In this episode, we talk to the author of the new book, "A Skeleton in the Desert," about the discovery of the skeleton of an ancient human skeleton in the Ethiopian desert, the discovery story behind the discovery, and how the discovery changed the field of archaeology forever. In this episode we discuss the story of the discovery and how it led to the creation of a new kind of detective story in the field and in the lab. We also discuss the challenges and challenges faced by the field team in the search for this ancient skeleton, and the challenges they faced in their efforts to find it. And finally, we discuss what it means to be an archaeologist, and why it's important to be a detective. This episode is brought to you by the National Museum of American Ethnology and the National Park Service. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: CRIMINALS at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase of a copy of his new book. Thank you so much for supporting our new book! We hope you enjoy this episode and look forward to hearing from you in the future episodes! We'll see you next week for our next episode! Thanks again for listening to CRIMES OF THE DECADE! - Tom Bell Tom Bell is an Internationally Syndicated Author, Editor, Author, and Journalist, and Educator. and Founder of CRIMETICALLY Advanced in the best book in the world and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The New York Review of Science and The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, The Harvard Crimson, and The Atlantic, and many other publications around the world. Tom talks about all things science and much more! Tom is an expert in all things related to archaeology, and he's also an avid reader of books, and so much more. His work can be found everywhere. . Tom's book is out on Amazon. His work is excellent, Tom is excellent. He's work is also on the internet is amazing, and you should check out Tom's blog is amazing! and you can find Tom's work on his podcast is worth listening to Tom's podcast is amazing. It's worth checking out Tom s profile on Tom s work is incredible, too, too Tom s book is incredible.
00:00:35.000I had started off working on a different book on the evolution of human locomotion and, I mean, just as an aside, Humans are weird primates in a lot of ways, but one way we're weird is just we're slow,
00:00:51.000we're weak, but we have this ability to walk and run long distances, which is kind of unique.
00:00:57.000So I thought, okay, I mean, certainly a lot of other people have noted that before, but as far as I was concerned, no one had really written the deep history of that.
00:01:07.000So I was going to go sort of investigate the anthropology of where this weird human capacity came from.
00:01:15.000And, you know, so I thought that the early human history like Artie would be this, you know, a little sliver of background before I got to the interesting stuff.
00:01:25.000But anyway, I started reading the Artie papers and they kind of undercut a lot of the things that I had, the research community had taken for granted, or at least challenged them, let's say.
00:01:36.000So anyway, I started talking to the people on the Artie team and then thinking, oh, tell me about how you found this thing.
00:02:00.000And then at some point after this agonizing time of reappraisal, I said, you know what, this is Much better than the actual story I was working on.
00:02:09.000I mean, this is a discovery that has been announced to the world, but it hasn't really been described in detail.
00:02:17.000And it's interesting at a whole number of different levels.
00:02:21.000I mean, there's the anatomy, it's just the exploring the natural history of the human body, literally from head to toe, because the skeleton was so remarkably complete, they had a skull, they had hands.
00:02:32.000They had feet, and the hands and feet were almost complete, which is unheard of.
00:02:38.000I mean, you're lucky to find any skeleton at this age, and to get something that's that complete is really unusual.
00:02:44.000And so there are other parts of the skeleton, too.
00:02:47.000So it sort of became a way to sort of tickle this interest I had in the natural history of the human body and human biology.
00:03:00.000The discovery story, the sheer adventure story was just astounding to me when I started talking to the field crew in particular and hearing about how they, you know, all the challenges in the field.
00:03:11.000And I'm like, oh my god, I mean, this is like collision of cultures in the Ethiopian desert.
00:03:15.000You know, the Iginist Afar people and the Highland Ethiopians and then the foreigners, you know, the Americans, the Japanese, you know, coming in and all.
00:03:23.000You know, meeting and the initial meetings were not friendly.
00:03:34.000And then the drama of discovery and there's bullets flying overhead and there's this excitement of finding one little piece and another little piece.
00:03:40.000I mean, anyway, to make a long story short, I kind of stumbled on this.
00:03:45.000And every time I turned over a rock, there was something interesting.
00:04:05.000So in other words, when you find a skeleton or something like that, the truths that it contains, the scientific revelations aren't immediately evident.
00:04:16.000You know, you look at the skeleton and say, oh, that's, you know, these people spend years studying this thing, measuring, you know, thinking about it.
00:04:23.000There was also this other detective story that sort of followed the field.
00:04:28.000There's a lab detective story that sort of followed the field detective story that went along with it.
00:04:34.000And then, of course, when this thing finally was revealed to the world, there was this, again, another clash, you know, this time a clash in the world of science, in academia, about people taking issue with the interpretation or denying its importance or trying to Trying to bury the skeleton again,
00:04:53.000if you will, with inattention and denial.
00:04:57.000So anyway, long story short, I didn't set out to do this, but it just sort of dawned on me that this was like a huge scientific saga.
00:07:13.000There's a lot of disbelief because the skeleton was so surprising in a lot of ways and so contrary to the predictions that many people in science had made that there was kind of like a head explode for a lot of people.
00:07:31.000So we should break down those particular things that are different than what was expected, right?
00:07:42.000I mean, if you saw, you know, if we could go back in the time machine and look at it, you know, this thing, the species name is Artipithecus ramidus.
00:07:50.000That's kind of a mouthful, but Arti is the individual skeleton that they found.
00:07:56.000That's, you know, the individual, like your joke, you're the individual...
00:09:27.000And they have, you know, they're different proportions, but they all have that in common.
00:09:29.000They got longer forelimbs than hind limbs.
00:09:32.000Artie was a big surprise because it actually had longer legs than forelimbs.
00:09:37.000I mean, you know, it definitely has bigger hands, has longer arms than we do, but...
00:09:44.000That was a surprise, at least to me and I think to some of the researchers.
00:09:50.000I was talking before about these kind of surprises that appear after the fact.
00:09:56.000Well, that was one, because the bones are broken.
00:10:00.000These guys on this research team, it's called the Middle Outwash Research Project.
00:10:05.000They spent a lot of time, you know, reconstructing this and then estimating, you know, what are the lengths of the pieces that are not there, and then, you know, run all kinds of regressions and a lot of calculations and stuff.
00:10:17.000So that revelation was sort of a delayed bombshell, if you will, that it actually had these limb proportions that were more like a biped.
00:11:52.000But anyway, what they all have in common is they knock a walk.
00:11:55.000So they got these long fingers, and when they walk, you know, I mean, they, you know, do this.
00:12:00.000I mean, if you look at a video sometime, you'll see it.
00:12:02.000And, you know, because our two closest cousins both do that, you know, there was a perfectly plausible theory that human ancestors did it well.
00:12:14.000So we evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor.
00:12:17.000I mean, there was even a cover story in Nature that...
00:12:21.000The headline was almost that, you know, humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor.
00:13:42.000There's a debate about just how long ago the last common ancestor of humans and chimps lived.
00:13:50.000It's probably at least anywhere from 1.5 million years before Artie to, some estimates put it even further back than that.
00:14:01.000There's another school of thought that's kind of emerged that says, well, it still could be a knuckle-walking ancestor that But it seems so fascinating that it has these really long arms,
00:14:24.000but that there's no evidence whatsoever of not only knuckle-walking in that species, but knuckle-walking as an ancestry.
