Trump comeback rally features empty seats, staff infections

"WE HAVE NEVER HAD AN EMPTY SEAT IN THE HOUSE" D. J. TRUMP

By KEVIN FREKING and JONATHAN LEMIRE

1 of 24 https://apnews.com/1a59b4efe97f2249d414ae4f0b3c6495
President Donald Trump arrives on stage to speak at a campaign rally at the BOK Center, Saturday, June 20, 2020, in Tulsa, Okla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — President Donald Trump launched his comeback rally Saturday by defining the upcoming election as a stark choice between national heritage and left-wing radicalism. But his intended show of political force amid a pandemic featured thousands of empty seats and new coronavirus cases on his own campaign staff.

Trump ignored health warnings to hold his first rally in 110 days — one of the largest indoor gatherings in the world during a coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 120,000 Americans and put 40 million out of work. The rally was meant to restart his reelection effort less than five months before the president faces voters again.

“The choice in 2020 is very simple,” Trump said. “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob, or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”

Trump unleashed months of pent-up grievances about the coronavirus, which he dubbed the “Kung flu,” a racist term for COVID-19, which originated in China. He also tried to defend his handling of the pandemic, even as cases continue to surge in many states, including Oklahoma.

He complained that robust coronavirus testing was making his record look bad — and suggested the testing effort should slow down.

“Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more cases,” he said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.”

“Speed up the testing,” Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, tweeted later.

In the hours before the rally, crowds were significantly lighter than expected, and campaign officials scrapped plans for Trump to address an overflow space outdoors. When Trump thundered that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before,” about a third of the seats at his indoor rally were empty.

Trump tried to explain away the crowd size by blaming the media for scaring people and by insisting there were protesters outside who were “doing bad things.” But the small crowds of pre-rally demonstrators were largely peaceful, and Tulsa police reported just one arrest Saturday afternoon.

Before the rally, Trump’s campaign revealed that six staff members who were helping set up for the event had tested positive for the coronavirus. Campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said neither the affected staffers nor anyone who was in immediate contact with them would attend the event

The president raged to aides that the staffers’ positive cases had been made public, according to two White House and campaign officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

Trump devoted more than 10 minutes of his 105-minute rally — with the crowd laughing along — trying to explain away a pair of odd images from his speech last weekend at West Point, blaming his slippery leather-soled shoes for video of him walking awkwardly down a ramp as he left the podium. And then he declared that he used two hands to drink a cup of water that day because he didn’t want to spill water on his tie — and proceeded to this time drink with just one hand.

But Trump also leaned in hard on cultural issues, including the push to tear down statue s and rename military bases honoring Confederate generals following nationwide protests about racial injustice.

“The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments,” Trump said. “They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new repressive regime in its place.”

Trump also floated the idea of a one-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of burning an American flag, an act of protest protected by the First Amendment. And he revived his attacks on Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who emigrated from Somalia as a child, claiming she would want “to make the government of our country just like the country from where she came, Somalia: no government, no safety, no police, no nothing — just anarchy.”

“And now she’s telling us how to run our country,” Trump continued. “No, thank you.”

After a three-month break from rallies, Trump spent the evening reviving his greatest hits, including boasts about the pre-pandemic economy and complaints about the media. But his scattershot remarks made no mention of some of the flashpoints roiling the nation, including the abrupt firing of a U.S. attorney in Manhattan, the damaging new book from his former national security adviser or the killing of George Floyd..

Large gatherings in the United States were shut down in March because of the coronavirus. The rally was scheduled over the protests of local health officials as COVID-19 cases spike in many states, while the choice of host city and date — it was originally set for Friday, Juneteenth, in a city where a 1921 racist attack killed as many as 300 people — prompted anger amid a national wave of protests against racial injustice.



But Trump and his advisers forged forward, believing that a return to the rally stage would reenergize the president, who is furious that he has fallen behind Biden in polls, and reassure increasingly anxious Republicans.

But Trump has struggled to land effective attacks against Biden, and his broadsides against the former vice president did not draw nearly the applause as did his digs at his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.

City officials had expected a crowd of 100,000 people or more in downtown Tulsa. Trump’s campaign, for its part, declared that it had received over a million ticket requests. The crowd that gathered was far less than that, though the rally, being broadcast on cable, also targeted voters in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

The president’s campaign tried to point fingers elsewhere over the smaller-than-expected crowds, accusing protesters of blocking access to metal detectors and preventing people from entering the rally. Three Associated Press journalists reporting in Tulsa for several hours leading up to the president’s speaking did not see protesters block entry to the area where the rally was held.

The campaign handed out masks and hand sanitizer, but there was no requirement that participants use them and few did. Participants also underwent a temperature check.

“I don’t think it’s anything worse than the flu,” said Brian Bernard, 54, a retired IT worker from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who sported a Trump 2020 hat. “I haven’t caught a cold or a flu in probably 15 years, and if I haven’t caught a cold or flu yet, I don’t think I’m gonna catch COVID.”

___


Lemire reported from New York. Associated Press writers John Mone and Ellen Knickmeyer in Tulsa, Okla., contributed to this report.

'Whitewashed and erased': There's a reason Juneteenth isn't taught in schools, educators say

WHY WE NEED CURRICULUM TO RECOGNIZE AND ADAPT RUBRICS FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH, LABOUR HISTORY MONTH, WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH, LGBTQ PRIDE MONTH, SOUTH ASIAN & ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH, DIFFERENTLY ABLED MONTH,  ETC. 
Daniella Silva, NBC News•June 18, 2020



A Connecticut fourth grade social studies textbook falsely claimed that slaves were treated just like “family.” A Texas geography textbook referred to enslaved Africans as “workers.” In Alabama, up until the 1970s, fourth graders learned in a textbook called "Know Alabama" that slave life on a plantation was "one of the happiest ways of life."

In contrast, historians and educators point out, many children in the U.S. education system are not taught about major Black historical events, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre or Juneteenth, the June 19 commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States.

As the country grapples with a racial reckoning following the killing of George Floyd in police custody, educators said that what has and what has not been taught in school have been part of erasing the history of systemic racism in America and the contributions of Black people and other minority groups.
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Whitewashed and erased': There's a reason Juneteenth isn't taught in schools, educators say

“There’s a long legacy of institutional racism that is barely covered in the mainstream corporate curriculum,” said Jesse Hagopian, an ethnic studies teacher in Seattle and co-editor of the book “Teaching for Black Lives.”

“It’s really astounding how little the contributions of Black people are included in much of the mainstream curriculum and how much of that institutional racism is disguised,” he said.

Historians said curriculums are about identity and learning about ourselves and others.

“The curriculum was never designed to be anything other than white supremacist," Julian Hayter, a historian and an associate professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said, "and it has been very difficult to convince people that other versions of history are not only worth telling. They’re absolutely essential for us as a country to move closer to something that might reflect reconciliation but even more importantly, the truth."

LaGarrett King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri, said the history curriculums in schools are meant to tell a story and, in the U.S., that has been one of a “progressive history of the country.”

