CHAPTER 8

2003

In the June 12 issue of Nature, an international weekly journal of science, an article and correspondence was published relating to a find in Africa of some fossils said to be the earliest homo sapiens. Because Nature is primarily for specialists, much of the language used is scarcely intelligible to non-specialists. More popular magazines such as Scientific American have their own writers who summarize and translate the articles of general interest into more familiar English.

Here's an example of the language in the article:

The supraorbital torus is differentiated into halves at the level of the (multiple) supraorbital foramina. The flat lateral portion is extremely broad anteroposteriorly (at zygofrontal suture 18 mm from orbital rim to temporal line), and forms a superoanteriorly facing trigone.

From another source here's an explanatory diagram which may help:

However, there is sufficient plain language for us to understand what is going on, and on that and our own translation abilities, such as they are, we will rely. Quotations will be in italics. My notes and comments will be in regular type.

The article was published as a very long letter, with seven scholars' names attached, which may mean they obtained publication but not financial reward for their contribution.

WHAT WAS FOUND?

1. The most complete specimen so far recovered ...is an adult cranium,... exposure before recovery led to the loss of the left side of the calvarium...

calvaria is Latin for skull.

The entire right facial skeleton is present...

Skeleton = bony structure of the skull.

There is some limited distortion in the existing remainder of this skull. And now we come to the reason why this chapter is being written.

The cranium, interpreted here as male, is generally large and robust, with a cranial capacity estimated by teff seed volume [right side doubled] at about 1,450 cm³, at the high end of the modern human range.

The great length of the cranium ...(globella to occipital) (219.5 + or - 2 mm) exceeds that found in... a global sample of over 3,000 modern humans...

The large overall size of (#1) stands out ... Apart from its exceptionally great anterior - posterior length

they mean front to back

the cranium exhibits large vault dimensions together with a deep, tall and broad face ... indistinguishable from anatomically modern homo sapiens [AMHS]...

This was no ape. All the ancient ancestors found so far of modern apes had brain cases well under 500 cubic centimetres (CCs); some living chimps have just over 400 ccs and gorillas under 600 ccs.

2. The second major adult specimen was an even larger adult, as judged by matching parts of its preserved temporal bone...the cranium, also a probable male, was highly fragmented and scattered after it emerged from the same sand unit. The lack of recovered dental, facial or basicranial parts indicates that it may have been embedded as a calotte.

A 'calotte' is a skull cap.

Evidence of intensive bone modification is present on 15 of its 24 recovered fragments. Some exhibit cutmarks that are probably associated with removal of soft tissue. Deep, typical defleshing cutmarks are seen on the parietals (the parietals are the two bones forming part of the sides and top of the skull) left zygomatic (bony part of the cheek) frontal and occipital (back of the head), More abundant but more superficial marks showing a repetitive scraping motion are present around the vault circumference, above the nuchal (nape of the neck) and temporal lines (the tempora is the flat side of the head between the forehead and ear). The latter pattern of bone surface modification is almost never present in hominid or non human faunal remains processed for consumption, and is therefore unlikely to represent evidence of utilitarian or economic behaviour.

3. A third adult individual represented by a left parietal fragment ,,, might have been slightly smaller overall than the two adults.

4. The immature cranium was found on the surface after its erosion ... it had been shattered into more than 180 small fragments from which the cranial vault and facial portions were restored... on the basis of modern human standards, we estimate the individual's age at death as 6-7 years. ...As with the adults the Herto child exhibits a character complex that is distinctly unlike that of Neanderthals.

WHERE WERE THESE SKULLS FOUND?

Here we report on stratigraphically associated Late Middle Pleistocene artefacts and fossils from fluvial and lake margin sandstones of the Upper Herto Member of the Bouri Formation, Middle Awash, Afar Rift, Ethiopia.

HOW LONG AGO DID THEY LIVE?

On the basis of the combined stratigraphic, geochemical and radioisotopic evidence, the Upper Herto archaeological and paleontological remains are therefore securely constrained to be between 160 (+ or - 2) and 154 (+ or - 7) k yr old...

And from another scholar's commenting letter

The fossils are complete enough to show a suite of modern human characters, and are well constrained by argon-isotope dating to about 160,000 years ago.

WHAT DID THEY EAT?

Associated faunal remains indicate repeated, systematic butchery of hippotamus carcasses.

ANY EVIDENCE FOR HUMAN-LIKE SOCIETY?

Contemporary adult and juvenile homo sapiens fossil crania manifest bone modifications indicative of deliberate mortuary practices. Adult #2 cranial fragments show selected defleshing cutmarks on the left ... and other more superficial artificial scoring above the left temporal line and across the occipital plane.... #3 child's cranium with defleshing cutmarks on the left spheroid, and right and left temporals and post-mortem polish on the parietals.

The juvenile cranium ... displays an unambiguous series of defleshing-related cutmarks on the basicranial surfaces of its splenoid

(compound bone between the temporal bone and the eye)

and temporal bones on both right and left sides. These fine but deep repetitive cutmarks were made by a very sharp, probably obsidian flake edge. Their locations, dimensions and directions ... indicate that this ... must have occurred after removal of the mandible. The intentional and deliberate removal of soft tissues such as basicranial vessels, nerves and muscles is therefore indicated.

The diverse bone modifications marking the three most intact Middle Awash Herto hominid crania indicate postmortem defleshing with stone tools in the Upper Pleistocene, in an archaeological context straddling the Acheulean and MSA...

