The Hobbit’s bite gets a stress test

Stone tools may have allowed Homo floresiensis to eat their meals with less chewing effort than earlier hominins.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DUKE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: A COMPUTER SIMULATION OF A HOMO FLORESIENSIS CRANIUM SHOWS THE PATTERN OF STRESS AND STRAIN IN THE BONES OF THE FACE DURING BITING. AREAS UNDER HIGH STRAIN ARE SHOWN IN WHITE, PINK AND RED. view more 

CREDIT: PLEASE CREDIT LEDOGAR LAB, DUKE UNIVERSITY

DURHAM, N.C. -- If you’ve ever suffered from a sore jaw that popped or clicked when you chewed gum or crunched hard foods, you may be able to blame it on your extinct ancestors.

That’s according to a Duke University-led study of the chewing mechanics of an ancient human relative called Homo floresiensis, which inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores before our species arrived there some 50,000 years ago.

Not much more than three feet tall, the hominin’s diminutive size earned it the nickname “the Hobbit,” after the characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” For the new study, which was published Aug. 13 in the journal Interface Focus, the researchers wanted to understand how the Hobbit’s skull behaved while it ate its food.

However, thousands of years of fossilization had left its skull -- the only one that has been found so far -- damaged and misshapen. Before the researchers could test it out, they had to restore it as close to its original shape as possible. Collaborators at Italy’s University of Bologna created a 3D virtual model, built from X-ray CT scans, digitally filling in the missing pieces to reconstruct what the skull of Homo floresiensis might have looked like when it roamed the island some 100,000 to 60,000 years ago.

From that, they used computer simulations and a technique called finite element analysis to give the virtual skull characteristics that mimic the real thing, such as the stiffness of the bones and the pulling action of the muscles. Then they had the virtual skull chomp down with its back teeth -- premolars and molars -- and analyzed the forces at work with each bite, essentially subjecting it to a digital crash test.

The researchers mapped the strains within their digital model of the Hobbit’s facial bones during biting, comparing the results to similar simulations for earlier human relatives called australopiths that lived some two to three million years ago in Africa, along with chimpanzees and humans living today.

The team determined that the Hobbit’s bite could have exerted around 1300 Newtons of force, comparable to the chomping power of modern humans and several of our extinct cousins. But had it bitten down too vigorously on a hard nut or a tough hunk of meat, the findings suggest Homo floresiensis would have been at greater risk than our earlier human kin of straining its facial bones, or dislocating the joint where the lower and upper jaws meet.

“We don't really know what Homo floresiensis ate,” said first author Rebecca Cook, a doctoral student in evolutionary anthropology at Duke. Patterns of wear on the teeth, combined with pygmy elephant bones and other animal remains unearthed from the same cave where the Hobbit was found suggest that it ate at least some meat.

But the results suggest that exceedingly hard or tough foods, which would have been no problem for an australopith to gnaw on or crack open, might have given the Hobbit a TMJ headache.

“Similar patterns are observed in modern humans,” Cook said.

Millions of years of human evolution gave us smaller teeth and more lightweight skulls, because cooking our food and slicing and pounding it with stone tools, and probably also eating meat, made having overbuilt skulls unnecessary.

But years after the Hobbit’s discovery its facial features remain a puzzle. Its skull had a curious mix of traits, some of which -- like its heavyset lower jaw -- are similar to our earlier and more ape-like ancestors, while others -- like its small delicate face -- resemble humans today.

“This can make it confusing as to where this species falls on the family tree of hominin evolutionary relationships,” Cook said.

The new study suggests this shift to smaller faces, weaker bites and achey jaws evolved early, before the common ancestors of Homo floresiensis and modern humans went their separate ways.

Justin Ledogar, Duke researcher and senior author of the study, says the next step is to do similar analyses on earlier members of the genus Homo, including Homo erectus. The first known hominin to use fire and cook food, this species also had smaller teeth, jaws and faces than earlier hominins, and is thought by some to be the ancestor of Homo floresiensis.

The researchers say the work could help answer lingering questions about where Homo floresiensis came from, how it lived and how it fits into the human evolutionary tree.

“This study is just one small piece of a much larger puzzle,” Cook said.

This research was funded by the American Association of Physical Anthropology and Duke University, and by grants from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (724046 SUCCESS) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF-BCS-0725126).

CITATION: "The Cranial Biomechanics and Feeding Performance of Homo Floresiensis," Rebecca W. Cook, Antonino Vazzana, Rita Sorrentino, Stefano Benazzi, Amanda L. Smith, David S. Strait and Justin A. Ledogar. Interface Focus, Aug. 13, 2021. DOI: 10.1098/rsfs.2020.0083

---

JOURNAL

Interface Focus

DOI

10.1098/rsfs.2020.0083 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The Cranial Biomechanics and Feeding Performance of Homo Floresiensis

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Aug-2021

COI STATEMENT

This research was funded by the American Association of Physical Anthropology and Duke University, and by grants from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (724046 SUCCESS) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF-BCS-0725126).

RIP DAME EDNA EVERIDGE 1934-2023

Sir Peter Jackson mourns death of The Hobbit's Great Goblin, Barry Humphries

Share on TwitterShare on Facebook

• Share via emailShare on ReddiShare on Linked In

Barry Humphries as the Great Goblin. Photo: AFP / Warner Bros

Sir Peter Jackson says the world is a "poorer place" without Barry Humphries, the iconic Australian performer who died this weekend, aged 89.

Humphries was best-known for his character Dame Edna Everage, whom he inhabited on stage and screen for more than 60 years.

But his work with Sir Peter saw him taking on a much less glamorous role - that of The Hobbit's Great Goblin.

"It was our honour to count Barry as a friend and a colleague," Sir Peter wrote on social media on Sunday, a day after Humphries' passing.

"We were overjoyed when he agreed to play the Great Goblin in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - not one of his most glamorous roles, but one which he tackled with enthusiasm and disarming authenticity."

Photo: Supplied / Facebook

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was the first in the Hobbit trilogy, released in 2012.

While it had mixed reviews, Humphries' performance - voice and via motion capture - was warmly received, many reviewers comparing the grotesque villain to Star Wars' Jabba the Hutt.

Celebrities from Australia and around the world mourned Humphries on social media, including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who called him a "great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one-of-kind".

Australian comedian, actor and author Barry Humphries, dressed as his alter ego, Dame Edna Everage, at a press conference in Sydney on 5 July, 2012. Photo: AFP / Pool / Greg Wood

Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Humphries a "a comic genius who used his exuberant alter egos, Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, to say the otherwise unsayable".