“Really the overarching theme is, ‘Yes, we made mistakes, but we overcame because we are the United States of America,'” said King, who is also the founding director of the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education at the university.

“What that has done is it has erased tons of history that would combat that progressive narrative,” he said.

King said the experiences and oppression of Black people, Latino people, indigenous people, Asian people and other minority groups in the U.S. are largely ignored or sidelined to fit those narratives.

“So, of course you’re not going to have crucial information such as what happened in Tulsa, you’re not going to have information such as the bombing of a Philadelphia black neighborhood,” he said.

In 1921 in Oklahoma, whites looted and destroyed Tulsa's Greenwood District, known for its affluent Black community. Historians believe that as many as 300 Black people were killed.



In May 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb onto the compound of MOVE, a black liberation group, killing six members, five of their children and destroying 65 homes in the neighborhood.

Another often-omitted period of U.S. Black history is the Red Summer, a period of time through 1919 when white mobs incited a wave of anti-Black violence in dozens of cities.

As for the protests against racial inequality and police brutality after the killing of Floyd and other Black people at the hands of police, King emphasized that these movements were not new.

“Black people have been saying this for the past 400 years, this is not a new movement,” he said. “Each generation has had their point in time where they’re trying to say through protest, through rebellion, ‘listen to us, listen to us,’” he said.

Part of the problem is that society has never listened to that history, he said.

“In many ways we wouldn’t have a Black Lives Matter movement if Black lives mattered in the classroom,” he said.

The current moment has also put increased national attention on Juneteenth, which is Friday this year.

President Donald Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that he moved a rally in Tulsa set for Friday to Saturday “out of respect” for two African American friends and supporters.

“I did something good. I made it famous. I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event, it’s an important time. But nobody had heard of it,” he said, although his office has previously put out statements marking the occasion.

Historians note that Juneteenth has been celebrated in Black communities across the country for 155 years.

Hayter said that the history of Black people and other minority communities has already “been completely whitewashed and erased" when it is taught in American classrooms.

He pointed to the argument made by some that removing Confederate statues and iconography is tantamount to erasing history.

“So when people say you can’t erase history, it's like, what are you talking about?” he said. “If you crack open a textbook from the mid-20th century, there are no minorities in those textbooks.”



“The contributions they made to the American democratic experience are completely ignored,” he said.

Hayter said those histories have been seen as “a footnote to a larger narrative and not an important and integral portion of the history more largely.”

“As long as we continue to treat these as addendums to a larger American narrative, we’re failing these kids in large part because we’ve reduced these histories to second-class status,” he said.

Hagopian said “Teaching for Black Lives” seeks to uncover some of these really important periods of Black history and give educators access points to teach students about them, including a whole lesson on the Tulsa Race Massacre.

He said another historical period that was glaringly absent from the mainstream curriculum was Reconstruction, the era following the Civil War that sought to address the inequalities of slavery.

“Reconstruction is one of the most fascinating and revolutionary periods in American history,” he said.

Hagopian said it was a remarkable period of time, although short, when the country undertook a conscious effort to tear down institutionally racist structures.

“Black people built the public school system across the South, and there were integrated schools in the 1860s. They were more integrated than today, just incredible examples of Black empowerment,” he said, adding that there were more Black elected officials than at anytime until recently.

“It’s such an important era to examine," Hagopian said. "If we’re going to escape the intense level of racism that we have today, we’re going to need to look at what it looked like when there was a movement toward institutional anti-racism."

It is also important, Hagopian said, to teach students that the civil rights movement went beyond a few famous figures commonly featured in history books or during Black History Month, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.

“I think one of the most important things for students to learn about is the way young people have helped shape American history in profound ways and to help understand the contributions especially of Black youth to this nation,” he said.

“They’re so often erased, but when students learn that it was young people who were the leaders of the civil rights movement, they can then see themselves as potential actors to transform the world today."

Pain management: Tulsa shooting exposes threats doctors face

The deadly mass shooting at an Oklahoma medical office by a man who blamed his surgeon for pain following back surgery underscores the escalating threats doctors face

By Andrew Demillo 

Associated Press
June 02, 2022

The deadly mass shooting at an Oklahoma medical office by a man who blamed his surgeon for continuing pain following an operation on his back underscores the escalating threat of violence doctors have faced in recent years.

Michael Louis, 45, fatally shot Dr. Preston Phillips and three other people in Tulsa on Wednesday before killing himself. Police said Louis had been calling the clinic repeatedly complaining of pain and that he specifically targeted Phillips, who performed his surgery.

“What we currently know is that Louis was in pain, Louis expressed that he was in pain and was not getting relief and that was the circumstance surrounding this entire incident,” Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin said at a news conference.

Doctors have been increasingly threatened with or become victims of violence by patients complaining of pain, especially in recent years when they have prescribed alternatives to opioids and tapered patients off addictive painkillers. Police have not said that Louis was seeking opioids to relieve his pain.

More than two-thirds of pain specialists surveyed during a violence education session at a 2019 American Academy of Pain Medicine meeting said a patient threatened them with bodily harm at least once a year. Nearly half said they had been threatened over opioid management.

“We only become aware of it when these dramatic and tragic events occur,” said Dr. W. Michael Hooten, a former president of the academy and a professor at the Mayo Clinic. “Some of the lower-level threats and lower-level occurrences of violence, we're simply not aware of them because they don’t get the attention.”

A jury in Minnesota returned a guilty verdict on all counts Thursday against Gregory Paul Ulrich, who was charged in the 2021 health clinic shooting that left one person dead and four injured. Sentencing is scheduled for June 17.

Investigators have said the alleged gunman's addiction to opioid medication was the “driving factor" behind the shooting.

A police report says Ulrich had threatened a similar mass shooting in 2018, allegedly as revenge against people who he said “tortured” him with back surgeries and prescribed medication.

In 2017, an Indiana man shot and killed a doctor who refused to prescribe opioids to his wife.

Oklahoma has been hit particularly hard by the opioid crisis. State statistics show that from 2007 to 2017, more than 4,600 people in Oklahoma died from opioid overdoses, including prescription painkillers and illicit drugs such as heroin and illegally made fentanyl. Nationally, opioids have been linked to more than 500,000 deaths since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the Tulsa shooting, Franklin said Louis was carrying a letter that said he was targeting Phillips, an orthopedic surgeon with an interest in spinal surgery and joint reconstruction.

Franklin said Phillips performed the surgery on Louis on May 19 and that the patient was released from the hospital on May 24.

He said Louis called the doctor’s office “several times over several days” reporting he was still in pain and that he saw Phillips on Tuesday for “additional treatment.” Louis called the office again Wednesday “complaining of back pain and wanting additional assistance,” he said.

The threats have prompted some facilities to take steps including installing panic buttons, restricting high-risk patients’ access and seating doctors closer to the door than patients. Dr. David Holden, president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association, said it’s also meant reviewing access points to their facilities.

Holden, an orthopedic surgeon, said doctors have long dealt with concerns about threats from patients over care. But the violence in recent years has taken that concern to a new level.

“We've had those concerns forever, so that's not new," Holden said. “What is new is the sudden, targeted violence to the extreme."

