insists he is Sahelanthropus tchadensis, distinctly hominid. If so, at 6 million years old, it absolutely makes Toumai the oldest hominid found.

White has continually rebuffed Brunet using a pretty weak argument: so little of Toumai was found – his fossil is limited to his skull. But that’s the case with thousands of early hominids. But alas, guess what, White has a nearly whole skeleton!

SECOND, a lowly member of the scientific team, Owen Lovejoy, an imminent scientist in his own right, is purporting some pretty unusual conclusions that I think would make Jay Gould and Charles Darwin turn over in their graves.

Lovejoy embraces a very controversial notion that behavior preceded biological evolution. Ardi’s physiognomy was much more modern than earliest man. The size of the male and female were not as divergent, and neither had monkey-like teeth. Lovejoy – presumably endorsed by the other team members – claims that these physical aspects were the result of a developing social family relationship between the male and female.

He even claims that it is likely that male Ardi’s wooed female Ardi’s with presents to get them to mate. (The presents being food.) He believes that the social behavior “allowed” for the later evolutionary trends that made men and women similar, and that ultimately “allowed” the human brain to grow considerably after birth, so that the baby could make it through the mother’s birth canal.

This is really stuff for a Simpson’s Show, and I would find it laughable if it weren’t vaguely representative of cultural zealots too often taking charge today in America.

Already, less celebrated scientists like William Jungers of Stoney Brook are taking aim at this popular unveiling of what might not be quite as big as the media would like.

“This is a fascinating skeleton, but based on what they present, the evidence for bipedalism is limited at best,” said William Jungers, an anatomist at Stony Brook University in New York State.

Without a real demonstration of bipedalism, Ardi could not be considered a hominid at all. If she isn’t a hominid, she wouldn’t rank the first 14 minutes on World News Tonight with Charles Gibson.

Stay tuned.

Unfortunately, we don’t know the exact date that Australopithecus boisei was found by Mary Leakey, but it was in July, 1959 and reported in August. Time to celebrate!

The discovery of Nutcracker Man in 1959 was the single most important paleontological discovery that jump started the science, quashed forever (except in weird and extreme circles) creationism, and paved the way for the next 50 years of jaw-dropping science.

We don’t know the exact date he was found, and like Africans everywhere he goes by a number of different names. Zinj seems to be the most used, a shortening of the initial scientific designation of Zinjanthropus boisei. “Zinj” is an Arabic contraction of “East Africa”. For most of my lifetime, though, it has been known as Australopithecus boisei.

And because Mary Leakey’s diaries and the entries in the National Museum in Nairobi differ by several days, we aren’t even absolutely sure of the exact date Zinj saw the sun for the first time in more than a million years. Possibly July 17, possibly July 25. And the actual announcement of the discovery wasn’t until August. (I read it in the “Weekly Reader” in October.) But good grief, you can’t fault a two million-year old creature for forgetting his date of discovery by a few days.

The Leakeys had excavated tirelessly Olduvai Gorge for 28 years before finding Zinj and were widely considered to be kooks. When the then Princess Elizabeth made a state visit to the colony of Kenya in 1954, Lewis Leakey was warned if he met the princess to “not say anything about that early man gibberish.”

Zinj was probably the 3rd or 4th early man skull to have been found, but the first to be reckoned as such. And shortly after the scientific community accepted its near million-year age, the other skulls that had been masquerading as chimp-like primates in South Africa were unmasked as true hominids. The science exploded.

Today we have nearly 10,000 early hominid remains and nearly 1,000 early hominid skulls or partial skulls. That’s quite a feat in less than twice the time the Leakey’s spent in finding the first!

And to think of the twists and turns in theory and application that Grandpa Darwin prepared for us, once these important pieces of evidence were unearthed! Shortly after the Zinj discovery, it was widely and near unanimously presumed by world science that hominid evolution was linear: old lemur to old ape to old chimp to old man to us.

We now understand that’s a grade schooler’s explanation of calculus. We know now there were at least 22 different kinds of early hominids. In fact, even today, there’s uncertainty where Zinj belongs. Most people think he’s an australopithecine, but there’s growing evidence to suggest he’s actually a paranthopus! Wikipedia is lobbying for that.

So happy birthday (or, rather happy unearthing?), Zinj! How amazing to see in my own lifetime your entire story from ungrave to exalted cradle of display: For today your actual self is on PUBLIC DISPLAY in the Nairobi Museum!

That gives me goose (or should I say, pterodactyl) bumps!

New research nails man’s birthplace near the Kalahari Desert. Science continues to trump the dwindling support for creationism or anything anti-evolutionist.

Today’s announcement by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania that continuing analysis of worldwide human DNA nails the birthplace of modern man near the Kalahari is a much sexier story in the U.S. than elsewhere. And I like that. Sort of like the continuing twisting of the screw of “I gotcha” into the bungled cork ideology of intelligent design, the last and dying religious ideology about hominid creation.

New research puts our birthplace in what is now the Kalahari Desert. Less than 100,000 years later, a few dozen of our surviving ancestors migrated into the Middle East to create modern humanity.

Olduvai Gorge has always been one of my very favorite places on safari. The first picture that I ever had taken in Africa was of myself spreading my arms above Olduvai Gorge in the early 1970s. Not a year has passed since that I haven’t visited it multiple times.

The spectrum of public interest and debate that has accompanied my developing love for the paleontology of Africa is mind boggling. In my career in Africa the science has increased more than anyone could have imagined. But so have the social politics of evolution.

Emerging from the liberal society of the 1960s, evolution was hardly more controversial than gravity. A generation later state legislatures were outlawing it. Science leaped forward while American society uturned back to the Dark Ages.

This was almost exclusively an American phenomenon.

For years, literally generations, paleontologists have postulated that our birthplace had to be in Africa. This wasn’t just because that’s where the vast majority of early hominids were found, but also because diligent (I should say, ‘unrelenting’) science in related areas like geology and chemistry were coming to likewise deductions.

The first real hard scientific evidence came from three pioneering academics in 1987. Publishing somewhat to their peril, they described their discovery of Mitochondrial Eve. Rebecca L. Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan C. Wilson described a shortcut if blueprint for later, more thorough DNA analysis of where man began.

It was very hard science and that was very hard for much of poorly educated American society to grasp, and easy for fanatics from the pulpit to contest. But for most of us half-educated dimwits, it was extraordinarily exciting.

But it was the human genome project that reenforced “Mitochondrial Eve” in spades. Two scientists from the University of Cambridge used the results appearing in the genome project to conclude in a May, 2007, study that not only did we originate in Africa, but all of us are ancestors of a small band (several dozen, maybe) of modern humans who entered the Middle East from Africa 50,000 years ago.

Toomas Kivisild and Phillip Endicott were not field researchers. They were numbers guys, crunching the data collected by the genome project in their offices in England. It was, as they said, “simple numbers.”

The earliest hominid may be 7 million years old, but they all died off. All of us are related to someone who walked out of Africa into the Middle East only 50,000 years ago.

Now, continuing study of the human genome project has added even more to our understanding of that “first man.” Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania has determined that maybe 100,000 years before that fateful crossing into the Middle East, the ancestors of that small band of humans was formed near the Kalahari Desert. That is when modern man emerged as a mutate from earlier forms of hominids.

That makes us the newest and most youthful of all forms of hominids, probably including the otherwise short-lived Neanderthals. We’re a mere 150,000 years old. Of the as many as 20 other forms of early hominids, none lived for less than a third of a million years.

We’ve got a long way to go to be Hominid Uno. Hope we can make it!