"To say Barry was beloved is an understatement," added Sir Peter.

"His ability to spread laughter, whilst making astute and telling observations, was unrivalled. Barry always had a twinkle in his eye - undoubtedly because his marvellous mind was up to some kind of mischief.

"He was truly a scholar, a gentleman and one glorious Dame. We will miss you, Barry.

Comedian Barry Humphries and his wife Lizzie Spender pose for a photograph as they arrive at St Bride's church for a service to celebrate the wedding between media Mogul Rupert Murdoch and former supermodel Jerry Hall which took place on Friday, in London, Britain March 5, 2016. 

REUTERS/Peter Nicholls/File Photo

Britain's Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, presents Barry Humphries the Wizard of Oz award for his fictional character Sir Les Patterson at the Oldie Of The Year Awards 2021 at The Savoy Hotel in London, Britain, October 19, 2021. 

Chris Jackson/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

 Barry Humphries accepts the Wizard of Oz award for his fictional character Sir Les Patterson at the Oldie Of The Year Awards 2021 at The Savoy Hotel in London, Britain, October 19, 2021. 

Chris Jackson/Pool via REUTERS

'One of a Kind': Australians Pay Tribute to 'Icon' Barry Humphries

Sunday, 23 April, 2023 -

Australia's Barry Humphries poses after receiving his Most Excellent Order of the British Empire from the Queen at Buckingham Palace, London October 10, 2007. 

REUTERS/Steve Parsons/Pool/

Asharq Al-Awsat

Australians have paid tribute to Barry Humphries, the comedian best known for his character Dame Edna Everage, as both a "one-of-a-kind" entertainer and a charming and intelligent man.

The Sydney Morning Herald said Humphries died on Saturday at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, where he had been treated for various health issues. Humphries was 89, said Reuters.

Humphries, born and raised in Melbourne, rose to fame in Britain in the 1970s playing a host of Australian caricatures including Dame Edna, repulsive drunk diplomat Les Patterson and Sandy Stone, a decrepit rambling senior.

St Vincent’s Hospital chaplain Martin Maunsell said he met Humphries when the comedian was being treated for a fall, describing him as "charming" and "intelligent".

“He was one of a kind,” Maunsell said. “I don’t think we’ll ever see someone like him ever again in Australia.”

In the beachside suburb of Coogee, Sydney resident Dani Kersh said Humphries was like a "complete ray of sunshine".

"He provided a good dose of comedy and humor and entertainment across Australia. What a legend,” Kersh said.

Another Sydneysider, Lucy Bloom, said it felt like the character of Dame Edna would never come to an end.

“Dame Edna is a character you expect to live forever, so I was really, really shocked to see that we would have no more Dame Edna," Bloom said "I met her in 2015 in San Francisco and will never forget.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese led the local tributes following Humphries' death, calling him a "great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one-of-kind".

"Barry Humphries entertained us through a galaxy of personas, from Dame Edna to Sandy Stone. But the brightest star in that galaxy was always Barry," Albanese wrote on Twitter.

Hobbit Controversy

The scientific controversy around Our Lady of Flores, (Lady of Flowers), aka the hobbit, continues...

The hobbit is definitely a new species of human, related to but separate from Homo sapiens, concludes a study by a Florida State University team published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Neuro-paleontologist Dean Falk, the head researcher, says she is "absolutely convinced" the brain of LB1, as the hobbit is officially known, is not abnormal.

The discovery of Homo floresiensis makes it much more likely that stories of other mythical, human-like creatures are founded on grains of truth.

Homo floresiensis (Liang Bua Cave, Indonesia) and a modern human skull

Peter Brown

File under cryptozoology; Dwarves, fairies, picts, brownies, gnomes, little people.

For more cryptozoology news check out this blog; Cryptomundo.




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Indonesia,, Our Lady of Flores,, Flores,, Homo floresiensis,, hominid,, humans,, evolution,, cryptozoology,,

Another Dirty Little Secret

Science and Shamanism combine in the unusual discovery of our Lady of Flores aka the Hobbit.

The people of Flores follow an unusual mix of Catholicism and ancestor worship. Sacrificing chickens and reading their entrails was all in a day's work for the archaeologists to ensure their digs proceeded smoothly, with the invaluable help of local villagers.

Catholicism fits well with Ancestor Worship since both deal with veneration of the dead over the living. And Christianity and Ancestor Worship arise from guilt over murder.

Morwood and van Oosterzee now believe our species, modern humans, killed the hobbits about 12,000 years ago.

Another dirty little secret revealed? So the humans occupying the area having race memories realize them through religion.

This was the time of the Stone Age, and for the scientists to assume this is an obvious modernist bias. Like this....



No final word ... the disputed picture of a male hobbit,
which became the defining image of the new species.

Disputed is right this is a male and so far the archaeological remains found are female, hence our Lady of Flores. This is her undisputed skull.

Homo floresiensis (Liang Bua Cave, Indonesia)
and a modern human skull

And here is the result of the female skull being fleshed out...

















But at least we now accept that they are a different species of humans. That was still being contested last fall.

And like the Neanderthals before them, they were wiped out by colonizers say the scientists. Imperialism and War are the natural outcome of Homo Sapiens need to dominate and colonize.



The hobbit pre-dates modern peoples in the region. Though race memory may create a zeitgeist in the wilderness, a hint, a legend, a myth of people who came before. The little people of legend. This is what the shaman experiences in their trance state. It is after all one of our oldest cross cultural beliefs.

This just another cultural/historical conjecture by scientists, based on little evidence and theorizing, speculating, hypothesizing, a priori on looking backwards from todays culture of war and Imperialism. After all they are still contesting the evidence that Our Lady of Flores is a different species.

So this assumption is contestable as well. The fact that humans and our hominid relatives existed side by side does not mean that we killed them off. There is just as much evidence for mutual co-existence, as Kropotkin asserts in his work Mutual Aid, and assimilation, as there is that we wiped out Neandertal.

It appears that our closest living relatives in the primate world are now also discovering tool making , and experiencing their own Primate Stone Age,including the making of spears. Chimps using spears to hunt bushbabies

And like our Lady of Flores, the female of the species stands out in this as well.



This new information on chimpanzee tool use has important implications for the evolution of tool use and construction for hunting in the earliest hominids, especially given our observations that females and immature chimpanzees exhibited this behavior more frequently than adult males.

Mistaking tool use for weapons use has been a common problem amongst anthropologists, archaeologists and historians of religion.