Trump snubs former EPA chief Pruitt in Tulsa visit

Alexander Nazaryan National Correspondent, Yahoo News•June 19, 2020

WASHINGTON — When President Trump comes to Tulsa on Saturday for his first campaign event since the coronavirus shut down the United States, he will be joined by Oklahoma’s most prominent Republican leaders, as well as rising GOP stars from other parts of the country.

Those expected to stand with the president at the BOK Center are Kevin Stitt, the state’s governor, as well as its two U.S. senators, James Lankford and Jim Inhofe, its four Republican members of the House of Representatives and Sen. Tom Cotton from neighboring Arkansas. Also present will be Reps. Lee Zeldin and Elise Stefanik, ardent defenders of the president who are both from the New York delegation.

One person won’t be there, at least not onstage with Trump and his allies: Tulsa’s own Scott Pruitt, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator. His absence is a reminder that former Trump Cabinet members rarely leave the administration unscathed.

Pruitt did not return calls from Yahoo News. The Trump campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The mere mention of Pruitt’s name evokes, for some, the freewheeling early days of the Trump presidency, a pre-impeachment, pre-pandemic time when Pruitt’s search for a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel could credibly pass as the biggest story in Washington.

Then-Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt in 2018. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

Pruitt was dismissed by Trump shortly after the mattress incident was made public, but the president had clearly been fond of Pruitt, arguing that he was treated unfairly by the media. Yet whatever sympathy Trump may have had for him appears to have expired. That may prove unfortunate for Pruitt, who is only 52 and is widely known to have political ambitions. During the heyday of his tenure, some even suspected he would run for president.

For all the scandal he caused in Washington, Pruitt retained the goodwill of his fellow Sooners. “I think Oklahomans still love him, support him and trust him,” the chairwoman of the Oklahoma GOP told the Associated Press after Pruitt’s dismissal by Trump.

Although he did not seek the governorship of Oklahoma in 2018, as some expected him to do, he was also once rumored to be after a more coveted prize: Inhofe’s seat in the U.S. Senate. At 85, Inhofe is the fifth-oldest member of the entire Congress. Inhofe said in March he would run again, but that was before the coronavirus and anti-racism protests upended virtually every political calculation across the land.
IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS 

Pruitt with President Trump in the White House Rose Garden in 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Once in the news on a near-daily basis, Pruitt has been functionally invisible for the better part of a year. “Where in the world is Scott Pruitt?” wondered one headline a year ago. The article noted that he had been spotted at a high-end Tulsa gym, running slowly on a treadmill. He had also registered as an energy lobbyist. There wasn’t much else.

Pruitt’s lonely fate is similar to that of many other top former administration officials. No longer part of Team Trump, removed from the intrigues of Capitol Hill, “formers” like Ryan Zinke (Interior Department) and Reince Priebus (White House chief of staff) are caught in political purgatory.

Some, like Pruitt, Zinke and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, were quickly undone by attempts to replicate the lifestyle befitting a high-net-worth administration. Living luxuriously on the taxpayers’ dollar angered the public, members of Congress and a president always sensitive to bad news.

Others, like Priebus and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, succumbed to the chaos and infighting that have characterized the Trump administration from the very start.

Few of the now-formers survived with their reputations intact. Most notable in that category is former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who always kept his distance from Trump and, most recently, criticized the president for clearing peaceful protesters from Washington’s Lafayette Square in the midst of the anti-racism protests that swept the nation.

Others have tried to claw their reputations back and exact revenge, often by writing books. Among them is David Shulkin, the former Department of Veterans Affairs head and the lone Obama holdover in the original Trump Cabinet. In his book, Shulkin claims that wealthy conservative allies of the president tried to sabotage his efforts and tried to privatize the agency’s operations.

And then, of course, there is John Bolton, who was dismissed as national security adviser in 2019. The scorned Bolton’s new book contains harsh assessments of the president and his policymaking style.

Pruitt is almost certainly not writing a tell-all book, but he did leave the Trump administration with a flourish, penning a fulsome resignation letter to the boss who fired him. “My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people,” Pruitt wrote. “I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence.”
Being ignored by the Trump campaign is still probably preferable to what happened to Jeff Sessions, the attorney general Trump blamed for the investigation into Russian electoral interference. Fired by Trump, Sessions returned to Alabama and declared he would seek to regain the Senate seat he’d held before joining the Trump administration. 

Trump has instead endorsed former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, also running for the Republican nomination. For good measure, the president lambasted Sessions, the first sitting senator to endorse his improbable White House bid back in early 2016, for having “no courage.

Tank Fire Prompts Evacuation at Port of Catoosa, Oklahoma

The roof of a chemical tank (foreground) caught fire at the Port of Catoosa on Wednesday, prompting a full evacuation (

Tulsa Fire Department / Gabe Graveline)

PUBLISHED FEB 17, 2023 12:48 AM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

On Wednesday, a fire broke out on the top of a chemical storage tank at the Port of Catoosa, an inland port at the western end of Oklahoma's Verdigris River. 

The fire broke out at about 0900 hours local time on Wednesday, and the port and a nearby elementary school were evacuated as a precautionary measure. Smoke from the tank was drifting towards a residential area, so local residents were ordered to shelter in place while fire crews responded to the blaze. 

According to the Tulsa Fire Deparment, the tank was empty at the time that the fire broke out. The first fire crew on scene reported fire and heavy smoke, and they applied water to extinguish the fire. Once the fire was out and temperatures on the tank fell, the site was turned back over to the tank farm operator. 

"You know, we prepare for it," Port Director David Yarbrough told local media. "Every now and then, something goes not according to plan, and you just react, and you do what you gotta do."

The extent of the damage to the tank is still under investigation, but some amount of soil surface remediation is expected. 

Image courtesy Tulsa Fire Department / Gabe Graveline

Port of Catoosa is a 2,000-acre industrial park and intermodal port on the northeast edge of Tulsa, and it is one of the largest, furthest-inland riverine ports in the United States. Its lessees employ about 3,000 people in a variety of manufacturing industries. The Verdigris River connects the port with the Arkansas River, then onwards to the Mississippi, and handles about 1,000 barges per year in traffic. 

Understanding the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Legacy of White Supremacy


By  Kendra Pierre-Louis

DE SMOG

Oil field workers adding a length of pipe to drill stream in Kilgore, Texas, in the 1930s. Credit: Russell Lee for U.S. Farm Security Administration, public domain


In December, The New York Times published a story revealing how ExxonMobil and other oil companies had paid a public relations firm named FTI to build “news” and information websites falsely suggesting grassroots support for the fossil fuel industry and its initiatives. ExxonMobil, which didn’t speak with Times reporter (and my former coworker) Hiroko Tabuchi for the story, responded by trying to smear the messenger. “We refused to work with the author,” ExxonMobil tweeted, “because of her obvious bias against the oil and gas industry.”

The firm was alluding to an October tweet by Tabuchi that she’d “been thinking a lot about fossil fuels and white supremacy recently,” noting that nearly every oil industry official she’d encountered as a reporter was white and male. ExxonMobil complained the tweet was a “baseless claim alleging industry links to white supremacy,” and Tabuchi later deleted it. But according to University of Notre Dame historian Darren Douchuk, Tabuchi’s tweet reflected something real.