00:14:34.000Yeah, and that blew the mind of a lot of people.
00:14:36.000And there's a school of thought, of critic out there, sort of...
00:14:43.000Okay, so this thing was announced in 2009. It surprised a lot of people.
00:16:04.000It's just like, what can we find about human evolution?
00:16:06.000But anyway, one of the big burning research questions at the time was, what came before Lucy?
00:16:12.000Now, you've probably heard about Lucy.
00:16:14.000Lucy was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. It was discovered by a guy named Don Johansson, an American guy, with his assistant, a guy named Tom Gray.
00:17:57.000So, meanwhile, Ethiopia is going into this period of turmoil.
00:18:03.000So, one of the big elements in this story is the difficulty of doing this kind of work in a place like Ethiopia.
00:18:13.000So, right around the time that Duluth Sea was discovered, the ancient monarchy of Ethiopia, headed by the last emperor, Haile Selassie, fell.
00:18:26.000It traces its roots to biblical times and claims to be the descendants of King Solomon and Queen Sheba.
00:18:35.000It's an ancient monarchy, but it hadn't really modernized, and then it was toppled by student activists, the military, this whole kind of coalition that wanted to modernize Ethiopia.
00:18:46.000Well, what happens is the power is seized by the military.
00:21:41.000So they find a tooth and then they start finding these pieces and walking kilometers after kilometers, day after day, and then find a few more elements.
00:21:54.000Anyway, over a couple of years, they collect enough to realize that this is a new species.
00:22:01.000But at this point, it's just like a few teeth, a few bone fragments and stuff.
00:22:06.000But anyway, then in 1994, They find the skeleton, and that's kind of an interesting piece, too, because it's kind of against all odds, and I can tell you how that happened if you're interested.
00:23:31.000I mean he's got this encyclopedic knowledge and he's got hair trigger bullshit detector and that's why a lot of people are afraid of him.
00:23:39.000Anyway, but he's also very exacting in the field.
00:23:44.000And, you know, so when they realize that they're in such a dense...
00:23:49.000They're starting to, you know, pick up fossils, you know, he organizes people to basically crawl, you know, hands and knees in these areas.
00:23:56.000He lays down, like, these lanes in the fossil-rich areas, either, you know, carve...
00:24:03.000You know lines in the sand with his little walking stick or he sometimes will put down ropes you know and it's like you know Joe your job is to walk shoulder to shoulder next to you know whoever and all 10 of you are just gonna crawl this space hands and knees and you're gonna pick up every damn thing that you see even if you think it's a rock put it in there put it in the can because we're not gonna know for sure until we get back and look at it more closely and and Anyway,
00:24:35.000There's a team working underneath him.
00:24:37.000Another character in this whole thing is one of Tim's former students, a guy named Burhani Asfaw, who's Ethiopian.
00:24:47.000There's an interesting backstory with Burhani.
00:24:49.000He had been a student in the time of the Revolution, and like a lot of other students, he was swept up in the whole Political reform movement, and like a lot of other students, he was horrified to see what happened when the military dictatorship came in.
00:25:07.000He was arrested, he was put in jail, he was tortured.
00:25:14.000He told me he went into prison on a chain gang with like seven other guys, and when he's released two years, or excuse me, six months later, there's only two guys alive.
00:25:24.000This is a story of that generation, and the suffering that Ethiopia went through at that time is astounding, and most Americans would find it hard to believe.
00:25:36.000But anyway, he's a member of this crew.
00:25:39.000There's a number of other Ethiopian guys.
00:25:41.000So part of the mission of this team has been, obviously, to find fossils, but they sort of made it a dual mission to Train Africans.
00:25:52.000But, you know, if you look at a lot of the old, you know, documentaries about human origins, you see people, I mean, oftentimes they're like, a lot of European people, you know, Americans and, you know, Africa's the country of human origins, but historically,
00:26:09.000at least, for a long time, Africans were not, they were hardly represented in the ranks of the scientists.
00:26:28.000And another guy who actually found the first piece of art, his name is Yohannes Haile Selassie.
00:26:33.000He came, he was trained by Burhani and Tim.
00:26:37.000So anyway, one of these days, he's out there with this group of people, and they're crawling across, and he finds a little bit of bone, like a little hand bone.
00:26:54.000And so, you know, and at first, you know, in this fascia sandwich, everything's broken.
00:27:03.000You know, the isolated tooth here, the little bone fragment there, you know.
00:27:07.000No one's expecting that if you find a piece like that, there's necessarily going to be anything else from that skeleton that you find because the stuff is just scattered and It came from God, eroded out of God knows where.
00:27:19.000But anyway, a few days later, they go back, they do the crawl again, they start finding more pieces and then more pieces.
00:27:24.000And then, you know, there's sieving, which is basically like, you know, taking dirt and shaking it through a screen and then, you know, seeing what's there.
00:27:34.000And there's, of course, a lot of rocks and all kinds of crap, but they start finding some bones in there.
00:27:39.000And then, you know, light bulb goes off.
00:27:40.000Oh, there's multiple elements of a skeleton here.
00:27:44.000Or multiple elements of an individual.
00:29:31.000So, it's pretty rare to be lucky enough to find something like this.
00:29:38.000Okay, so in that part of Africa, there are a lot of predators, you know, and there's hyenas.
00:29:41.000I mean, now and then, you know, because they find, like, you know, along with these fossils of things like Arnie, they also find, like, you know, ancient hyenas, ancient big cats, you know, all these things that were, like...
00:32:04.000Now there's another thing that has to happen.
00:32:06.000It has to be in a depositional environment that will encourage the bone to fossilize and not just degrade.
00:32:14.000There's different places that are conducive to that.
00:32:16.000One is a place where there's a lake or something covering it with sediment.
00:32:24.000This particular place, they think, was probably an ancient floodplain.
00:32:27.000So somewhere near a river where there'd be overbank flooding every now and then, it would Put on these layers of silt over time, and then the stuff would just be buried in the silt, and then it would fossilize.
00:32:36.000But anyway, to answer your question, you could have a herd of antelope or whatever, 100 antelope, and they'd all meet their ends in various ways, but none of them could actually be fossilized in the end.
00:32:51.000So it's a pretty small minority of things that have the courtesy to leave their bones for us.
00:32:59.000And then, so that's one element that makes this thing so hard.
00:33:02.000And then the other one is just, you know, you have to be, if you are the fossil hunter, you know, the paleontologist, you have to come along at the right time when that fossil is coming out of the ground.
00:33:16.000You know, so basically this stuff gets buried, you know, in our layer cake.
00:33:23.000Other layers stack up and then fossilize it, but then they come to the surface again, usually by geological faulting or erosion.
00:33:33.000And once the stuff comes to the surface, some fossils are like rock, and they'll last for a long, long, long time.
00:33:41.000But other stuff, like this particular skeleton, are actually really chalky.
00:33:46.000And, I mean, Tim White, the fellow who was...
00:33:53.000Sort of guiding this whole operation says that it could come apart in your hands if you didn't handle it right.
00:34:04.000So they just happened to have the good fortune to kind of show up in this spot when it was coming out of the ground just enough to be found but it hadn't been on the surface for long enough to sort of be degraded and stomped on by animals and blown around.