A case in point is William Irwin Thompson's expose of an ancient neolithic shaman's (male) warrior spear which he speculates is not, but is actually a woman shamans lunar calendar calculated on menstrual cycles and womens collective dream time.

Pruetz noted that male chimps never used the spears. She believes the males use their greater strength and size to grab food and kill prey more easily, so the females must come up with other methods.

And to defend themselves and their babies from more aggressive males.

Maria Gimbutas suggests that during the period of Our Lady of Flores and after there was a long period of matriarchal cultural development, which was not based on later armed male nomadic warfare, but settled peaceful civilizing of the world.

There remains no scientific evidence that humans wiped out Our Lady of Flores, they could have assimilated or have been wiped out by disease, lack of food, natural disasters, etc.

It is idle speculation like this that moves beyond science into science fiction. Just like 2001 a Space Odyssey.






See;

Primates

Neandertal

Apes

Evolution

Primates

Magick

Shamanism


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Indonesia,, Our Lady of Flores,, Flores,, Homo floresiensis,, hominid,, humans,, evolution,, cryptozoology,,

Homo, floresiensis, Indonesia, microcephallic, dwarfhumans, homo-erectus, neandertal, cro-magonon, Java,
Pleistocene, Jinniushan, fossil, prehistoric, man, woman, matriarchy,
chimps, monkeys, Great Apes, Africa, West Africa,Christianity, bushmeat, logging, cannibalism, prehistoric, primates, evolution, Darwin, anthropology, vegan, diet, extinction

New Zealand loses its precious ‘Rings’ series to Britain
By NICK PERRY

FILE - In this Oct. 26, 2012, file photo, some of the costumes, props and memorabilia created for the "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" movies are displayed in a mini-museum at Weta Cave in Wellington, New Zealand. New Zealand has long been associated with "The Lord of the Rings" but with the filming of a major new television series suddenly snatched away, the nation has become more like Mordor than the Shire for hundreds of workers. (AP Photo/Nick Perry, File)

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand has long been associated with “The Lord of the Rings” but with the filming of a major new television series suddenly snatched away, the nation has become more like Mordor than the Shire for hundreds of workers.

In a major blow to the nation’s small but vibrant screen industry, Amazon Studios announced Friday it would film the second season of its original series, inspired by the books of J.R.R. Tolkien, to Britain.

“The shift from New Zealand to the U.K. aligns with the studio’s strategy of expanding its production footprint and investing in studio space across the U.K., with many of Amazon Studios’ tentpole series and films already calling the U.K. home,” the company said in a statement.

The move came as a blow to many in New Zealand. The production is one of the most expensive in history, with Amazon spending at least $465 million on the first season, which just finished filming in New Zealand, according to government figures.

The series employed 1,200 people in New Zealand directly and another 700 indirectly, according to the figures.

“This is a shock to everyone,” said Denise Roche, the director of Equity NZ, a union representing performers. “I really feel for all the small businesses, the tech people who invested in this for the future. Nobody had any inkling.”

Roche said people feel let down by Amazon, although she added that the industry was resilient.

Amazon said the as-yet untitled series takes place on Middle-earth during the Second Age, thousands of years before the events depicted in Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” books and the subsequent films directed by Peter Jackson.

Filming began last year but was delayed due to the coronavirus. Post-production on the first season will continue in New Zealand through June before the show premieres on Prime Video in September next year.

The move to Britain comes just four months after Amazon signed a deal with the New Zealand government to get an extra 5% rebate on top of the 20% — or $92 million — it was already claiming from New Zealand taxpayers under a screen production grant.

Many locations around the world compete for productions by offering similar, generous rebates.

At the time of the deal, New Zealand’s Economic Development Minister Stuart Nash said the production would bring economic and tourism benefits to the country for years to come and create “an enduring legacy for our screen industry.”

Nash said Friday the government had found out only a day earlier that Amazon was leaving and he was disappointed by the decision. He said the government was withdrawing the offer of the extra 5%.

Amazon said it no longer intended to pursue collecting the extra money. But it will still walk away with at least $92 million from New Zealand taxpayers.

“The international film sector is incredibly competitive and highly mobile. We have no regrets about giving this production our best shot with government support,” Nash said. “However, we are disappointed for the local screen industry.”

New Zealand became synonymous with Tolkien’s world of orcs, elves and hobbits after Jackson directed six movies in the South Pacific nation. “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “The Hobbit” trilogy combined grossed nearly $6 billion at the box office.

When Amazon Studios first announced it would film in New Zealand, it said the pristine coasts, forests, and mountains made it the perfect place to bring to life the primordial beauty of early Middle-earth.

The large ensemble cast includes Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Morfydd Clark, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Sophia Nomvete and Lloyd Owen.

 

New prehistoric 'Hobbit' creature is among 3 discoveries suggesting rapid evolution of mammals after dinosaur extinction

by Taylor & Francis

Left to right, Conacodon hettingeri, Miniconus jeanninae, Beornus honeyi. Credit: Banana Art Studio

Research published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Systematic Palaeontology describes the discovery of three new species of ancient creatures from the dawn of modern mammals, and hints at rapid evolution immediately after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

These prehistoric mammals roamed North America during the earliest Paleocene Epoch, within just a few hundred thousand years of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary that wiped out the dinosaurs. Their discovery suggests mammals diversified more rapidly after the mass extinction than previously thought.

New-to-science, the creatures discovered are Miniconus jeanninae, Conacodon hettingeri, and Beornus honeyi. They differ in size—ranging up to a modern house cat, which is much larger than the mostly mouse to rat-sized mammals that lived before it alongside the dinosaurs in North America.

Each have a suite of unique dental features that differ from each other.

Beornus honeyi, in particular has been named in homage to The Hobbit character Beorn, due to the appearance of the inflated (puffy) molars (cheek teeth).

The new group belong to a diverse collection of placental mammals called archaic ungulates (or condylarths), primitive ancestors of today's hoofed mammals (eg, horses, elephants, cows, hippos).

Paleontologists from the University of Colorado in Boulder unearthed parts of lower jaw bones and teeth—which provide insights into the animals' identity, lifestyle and body size.

The three new species belong to the family Periptychidae that are distinguished from other 'condylarths' by their teeth, which have swollen premolars and unusual vertical enamel ridges. Researchers believe that they may have been omnivores because they evolved teeth that would have allowed them to grind up plants as well as meat, however this does not rule out them being exclusively herbivores.

The mass extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago is generally acknowledged as the start of the 'Age of Mammals' because several types of mammal appeared for the first time immediately afterwards.