“In researching the history of oil in modern America since the 1860s to the present, oil was I think unquestionably the most racially homogenous industry in America. And, there are clear racist patterns of organization within the industry from the very beginning,” says Douchuk, author of Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America.

White supremacy can be narrowly defined as a system of overtly racist individuals who seek to oppress or eliminate anyone who is not white, and more broadly as a system designed to protect and elevate whiteness. This latter definition shifts the focus from a few explicitly racist individuals to the underlying system of norms that give white people a disproportionate advantage. A banal example is when a nightclub establishes a “No Timbs” policy, referring to the brand of work boots long fashionable in Black hip-hop culture, to exclude young Black male patrons.

These norms can also oppress Black people and elevate white people in more enduring ways. People with “Black” names get fewer calls for job interviews compared to similarly qualified white people. Homes with a Black owner are typically appraised at lower values than those whose owners are perceived to be white.

Whichever definition you choose, says Douchuk, the historical record reveals clear links between white supremacy and the oil industry. According to his research, when crude oil was discovered in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania just prior to the Civil War, it was seen “as a mystical fount that might ease America out of bloodshed and into a new age of peace and prosperity. Oil was to be a healing balm for the body politic.”

A game of cards at the oil workers’ union headquarters in Seminole, Oklahoma, in the 1930s. Credit: Russell Lee for U.S. Farm Security Administration, public domain

But this healing balm was intended for “whites only,” and that wasn’t just because in that era few Black people lived in the communities where oil was first extracted. As the industry shifted west and south at the turn of the 20th century, to Texas, California, and Mexico, it collided with the emergence of the “Lost Cause” mythos across the South, a set of pseudo-historical justifications for slavery as a just system in which the enslaved were happy, and the Civil War was a heroic insurrection to protect the South’s “economic prosperity” from “Northern aggression.” The Lost Cause lie erases from history the reasons that abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Denmark Vessey, and Nat Turner fought for Black liberation.

White oilmen (they were almost all men) saw oil as a resource that could help the South rebuild, while also re-installing a system that ensured Black people would remain structurally at the bottom of their racial hierarchy. So they codified segregation into the oil fields. “The oil industry circa 1901 [and] going forward is very much implanted in regions of Texas and Oklahoma that are typically places where lower-class whites have been fighting and clawing for privilege on the racial ladder,” says Douchuk, “fighting against, as they see it, rising Black southerners who want also a place on the economic pecking order.”

One way the industry accomplished this in the South was by limiting the types of work available to people of color. By the early 20th century, white oilmen had firmly established a pattern of keeping the most lucrative roles in the oil business for themselves, says Douchuk, while relegating the most difficult and least profitable to Black and Mexican American workers, such as drilling pipe and laying pipelines that could weigh upwards of 600 pounds through mosquito-infested swamps.

Oil field worker housing in Hobbs, New Mexico, around 1940. Credit: Russell Lee for U.S. Farm Security Administration, public domain

The oil industry also segregated its employees in other ways. Black workers typically lived in tents, compared to sturdier lodging for white workers. Black workers were left to feed themselves, often turning to hunting, despite earning a fraction of the pay of white workers who were fed on the company dime.

Oil towns were also scenes of brutal attacks by whites against Blacks, according to Douchuk. “Traditionally, this is where a lot of the most violent lynching has gone on,” he says. Texas was so violent that Black oil workers who managed to eke out enough money sometimes sought safer pastures in Oklahoma. But that was no guarantee of safety. The story of the 1921 Tulsa Riots, in which white rioters killed 36 Black people in Tulsa, Oklahoma and obliterated the city’s prosperous Greenwood district (known as “Black Wall Street”), gained new public attention in 2019 when it was featured in the opening episode of HBO’s “Watchmen.” But the fact that Tulsa was an oil town, then nicknamed the “Oil Capital of the World,” is less remarked upon.

This kind of racist violence was common among oil towns. The Tulsa massacre was just unique in the scale of the destruction.

ExxonMobil has roots in this era, going all the way back to the 1911 founding of the Humble Oil & Refining Company in Humble, Texas. Humble Oil was soon acquired by Standard Oil of New Jersey, which in 1972 became the Exxon Corporation, which merged with Mobil (formerly the Standard Oil Company of New York) in 1999

.

Oil field workers eating lunch on site in Kilgore, Texas, in the 1930s. Credit: Russell Lee for U.S. Farm Security Administration, public domain

Even as the oil business went all in on Jim Crow, Black workers began to carve out spaces for themselves in the lumber and shipping industries. By 1910, Black laborers made up 59.1 percent of the timber workforce in Louisiana, and 38 percent in Texas. But as late as 1940, Black oil workers only accounted for 0.05 percent of all employees in oil production, and 3 percent of refinery workers.

American oilmen also exported this bigotry. During early-20th-century oil exploration in Mexico, U.S. firms relegated Black and Chicano workers to “the hot, dirty, and unskilled jobs: clearing land, doing laundry, cooking and washing, cleaning buildings, and carrying equipment,” according to Jonathan Brown’s book Oil and Revolution in Mexico. In the 1930s, Texaco chief executive Torkild Rieber was a Nazi sympathizer whose company would go on to literally fuel Hitler’s regime. In Saudi Arabia, Standard Oil Company of California (now part of BP) created “a system of privilege and inequality, which we know as Jim Crow in the United States, as Apartheid in South Africa, and as racism more generally,” writes University of Pennsylvania political scientist Robert Vitalis in America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, and brought the system with it to Latin America and Indonesia as well. In Libya, Esso (another ExxonMobil precursor) created a “settler community” based on architectural separation between Libyans and white American, British, and Canadian employees.

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, along with the decolonization movements across Asia and Africa, sought to upend some of these racist hierarchies. But the oil industry’s white supremacy remained entrenched. As reported recently in Drilled News, in 1994 financial analyst Bari-Ellen Roberts and five colleagues filed a class action suit against Texaco (now Chevron) after she was passed over for a promotion, and then asked to train the white man who got the job. In 1996, Richard A. Lundwall, a dismissed Texaco executive, turned over recordings of senior Texaco officials discussing the lawsuit to the plaintiffs’ lawyers in which they considered destroying incriminating evidence related to the suit. They referred to Black employees as the “N-word” and “Black jelly beans,” helping make Roberts’ case.

Civil rights march in Washington, D.C. in 1963. Credit: Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection

After winning a $176 million settlement — the largest to date in a corporate discrimination lawsuit — Roberts wrote a book chronicling the racism she had encountered at Texaco. In one incident, a white employee poked his head into Roberts’ office and exclaimed, “Well, Jesus Christ, I never thought I’d live to see the day when a Black woman had an office at Texaco.” In another, Roberts discovered her performance grade was lowered because a manager considered her “uppity,” a racist dog whistle suggesting that a Black person was moving beyond their “station.” Roberts also learned that behind her back, one of her bosses had referred to her as a “little colored girl.”