00:34:20.000Because once the stuff comes to the surface it doesn't It's on a slope, right?
00:34:47.000It's putting yourself in the position to find things, to spot them if they're on the ground, and then to do the detective work to find the original resting place.
00:34:59.000Tim White, this guy mentioned he's the paleoanthropologist.
00:35:06.000When they found this scatter of stuff on the ground, the question is, where did it come from?
00:36:21.000Okay, so I think they found the first piece of the skeleton in, I think it was sometime in November of 94. And then, meanwhile, there's all kinds of stuff going on.
00:36:31.000So they're doing surveys elsewhere, because as I mentioned before, this particular project, they've got stuff, sediments of all kinds of ages, and it's huge.
00:36:41.000And so, you know, they've got a lot of places to look.
00:36:47.000If you're in this line of work, you don't start digging...
00:36:50.000Until you have a pretty good reason to believe there's something there, because otherwise you're just going to waste your time, and you don't have much time in the field.
00:37:00.000You've got to pay to sustain these expeditions in the desert.
00:37:03.000There's people running around with guns.
00:37:08.000We haven't talked about this, but there's this tribal warfare going on there.
00:37:18.000So you don't waste your time digging unless you have a pretty good reason to believe that there's something there.
00:37:24.000So anyway, they find this first piece in November, and then I think they come back some days later and then start finding these other pieces that I mentioned.
00:37:36.000It was some weeks later before they started digging.
00:37:45.000Waiting until there was enough evidence to really strongly indicate that there was something there, and some of that was just juggling the conflicting priorities in the field.
00:37:56.000And one of those conflicting priorities is actually they were searching for another, what they hoped would be another skeleton quite close to this one, just maybe a couple hundred meters away, because they had found a nice arm bone there the year before, And then dug this hole,
00:38:12.000and dug, and dug, and dug, and they dug for years there, but never found any more of that creature.
00:38:17.000So that's kind of an example of what is not at all an unusual experience, where you've got your hopes up, you dig, and then, dang it, there's nothing there.
00:38:26.000But in this case, there was something there, and it was a lot there.
00:38:38.000Of course, unclear when you're starting to dig, you know.
00:38:42.000But, you know, I think over the days and weeks as they were, you know, slowly pulling pieces out of this excavation site, which is a very slow process.
00:38:55.000I mean, they're literally working with like...
00:39:00.000I mean, there's a lot of pictures of Tim there chipping away at this, and his students, they're using brushes to brush because you don't want to go in there with a trowel because you're going to destroy something.
00:39:12.000So over the days and weeks, they discover there's no duplication of parts, which is a strong indication that it might be Excuse me, one individual.
00:39:24.000Are they filming all this so that if there are skeptics, because with anthropologists and paleontologists, there are a lot of skeptics, right?
00:39:33.000So are they preparing for this and filming every step of the way?
00:39:38.000Not every step of the way, but Tim White is a relentless record keeper.
00:39:46.000And he has this voluminous photo archive, for one.
00:39:54.000And when the excavation started, as you said, they did set up a video camera on a tripod and train it on the excavation era and just let it roll.
00:40:08.000VHS? Yeah, I don't know if it was VSS or Micro something.
00:40:12.000But anyway, so they're filming all this stuff.
00:40:14.000So by the time I come along, you know, many, almost 20 years later, Tim lets me see all this stuff.
00:40:21.000And to me, this was like an absolute goldmine.
00:40:24.000Because I, you know, this thing that I would normally have to reconstruct, you know, after the fact, which, you know, I wouldn't be able to see the conversations that people told me what they said, I'd have to...
00:40:35.000Treat that with some skepticism because how reliable was this person's memory after 20 years?
00:40:39.000I mean, I couldn't really be there in any way.
00:40:43.000But now that I have this videotape, I'm watching while these guys are digging up these little pieces.
00:40:50.000I'm watching while Tim is exposing this smile of this ancient I'm a member of the human family.
00:41:03.000And there's hours and hours of this stuff.
00:41:05.000So I can actually hear the excitement and then all the other kind of cross-talk, the jokes, the fact that they're playing the Grateful Dead in the background or Bob Marley or listening to the BBC, all this stuff.
00:41:17.000So to me, as a reporter, that was like the equivalent of them finding the skeleton.
00:41:27.000For me, having this trove of records, It was just such an astounding jackpot for me because it let me be there.
00:42:01.000This operation went on for years and over the years they collected a lot of fragments from other individuals.
00:42:07.000So I'm sure they have pretty much all the teeth or pretty close to all the teeth.
00:42:12.000I mean the number of teeth they have is It's in the book somewhere.
00:42:17.000I don't remember the number, but it's well over 100. So with Artie in the skeleton, is this the only example of this particular member of this period in evolution?
00:42:33.000Or are there other of the similar time frame that they found?
00:43:09.000Bigger member, they're kind of jokingly nicknamed Bigfoot.
00:43:13.000And they're aging these creatures based on the biological material that's around it?
00:43:20.000Yeah, well, this is interesting, and this, if you read the book, this becomes part of the sort of scientific detective story, is all the techniques that are used.
00:43:29.000And for me as a reporter, this was actually part of the richness of this story, was getting to learn about all these component sciences and That go into paleoanthropology.
00:43:40.000It's definitely a multidisciplinary field.
00:43:42.000But one of the most important sub-disciplines within this is geology.
00:43:50.000And the reason is that geology gives you the timeline to answer the question that you just asked.
00:43:56.000And so there's different methods of dating.
00:44:00.000If you're in the field, you can begin to make estimates about the age of the sediments based on We're good to go.
00:44:39.000You could think of geology as like a layer cake, right?
00:44:42.000So let's just say, like, here are the ancient layers that were laid down like I was describing.
00:44:45.000Let's just say this one is a million years old, this one's two million, this one's three, this one's four.
00:44:51.000Okay, so how do you know how old things are?
00:44:54.000Well, the main method of dating is called radiometric dating.
00:44:58.000And so that basically means that they find volcanic ashes and lavas everywhere.
00:45:03.000That are, because this is on the edge, the Great Rafale, there's like tons of volcanoes all up and down eastern Africa, and every once in a while they erupt, and they spew out, you know, ashes and lavas, and the stuff settles on the ground.
00:45:16.000In some cases, I mean, these ash layers are really thick, I mean, like several feet thick, and you think, oh my god, what an apocalyptic eruption that must have been when that happened.
00:45:27.000But anyway, it's great for the geologists, because they can take these ashes, and they take them into the lab, and then They can tell basically by the...
00:45:59.000A yardstick to measure how old something is.
00:46:04.000So they can't figure out the age of the individual bones, but you can figure out the layers of the ashes and lavas that are above it and below it.
00:46:26.000So with this particular skeleton, Very conveniently, an ash in the layer above it and another one below it.
00:46:35.000And when they did the dating, they both were calculated to be 4.4 million years old.
00:46:40.000So that means that the area between them was deposited in a pretty short period of time.
00:46:49.000I mean, you know, this method dating doesn't give you it down to like the year or even, you know, tens of years, so no one knows like just how long that period of time was, but it's probably on the order of Maybe a hundred years, something in the hundreds of years.
00:47:26.000I'm not a geologist, so I don't want to speak beyond my layer of knowledge here.
00:47:33.000With this one, they brought it down to 4.4, so that's pretty tight.