As lead author Madelaine Atteberry from the University of Colorado Geological Sciences Department in the USA explains, "When the dinosaurs went extinct, access to different foods and environments enabled mammals to flourish and diversify rapidly in their tooth anatomy and evolve larger body size. They clearly took advantage of this opportunity, as we can see from the radiation of new mammal species that took place in a relatively short amount of time following the mass extinction."

Atteberry and co-author Jaelyn Eberle, a curator in the Museum of Natural History and Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado, studied the teeth and lower jaw bones of 29 fossil 'condylarth' species to determine the anatomical differences between the species, and used phylogenetic techniques to understand how the species are related to each other and to other early Paleocene 'condylarths' in the western United States.

The evidence supports the discovery of these three new species to science.

About the size of a marmot or house cat, Beornus honeyi was the largest; Conacodon hettingeri is similar to other species of Conacodon, but differs in the morphology of its last molar, while Miniconus jeanninae is similar in size to other small, earliest Paleocene 'condylarths', but is distinguished by a tiny cusp on its molars called a parastylid.

"Previous studies suggest that in the first few hundred thousand years after the dinosaur extinction (what is known in North America as the early Puercan) there was relatively low mammal species diversity across the Western Interior of North America, but the discovery of three new species in the Great Divide Basin suggests rapid diversification following the extinction," says Atteberry. "These new periptychid 'condylarths' make up just a small percentage of the more than 420 mammalian fossils uncovered at this site. We haven't yet fully captured the extent of mammalian diversity in the earliest Paleocene, and predict that several more new species will be described."

Ankle and foot evolution gave mammals a leg up

More information: Madelaine R. Atteberry et al, New earliest Paleocene (Puercan) periptychid 'condylarths' from the Great Divide Basin, Wyoming, USA, Journal of Systematic Palaeontology (2021). DOI: 10.1080/14772019.2021.1924301

Journal information: Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 

Provided by Taylor & Francis 

Our Lady of Flores Redux

A new update on the hobbit controversy Homo Floresiensis: Two Years Out

I dislike the hobbit dwarf label so,as I have said before since predominately female remains have been identified perhaps the species should have been called Our Lady of Flores.(La nostra signora dei fiori).

"We explore the affinities of LB1 using cranial and postcranial metric and non-metric analyses. LB1 is compared to early Homo, two microcephalic humans, a pygmoid excavated from another cave on Flores, H. sapiens (including African pygmies and Andaman Islanders), Australopithecus, and Paranthropus. Based on these comparisons, we conclude that it is unlikely that LB1 is a microcephalic human, and it cannot be attributed to any known species. Its attribution to a new species, Homo floresiensis, is supported."

One subject that is new is the matter of the tools. Martin et al argue that the tools from 18,000 years ago are not like any simple tool linked to Homo erectus. They are more sophisticated, and have only been associated before with Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. The preservation of the tools in the Liang Bua cave, where the fossils were found, suggests to the scientists modern humans coming back again and again to the cave after they arrived on Flores.

But wait for it.....as usual there is contention....Compelling evidence demonstrates that 'Hobbit' fossil does not represent a new species of hominid



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, Homo, floresiensis, Indonesia, microcephallic, dwarfhumans, homo-erectus, neandertal, cro-magonon, Java,

CRYPTOZOOLOGY

Dwarf elephants? Giant rats? Strange island creatures at high risk


A mounted skeleton of an extinct Sicilian dwarf elephant s seen at Museo Geologico "G. G. Gemmellaro" in Palermo

Will Dunham
Thu, March 9, 2023 
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A dwarf elephant the size of a Shetland pony once roamed the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. In the West Indies, a giant rat-like rodent tipped the scales at more than 400 pounds (180 kg), rivaling an American black bear.

They were examples of the "island effect," a rule in evolutionary biology describing how large-bodied species tend to downsize on islands while small-bodied species upsize. These island dwarfs and giants - a menagerie also including pint-sized hippos, buffaloes and wolves - long have faced an elevated extinction risk that, according to a new study, is intensifying, imperiling some of Earth's most unique creatures.

Focusing on island-dwelling mammals, researchers said on Thursday they examined 1,231 existing species and 350 extinct ones spanning the past 23 million years. Extinction risk was seen highest among species that underwent more extreme body size shifts compared to mainland relatives. And the arrival of people on the islands raised extinction rates more than tenfold.

"Unfortunately, the slope of the extinction curve that began with the arrival of the first human voyagers and continued with the later waves of colonization has become even steeper in recent decades," said paleoecologist Roberto Rozzi of the Natural History Museum of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany, lead author of the study published in the journal Science.

Islands foster unique evolutionary dynamics. For large-bodied species, there is evolutionary pressure to get smaller because of limits to habitat area and food resources compared to the mainland. But small-bodied species, because there is a decreased risk from predators on islands, are emancipated from evolutionary constraints on their size.

Some endangered island species today include: the dwarf buffalo Tamaraw on the Philippine island of Mindoro, 21% the size of its closest mainland relative; the spotted deer of the Philippine Visayan islands of Panay and Negros, 26% the size of its closest mainland relative; and Jamaica's hutia, a rodent 4-1/2 times bigger than its closest mainland relative.

Indonesia's island of Flores is a remarkable laboratory for the island effect, also called "Foster's rule," based on observations by mammalogist J. Bristol Foster in the 1960s. It once was home to a dwarf elephant relative, giant rats and a giant stork, as well as a dwarf human species - Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the "Hobbit," standing just 3-1/2 feet tall (106 cm) tall. The Hobbit disappeared about 50,000 years ago, shortly after our species Homo sapiens reached Flores.

Islands are biodiversity hotspots. Although they cover less than 7% of Earth's land area, they account for up to 20% of land species.

"Because of the island rule, you get all sorts of weird and wonderful animals on islands, many of which are already extinct. Of the still-extant species, islands harbor a large proportion of the diversity of terrestrial species on the planet and about 50% of them are at risk of extinction. It's incredibly depressing," said paleoecologist and study co-author Kate Lyons of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The researchers documented an accelerating uptick in island extinctions, beginning more than 100,000 years ago.

Our species has played a leading role through hunting, habitat destruction, and introductions of diseases and invasive predators, destabilizing pristine island ecosystems. Even the earlier arrival of extinct human species like Homo erectus on islands coincided with a doubling in extinctions.

"We always need to be cautious about stating true causality, especially because there are usually many different things happening at the same time," said biologist and study co-author Jonathan Chase of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research.

"But our results show with pretty good certainty that extinction rates on those islands increased dramatically after the arrival of modern humans, which, at least historically, were often due to overhunting," Chase added. "There might have only been a few hundred dwarf elephants running around Cyprus when humans first got there, and it didn't take long for them to disappear."