This kind of bigotry isn’t relegated to the last century. Just four years ago, NPR reported on discrimination in oil fields. One former Black employee who spoke to reporter Jeff Brady described finding phrases like “n***** go home” scribbled onto a pipe, and nooses being left for him and other Black workers to find. Late last year, a class action lawsuit was filed against Pipeliners Local Union 798, a major pipeline workers trade union of more than 8,000 members, alleging that the union refused to employ Black workers (and white women) through the 1980s. The suit contends that even today Black workers are consistently hired for less well-regarded and more poorly paid “helper” roles, but passed over in favor of less qualified white employees for the better-paid “journeyman” roles. Everything old, it seems, is indeed new again.

The links between the oil industry and white supremacy extend beyond the corporate office and the drill pad. Refineries and other industrial sites are deliberately and disproportionately sited in or near communities of color. Race can predict which communities will and won’t get cleaned up after an oil spill. One could argue that white supremacy within the oil industry is so much the norm, that it is easier to point to the exceptions.

When firms like ExxonMobil make accusations of bias against those who, like The Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi, point out the historic links between the oil industry and white supremacy, they are trying to rewrite more than a century of well-documented racism into a rosier history. “They’re coming out of certain assumptions of racial privilege, which they might not even be able to articulate,” says Douchak. But learning from previous generations frees us to make new advances and avoid catastrophic pitfalls.

As James Baldwin, the acclaimed activist and writer, once wrote, “we are trapped in history.” The present is built upon the past, and will be constrained by it until we face up to these devastating truths. Will the oil industry embrace that reckoning? “I think there’s been an effort lately to improve on that,” Douchak says, “but that, that is a legacy. And it’s not just a legacy, but it’s something that needs to be confronted.”

Mar 29, 2021

ByKendra Pierre-Louis

Kendra Pierre-Louis is a climate reporter. She currently works for Gimlet, the podcasting company. Previously she was a climate reporter with The New York Times, a staff writer for Popular Science (PopSci) where she wrote about science, the environment, and, occasionally, mayonnaise.

Scientists find oldest evidence of humans in Israel — a 1.5 million-year-old bone

An ancient vertebra from an archaic hominin species child gives ‘unambiguous’ evidence of migrations out of Africa, Israeli researchers say

By LUKE TRESS

Today, 12:04 pm

The 'Ubeidiya archaeological site in the Jordan Valley, where researchers found a 1.5 million year old human vertebra. (Courtesy/Dr. Alon Barash)

An international group of Israeli and American researchers has discovered a vertebra from a hominin species dated to 1.5 million years ago that lived in the Jordan Valley. The bone was from a child aged 6-12 and is the most ancient evidence of a human presence in today’s Israel, as well as the second oldest human remain found outside of Africa.

The stunning find shines light on the most ancient human migrations out of Africa by offering a sign that multiple waves of different hominin species left the continent, the researchers said in an article published Wednesday in the prestigious peer-reviewed Scientific Reports journal.

“We now have unambiguous evidence of the presence of two distinct dispersal waves,” said the researchers.

Human evolution can be traced back around 6 million years through fossil and DNA evidence. Hominins are primates that are modern humans’ direct ancestors or closely related to us. Homo sapiens, our modern form, does not appear in the fossil record until around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.

Evolution is not a straight path, but a tree, with many branches leading nowhere. It occurs on a long continuum and there have been many hominin species that went extinct, the most famous being the Neanderthals. (The famous ancient skeleton dubbed “Lucy,” found in Ethiopia in 1974, was a pre-Homo sapiens hominin from 3.2 million years ago.)
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Around 2 million years ago, there is evidence that some archaic human species began to leave Africa. The first human remains of groups that left Africa were found in modern Georgia in the Caucasus region and are dated to around 1.8 million years ago. Archaeologists found their remains and tools at a site called Dmanisi.

The new vertebra found in Israel is evidence of a second wave out of Africa by another species hundreds of thousands of years later, the researchers said.

The top (a), rear (b), bottom (c) and front (d) view of the vertebra discovered at the ‘Ubeidiya site. (Courtesy/Dr. Alon Barash)

Archaeologists found the tiny bone in 1966 at a prehistoric site called ‘Ubeidiya, near Kibbutz Beit Zera, just south of the Sea of Galilee. During these previous excavations from 1960 to 1999, archaeologists uncovered ancient stone and flint tools that resemble finds in eastern Africa; extinct animal bones including sabertooth tigers, mammoths and giant buffalo; and bones from species no longer in the region, including baboons, warthogs, hippopotamuses, giraffes and jaguars.
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For the new study, researchers renewed excavations at the site and made use of new technology to better classify and date previous finds.

The ancient child’s vertebra was discovered while examining fossils from the previous excavations that are kept at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The bone had previously been examined but had not been identified.

They identified it as a human lumbar vertebra, from the lower part of the back, dating to 1.5 million years ago.

The researchers said there is an ongoing debate over whether humans left Africa at once, or in multiple waves, and the new find supports the second theory, since it appeared to be from a different human species than the skeletons in Georgia.

A pre-human skull found in 2005 in the ground at the medieval village Dmanisi, Georgia, pictured on October 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Shakh Aivazov)

Stone tools found in Georgia and at the Israeli site were also different. Researchers initially believed they were produced by two different cultures, but in the new report, the archaeologists said they were likely made by different species.

The new study also uncovered that the two known sites of early human habitation had divergent climates that contributed to the distinct cultures.
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“One of the main questions regarding the human dispersal from Africa were the ecological conditions that may have facilitated the dispersal. Our new finding of different human species in Dmanisi and ‘Ubeidiya is consistent with our finding that climates also differed between the two sites. ‘Ubeidiya is more humid and compatible with a Mediterranean climate, while Dmanisi is drier with savannah habitat,” said Prof. Miriam Belmaker of the University of Tulsa, whose grant facilitated the new excavations.

Study researchers from left to right: Dr. Omry Barzilai, Y. Merimsky, who discovered the prehistoric site at ‘Ubeidiya, Prof. Miriam Belmaker and Dr. Alon Barash (Bar-Ilan University)

The Israeli researchers’ analysis showed the bone found in Israel was from an individual who was between 6 and 12 years old at his time of death. He was tall for his age, and would have reached around 5 feet 9 inches tall (180 cm) as an adult.

His size was similar to other large hominins in eastern Africa around the time. The species in Georgia was shorter, the researchers said.

“It seems, then, that in the period known as the Early Pleistocene, we can identify at least two species of early humans outside of Africa,” said Dr. Alon Barash of Bar Ilan University, one of the lead researchers.

“Each wave of migration was that of different kind of humans — in appearance and form, technique and tradition of manufacturing stone tools, and ecological niche in which they lived,” he said.

The study was led by researchers from Bar-Ilan University, Ono Academic College, the University of Tulsa and the Israel Antiquities Authority.

PALAEOANTHROPOLOGY

Vertebra discovered in the Jordan Valley tells the story of prehistoric migration from Africa

A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that ancient human migration from Africa to Eurasia was not a one-time event but occurred in waves.