00:47:39.000There's certainly a margin of uncertainty or margin of error in there that they reported, and it's some long number with a lot of decimal points, which I don't remember.
00:47:48.000Long story short, that 4.4 is a pretty good date, and for stuff of this age, it's It's quite solid.
00:47:59.000Now, when you have a being like this that's so unusual, it's not like anything they've encountered before with the longer legs and the thumbs on the feet and the whole deal.
00:48:08.000When they're piecing this together, how do they know exactly where everything goes?
00:48:45.000You don't get a fever confused with a thumb phalanx.
00:48:51.000I don't have this knowledge, but certainly those people do.
00:48:56.000They can pick up a tooth and say, oh yeah, this is the upper right side of the mouth.
00:49:00.000The people that know skeletons can do all this mental rotation in their head And they can often do it from fragments of bones.
00:49:12.000So it's not the whole tooth, but like a fraction of the tooth or a fraction of some foot bone.
00:49:18.000And to me, that was actually one of the fascinating things about this, is how these people that know their skeletons can read the revelations in the skeletons.
00:49:32.000Do you know the story of Gigantopithecus, how they discovered that?
00:49:40.000There was an anthropologist who found, I believe he found a tooth.
00:49:44.000And he was like, what the hell is this?
00:49:46.000And he realized it was a primate tooth, but it was much larger than anything they'd ever seen before.
00:49:50.000And then he asked them to, I think it was, I want to say 1920s or 1930s.
00:49:54.000And then they, I mean, I don't think they've gotten anything more than some jaw bones and teeth.
00:49:59.000And they realized it's a bipedal hominid that was somewhere in the neighborhood of eight feet tall.
00:50:06.000It wouldn't have been a hominid if it was...
00:50:08.000A hominid, at least in the old meaning, the meaning has changed, but means member of the human family, which was basically after our split from the chimps.
00:50:17.000Now they call them hominines with an I-N at the end.
00:50:24.000Gigantopithecus, I believe, is a Miocene ape.
00:50:28.000It's a primate, but you wouldn't consider it a member of the human family.
00:50:32.000It's just one of many Weird things from this period they call the Miocene.
00:50:41.000I fucked the terminology up, but the point I was getting at is that just from looking at a jawbone, they can figure out what this thing was and how tall it was.
00:51:04.000Believe it or not, the head of the femur is often used as kind of a ball and socket joint on your thigh bone is often used, was used in Artificus, in fact, to scale different parts.
00:51:18.000So they've got this complete skeleton.
00:51:36.000Like Tim White, the paleoanthropologist, he calls them carnivore hors d'oeuvres, because you're lying, your carcass is there, and the pack of hyenas comes in, and here's a handout for the carnivore.
00:51:50.000So it's remarkably complete, but there are some pieces missing, and there are some pieces that are just present but really damaged.
00:51:58.000Most of the spine is not there, and it sure would be nice To have the spine, because you can tell a lot about the design of the creature, the organization of the creature, if you know how its spinal segments are divided.
00:52:13.000The pelvis, they have a lot of, but it's pretty distorted by geology.
00:52:18.000And some of the limb bones are fragmentary.
00:52:25.000For example, they don't have a knee joint, which sure would be nice to have, because that's an interesting bit of data to figure out just how this creature was a biped.
00:52:37.000So anyway, there are certainly pieces missing, and I'm sure that science would love to have them.
00:53:10.000To reconstruct the skeletal elements is not terribly hard for these guys to do.
00:53:19.000I think in one case there might have been a question about one of the hand bones There was a phalanx of one of the fingers and there was a question, did it go in this finger or another finger?
00:53:30.000But for the most part, it's easy for these experts to know where an element goes in the skeleton.
00:53:37.000So there's pictures of the skeleton laid out not long after discovery.
00:54:02.000Some of the pictures were published of it, but when it came out of the ground, I think it had been kind of pounded down just by the force of ecology.
00:54:11.000So it was like if you took a pile driver and just whap!
00:55:18.000It's actually the right side that was reconstructed, but the left side is the actual skull itself, which is a bunch of pieces, but the teeth are remarkably intact.
00:55:27.000The other part that was fascinating to me was that it doesn't have canines like a chimp.
00:55:36.000Yeah, and actually that was one of the big, well, number one, that's one of the indicators, the strong indicators that tells us that this is something somewhere in the human lineage, number one.
00:55:50.000Because we have, as you mentioned, canines that are different than most other apes.
00:55:57.000The other Most other primates have these interlocking canines.
00:56:00.000I mean, chimps and gorillas are two closest cousins both to do.
00:56:26.000So Artie's canines are certainly bigger than yours or mine or later members of the human family, but it shows that this, what they call canine reduction, was already well underway by the time Artie lived.
00:56:39.000And actually, this is an important point because the teeth, the canines in particular, are kind of a diagnostic feature of these early members of the human family.
00:56:51.000Because when you get back in time, The clues that tell you that this is a member of the human family, they become much more subtle because these creatures get more and more ape-like and less and less human-like as you go back in time.
00:57:07.000So canines are a sort of reliable way, or let's say a reliable indicator to tell you that you're looking at some...
00:57:46.000The sort of predominant interpretation is that this is a sign of intraspecies aggression.
00:57:57.000Because, you know, with gorillas, for example, they Their mating structure is that there's a big alpha male, I'll call him a silverback, and he lords over this harem of females and tends to sire the kids.
00:58:13.000And there are these bachelor males that will sometimes challenge alpha male and try to take them out.
00:58:23.000So natural selection, in the case of gorillas, would favor these big Sharp canines and then these big brute bodies.
00:58:35.000In some cases, they're twice as big as the females.
00:58:37.000And this is all interpreted as intraspecies aggression for mating.
00:58:43.000Now, humans are interesting because we don't have these big canines.
00:58:49.000And actually, this factors into the Artie story because one of the...
00:58:53.000The main investigator is an evolutionary theorist who interpreted art.
00:58:58.000He was a fellow named Owen Lovejoy, and he's from Kent State University in the United States.
00:59:03.000And he has a theory that what you're looking at with canine reduction is a social revolution, that this is monogamy happening, basically.
00:59:15.000That instead of, you know, some gorilla-like mating structure, you know, where you have, like, Instead of like the harem or a mating structure like chimps or bonobos, which are more promiscuous, but certainly starting to not monogamous.
00:59:32.000But he thinks that the canine reduction we see in the human lineage is because there was pair bonding and that the reduction in canines is a sign of reduced aggression in our species.
00:59:47.000And this was He believes one of the early human major adaptations that That's got to be a very controversial theory, isn't it?
01:00:01.000Because there's a lot of paleontologists that think that, even with human beings, there's a lot of people that think that human beings weren't really monogamous until they figured out whose kids there were.
01:01:07.000It is a legitimate Way to describe a baiting strategy that exists in many places in nature.
01:01:17.000Okay, so yeah, and there's other theories that have ascribed human sexuality to something more like a chimp.
01:01:29.000It's promiscuous, and especially, as the book mentions, this whole model of a chimp-like ancestor has been prevalent in anthropology for For decades, and one subcategory there is mating strategy.
01:01:52.000If you ever want to amuse yourself, read about theories about human mating strategies.
