On human evolution

The Origin of Humans: Where Does the Beginning of That End, Which Ends the Beginning, Start? In knowing the world, a person knows himself through it. Among scientific theories, the one that will attract attention is the one that tells us something about ourselves—we are interested in the mirror we can look into. The passions boiling around the theory of evolution are a consequence of the conclusion derived from it that humans “originated from a monkey.” By the way, this common phrase is incorrect; it would be more accurate to speak of the origin of humans from ancestors shared with modern monkeys. In the zoological sense, a human is a monkey: the order Primates includes the suborders Prosimii and Simiiformes; our family Hominidae belongs to the latter. Does the last sentence not upset you? For everyone except zoologists, such an approach usually provokes protest. A monkey is an animal, and a human… also! Only a human is an “animal” not as a creature driven by base urges, but as something that is neither plant nor fungus. And do you know why a monkey seems funny and ugly, whereas, say, a dog, a horse or a dolphin does not? Because the monkey resembles us; its features are a caricature of ours (The more similar the competitors, the sharper the competition. Who provoked sharper hatred among the Bolsheviks: monarchists or Mensheviks?). To preserve a species, its individuals must be able to distinguish their own from foreign and decisively reject intruders. That is why the zoological approach to our species irritates us so much that we are not ready to live with other forms of life, recognizing them as “equal” to us. [IMG_1] Pithecanthropus in its traditional, school presentation (left). A pitiful sight, isn’t it? Modern reconstruction of Homo erectus, the pithecanthropus (right) Let us wish luck to cryptozoologists who search for living Homo floresiensis (see “KT” #566) in Southeast Asia and Homo neanderthalensis in the mountains of Central Asia. And imagine that a hypothetical “snow” or “forest” human has been found. Would we be ready to live in a world where other human species exist? Should we grant them the same rights and duties as us? Should we have judged a Floresian human who killed one of us by our laws? What would be the consequences of our acceptance of their concepts of life, morality and law? Our unreadiness to see ourselves as one of the stages of animal evolution colors messages that relate to our history with particular interest and distrust. No finds provoke responses like the recurring “missing links” in human evolution. In this regard, several common misconceptions need to be discussed. The first is the view that fossil human finds are something extraordinary. “It is remarkable that all the physical material we have for proving human evolution could be placed in a single coffin, with room left over!”¹ Fortunately, so many pieces of evidence for human evolution have already been found that they would fill a substantial cemetery. Recently, paleoanthropology relies not on accidental finds but on extensive material that allows serious analysis. The second misconception is the notion of human evolution as a linear process. In school textbooks, which most of us learned from, everything was simple: from monkeys to monkey‑humans, then to the earliest humans… Now that scheme has collapsed. What seemed a single trunk has split into many branches, each with its own fate. Our species evolved along several branches; several independently evolving lineages belong to our genus; our family includes several genera with their own destinies. For example, some species formerly regarded as our potential ancestors and placed in the genus Australopithecus are now assigned to the genus with the unambiguous name Paranthropus (para (Greek) – near, beside; anthropos (Greek) – human). Various species of the genera Paranthropus and Homo co‑existed in Africa side by side and followed their own evolutionary paths of body size, brain enlargement and tool refinement. The third misconception is closely linked to the second and is based on the assumption that the intellectual and creative abilities of our ancestors increased progressively as they approached the modern human, while all their distant relatives were pitiful failures. In recent years, the attitude toward many of our relatives had to be radically revised. Homo erectus was long perceived as a primitive pithecanthropus (the name given to this species by its discoverer Eugène Dubois). Compare the associations linked to “pithecanthropus” with those linked to even a chimpanzee! The awkward, stooped creature with an ugly face and dull gaze seems imperfect even next to modern monkeys. It turns out that the “pithecanthropus” not only dominated the Earth for one and a half million years but, as the discovery of its descendants in Indonesia showed, even mastered seafaring! The heavily mocked Neanderthal turned out to be an independent species with a brain larger than ours, which successfully survived in Europe under harsh glacial conditions. Recent studies demonstrate that its articulatory mechanism was no less developed than ours and that its fingers could perform movements as precise as ours. The fact that this species lost to us does not mean it was “worse”: it was different. Finally, the fourth misconception concerns the hope of finding a “missing link” or “transitional form.” How we would like to visually demonstrate every stage of evolutionary morphing! Yet each new find, spitefully, adds original features to the picture instead of obediently fitting into pre‑made slots. The desire to find a reflection of the scheme that arose in our mind leads, at best, to misinterpretation of finds, and at worst—to falsifications. An example of the latter is the story of the Piltdown man—a fabricated “find” (assembled from a human skull and an orangutan jaw) created in 1912 in England, reflecting the contemporary ideas about the course of anthropogenesis. And examples of misinterpretation are countless; they regularly appear on news channels. [IMG_2] Skull and reconstruction of Pierolapithecus Every paleontologist loves his own find and wants it to attract attention. How to do that? By claiming that it is the missing piece of the evolutionary puzzle we are assembling. A characteristic example can be the recently discovered remains in Catalonia of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, a hominoid ape dated to 13 Ma, which, after a loud article in Science, was reported by virtually all mass media. This ape lived when the evolutionary lines of the ancestors of gibbons and the common ancestors of humans and great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans) had already diverged. Most traits that unite us with great apes were also present in this species. The discoverer of Pierolapithecus, Professor Salvador Moya‑Sola, announced that this species is the missing link, the common ancestor of humans and great apes. But the find was made in Spain, while the center of human origin is Africa? No problem—so the species must have also lived in Africa! Do you see how the desired replaces the actual? Does this mean that the discovery of a new fossil ape species is uninteresting? Of course not! It is indeed a very interesting species, whose study can illuminate the murky period of anthropogenesis. It is not a “missing link” in a phylogenetic sense, i.e., there is no basis to claim that the discovered animals were our direct ancestors. However, there is a good chance that Pierolapithecus—or a close relative of our ancestors—can show, by example, how our evolution proceeded. Let us give a crude analogy. Suppose we are interested in how a lieutenant can become a general. Of course, the best approach is to gather complete data on the career of a specific general and verify that a major was indeed a transitional form between captain and lieutenant colonel. If such data are unavailable, comparing different, unrelated officers can demonstrate that military ranks indeed form a sequential series. It is precisely the regular elevation of ever more transitional links to a pedestal, followed by their subsequent overthrow, that constitutes a constant rebuke to evolutionary teaching from its opponents. One encounters arguments of this sort: “Earlier evolutionists said humans derived from Neanderthals and pithecanthropuses, and now they say from Homo sapiens idaltu and Homo helmei; given such confusion on such an important issue, it is clear that humans were created by the Lord God without any evolution.” Following the same logic, one could formulate a similar statement: “Earlier people thought Vasyl’s father was Ivan Ivanovich, and later that it was Petro Petrovich; apparently, the matter did not escape the immaculate conception.” Of course, miracles have nothing to do with this. Yet if at conception there was no one to hold a candle, we will never obtain precise data about that process. We will have to rely on genetic testing data… And there is no need to look down on other animals. Is it even possible to find a genuine transitional form, to “dig up” a fossil ancestor that began acquiring features of the modern species (“major form” of today’s general)? It is almost inconceivable. Both the original and the new forms could spread only because they matched a particular way of life. A real transitional form shifted from one lifestyle to another, and therefore its existence was highly unstable. In a sense, evolution moves in jumps: changing populations pass from one period of stability to another. The full spectrum of transitional forms can be found only when several unlikely conditions coincide. For this, evolution of the group in question must proceed relatively uniformly, i.e., a complete spectrum of stable adaptive zones (ways of life) must have existed, allowing a high population density. Evolution must have occurred within a single territory, without the formation of small enclaves and genetic isolation of geographically separated forms. Finally, throughout its course, effective fixation of occurring events in the geological record must be ensured. Everything we know about human evolution testifies to the opposite. During our development, our ancestors’ way of life changed sharply. Their numbers sometimes declined, and they were nearly on the brink of extinction. This is reflected in the reduced genetic diversity of humans, far lower than, for example, that of chimpanzees. The settlement of new territories played a major role in our history. On some of them, the geological record is absent or inaccessible. Thus, the hope of finding a complete series of our ancestors will, unfortunately, have to be abandoned.