The first wave reached the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus approximately 1.8 million years ago. The second is documented in ‘Ubeidiya in the Jordan Valley about 1.5 million years ago.

The research was led by Dr. Alon Barash of the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University, Professor Ella Been of Ono Academic College, Professor Miriam Belmaker of The University of Tulsa, and Dr. Omry Barzilai of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

According to fossil evidence and DNA research, human evolution began in Africa about six million years ago. Approximately two million years ago, ancient humans (nearly, but not yet in modern form) began to migrate from Africa and spread throughout Eurasia, a process known as the “Out of Africa.” ‘Ubeidiya, located in the Jordan Valley near Kibbutz Beit Zera, is one of the places where we have archaeological evidence for this dispersal.

The prehistoric site of ‘Ubeidiya is significant for archaeological and evolutionary studies because it is one of the few places that contain preserved remnants of the early human exodus from Africa. The site is the second oldest archaeological site outside Africa and was excavated by several expeditions led by Professor M. Stekelis, Professor O. Bar-Yosef, and Professor E. Tchernov between 1960 and 1999.

The finds from the site include a rich and rare collection of extinct animal bones and stone artifacts. Fossil species include sabertoothed tiger, mammoths, and a giant buffalo, alongside animals not found today in Israel, such as baboons, warthogs, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and jaguars. Stone and flint items made and used by ancient humans show resemblance to those discovered at sites in East Africa.

Recently, excavations in ‘Ubeidiya were resumed by Belmaker and Barzilai under a grant that Belmaker received from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The project uses new absolute dating methods to refine the site’s dating and to study the paleoecology and paleoclimate of the region. While looking at the fossils from the site, now housed at the Hebrew University’s National Natural History Collections, Belmaker, a paleoanthropologist from The University of Tulsa’s Department of Anthropology, encountered a human vertebra. Initially unearthed in 1966, the bone was studied by Barash and Professor Ella Been. They identified it as a human lumbar vertebra, the earliest fossil evidence of ancient human remains discovered in Israel, approximately 1.5 million years old

According to Barash, human anatomy and evolution researcher at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University, there is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether the migration was a one-time event or occurred in several waves. The new find from ‘Ubeidiya sheds light on this question. “Due to the difference in size and shape of the vertebra from ‘Ubeidiya and those found in the Republic of Georgia, we now have unambiguous evidence of the presence of two distinct dispersal waves.”

According to Barzilai, head of the Archaeological Research Department at the Israel Antiquities Authority, “The stone and flint artifacts from ‘Ubeidiya, handaxes made from Basalt, chopping tools, and flakes made from flint, are associated with the Early Acheulean culture. Previously, it was accepted that the stone tools from ‘Ubeidiya and Dmanisi were associated with different cultures – Early Acheulean in ‘Ubeidiya and Oldowan in Dmanisi. After this new study, we conclude that different human species produced the two industries.”

Belmaker explained, “One of the main questions regarding the human dispersal from Africa were the ecological conditions that may have facilitated the dispersal. Previous theories debated whether early humans preferred an African savanna or new, more humid woodland habitat. Our new finding of different human species in Dmanisi and ‘Ubeidiya is consistent with our finding that climates also differed between the two sites. ‘Ubeidiya is more humid and compatible with a Mediterranean climate, while Dmanisi is drier with savannah habitat. This study showing two species, each producing a different stone tool culture, is supported by the fact that each population preferred a different environment.”

“The analysis we conducted shows that the vertebra from ‘Ubeidiya belonged to a young individual 6-12 years old, who was tall for his age. Had this child reached adulthood, he would have reached a height of over 180 cm. This ancient human is similar in size to other large hominins found in East Africa and is different from the short-statured hominins that lived in Georgia,” said Been, paleoanthropologist at the Ono Academic College Faculty of Health Professions and an expert in spinal evolution.

“It seems, then, that in the period known as the Early Pleistocene, we can identify at least two species of early humans outside of Africa. Each wave of migration was that of different kind of humans –– in appearance and form, technique and tradition of manufacturing stone tools, and ecological niche in which they lived,” concluded Barash.

Ubeidiya - Image Credit : Hanay - CC BY-SA 3.0

BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY

Archaeologists Discover Missing Link in Human Evolution, in Israel

A hominin died in Jordan Valley 1.5 million years ago – and isn’t the same species as the hominins who reached central Asia 1.8 million years ago. Israeli archaeologists prove there were multiple exits from Africa, and by more than one human species


A top (a), rear (b), bottom (c) and front (d) view of the vertebra discovered at Ubeidiya.

Credit: Dr. Alon Barash

Ruth Schuster

HAARETZ
Feb. 2, 2022 12:04 PM

About 1.5 million years ago, a child died near the Sea of Galilee. All that remains of the youngster is a single bone, a vertebra. But that skeletal fragment, first unearthed in 1966 and only now recognized for what it actually is – the earliest large-bodied hominin found in the Levant – changes the story of human evolution.

Among other things, that one bone proves for the first time that there were multiple exits by archaic humans from Africa. At 1.5 million years of age, the bone is the second-oldest hominin fossil to be found outside Africa. The oldest date to 1.8 million years ago and were found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and that difference of about 300,000 years proves in and of itself that there was more than one exit.

More? This archaic child in the Jordan Valley and the hominins at Dmanisi were not the same species.

The study on the vertebra, which is by far the oldest hominin fossil in Israel, was published Wednesday in Scientific Reports by an international team led by Dr. Alon Barash of the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University, Prof. Ella Been of Ono Academic College, Prof. Miriam Belmaker of the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Omry Barzilai of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Open gallery view

The site at Ubeidiya.Credit: Dr. Omry Barzilai / Israel Antiquities Authority

Ecce homo?

The story of the bone begins in 1959, when a member of Kibbutz Afikim named Izzy Merimsky was bulldozing land in preparation for agriculture and, Barash explains, suddenly observed that his machine was unearthing human bones, including a skull and teeth.

No, those did not belong to the ancient child. We don’t know what they were because they were hopelessly out of archaeological context, Barash explains. They could be incredibly ancient or from some recent local flare-up. Maybe one day that will be cleared up.

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Anyway, being archaeologically aware, Merimsky called in the authorities. Excavation began in 1960 and it became clear that the site was deeply prehistoric. Subsequently, in 1966, the archaeologist Moshe Stekelis unearthed the vertebra in situ that would change the story of human evolution. But not right away.

Said vertebra had been found with animal bones. “For some reason,” Barash says, “it was placed in a box marked ‘Homo?’ – with the question mark – and forgotten. It was ignored. It was put with monkey bones.”

Moving onto the 2020s and University of Tulsa paleoanthropologist Miriam Belmaker, who was working with the Antiquities Authority’s Barzilai on reconstructing the paleoclimate at prehistoric Ubeidiya, and embarking on the tortuous process of trying to date the site with accuracy. “It’s a work in process,” Barash observes.


In the hope of resolving the dating conundrum, Belmaker reanalyzed all the animal fossils found at the site, which are indicative of climate. (If a tropical animal is found, the area wasn’t glaciated, to be extreme about it.) She rediscovered that backbone bit, suspected it was not a monkey, and called in Barash the paleoanthropologist, Barzilai relates. One look sufficed for Barash to know that an ape, it was not.