01:01:58.000There's all kinds of ways that people have explained our peculiarities and our Yeah, our sexuality and all that stuff.
01:02:09.000Now, what we're looking at already, we're talking about an animal that predates weapons, correct?
01:03:15.000And actually, surprisingly, weapons arrive pretty late in human origins.
01:03:22.000I... The figures in the book, and I don't want to say it now because I don't remember what it is offhand, but the early tools are things like, you know, choppers and then hand axes.
01:03:33.000But those are tools for processing food, you know.
01:03:38.000They're not, I mean, the weapons come late.
01:03:40.000It's kind of interesting that, you know, the things that are identifiable weapons are...
01:03:45.000Like spears and atlatls and stuff like that.
01:03:48.000Yeah, or, you know, particularly like lithic things, you know, that leave a...
01:03:53.000Excuse me, leave a, you know, that are stone, that are preserved.
01:04:13.000Yeah, so they can make some determinations based on a couple of lines of evidence.
01:04:21.000One is the microscopic striations in the teeth, because when you eat something, you know, whatever you eat leaves kind of like scratches on the surface of the dental material, so they can make some inferences there.
01:04:37.000Another one is using This gets kind of complicated, but they can make some inferences about what kind of plant foods they ate based on...
01:04:49.000There's two kinds of plants, like C3 or C4, and this refers to two different forms of photosynthesis.
01:04:58.000C4 plants tend to be more open, sunny sort of thing.
01:05:04.000C3 plants tend to be more shady things.
01:05:08.000I mean, this is not an absolute difference, but it's an important one.
01:05:12.000Make some inferences there that Ari's diet was mostly like C3 things, which tends to be things that are in more kind of wooded areas, not the open food of the grasslands and that sort of thing.
01:05:27.000I mean, it did have some C4 in its diet, but it's mostly C3. So mostly vegetables?
01:05:36.000Yeah, they think it's probably omnivorous.
01:05:39.000I've heard some speculation that maybe if they are maybe eating some bugs and stuff like that.
01:05:45.000I mean, the interesting thing is you can get this C3 or C4 signature from eating the plant foods directly, but you can also get it if you eat...
01:05:54.000Another animal that's been eating one of those two things.
01:05:57.000So this kind of moves up through the food chain.
01:05:59.000Is there speculation as to what natural selection benefit there would be for it to stand up?
01:06:07.000Yeah, so this actually gets back to that monogamy theory I was telling you about, which is admittedly quite controversial.
01:06:15.000But so what Owen Lovejoy theorizes, and this was presented when With the announcement of the series of papers when Artie was finally revealed to the world in 2009. Owen's theory is that monogamy is a mating strategy.
01:06:55.000So this, of course, you know, why did humans stand upright is the million-dollar question of human origins.
01:07:01.000I mean, Darwin tried to answer it, you know, and many, many people have tried to answer it.
01:07:07.000There's more theories than you can shake a stick at, you know.
01:07:10.000I mean, Darwin said, you know, people stood up because they were using tools, you know, to free the hands.
01:07:15.000And other people have said, no, it's because they were Trying to minimize sun exposure because if you're standing up in a hot place, you're getting less sun.
01:07:25.000People have said it's phallic display.
01:08:57.000It's because people blow out knees or blow out hips.
01:09:01.000Standing upright also causes these vulnerabilities in your back because of the way the spine is kind of contorted with humans.
01:09:09.000So why on earth would this species do this stupid thing?
01:09:14.000And why are there 8 billion of us here now if we did this stupid thing?
01:09:20.000So Owen's theory is that it was actually a sacrifice in locomotion, but what it did do is it gave us this big payoff In reproduction.
01:09:32.000So he thinks that standing erect was to free the hands that, within the context of these monogamous relationships I was telling you before, so that the males, you know, guys like you and me, became provisioners.
01:09:46.000So they basically became, the males became partners in the child rearing, and this increased survivorship.
01:09:54.000So it's an interesting thing, like, other apes, you know, are not very...
01:11:47.000Does the fact that Artie was basically intact despite being around predators and scavengers and all these different things, and the fact that Artie was walking on hind legs despite the fact that walking on hind legs makes you more vulnerable,
01:12:05.000does this signify that it was in some sort of a protected environment where it wasn't at such risk of predation?
01:12:14.000Well, remember, these things can go, you know, in terms of escaping predators.
01:12:19.000Yeah, I mean, it can go up a tree, and I mean, I'm not, you know, between you and me, I don't have an opposable toe, but if I were out on, you know, out in some dangerous place in Africa when the sun is going down, and, you know, the hyenas were coming out, I would be probably heading up a tree,
01:12:36.000too, and I would recommend you do the same.
01:12:49.000You know, I mean, there are other animals that, you know, monkeys that live there that have the same, you know, the same challenge today.
01:12:58.000But actually, I'll tell you, just a little interesting aside here and sort of the fieldwork part of the detective story.
01:13:04.000So the fact that they found this skeleton that was remarkably complete It was all the more miraculous because of the condition of all the other stuff they were finding until that point.
01:13:14.000So Tim White, the main paleoanthropologist on the team, he's very experienced and has been working in Africa for a long time.
01:13:24.000And when he looked at the fossil assemblage, the word that he used, it was ravaged.
01:13:33.000You know, from their first days on the site because they're finding all these fragments of things that have clearly been chewed apart.
01:13:42.000And instead of finding teeth, they're finding pieces of teeth and like bones that are chewed to splinters.
01:13:47.000In some cases, they actually found things that are etched by digestive acid.
01:13:55.000So basically what that means is that, you know, it was eaten by some carnivore, you know, passed through the digestive tract and shit out, you know, left in some pile, you know, that then, you know, degrades, but the tooth is still there.
01:14:06.000But they can see, like, the surface has this, you know, kind of altered texture to it that tells these people that, yeah, there's digestive acid at work on this thing.
01:14:21.000Because that was the signature of all this fossil sandwich that they were seeing.
01:14:27.000If you're just getting teeth and things that have been passed through the adjecture, track record and splinters, you're not hoping for a skeleton.
01:14:38.000You're not going to find a skeleton here.
01:14:40.000But somehow, just by great luck, they did.
01:14:45.000For some reason, this carcass wound up on the ground.
01:14:55.000Was that one of the reasons why it was treated with so much skepticism?
01:15:07.000No one doubts the existence of the skeleton.
01:15:17.000There's so many things that are so specific, like the carbon dating of the upper and lower layers, the fact that you have so many bones, the fact that they're not repeating, the fact that It's clearly some sort of a primate, and you've put all this stuff together and reconstructed the skull.
01:16:08.000But there's a great deal of skepticism in the field.
01:16:12.000There's people who I talk to who doubt that any of these early species Species that have been identified as hominins or early members of the human family.
01:16:25.000They doubt that any of them really are, or that it's just unknowable.
01:16:28.000So there's kind of like this, I don't know, almost in some people, this almost like nihilistic view that you can really ever know.
01:16:45.000The validation of Arti as a member I think there is a growing number of people who are accepting it.
01:16:58.000And there's some people with a lot of outside people who have basically endorsed what the research team Whether it's a direct ancestor or one of your extinct aunt-uncle.
01:17:14.000Maybe it's not your grandfather, but maybe it's your aunt-uncle.
01:17:27.000Another one is the arguments that the discovery team has made about what it reveals about the last common ancestor of humans and apes.
