How newly discovered cave art is changing our perception of early humankind’s story.

December 28, 2018

Human pre-history keeps changing. Buried down on the list of year-end science stories that grabbed headlines in 2018 — somewhere between the growing impact of livestock on planet Earth’s increasingly fragile ecosystems and speculation about how Bajau ‘sea nomads’ deep-diving the waters off southern Philippines have changed the way we think about natural selection — was newly discovered evidence that Europe’s hegemony on humankind’s story may be misplaced.

In November, a newly uncovered cave painting of a wild banteng, a kind of wild cattle, on Borneo was found to be 40,000 years old, older than the prehistoric Lion-man ivory sculpture discovered in a limestone cave in southern Germany’s Hohlenstein cliffs region, in 1939.

The Lion-man, dubbed Löwenmensch, was important to science because, until this past year, it was believed to be oldest-known animal-shaped sculpture in the world and, more importantly, the oldest-known uncontested example of figurative art — proving that, while humankind’s early ancestors might have walked out of Africa, it was in Europe where those same ancestors first learned to appreciate art.

That was the theory, anyway.

It was always bound to be controversial, and not just because it caters to a specifically Eurocentric view of civilization but because of nitpicking over artistic interpretation. Carbon dating determined a flaked stone found in Blombos Cave in South Africa — a stone with hashed patterns made by an ochre crayon — was at least 70,000 years old, but the experts decided the markings “fell short” of being identifiable art.

Evidence of identifiable art is important to palaeontologists and art historians alike because it supposedly shows the emergence of minds like our own — civilized, if you will, and reflective of behavioural modernity. Modern-day Homo sapiens are smarter than Homo neanderthalensis — Neanderthals — the thinking goes, because we can tell Michelangelo from Andy Warhol. (Even by this reckoning, early Neanderthals may not have been not as dumb as they looked: a cave wall discovered on Spain’s Cantabrian coast in February of this past year revealed abstract paintings of mysterious figures dating back some 65,000 years; the only people known to be living in northern Spain at the time were Homo neaderthalensis.) As Dr. Adam Rutherford, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science, remarked in a year-end essay for a UK news site, “Neanderthals were simply people, too.”

As human population expands and northern glaciers recede, more and more previously unexplored quarries and caves are being examined and scrutinized. Who knows what hidden tales the coming year will uncover?

Humankind’s history has not been written just yet. Only the early chapters.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/23/the-science-stories-that-shook-2018-genetics-evolution-climate-change-artificial-intelligence

Making Lucy, in her own image.

August 09, 2017

“Came for the comments war,” one commentator posted. “Wasn’t disappointed!”

“These (so-called) paleo-artists are nothing more than science-fiction artists,” another noted. “The most important skill they have is imagination, which has nothing to do with reality. As (the artist) says, ‘This is what they may have looked like.’ They keep trying to make monkeys out of us.”

“That’s why they call it ‘art,’” another countered. “It’s an interpretation. No one is trying to tell you what to believe. Too bad the same can’t be said about you!”

Whoa, there.

“Go to any museum,” the skeptic replied, “and see if they state that what you are looking at may be a bald-faced lie. I believe in science, but this whole field isbunk.”

Even if it is bunk, though — and there are plenty of experts who insist it isn’t — it’s compelling stuff.

What’s the point of being human if we’re not allowed to dream? Besides, recreating three-dimensional faces and even entire bodies from skeletal remains is a time-honoured, time-tested technique of forensic science, used in everything from cold-case murderinvestigations to ongoing missing-persons cases.

And there’s no question that leaders in the field — University of Kansas paleoartist John Gurche among them — are both respected in the scientific community and routinely have their work displayed at scientific institutions like the Field Museum in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

Gurche is no dilettante. He frequently creates illustrations for National Geographic, created a set of four dinosaur-themed stamps for the US Post Service in the late 1980s and was one of the lead consultants on the original Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park. More notably, perhaps, he published the 2013 book Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins, in which he detailed his work on no fewer than 15 paleoanthropology displays he designed for the National Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins.

Gurche is currently Artist in Residence at Ithaca, NY’s Museum of the Earth.

He was most recently in the news for a Discovery Magazine article ‘Making Lucy: A Paleoartist Reconstructs Long-Lost Human Ancestors,’ which he both wrote and illustrated.

“I have an interesting job,” he deadpanned, then went on to explain how he created a lifelike, life-sized three-dimensional recreation of the most famous human ancestor ever unearthed.

“When I first learned of Lucy’s discovery, I wanted to make her (in her own image),” Gurche explained. “It is a wonderful endeavour to seek answers to questions about how she lived. Seeing her as she may have appeared in life can make a connection for us that nothing else can.”

‘Lucy’ is the name given to a 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton found by Cleveland Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson on Nov. 24, 1974, near the village of Hadar, in Ethiopia’s Awash Valley. Lucy was believed to be the earliest known representative of Australopithecus afarensis.

Despite those who would dismiss Gurche and others’ work as so much junk science, paleoartists’ supporters in the scientific community note that paleoart is not the fantasy of an artist’s imagination but rather the result of cooperative discussions among scientists and artists alike. When trying to recreate an extinct animal — or person — the artist must employ both scientific knowledge and the mind’s eye.

Through exhibits at institutions like the Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins, paleoart shapes how the public perceives long extinct animals and early humans.

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology has awarded the John J. Lanzendorf Prize in Paleoart since 1999. Gurche won the award in its second year, in 2000.

The society describes paleoart as “one of the most important vehicles for communicating discoveries and data among paleontologists, and is critical to promulgating vertebrate paleontology across disciplines and to lay audiences.”