Fossils and ancient DNA paint a vibrant picture of human origins
A century of science has begun to explain how and where Homo sapiens and our kin evolved

A century ago, scientists knew almost nothing about our ancient ancestors, but have since discovered a wide range of relatives.
THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


By Erin Wayman

SEPTEMBER 15, 2021 AT 10:30 AM


In The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Charles Darwin hypothesized that our ancestors came from Africa. He pointed out that among all animals, the African apes — gorillas and chimpanzees — were the most similar to humans. But he had little fossil evidence. The few known human fossils had been found in Europe, and those that trickled in over the next 50 years came from Europe and from Asia.

Had Darwin picked the wrong continent?

Finally, in 1924, a fortuitous find supported Darwin’s speculation. Among the debris at a limestone quarry in South Africa, miners recovered the fossilized skull of a toddler. Based on the child’s blend of humanlike and apelike features, an anatomist determined that the fossil was what was then popularly known as a “missing link.” It was the most apelike fossil yet found of a hominid — that is, a member of the family Hominidae, which includes modern humans and all our close, extinct relatives.

That fossil wasn’t enough to confirm Africa as our homeland. Since that discovery, paleoanthropologists have amassed many thousands of fossils, and the evidence over and over again has pointed to Africa as our place of origin. Genetic studies reinforce that story. African apes are indeed our closest living relatives, with chimpanzees more closely related to us than to gorillas. In fact, many scientists now include great apes in the hominid family, using the narrower term “hominin” to refer to humans and our extinct cousins.

In a field with a reputation for bitter feuds and rivalries, the notion of humankind’s African origins unifies human evolution researchers. “I think everybody agrees and understands that Africa was very pivotal in the evolution of our species,” says Charles Musiba, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Colorado Denver.

Paleoanthropologists have sketched a rough timeline of how that evolution played out. Sometime between 9 million and 6 million years ago, the first hominins evolved. Walking upright on two legs distinguished our ancestors from other apes; our ancestors also had smaller canine teeth, perhaps a sign of less aggression and a change in social interactions. Between about 3.5 million and 3 million years ago, humankind’s forerunners ventured beyond wooded areas. Africa was growing drier, and grasslands spread across the continent. Hominins were also crafting stone tools by this time. The human genus, Homo, arrived between 2.5 million and 2 million years ago, maybe earlier, with larger brains than their predecessors. By at least 2 million years ago, Homo members started traveling from Africa to Eurasia. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, our species, emerged.

All in the family

Fossil finds suggest that many hominin species have lived over the last 7 million years (dates for each species are based on those finds), though researchers debate the validity of some of these classifications. The earliest purported hominins (purple) show some signs of upright walking, which became more routine with the rise of Australopithecus (green). Seemingly short-lived Paranthropus (yellow) was adapted for heavy chewing, and brain size began to increase in Homo species (blue).
H. THOMPSON

But human evolution was not a gradual, linear process, as it appeared to be in the 1940s and ’50s. It did not consist of a nearly unbroken chain, one hominin evolving into the next through time. Fossil discoveries in the ’60s and ’70s revealed a bushier family tree, with many dead-end branches. By some counts, more than 20 hominin species have been identified in the fossil record. Experts disagree on how to classify all of these forms — “Fossil species are mental constructs,” a paleoanthropologist once told Science News — but clearly, hominins were diverse, with some species overlapping in both time and place.

Even our species wasn’t always alone. Just 50,000 years ago, the diminutive, 1-meter-tall Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the hobbit, lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. And 300,000 years ago, Homo naledi was a neighbor in South Africa.

Finding such “primitive” species — both had relatively small brains — living at the same time as H. sapiens was a big surprise, says Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Those discoveries, made within the last two decades, were reminders of how much is left to learn.

It’s premature to pen a comprehensive explanation of human evolution with so much ground — in Africa and elsewhere — to explore, Wood says. Our origin story is still a work in progress.

Raymond Dart had a wedding to host.

It was a November afternoon in 1924, and the Australian-born anatomist was partially dressed in formal wear when he was distracted by fossils. Rocks containing the finds had just been brought to his home in Johannesburg, South Africa, from a mine near the town of Taung.

Raymond Dart recognized that the Taung Child (shown with Dart decades after its 1924 discovery) had both apelike and humanlike qualities. The find sparked the search for more hominin fossils in Africa.

SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Imprinted on a knobby rock about as big as an orange were the folds, furrows and even blood vessels of a brain. It fit perfectly inside another rock that had a bit of jaw peeking out.

The groom pressed Dart to get back on track. “My god, Ray,” he said. “You’ve got to finish dressing immediately — or I’ll have to find another best man.”

As soon as the festivities ended, Dart, 31 years old at the time, started removing the jaw from its limestone casing, chipping away with knitting needles. A few weeks later, he had liberated not just a jaw but a partial skull preserving the face of a child.

On February 7, 1925, in the journal Nature, Dart introduced the Taung Child to the world. He described the fossil as an ape like no other, one with some distinctly humanlike features, including a relatively flat face and fairly small canine teeth. The foramen magnum, the hole through which the spinal cord exits the head, was positioned directly under the skull, implying the child had an erect posture and walked on two legs.

Dart concluded that the Taung Child belonged to “an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man.” His italicized text emphasized his judgment: The fossil was a so-called missing link between other primates and humans. He named it Australopithecus africanus, or southern ape of Africa.

The Taung Child was the second hominin fossil discovered in Africa, and much more primitive than the first. Dart argued that the find vindicated Darwin’s belief that humans arose on that continent. “There seems to be little doubt,” Science News Letter, the predecessor of Science News, reported, “that there has been discovered on the reputed ‘dark’ continent a most important step in the evolutionary history of man.”

But Dart’s claims were mostly met with skepticism. It would take more than two decades of new fossil finds and advances in geologic dating for Dart to be vindicated — and for Africa to become the epicenter of paleoanthropology.

Hot spots

This map marks locations of some of human evolution’s biggest fossil discoveries. The search in Africa began in the 1920s. Yet there is still much of the continent left to explore, as paleoanthropologists have mostly focused on eastern and southern Africa.

A. The oldest known Homo sapiens fossils, dating to about 300,000 years ago, come from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.

B. At the Toros-Menalla site in Chad, scientists found what may be the earliest known hominin, Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

C. Ethiopia’s Afar region hosts numerous sites, some stretching back more than 5 million years. Major finds include the early hominin Ardipithecus and Lucy.

D. Southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya hold a long hominin history, including Australopithecus fossils, some of the oldest known stone tools, early Homo fossils and early H. sapiens fossils.

E. Louis and Mary Leakey put Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge on the map with discoveries of Paranthropus boisei and Homo habilis. The nearby Laetoli site preserves hominin footprints dating to 3.6 million years ago.

F. The Kabwe skull, the first hominin fossil found in Africa, came from a mine in Zambia in 1921.

G. South Africa’s limestone caves have yielded Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Homo fossils.

H. Quarry workers near Taung, South Africa, recovered the first Australopithecus fossil ever found.

I. At caves along coastal South Africa, scientists have recovered a rich record of H. sapiens activity, including what may be the earliest known drawing and other signs of symbolic behavior.
SOURCE: NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL/UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE’S INFLUENCE ON HUMAN EVOLUTION 2010; ADAPTED BY E. OTWELL

Against the establishment

Unlike Darwin, many evolutionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had theorized that the human family tree was rooted in Asia. Some argued that Asia’s gibbons were our closest living relatives. Others reasoned that tectonic activity and climate change in Central Asia sparked human evolution. One naturalist even proposed that human origins traced back to a lost continent that had sunk in the Indian Ocean, forcing our ancestors to relocate to Southeast Asia.

And that’s where the best contender for an early human ancestor had been found. In the 1890s, a crew led by Dutch physician-turned-anthropologist Eugène Dubois had uncovered a skullcap and thigh bone on the Indonesian island of Java. The thick skullcap had heavy brow ridges, but Dubois estimated it once held a brain that was about twice as big as an ape’s and approaching the size of a human’s. The thigh bone indicated that this Java Man, later named Homo erectus, walked upright.

Europe had its own tantalizing fossils. Neandertals had been known since the mid-19th century, but by the early 20th century, they were generally thought to be cousins that lived too recently to shed much light on our early evolution. A more relevant discovery seemed to come in 1912, when an amateur archaeologist had recovered humanlike bones from near Piltdown, England; the site also contained fossils of extinct creatures, suggesting Piltdown Man was of great antiquity. Skull bones hinted he had a human-sized brain, but his primitive jaw had a large, apelike canine tooth.

Some experts questioned whether the skull and jaw belonged together. But British scientists embraced the discovery — and not just because it implied England had a role in human origins. Piltdown Man’s features fit with the British establishment’s view of human evolution, in which a big brain was the first trait to distinguish human ancestors from other apes.

So when Dart announced that he had found a small-brained bipedal ape with humanlike teeth in the southern tip of Africa, scientists were primed to be skeptical, says Paige Madison, a historian of science at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. Scientists were also skeptical of Dart. While a student in London, he had earned a reputation as a “scientific heretic, given to sweeping claims,” according to a paper coauthored by a colleague.

But initial criticism focused mostly on practical concerns, says Madison, who has studied the skeptics’ reactions. “I found what they were actually saying on paper to be quite reasonable.”

A big problem: Dart’s fossil was of a 3- or 4-year-old child. Critics pointed out that a young ape tends to resemble humans in some ways, but the similarities disappear as the ape matures. Critics also complained that Dart hadn’t done proper comparative analyses with young chimps and gorillas, and he refused to send the fossil to England where such analyses could be done. This refusal irked the British old guard. “It was unpalatable to the scientists in England that the young colonial upstart had presumed to describe the skull himself,” one of Dart’s contemporaries later wrote, “instead of submitting it to his elders and betters.”

It’s hard not to wonder how the era’s colonialist and racist attitudes shaped perceptions. The Taung Child came to light at a time when eugenics was still considered legitimate science, and much of anthropology was devoted to categorizing people into races and arranging them into hierarchies. On the one hand, Western researchers tended to maintain the perverse notion that Africans are more primitive than other people, even less evolved. On the other, they wanted to believe Europe or Asia is where humans originated.

How these views influenced reactions to the Taung Child is not clear-cut. Many skeptics didn’t cite the fossil’s location as a problem, and some acknowledged humans could have evolved in Africa. But deep-seated biases may have made it easier for some researchers to reject the Taung Child and accept Piltdown Man, even though fossil evidence for that claim was also scant, says Sheela Athreya, a paleoanthropologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Newspapers worldwide followed the Taung Child controversy. And while fans sent Dart poems and short stories casting the child as a national hero, he also received letters from disapproving creationists.

Amid it all, Dart had convinced at least one well-known scientist. Robert Broom, a Scottish-born physician living in South Africa and an authority on reptile evolution, recognized that fossils of fully grown A. africanus individuals would be needed to confirm that the Taung Child’s humanlike qualities were retained in adulthood.

In the 1930s and ’40s, Robert Broom unearthed fossils in South African caves, including at Sterkfontein (shown), that helped convince skeptics that Australopithecus was a human ancestor.

NATURAL HISTORY, 1947 (LINDA HALL LIBRARY)

Broom began to find just that evidence in 1936 in caves not far from Johannesburg. Often taking the heavy-handed approach of detonating dynamite to free specimens, he amassed a collection of fossils representing both the young and the old. Limb, spine and hip bones confirmed South Africa was once home to a bipedal ape, and skull bones verified Dart’s inferences about A. africanus’ humanlike teeth.

Even the staunchest Dart doubters couldn’t overlook this evidence. British anatomist Arthur Keith, who had once called Dart’s assertions “preposterous,” conceded. “I am now convinced,” he wrote in a one-paragraph letter to Nature in 1947, “that Prof. Dart was right and that I was wrong; the Australopithecinae are in or near the line which culminated in the human form.”

A few years later, in 1953, researchers exposed Piltdown Man to be a hoax — someone had planted a modern human skull alongside an orangutan jaw with its teeth filed down. Many experts outside of England had never been convinced by the find in the first place. “It was not a complete surprise when he was proved to be a fake,” Science News Letter reported.

Still, Africa’s role in human evolution was not cemented. From the time of the Taung Child’s unearthing through World War II, discoveries of hominin fossils continued in Indonesia and at a cave site near Beijing called Zhoukoudian. These fossils kept the focus on Asia

.

Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania’s eastern Serengeti Plains was home to a lake millions of years ago. Nearby volcanic eruptions helped preserve fossils at the site and enable dating of the finds.

NOEL FEANS/FLICKR (CC BY 2.0)

A series of surprises

It was ultimately a series of discoveries by the husband-wife paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey that shifted the focus. Louis, who had grown up in East Africa as the son of English missionaries, had long believed Africa was the human homeland. While Broom was scouring South Africa in the 1930s, the Leakeys began exploring Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania.