01:17:39.000For example, we were talking before about this model of a chimp-like common ancestor of humans and African apes.
01:17:52.000The ARTI team spent 15 years studying this thing before they announced it to the world.
01:17:59.000They believed and strenuously argued that The skeleton shows you that the common ancestor of humans and the African apes was in fact not like a chimp, nowhere near as chimp-like as everyone thought,
01:18:17.000because there's no vestige of knuckle-walking.
01:18:19.000I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that gets into sort of like some anatomical, very esoteric anatomical stuff.
01:18:27.000So if you read the book, if you're interested, because it gets into all that.
01:18:34.000So anyway, that's part of the controversy.
01:18:36.000So there is a sort of subset of the critics who have come to accept Artie as indeed a member of the human family.
01:18:49.000They placed it correctly in the human family tree, but they are not yet convinced that it falsifies this idea of a chimp-like ancestor.
01:19:00.000Their argument would be, well, Sure, in the ways that Artie may have still descended from this chimp-like ancestor, but it evolved these new adaptations that sort of erased those from its anatomy.
01:19:21.000The great thing about this skeleton, actually, because it is so complete and because it It was released with this huge package of this whole series of paper about the hand, the foot, the pelvis, the skull.
01:19:36.000There was a lot of fodder there for debate and disagreement, and that's what's been happening for the last 10 years.
01:19:46.000Now, when they talk about a chimp ancestor, a chimp-like ancestor, is this just because chimps are around and we know genetically that we're at least closely related to chimps?
01:20:44.000Actually, as it happens, I think some of the The estimates that are kind of furthest out are in fact 12 million, but somewhere between 6 and 12 million where humans and chimps split.
01:20:57.000But they do think that once upon a time there was a split between humans and chimps.
01:21:02.000So if you go back far enough, you'll find a chimp or something like a chimp.
01:21:06.000Well, you'll find an ancestor of a chimp.
01:21:09.000The big question is, does it look like a modern chimp or does it look like something you've never seen before?
01:21:16.000Or does it look like something that's sort of...
01:21:18.000A more primitive version of Ardipithecus.
01:22:38.000There's this huge research community that studied chimpanzees.
01:22:42.000Either it studied them in the field doing observational studies or studied them in the lab to try to find clues about the origin of human locomotion or anything.
01:22:53.000I mean, chimps kind of became this all-purpose model.
01:23:06.000It's so fascinating to me that there was a time where this thing didn't exist, we didn't know it existed, and that it was only 1994. And that our understanding of where the human species came from relies on these perfect conditions To happen and then someone to come across this thing at just the right time and that this person has to be a skilled researcher that knows how to handle it.
01:23:35.000Our understanding of where we came from, as much as we know about the internet and space travel and the galaxy, it's so crazy to me that we need to piece together our understanding Yeah.
01:24:10.000We're pretty certain that early human origins was in Africa.
01:24:15.000I mean, that's pretty clear at this point.
01:24:18.000And humans were confined to Africa, as far as we know, until about two million years ago when some of these primitive species started to go out.
01:24:30.000Now, you often hear people say, well, the Great Rift Valley is the cradle of humanity, or South Africa is the cradle of humanity, or the Eden, or whatever.
01:24:38.000And these places were not necessarily the only places that human ancestors dwelt.
01:24:46.000The reason we know about these things is just because these are the countries that Where the geological conditions favor the preservation of fossils.
01:24:57.000And so there's this whole mythology, you know, it's sort of about like, well, this place or that place is like the Eden of humanity or whatever.
01:25:05.000I mean, a lot of that is just self-promotion, tourist board stuff, sometimes science is self-promoting.
01:25:12.000Again, what they should be saying is we're not the...
01:25:17.000The birthplace of humanity, we're the graveyard.
01:25:20.000But that doesn't have the same PR appeal.
01:25:25.000But if you look at where fossils are found, like look at a map of Africa, it's a tiny portion of the African continent has a fossil record.
01:25:36.000And there's Ethiopia we've talked about, there's Kenya, there's South Africa, there's different geological conditions there that explain You know, South Africa things tend to be preserved in caves,
01:25:51.000tend to be a little, not quite as old as the oldest things from the Rift Valley.
01:25:56.000But we have a few scatterings of things elsewhere, like in Chad and some other countries, but most of Africa is totally unknown, the fossil record.
01:26:06.000And so there could be a large part of the human story of just, you know, evolutionary biology in general that are just Just gone, or at least not yet discovered.
01:26:17.000So our windows into the past are like these little pinholes.
01:26:22.000And the places where you find those things, like in this Afar Depression of Ethiopia that I'm talking about, are pretty rare.
01:26:30.000So you need to have those rare places, and then you also need to have this skill.
01:26:40.000I've gone out to the field with this particular group a couple of times, and this is not easy work to do at all.
01:26:47.000It's not easy to find the stuff, to have the eyes to see it, and then, you know, to spot it on the ground.
01:26:53.000And it's also not easy to do just logistically.
01:26:57.000I mean, like right now, for example, I mean, the work in Ethiopia has kind of come to a standstill because their country is again having, you know, some political turmoil.
01:27:08.000There's fear that might Be heading into civil war, and so that means it's too...
01:27:14.000A lot of these teams are probably reluctant to go to the field because of the danger.
01:27:22.000And so we're kind of back to a situation like what I was describing earlier, where it's just too dicey to go into the field.
01:27:34.000It gets back to the question, why are there so few skeletons?
01:27:36.000Well, the places where you find it are rare.
01:27:40.000The logistical challenges are severe, and also the skill level that it takes to find something, even if it does exist, it takes a lot of skill.
01:27:55.000I was quite impressed when I went there to see how people could find things, because people would find things that I, as a layperson walking, It just makes you wonder how much we've missed, how much people have stumbled upon where they didn't have that skill,
01:28:12.000or they didn't know what they were looking at, or they weren't trained, or they weren't educated in it, and they just found some piece of something that probably could have changed the way we look at our history.
01:28:22.000Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's just like, yeah.
01:28:26.000Yeah, I mean, there could be, you know, I mean, somewhere under the surface in Africa, there's all kinds of skeletons and fossils that could answer all kinds of questions for us, but if it's just buried that far underneath the surface and, you know, some surveyor comes along and walks over it,
01:28:44.000you know, there's nothing eroding to the surface yet, you know, it's invisible.
01:28:49.000Right, and there's so much ground space.
01:29:02.000Now, since the time of the initial discovery in 1994, there's been a lot of different versions of the human being that have also been discovered.
01:29:14.000How many different humans have they discovered now?
01:29:22.000Yeah, so that is some fragments of bone that are from a cave up in Siberia, and actually that one's kind of interesting because they were able to get some ancient DNA out of it.
01:29:32.000So stuff like Artie and Lucy are too old to get DNA out of.
01:29:41.000But in some of the newer stuff, or younger stuff, the They can get what they call ancient DNA out of them.
01:29:54.000So, I mean, just as an example, that about 10 years ago, some researchers were able to extract some DNA from some old Neanderthal bones.
01:30:09.000There's been this interesting question, you know, for decades about whether Neanderthals, you know, Neanderthals are, of course, these famous You know, fossil species known from Europe and from Asia.