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Homo erectus

Credit: Henry Gilbert and Kathy Schick

That look was followed by a vast amount of comparative research on the vertebrae of ancient hominins, modern humans, hyenas, rhinos, lions, apes and other animal suspects that had all been present in Ubeidiya, say Barash and Ono College's Prof. Been. And this is what they found.

“It was not an australopithecine and not an elephant and not a gorilla and not a mermaid – we measured a ton of vertebrae. It has distinct features. It was a large-bodied bipedal hominin,” Barash says.

Even before the vertebra resurfaced and was reclassified as a fragment not of monkey or merperson but of extremely ancient hominin, Ubeidiya had been believed to date back to 1.5 million years, based on stone tools unearthed there thanks to that observant kibbutznik who just meant to clear land to grow something or other, Barzilai says.

Analysis of the bone was done with Been, an expert on paleoanthropology who explains that having thoroughly studied the vertebrae of every animal that moved in Ubeidiya at the time, and decided it was a hominin, they then considered what part of the hominin’s back it came from. Morphometric analysis showed the bone was one of the lower three lumbar vertebrae.

“In bipeds, these vertebrae have a unique structure,” Been explains. “The anterior part is tall and posterior part short” (because in bipeds, the lower back is load-bearing). “In this one, the anterior part was tall and the posterior part was short, which we don’t see in monkeys or apes, which are not bipedal.”

The question is, which hominin was this child? One hint lies in the tools found at Ubeidiya, which were classified as relatively advanced Acheulean-type, not primitive Oldowan – which is hugely significant. (Yes, there were extremely primitive stone tools as much as 3.3 million years ago, but we have no idea who the toolmaker was, Barash points out, and shall leave that out of our story.)

Open gallery view

Omry Barzilai from the Antiquities Authority.

Credit: Miri Bar, Israel Antiquities Authority

Confusion in the Caucasus

It is believed that the Homo line (culminating in us) split from the Pan line (culminating in the chimpanzee) 7 million to 6 million years ago. Until recently it was thought that after the split, human evolution was linear.

It was not. We now realize there were multiple types of hominins, some living contemporaneously with one another and, as of 2 million years ago at least, roaming out of Africa.

The oldest hominin fossils found to date outside Africa are just over 1.8 million years old, in Dmanisi; and now we have this individual from 1.5 million years ago in Israel. So, first of all, clearly there was more than one hominin migration out of Africa. There could have been dozens, there could have been constant creep, in both directions – we simply don’t know. The fossil evidence of our prehistory is incredibly sparse and stone tools can only tell us so much.

We also can’t say how many hominin species there were in Africa when the ancestors of the Dmanisi crew exited. But among the earliest members of the Homo line in Africa was Homo habilis, which lived from perhaps 2.3 million to 1.6 million years ago. And following on its very heels, we find a new species – Homo erectus, – Barash explains.

The chimp brain is about 300 to 400 cubic centimeters in volume. Australopithecus was no larger than a chimp and had only a slightly bigger brain: perhaps about 450 cc. In other words, no great difference. Australopithecines were weeny, too, with the famed Lucy estimated to have been a meter tall (3 feet, 3 inches). Some think maybe 1.20 meters, which is still wee. Still no great distance from the chimp.

Homo habilis was a step along, with a brain about 600 to 700 cc. in volume but was also short, a few centimeters taller than Lucy. Then come the next species: erectus was a giant, relatively to its predecessors. It was beefier and taller, with a bigger brain, about 800 to 900 cc, Barash explains.

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A skull of Homo habilis.Credit: Rama

In addition, Homo habilis in Africa was found in association with the primitive, early Oldowan-type tools. Homo erectus in Africa was found in association with more advanced Acheulean-type tools: hand-axes, choppers and the like.

Now for a twist. Who exactly was found at Dmanisi?

Good question. The Georgian authorities simply deflected any classification enigmas by dubbing their being Homo georgicus. Many simply assume it was a variant of erectus. But in fact they were small-bodied and had small brains, Barzilai points out.

Reconstruction of Homo georgicus showed them to be much shorter than erectus, he observes. Moreover, the stone tool culture found there is primitive Oldowan-type, not advanced Acheulean.

Yes, the team suspects that Dmanisi Person, aka Homo georgicus, arose from Homo habilis expanding out of Africa around 2 million years ago and reaching central Asia and perhaps beyond. Though while about it, Barash makes things even messier: there is no consensus that the creatures at Dmanisi belonged to a single species, he says.

“The bottom line is that georgicus were definitely not Homo erectus,” he says. “For one thing, their brains were too small. If you took the Dmanisi skulls and put them in an African context, you would clearly see – it’s habilis.”

Fine. How the habilis or whoever it was got to Dmanisi, we do not know. Israel and the Levant are the natural land bridge between Africa and Eurasia, but no fossil hominin bones from that deep prehistory have ever been found in Israel or anywhere in the Levant. Nor have sites that could be 2 million to 1.8 million years old, going by tools. Which doesn’t necessarily mean habilis didn’t pass through here 2 million to 1.8 million years ago, just that we haven’t found the evidence.

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A skull of Homo erectus.Credit: Tiia Monto

But now, from 1.5 million years ago, associated with relatively advanced Acheulean-type hand axes, Israel has a bone. Whose bone? Erectus’ bone.

“It certainly belonged to erectus,” Barash states.

Let us be clear that this momentous discovery does not make our lineage any clearer. If anything, it’s muddier. We cannot say that habilis begat erectus which begat hominin races in Europe such as the Neanderthal. We have absolutely no idea which if any of these species were our ancestors.

But we can say that because Ubeidiya is 1.5 million years old and the tools are Acheulean, the person there was from a separate migration wave than the ones who wound up in the Caucasus.

One wonders why everybody and his dog assumes the Dmanisi specimens were erectus and are not commonly identified as habilis.

“Erectus used to be the waste basket – everything from 1.5 million years onward was called erectus,” Barash sniffs. Nowadays, the fashion is to split them: Homo ergaster, Homo antecessor, and so on. The rub is that actual evidence is beyond scarce. There are perhaps one or two samples of each, which is hardly enough to base speciation on; and may we note the vast variation that can exist within a species. (Pygmy versus Norwegian – need we say more?)

But Barash is sure that Ubeidiya Person is an erectus type. For one thing, despite being a child it would have been huge – not like the weedy, ape-like habilis that maybe would have weighed 30 to 40 kilograms (66 to 88 pounds) in adulthood and reached your waist. The only complete erectus skeleton ever found, in Kenya, was 1.8 meters (6 feet) tall – and it was young. This one in Israel would have been that tall too if it had survived to adulthood, the archaeologists estimate.