Year after year, the pair failed to find hominin fossils. But they dug up stone tools, suggesting that hominins must have lived there. So they kept looking. One day in 1959, while an ill Louis stayed behind in camp, Mary discovered a skull with small canine teeth like Australopithecus. But the fossil’s giant molar teeth, flaring cheekbones and bony crest running along the top of the skull where massive chewing muscles would have attached suggested something else. Nicknamed Nutcracker Man for its chompers, the species was dubbed Zinjanthropus boisei (it’s now called Paranthropus boisei because it is clearly a close cousin of P. robustus, a South African species found by Broom).

Louis and Mary Leakey spent decades digging in East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge (above) before finding hominin fossils. Their luck changed in 1959 when Mary found a skull belonging to an ancient human relative now known as Paranthropus boisei (below).

ACC. 90-105 – SCIENCE SERVICE, RECORDS, 1920S-1970S, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ARCHIVES/FLICKR

Paranthropus boisei

HUMAN ORIGINS PROGRAM, NMNH, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Until the Zinjanthropus discovery, determining a hominin fossil’s age was largely a guessing game because there was no good way to measure how long ago an ancient fossil had formed. But advances in nuclear physics in the early and mid-20th century led to radioactive dating techniques that allowed age calculations. Using potassium-argon dating, geologists reported in 1961 that Zinjanthropus came from a rock layer about 1.75 million years old. The fossil was three times older than the Leakeys initially suspected. (Later, A. africanus proved to be even older, living about 2 million to 3 million years ago.) The discovery vastly stretched the timescales on which researchers were mapping human evolution.

The surprises didn’t end there. In the early 1960s, the Leakeys’ team recovered fossils of a hominin that lived at roughly the same time as Zinjanthropus but had smaller, more humanlike teeth and a brain notably bigger than that of both Zinjanthropus and Australopithecus. Because of the elevated brain size and details of the hand, the Leakeys argued that this hominin was the one who made the tools at Olduvai Gorge; in 1964, Louis and colleagues placed it in the human genus with the name Homo habilis, or handy man.

The Homo designation was controversial, and to this day paleoanthropologists debate how to classify these fossils. Still, the discoveries at Olduvai Gorge kicked off a paleo-anthropological gold rush in Africa. A 1974 discovery in Ethiopia, for instance, once again expanded the timescale of human evolution. It was one of the most famous discoveries in all of human evolution: the nearly 40 percent complete skeleton of Lucy, known more formally as Australopithecus afarensis, who lived about 3.2 million years ago.

Since then, researchers have shown repeatedly that the hominin fossil record stretches farthest back in Africa. Today, the oldest purported hominins date back some 6 million or 7 million years — to around the time when the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees probably parted ways.

The skeleton known as Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, helped confirm that our ancient ancestors evolved upright walking long before big brains.

JOHN KAPPELMAN/UNIV. OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

On the origin of our species

Even after it became clear that hominins originated in Africa, it was still uncertain where our species, Homo sapiens, began. By the 1980s, paleoanthropologists had largely settled into two camps. One side claimed that, like the earliest hominins, modern humans came from someplace in Africa. The other side championed a more diffuse start across Africa, Asia and Europe.

That same decade saw researchers increasingly relying on genetics to study human origins. Initially, scientists looked to modern people’s DNA to make inferences about ancient populations. But by the late 1990s, geneticists pulled off a feat straight out of science fiction: decoding DNA preserved in hominin fossils.

For paleoanthropologists, studying ancient DNA has been like astronomers getting a new telescope that sees into deep space with a new wavelength of light. It’s revealing things no one even thought to look for, says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “That is the most powerful thing that genetics has handed us.”

And it’s revealed a truly tangled tale.
A trellis or a candelabra

Long before the rise of genetics, or even the discovery of many hominin fossils, unraveling human origins was a quest to explain how the world’s different races came to be. But after the horrors of World War II, anthropologists started to question the validity of race.

“This was a real moral hinge point in the science,” Hawks says. “It was a realization that viewing things through the perspective of race was creating evils in the world.” And it was scientifically dubious, as genetic evidence has shown that people are all so similar that race is more of a cultural concept than a biological phenomenon. Humans, in fact, are less genetically diverse than chimps.

As race was de-emphasized in the 1940s and ’50s, anthropologists started to think more about the mechanisms of evolution and how populations change over time, a direct influence of the “modern synthesis” that had united Darwinian evolution and genetics.

One influential forerunner to this period was anatomist and anthropologist Franz Weidenreich. After leaving Nazi Germany in the 1930s, he ended up in China studying fossils known as Peking Man (now classified as H. erectus), who lived several hundred thousand years ago. Weidenreich noticed that Peking Man shared certain features, such as shovel-shaped incisor teeth, with some present-day East Asians.

From this observation of apparent regional continuity across time, he concluded there had never been just one real-life Garden of Eden. As he wrote in 1947, “Man has evolved in different parts of the old world.”

Rather than picturing a family tree with one main trunk and branches, he envisioned human evolution as a trellis. Vertical lines represented groups of humans from different geographic regions, with the crisscrossing lines of the lattice representing mating between groups. Such gene flow enabled ancient forms across Africa, Asia and Europe to stay a unified species that gradually evolved into modern humans, with some regional variation maintained.

One consequence of all that mixing: “Pure” races never existed.

But a minority of researchers clung to the idea that race was central to understanding human evolution. In 1962, American anthropologist Carleton Coon transformed Weidenreich’s trellis into a candelabra, trimming away the intersecting lines. He argued that modern races stemmed from a common ancestor, but different lines independently evolved into H. sapiens, with races crossing the “sapiens” boundary at different times. In his view, Science News Letter explained, “the Negro race is at least 200,000 years behind the white race on the ladder of evolution.”

It’s a deeply disturbing statement to type today, and it was rejected by many at the time. Coon published his claims during the height of the U.S. civil rights movement, less than a year before Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and shared his dream of racial equality. Advocates of segregation cited the supposed evidence of inferiority to justify their racist agenda. But many experts discounted Coon’s views. It’s an “extreme opinion,” one anthropologist told Science News Letter in 1962, lacking “evidence of any nature to support it.”

Still, Coon’s claims tarnished Weidenreich’s view of human evolution. And in the 1960s and ’70s, interest shifted to much earlier stages of hominin history, many millions of years ago.