01:30:22.000And for a long time, there had been this debate about whether Neanderthals evolved into modern humans.
01:30:29.000There was one school of thought that they did, and then another school who thought, they called it the Out of Africa group, who believed that another species of Homo sapiens, that's us, arose in Africa and then moved into Europe and Asia and displaced the Neanderthals and basically either out-competed them or killed them or whatever.
01:30:54.000Somehow we showed up, they disappeared.
01:30:58.000And some of the early DNA studies kind of supported that out-of-Africa deal, that sort of displacement thing.
01:31:04.000But anyway, about 10 years ago, The people that study ancient DNA were able to start extracting ancient DNA from some Neanderthal bones that had not completely fossilized.
01:31:18.000So there was like a little bit of biological material there where they could start to knit together these ancient genomes.
01:31:27.000I mean, it's astounding what they're doing now.
01:31:29.000And I shouldn't say too much about it because that's not my focus.
01:31:36.000So don't ask me too many hard questions about that.
01:31:39.000But anyway, so one of the things that they have discovered was that, in fact, there was some interbreeding between, you know, these modern Homo sapiens who came out of Africa and went to Europe and Asia.
01:31:52.000And, you know, there's some portions of the Neanderthal genome that are still alive or still exist in the genomes of People who are of what they call non-African descent.
01:32:04.000So basically, the people who left Africa interbred, at least to a limited degree, with Neanderthals, and so there's a little Neanderthal in a lot of us.
01:32:56.000There's great incentive to name something new because, you know, new species, headlines, you know, and it's interesting.
01:33:04.000Let's say you find another something that is a species that's already known.
01:33:09.000You know, maybe it's just like a variation of that or, you know, slightly older, slightly younger, slightly like, you know, physically different.
01:33:38.000There's many other things that have been discovered.
01:33:40.000But I think the thing that's difficult here is that the whole idea of species is people say, oh, something is a species, but what does that mean?
01:33:52.000And in modern humans, for all We like to talk about our diversity.
01:33:57.000We're actually, at least genetically, pretty homogenous, you know, compared to other primates.
01:34:02.000And so I think in the ancient past, there's probably a lot of variation, at least in some species, that's greater than what we see in our cells now.
01:34:15.000And anyway, so that's part of the problem.
01:34:21.000Creates this debate about whether something is a new species or just another example of something that we already know about.
01:34:28.000And the other thing is that—yeah, go ahead.
01:34:30.000I was going to say, that little guy that they found on the island of Flores, Homo floreensis, is that what you say?
01:34:37.000Yeah, this little dwarf-like thing, yeah.
01:34:42.000Yeah, well, that's a big—that's, again, another point of debate.
01:34:45.000I mean, there's everyone— I haven't heard anyone doubt that it's a member of the human family, but it's really weird because it has this tiny head.
01:34:56.000There's this phenomenon called island dwarfism where sometimes Let's say it goes on an island and the sea levels change.
01:35:05.000Things get small or some things get big.
01:35:40.000And certainly within the lifetime of our species, yeah.
01:35:46.000Well, it's something where cryptozoology, which is always a weird thing, right?
01:35:51.000But there's people that believe, I think it's called Orang Pendek.
01:35:57.000There's a legendary animal in the jungle of Vietnam that is very much like this Homo floriensis, a very small person, very small, hairy little person that lives in the jungle.
01:36:24.000I think it's probably a lot of it is horseshit, but when they found this Homo floriensis, I think a lot of the people that were proponents of this Orang Pendek thing, they were like, well, hey, that's what we're talking about.
01:38:27.000And so a Neanderthal is something that looks sufficiently different from Homo sapiens that it's put in a different category.
01:38:36.000So one of the big wows of ancient DNA is you have two things that look physically different enough to be categorized as different species, but now the genetics tell us that they did interbreed.
01:38:54.000So now there's like this big problem with like, what is a species?
01:38:58.000Like, what do you, you know, and I don't think biology has, at least, I mean, I'm sure others have different opinions about this, and some avoid the question altogether, but that was one thing I wrestled with in this book, you know?
01:39:11.000It's like people, we have this, we're using like language to describe biology, but those are two different mediums, and sometimes the biology defies biology.
01:40:40.000Snapshots that we've been lucky enough To capture, and Artypithecus is one, you know, Lucy was one, Homo erectus, you know, Homo naledi, you know, this Denisovans, the little florist thing, I mean, those are all these snapshots,
01:40:56.000but, you know, it's not like we have anything like a complete picture.
01:41:02.000I mean, you can certainly see some trends, some through lines, you know, from the more, you know, primitive things to modern things, you know, the Becoming more advanced bipeds, the limb proportions changing, the brain, of course,
01:41:59.000When you have this idea of a tree where everything is splitting into dead ends, You know, it leaves these questions when people say, like, humans and Neanderthals, which one led to modern humans?
01:42:11.000And it becomes like this either-or thing, right?
01:42:13.000So when you have all these species that look different from—I'm trying to center my hand on the frame here.
01:42:19.000I think it has sometimes led science into false choices, where we say, okay, well— You know, the ancestor has to either be this one or that one because, look, there's a split here, you know, and they went their separate ways because that's kind of what the tree metaphor depicts.
01:42:36.000But actually what ancient DNA is showing you is that things that are actually looking different are actually able – you're getting some crossover there.
01:42:43.000And so now your tree is looking a lot – A lot less like a tree.
01:42:49.000It's looking more like a web or a lattice sometimes.
01:42:52.000People are searching for these other metaphors to convey the complexity of what biology is showing.
01:43:00.000But it's a lot more complex than the simple trees of the species.
01:43:07.000Anyway, just wanted to insert that little word of I mean, the tree is a really powerful metaphor for the diversity of life, but when creatures that have recently split, you know, those branches don't necessarily remain isolated from each other.
01:43:24.000They can have some crossover and some interbreeding or hybridization, whatever you want to call it, that makes it kind of hard to give you Nice, neat through lines from this species to that species.
01:43:35.000This is what I was going to get to with all these various species of human or different types of humans that we know of now since 1994. Is it possible that there was...
01:44:07.000And creating the Denisovans, and the Homo floriensis, and Homo sapiens, and Neanderthals, and it's all just kind of happening at the same time, but not along the exact same timeline with the exact same ancestor.
01:44:23.000Okay, well, okay, so let's take art of physics.
01:44:28.000Because at that point, Ardipithecus is only known at this point, as far as I know, from Ethiopia.
01:44:34.000And one is the middle Awash, the place where Artie came from that I was describing earlier.
01:44:38.000And then they've also found some other Ardipithecus at a place called Gona, which is basically another project area that's adjacent to the middle Awash.
01:46:43.000So anyway, the point here is that there is, just as there is in modern species like baboons or whatever, there's different populations or subspecies that sometimes develop different adaptations for whatever reason.
01:46:58.000And they're quite similar, but you'd get these variations for whatever reason.
01:47:17.000It's like maybe 50 miles or within that.
01:47:21.000It's just down – the river that runs through there is called the Eyewash River, and Gona is the – Is it speculation that they were living in the same specific type of environment?
01:47:41.000Yeah, there's some difference in environmental interpretation between the two, but they're similar.
01:47:50.000The reason why I ask, have you ever seen images of indigenous people in the Amazon that walk around barefoot and their feet literally start to look like hands?