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Dr. Alon Barash from Azrieli Faculty of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan.Credit: Dr. Alon Barash

Prof. Been for one thinks its final height would have been more than 1.8 meters tall, which is their conservative estimate. It was big, and if anything bigger than the African erectuses, she says.

he died young

So there were multiple waves out of Africa; habilis and erectus, and who knows who else. Asked apropos of nothing for his opinion about the tiny small-brained “hobbits” of Southeast Asia, Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis, Barash doesn’t completely dismiss the possibility that they really did arise from a super-primitive species like Australopithecus who might have left Africa even earlier. However, he suspects they arose from habilises or erectuses that reached the region, and underwent dwarfism on the islands. Sapiens they were not.

Now back to northern Israel and that vertebra. Morphologically it was biped-type and hailed from the lower back, aka the lumbar region. And the being was big (“large-bodied”), Barash says.

How do they know 1.5 million years after the event, from a single bone, that it came from a juvenile? It hadn’t finished growing. Ossification was not complete.

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The site at Ubeidiya where the vertebra was discovered in 1966.Credit: Emil Alagem/Israel Antiquities Authority
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A 1.5 million-year-old flint cutting tool found in Ubeidiya.Credit: Dafna Gazit/Israel Antiquities Authority

In modern humans, the last bone to finish ossifying is the pelvis, at about age 25, he explains. The vertebrae ossify at about age 3 to 4. This vertebra was not completely ossified, so it came from a child. They think it may have weighed between 45 to 50 kilograms at death.

This particular one is estimated to have been aged somewhere between 6 and 12, but we don’t know how its species grew, he qualifies.

“Modern humans grow very fast from birth to age 3-4, then we grow more slowly, and then in adolescence we have another growth spurt. No other animal does that,” Barash explains. “We think Neanderthals also grew linearly. We suspect that here too.”

Based on extrapolation, they believe the child would have reached a considerable 1.8 meters in adulthood. Yes, that’s classic erectus territory and completely different from what we know from Dmanisi. Going by chimp standards, it could have towered to 1.92 meters in adulthood, the team adds.

Been also shares a personal story – how she became involved in the research. “I was born just 2.5 kilometers from Ubeidiya, in Kibbutz Alumot. When I was a small child, 3 or 4, my grandfather Moshe Zoref would pick up flint tools in the fields which could have been made by erectus! He would make knives out of them, using animal jawbones. He taught me how to use them and would tell me about ancient hominins. For me, this project was closing a circle,” she says.

So, what do we have? A child from a very large species of hominin, who in dying in northern Israel 1.5 million years ago provided the first proof that more than one species left Africa in multiple waves over 200,000 to 300,000 years.

Open gallery view

The site at Ubeidiya in northern Israel.Credit: Dr. Alon Barash

And then what happened, after habilis and erectus and who knows who else left Africa? We have no idea.

“Were there other waves before or after? We don’t know. We find elephants – maybe they followed the elephants to hunt them,” Barash says, going straight into the territory of his colleague at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Ran Barkai, who believes human evolution has close ties with our appetite for elephant.

Barash continues to throw little bombshells into this boiling pot of evolutionary spaghetti. Maybe the erectus and habilis met and interbred in Europe, he speculates for fun. And asked to confirm that, indeed, we have no indication that either of them are ancestral to us, he confirms it.

He also adds: we sapiens never were massive. We are a gracile lot, while the erectus and its ilk (and Neanderthals) were not only tall but burly. It is entirely possible that with all the recent discoveries and all the insights, we never have found our ancestor.

The earliest Pleistocene record of a large-bodied hominin from the Levant supports two out-of-Africa dispersal events

• Alon Barash, 
• Miriam Belmaker, 
• Markus Bastir, 
• Michalle Soudack, 
• Haley D. O’Brien, 
• Holly Woodward, 
• Amy Prendergast, 
• Omry Barzilai & 
• Ella Been 

Scientific Reports volume 12, Article number: 1721 (2022) Cite this article

• Metricsdetails

Abstract

The paucity of early Pleistocene hominin fossils in Eurasia hinders an in-depth discussion on their paleobiology and paleoecology. Here we report on the earliest large-bodied hominin remains from the Levantine corridor: a juvenile vertebra (UB 10749) from the early Pleistocene site of ‘Ubeidiya, Israel, discovered during a reanalysis of the faunal remains. UB 10749 is a complete lower lumbar vertebral body, with morphological characteristics consistent with Homo sp. Our analysis indicates that UB-10749 was a 6- to 12-year-old child at death, displaying delayed ossification pattern compared with modern humans. Its predicted adult size is comparable to other early Pleistocene large-bodied hominins from Africa. Paleobiological differences between UB 10749 and other early Eurasian hominins supports at least two distinct out-of-Africa dispersal events. This observation corresponds with variants of lithic traditions (Oldowan; Acheulian) as well as various ecological niches across early Pleistocene sites in Eurasia.

Introduction

The Levant region, the major land bridge connecting Africa with Eurasia, was a significant dispersal route for Hominins and fauna during the early Pleistocene1,2,3. But while there are numerous Eurasian early Pleistocene sites, fossil hominin remains are rare and present only at four localities dated between 1.1 and 1.9 Mya4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11: Dmanisi (Georgia), Venta Micena (Orce, Granada), Modjokerto and Sangiran (Java, Indonesia), and Sima De Elefante (Atapuerca, Spain) (Supplementary 2: Table 1; Fig. 1a). In contrast, early Pleistocene east African sites containing Homo cranial remains are more abundant, but postcranial remains are scarcer, and the best-preserved skeleton is Nariokotome KNM-WT 1500012,13.

Figure 1

‘Ubeidya site locality. (a) Map of Africa and Eurasia with major Pleistocene paleoanthropological sites. Black circles denote sites with no osteological remains; red circles denote sites with human osteological remains. (b) The location of the site of ‘Ubeidiya, south of lake Kineret (Sea of Galilee), on the western banks of the Jordan Valley (red circle) (c) aerial photograph of the excavation plan of ‘Ubeidiya with the location of layer II-23 where UB 10749 was recovered.

Full size image

In the Levant, the only site from this time-period with hominin remains is ‘Ubeidiya at the western escarpment of the Jordan Valley which is a part of the broader Rift Valley (Supplementary 1: Fig. 1b,c). The fossil remains include cranial fragments (UB 1703, 1704, 1705, and 1706), two incisor (UB 1700, UB 335) and a molar (UB 1701), identified as Homo cf. erectus/ergaster14,15,16,17,18. It is important to note that some of these fragments were bulldozed out of the ground preceding the first season, while others are considered intrusive and younger than the surroundings deposits17.

In 2018 during a reanalysis of the faunal assemblages done by two of the authors (A. B, and M. B.) a complete vertebral body (UB 10749) with hominin characteristics was found. This is the first hominin postcranial remain found at ‘Ubeidiya securely assigned to early Pleistocene deposits (See “Materials and methods”).

Here we assess the taxonomic affinity of UB 10749, its serial location along the spinal column, its chronological and physiological age at death, estimate the specimen's height and weight, and detect any pathological or taphonomic changes. Based on our findings, we explore the unique developmental characteristics of the UB 10749 within the context of early Homo paleobiology and its implications for hominin dispersal out of Africa.

READ ON The earliest Pleistocene record of a large-bodied hominin from the Levant supports two out-of-Africa dispersal events | Scientific Reports (nature.com)