Homo sapiens arrives, somehow

In the mid-1980s, anthropologists went back to disentangling the roots of H. sapiens. By then, a basic picture had emerged: Hominins arose in Africa, and H. erectus was the first to venture outside of it, by what we now know was nearly 2 million years ago. In some places, H. erectus persisted for a long time; elsewhere, new groups appeared, such as Neandertals (H. neanderthalensis) in Europe and Asia. At some point, somehow, H. sapiens arrived and its predecessors vanished.

T.D. WHITE ET AL/NATURE 2003

Some of the oldest fossils classified as Homo sapiens still lack some features typical of people today. For instance, a roughly 300,000-year-old skull (top) from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco has a relatively long, flat braincase. Only later does a tall, rounded braincase appear to evolve, as seen in a 195,000-year-old skull (middle, white fills in missing pieces) from Omo Kibish and a 160,000-year-old skull (bottom) from Herto, both in Ethiopia.

That “somehow” became a matter of debate in the 1980s, ’90s and into the 2000s.

Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues revived the latticework of Weidenreich’s trellis model in the 1980s. Under this “multiregional” view, it was difficult to draw a clean line between the end of H. erectus and the beginning of H. sapiens. In fact, Wolpoff argued that H. erectus and other seemingly distinct groups should be folded into our species. Through intergroup mating these earlier “archaic” H. sapiens gradually evolved the features of “anatomically modern” humans.

Critics doubted there could have been enough intergroup mating back then to allow a small, globally scattered population to remain as one. Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, and colleagues proposed instead that H. sapiens originated in just one place — descending from H. erectus or a subsequent species — and then spread across the world. Along the way, these humans replaced other hominins, including Neandertals.

Both theories were difficult to test. For instance, the single-origin idea predicted that the oldest modern human fossils should all be found in just one region. But there weren’t many well-dated fossils from the relevant time period. And seeing ourselves in the fossil record proved challenging. Researchers disagreed on what features defined modern humans. A globular head? A flat face? Something as banal as a chin? These disagreements meant researchers on both sides could often look at the same fossil data and claim support for their position.

Genetic revolution

By the 1980s, DNA offered a new way to investigate the deep past. In 1987, one genetic study shifted momentum toward the single-origin theory, with Africa as the point of origin.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley analyzed mitochondrial DNA from people around the world. Because it’s inherited from mother to child and undergoes no genetic reshuffling, mitochondrial DNA preserves a record of maternal ancestry. African populations showed the greatest genetic diversity. And when the team built a family tree using the genetic data, it had two main branches: One held only African lineages and the other contained lineages from all over the world, including Africa. This pattern suggested the “mother” lineage came from Africa. Based on the estimated rate at which mitochondrial DNA accumulates changes, the team calculated that this African Eve lived about 200,000 years ago.

“Thus,” the team reported in Nature, “we propose that Homo erectus in Asia was replaced without much mixing with the invading Homo sapiens from Africa.”

Like fossils, genetic evidence is open to interpretation. Proponents of multiregional evolution pointed out that the African diversity may not be indicative of greater antiquity but simply a sign that African populations were much larger than other ancient groups. Mitochondrial DNA also isn’t a complete record of the past — given its unusual inheritance, lineages are easily lost over time.

Even with those warnings, the “Out of Africa” model gained followers as genetic evidence piled up. And in the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, new dating techniques and discoveries suggested the earliest H. sapiens fossils came from Africa, at sites in Ethiopia dating to between 195,000 and 160,000 years ago. More recently, scientists linked roughly 300,000-year-old Moroccan fossils to H. sapiens.

A new window into the past opened in 1997. A team led by Svante Pääbo, a geneticist now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, recovered mitochondrial DNA from a Neandertal fossil. It was so different from any modern human’s DNA that it suggested Neandertals must be a separate species. That was another blow to the multiregional model.

But paleoanthropology is like solving a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces; any new piece can change the picture. That’s what happened in 2010. When Pääbo and colleagues assembled the Neandertal’s genetic blueprint, or genome, and compared it with modern human DNA, the team came to a startling conclusion: About 1 to 4 percent of DNA in non-Africans today came from Neandertals.

“We were naïve to think that humans just marched out of Africa, killed some Neandertals and populated the world,” archaeologist John Shea of Stony Brook University in New York later told Science News.

That genetic data seemed to support a compromise model between Out of Africa and multiregionalism. Yes, modern humans originated in Africa, the idea went, but once they expanded into new territories, they mated with other hominins. Hints of such hybridization had been reported in the late ’90s, when some researchers claimed an ancient skeleton from Portugal had a mix of Neandertal and human features.

Interbreeding wasn’t the only shock to come in 2010. Pääbo’s group also analyzed DNA from a finger bone found at Siberia’s Denisova Cave. Both Neandertals and modern humans had once lived there, but the DNA didn’t match either group. For the first time, genetics had revealed a new hominin. These Denisovans are still mysterious, known from only a few bits of bone and teeth, but they too interbred with humans. For instance, Denisovan DNA accounts for about 2 to 4 percent of Melanesian people’s genome.
It’s complicated

Over the last decade, as genetic and fossil revelations have painted a more complex picture of human origins, paleoanthropologists have moved beyond both the multiregional and simple Out of Africa scenarios. Rather than a tree with separate branches or a trellis, human evolution was probably more like a braided stream, a concept traced to paleoanthropologist Xinzhi Wu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who used a river metaphor to describe patterns of human evolution in China. Different human populations may have emerged, with some floating away and petering out and others connecting to varying degrees.

One emerging view suggests that much of early human evolution occurred in Africa, but there was not one place on the continent where H. sapiens was born. Starting at least 300,000 years ago, modern H. sapiens features start to show up in the fossil record. But these features didn’t arise all together. Only through the mating of different populations across Africa did the suite of behavioral and biological traits that define us today crystallize, says Eleanor Scerri, an evolutionary archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

“Our origins lie in the interactions of these different populations,” she says. Understanding those interactions is limited by how little of ancient Africa researchers have explored so far. Western, central and much of northern Africa are terra incognita.

There’s still much to explore in other parts of the world too. A single, unifying explanation of human origins may not be possible, as different evolutionary processes probably shaped human history in different regions, says Athreya, of Texas A&M University.

Making more progress on understanding those processes and our roots will come from new discoveries, technological advances and, importantly, new perspectives. For the last 100 years, our origin story has been told by mostly white, mostly male scientists. Welcoming a more diverse group of researchers into paleoanthropology, Athreya says, will reveal blind spots and biases as scientists add to and amend the tale.

This is, after all, everyone’s story.

About Erin Wayman is the magazine managing editor. She has a master’s degree in biological anthropology from the University of California, Davis and a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University.