01:48:03.000I haven't seen those particular pictures, but I do know that people that walk around unshod, you know, so in other words without shoes, tend to develop toes that are more divergent.
01:48:29.000And it's very strange where it's almost like they're gripping the ground with their toes and the toes are very thick and strong because they're constantly walking around barefoot and they use their toes and the toe muscles in a way that we don't use them anymore because essentially we're in casts with our shoes.
01:48:49.000Yeah, well, you know what's really interesting about when you look at, like, modern adaptations of modern humans, you know, in all these different pockets of the world, or, you know, particularly when you look into all these ancient species, which are even weirder, is you realize there's nothing about our form that's like an end destination.
01:49:07.000There's nothing about our form that is like, you know, we have arrived, that this was, you know, where primates were going the whole time.
01:49:14.000It's, you know, if you want to talk about who are the weird ones, It's not all these other things.
01:49:30.000And then there's all these kind of myths about why...
01:49:35.000I mean, God, there's so many myths in the field of human origins.
01:49:38.000But one of them is you've probably heard about the divine proportions or the golden ratio that humans were constructed according to these ratios.
01:51:57.000Lucy was, the species is called Australopithecus afarensis, named afarensis after the AFR, you know, this part of the world that I was describing, the AFR depression.
01:52:07.000She was discovered in 1974. She's very petite, probably a female, and I forget how tall she is, but it's like three foot something.
01:52:25.000But anyway, so with Lucy, you know, when her skeleton was found, you know, this was, you know, the only skeleton of that species.
01:52:34.000They had a lot of other pieces of things, but no skeletons.
01:52:36.000But there was this assumption that that species was small, or at least the female.
01:52:43.000And now, thanks to some other work that's done in Ethiopia at a place called Oronzo Miele, A few years ago, a team announced discovery of another skeleton of Lucy's species.
01:54:26.000So when we look at humans like the Denisovans, and we consider that to be a different human than Homo sapien or than Neanderthal, do we have any idea how that came about?
01:54:41.000Well, so first of all, I should say I don't know much about Denisovans.
01:54:45.000My understanding is there's not too much skeletally I mean, to have enough bones, they've obviously been able to take...
01:54:53.000It's a fairly recent discovery, right?
01:54:55.000Yeah, it's within the last, I don't know, 10 years or something.
01:54:59.000So, it's a question like, why do they look so different?
01:55:35.000It's just like an adaptive radiation of all these things going out and turning into these different species, and that's kind of one way to look at it.
01:55:42.000The way I prefer to look at it is what the scientists call isolation by distance, which sounds horribly boring, I know.
01:55:53.000You're like, what the hell does that mean?
01:55:54.000But basically what it means is that things spread out, and particularly when ancient humans got the technology to basically live in all these different parts of the world, they were isolated and then could adapt You know,
01:56:11.000make these local adaptations, which make the Neanderthals look different than the sub-Saharan Africans, for example, who were their contemporaries.
01:56:21.000But yet, they're still closely enough related, so when they do come back in contact, as they sometimes do, they can still potentially interbreed.
01:56:33.000So what the isolation by distance means, it just means that these things spread out enough so that they get Local adaptations, like your example from the Amazon or people from the Inuit,
01:57:43.000I mean, I know my book is about fossils, and that's mostly what I know about.
01:57:47.000But genomics, genetics, in ancient DNA, it's an important cutting edge right now.
01:57:55.000But anyway, there's a guy, a prominent geneticist at Harvard named David Reich.
01:58:01.000We're like kindergartners in our knowledge of this stuff at some point.
01:58:05.000As advanced as the science is, and as amazing as the breakthroughs have been, they're still only just beginning to understand how that genetic code really translates into biology, for example.
01:59:03.000As a journalist, when you're writing a book about this and you have to take a deep dive into all the science behind it and just the history of it, what is that experience like for you?
01:59:15.000I mean, it seems like it would be all-consuming because it's such a deep field of study.
01:59:30.000Well, people would keep, you know, people would ask.
01:59:32.000I mean, I had numerous conversations that went like this, right?
01:59:35.000I'd be talking to some scientists, you know, someone I've been talking to for a while.
01:59:37.000I'd say, oh yeah, what's your timeline?
01:59:39.000And I'd say, oh yeah, I'll probably be done this time next year.
01:59:43.000I mean, I was saying that in like 2012. Here the book is being published, you know, this week.
01:59:49.000So part of the, I mean, and this kind of gets to the richness of the story that I was telling you about.
01:59:57.000I mean, so I was you know, there was this Interesting story about this fossil, the oldest skeleton ever found in a human family.
02:00:04.000So I wanted to understand the full life cycle of that discovery, like how the hunt, the research question, was framed in the beginning, and then how it was found, interpreted, announced to the world, and then all the debate that followed.
02:00:18.000I want to follow the life cycle of this whole thing through, because to me, that's a really interesting story.
02:00:23.000And there are all these interesting components along the way, like geology and genomics and Developmental biology and the anatomy of all these different parts.
02:00:34.000So anyway, that obliged me to sort of learn all these topics.
02:00:41.000And so that was just a lot of reading, a lot of talking to people.
02:00:44.000I'm so indebted to a lot of scientists who guided me through the geology, through the fieldwork, through the interpretation of the skeleton.
02:00:58.000I mean, they provided a service to me personally, but they also, more importantly, provided a service to public understanding.
02:01:06.000And I can't say enough how grateful I am to those people.
02:01:13.000I mean, when you spend eight years working on a book about an ancient ancestor to human beings, and then you take a big deep breath, you do all the publicity work, where do you go from here?
02:02:26.000Well, like with Ardipithecus, I didn't really choose it in the sense that, like, I sort of sat down eight years ago and said, okay, well, what am I going to do?
02:02:34.000I mean, as I said, I started off on this other road.
02:02:41.000This story just sort of appeared in front of me and sort of told me that there's another road here that actually might be more rewarding.
02:02:51.000And then, as I kind of went along, I kept having to stop and learn about the geology and all these component sciences, or about Ethiopia.
02:03:01.000We haven't talked much about that, but the backdrop of Ethiopia while all this was going on.
02:03:05.000It's an important part of the story at multiple levels.
02:03:09.000I mean, there's the turmoil in the country that makes it difficult to work there.
02:03:13.000There is this sort of ascendance of indigenous African scientists from Ethiopia who are entering the science and sort of claiming a place at the table in a science that has some colonialist roots.
02:03:34.000There's all, you know, all these component pieces that took me, were not visible at the outset, but I just sort of had to delve into them as I waded through this topic.
02:03:45.000And believe me, there was a lot of pain and suffering that went into this book.
02:03:48.000I mean, I know parts of it are, you know, sometimes, you know, strike people as maybe hard science, but believe me that there was like, I could have written, And did write, in some cases,
02:04:04.000what you might see in a couple sentences that I tossed off about this or that.
02:04:09.000There may have been a 10-page draft of that topic, or five-page, or whatever, that I needed to write to be able to understand it, and then to reduce it, reduce it, reduce it, and then sort of reduce it down to just one brick that I could just sort of put in the wall of this story.
02:04:26.000But yeah, there was a lot of that, and that accounts for why it was such a drawn-out process.
02:04:31.000Well, congratulations on the completion, and thank you very much for spending some time with me today.