That’s a dry way of saying paleoart is not only cool to look at; it also serves a useful scientific purpose.

In Gurche’s paper, he outlined how, in 1996, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science commissioned him to produce “a life-sized, three-dimensional reconstruction” of Lucy, as lifelike as methods at the time would allow.

Gurche explained how first he had to settle on a pose.

“Was there a way to represent both climbing and upright walking in the same pose?” he wrote. “It would be tricky, but perhaps I could depict a moment of transition, where it’s obvious that Lucy is climbing down from a tree, and equally obvious that she’s dropping into an upright position, as opposed to dropping to all fours.”

©National Museum of Natural HIstory, Hall of Human Origins

Gurche went on to explain how he constructed a 3-D version of Lucy’s feet — “one foot in front of the other” — then based his reconstruction of Lucy’s face on a composite female skull, with more dainty features than a male.

“Lucy’s skeleton displays many clues about the position and development of her musculature,” Gurche noted. “These can be ‘read’ using the anatomy of modern apes and humans as guides.”

There’s room for creative licence, in other words.“Bunk,” thnough, is a harsh word, especially when one realizes the lengths to which Gurche went to ensure at least a modicum of scientific accuracy.

©Smithsonian Institution/Altamira cave paintings

“The amount of body hair in australopiths is unknown,” Gurche explained. “We assume that the common ancestor of chimps and humans, like all the non-human apes, had a full coat. We can guess that this coat was lost by the time of Homo erectus, as (the) skeleton’s proportions show that it was adapting to heat stress, much as modern humans do. Part of our adaptation involves an enhanced sweat gland cooling system, which would not function well with a full coat of body hair.”

Got that? Good.

“About a million individual hairs were punched into Lucy’s silicone skin over a period of three months in each of her incarnations,” Gurche added, “for the Denver museum and later for the Smithsonian *as well).”

That’s a lot of work to go through if the end result is, as paleoart’s detractors insist, little more than junk science.

And the effect is truly remarkable. It’s difficult — impossible, even — to look at Gurche’s work and not feel at least a pang of human curiosity and recognition.

The Smithsonian, National Geographic and the Natural History Museum can’t all be wrong.

http://discovermagazine.com/galleries/2013/dec/paleoartist-reconstructs-human-ancestors

Most detailed look yet at how early humans left Africa.

August 07, 2017

“The more we understand about this particular event in human history, the more it provides a complete picture of our past,” University of Washington evolutionary biologist Joshua Akey told New Scientist recently.

“This particular event in human history” is the early migration of humankind from the so-called Dark Continent to Mesopotamia, the Middle East and beyond, into Europe and, eventually, North America and the equatorial Pacific.

As much as is known about these early migrations — and we know a lot — much remains a mystery. This has been an active and unpredictable period for new discoveries about early humankind, from fossil evidence in regions as far-flung as the Rif mountains of Morocco to the Australian Outback. Incredibly, new cave art is still being discovered in areas of Europe that have been settled for millennia. Carbon dating continues to prove the old adage that the more we learn, the more we learn that we don’t know.

Modern humans emerged out of Africa — that much is reasonably certain — but exactly when, and how, remains the subject of fierce debate.

Two theories have jumped to the fore, emphasis on the word “theory.” One posits that our earliest ancestors left Africa in a single wave, around 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Many of these groups died out, though, even as a handful passed their DNA to their descendants as they settled the break basket of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys.

A new theory, which has gained traction of late, is that early humans migrated in several waves, not just one, and that the waves originated thousands of years earlier than was previously believed.

The answer, many scientists now believe, lies buried in our human genome. The authors of no fewer than three recent studies have analyzed the genomes of roughly 800 individuals from 250 populations scattered throughout the globe. In one study, Harvard geneticist David Reich argues that the clear genetic similarities between remote communities far removed from one another suggests that modern humans did indeed emerge in a single wave from Africa, even though DNA evidence shows that our earliest African ancestors were already dividing into separate groups more than 200,000 years ago — a full 120,000 years before that early migration, if the genetic findings are to be believed.

Early human development shows that rapid advances in technology, culture, art, language, religious rites and the use of tools occurred during a relatively short span of time, between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago — in other words, around the same time as those early migrations out of Africa.

In an early sign of how climate change affected human migrations, scientists now believe that fluctuating temperatures and an increasingly unpredictable life cycle of plant growth hastened the urge to move, even as the natural barrier ofmountains and deserts kept groups of people separate, leading to genetic differences in human populations around the world.

Separate genetics studies from Harvard, the University of Washington and the Estonian Biocentre in Tartu, Estonia suggest that while most modern non-Africans are indeed descended from a single, out-of-Africa exodus roughly 80,000 years ago, genome studies in Papua, New Guinea suggest there may have been an earlier exodus, according to Cambridge-educated molecular biologist Luca Pagani, senior researcher with the Estonian Biocentre in Tartu, Estonia.

Another recent study, this one supervised by evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev at Denmark’s University of Copenhagen, has found that indigenous groups in Australia are strikingly distinct, genetically speaking, from other groups in Australia, despite sharing the common gene that suggests they were all descended from a single, founding wave of early human migrations from Africa.

©Eske Willerslev/University of Copenhagen

Why do we care? Why do we continue to care?

“People are just inherently interested in their past,” Akey told New Scientist, whether they’re from Seattle or South Yunderup township in Western Australia.

Answers inevitably lead to new questions, even as missing pieces in the puzzle are found. The mystery of early humankind — who we are, where we came from — continues to be one of the most fascinating riddles facing humankind today.

How newly discovered cave art is changing our perception of early humankind’s story.

Making Lucy, in her own image.

Most detailed look yet at how early humans left Africa.

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