1 Life – how did it arise? Through evolution or through creation? WatchTower Bible & Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 1992. P. 86. Back to the text Ten Thousand Generations of Ancestors. Paleontological finds can be made not only in excavations but also in museums. The remains of ancient humans, found by the authoritative paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey in 1967, turned out to be much older than previously thought. We are talking about skulls found on the banks of the Ethiopian Omo River and named Omo I and Omo II. At one time (with some uncertainty), they were attributed to deposits 130,000 years old. The deposits of the Omo River have generally yielded an extremely rich harvest of paleoanthropological material. However, dating in this valley is complicated by the possibility of redeposition (movement from layer to layer) of fossil material. The Omo I skull belongs to a representative of our species, and Omo II to another, less similar form of one of our genera. Omo I was considered one of the oldest finds of Homo sapiens, but not the oldest. Two years ago, near the village of Terto in northeastern Ethiopia, skulls of a child and two adults aged 160,000 years were found. Scientists from New York University studied the 1967 find site and concluded that the "owners" of both skulls lived about 195,000 years ago. Thus, Omo I (its reconstruction, based on found fragments, is shown in the figure) is the oldest known representative of our species. Recently, genetic markers have occupied a special place in the study of human history. Genetic data helped refute the multiregional hypothesis of human origin, according to which the different races inhabiting the Old World originated in the same regions where they live now. It became clear that our species originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago and spread to adjacent territories approximately 50,000 years ago. The new dating of Omo I is well consistent with this conclusion. Another interesting result obtained by population genetics methods is that about 60,000 years ago, humanity experienced its most acute crisis, when its population size decreased to two thousand individuals. A little more, and the main evolutionary success would have awaited another branch (likely less aggressive than ours). Not only did three-quarters of our history pass in Africa, and three-quarters of our ancestors' generations lived there (and there were at least ten thousand of them). For a significant part of this time, people practically the same as modern ones lived there. Their differences from us are not biological but cultural. It gives the impression that first, human cultural evolution had to reach a certain level, and only then did Homo sapiens begin to spread across the planet. A characteristic marker of this level is the inclination towards art (creation of images, singing, music, dance), which unites all modern human populations. This ability of our species began to manifest systematically precisely about 50,000 years ago. For other species of our genus, this trait is not characteristic (if we do not consider isolated finds related to Neanderthals, where perhaps features of tools, not directly related to their use, are reflected). The propensity for creativity is not the worst distinguishing feature. One can hope that our species' victory in the evolutionary race was not solely due to human aggressiveness.

D. Shabanov. The Origin of Man: Where is the beginning of the end that ends the beginning? // Kompyuterra, M., 2004. – No. 47 (571). – pp. 56–57 D. Shabanov. Ten Thousand Generations of Ancestors // Kompyuterra, M., 2005. – No. 9 (581).