The Pleistocene epoch lasted from around 1.8 million years to some 12,000 years ago. MSA = Middle Stone Age. We have more to say about Acheulean later in this chapter.

WHAT WAS THE LANDSCAPE LIKE?

A widespread erosional surface ...(was found)... with distinctive rounded pebbles and large bentonite clasts ...(with) small gastropod shells often present immediately above the ... pebble horizon (we interpret) as having been deposited marginal to a shallow freshwater lake.

I believe bentonite is a kind of clay, and clasts are broken pieces of older rocks. Gastropods are fresh or salt water molluscs, e.g. snails and limpets.

This erosional surface is immediately overlain by a volcanic clastic sandstone and gravel deposit that yielded all of the Herto hominid fossils...

WHAT KIND OF WILDLIFE?

The bulk of the vertebrate fauna also comes from this widespread sand unit and includes a derived extinct bovine, Kobus species, Thryonomys, Hippopotamus, Equus and Connochaetes. These taxa indicate the proximity of both aquatic and grassland habitat.

'Bovine' is an ox, so, an extinct ox; 'kobus species' are African antelopes and waterbucks; 'Thryonomys' is of the order of rodents, and thryonomys swinderianus is the great cane rat, grasscutter, common today in Africa south of the Sahara, usually 1-2 feet in body length plus 3-10 inch tail, males weighing close to ten pounds, so, large rats; 'equus' includes horse, ass and zebra; and 'connochaetes' are wildebeest and gnu.

WHAT KIND OF TOOLS WERE FOUND?

The ...Upper Herto archaeological assemblages vary spatially in their lithological and typological contents. The Levallois method is well represented across samples ... and was used frequently in the production of the hand axes and cleavers. Evidence of Levallois method is also observed on 48 flakes, blades, and points,,, flakes are mostly elliptical with flat section, with platforms almost always faceted convex... with a platform angle always between 90° and 95°...

The analysed 28 bifaces span a wide size range and were all made on fine-grained basalt. They are represented by ovates, elongate ovates, triangulars, cleavers, and a pick, biface scraper and biface nucleus. The 17 hand axes with ovate and elongate ovate plan forms were always made on flakes and finished with soft hammer technique. Edges are regular and show secondary edge retouching.

The Acheulean is a style of stone tool-making attributed to 'homo erectus' or upright man. This 'man' is derived from a number of independent finds of prehistoric apelike creatures of somewhat different sorts and sizes from various sites around the world lumped together under a general heading of homo erectus. The largest brain case size of any of them was 1,000 ccs, in contrast with the 1450 ccs of the Upper Herto finds we are discussing here. One source book I have gives this sample of Acheulean tools:

And describes them as:

Chipped hand axe, scrapers, blades and a point made by homo erectus between 1 million and 400,000 years ago, belonging to the Acheulian style

Another source book gives this sample

with the caption

Stone hand-axes, which were much more versatile than simple pebble-tools, were developed by 'Homo erectus' or 'Upright man,' who first appeared about half a million years ago. Their sharp points and edges were achieved by patiently chipping away a succession of thin flakes with a piece of bone or hard wood.

This is, I believe the Levallois method described in the Nature article.

A third source book provides these

Described as (on the left)

Hand axe from Swanscombe, Kent, England, profile and front view,

middle Acheulian

And (on the right)described as

Hand axe from Bournemouth, Hants. England, late Acheulian

You can see the late Acheulean has a slimmer profile, difficult to do with stone.

Once you get to flaking by use of softer material than stone there is little or no further significant development it seems to me even down to Neanderthal man as recently as 50,000 years before present:

I have some problems with these illustrations. In the first two books cited the dates given for Homo Erectus are wildly different. Next, we have no provenence given for the tools illustrated, that is, we don't know where they came from, or whether they are individual pieces from different sources arbitrarily put together to present as a collection. We have no probable date for any of the finds and we don't know whether skulls were discovered with the finds, and if so, what were the ccs of their brain cases. As a consequence, I believe the illustrations provided may be interesting but not to be taken as reliable evidence for our purposes.

Further, valuable as the Herto find is, although the 2nd letter/article says:

controlled surface collection and excavation at Upper Herto localities BOU-A19, BOU-A26 and BOU-A29 yielded a pooled lithic assemblage of 640 analysed artefacts (see Supplementary Information)...

I did not find the Supplementary Information identified as such in the article or by being appended to it. As a result, we do not have a photo of even one of these 640 stone tools so that we have no basis for comparison. I suggest scholars should provide better uniformity in presenting their work to the world.

WHAT DO SCHOLARS THINK OF THE HERTO FINDS?

Chris Stringer of the Human Origins Group, Natural History Museum, London, has this to say in a letter in the same issue of Nature:

Do the Herto fossils represent 'modern' H. Sapiens? ...despite the presence of some primitive features, there seems to be enough morphological evidence to regard the Herto material as the oldest definite record of what we currently think of as modern H. sapiens. The fact that the geological age of these fossils is close to some estimates obtained by genetic analyses for the origin of modern human variation only heightens their importance.

Tim D. White ( Department of Integrative Biology and Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, California,) and his colleagues, who provided both letters to Nature, have this to say:

Because the Herto hominids are morphologically just beyond the range of variation seen in AMHS (Anatomically Modern Homo Sapiens) and because they differ from all other known fossil hominids, we recognize them here as Homo Sapiens Idaltu , a new paleosubspecies of Homo Sapiens.

GENERAL COMMENTS

In the description of the fauna, predators are not mentioned, and we have a very similar collection of vegetarian or herbivore animals to many of those living today in the grasslands of Africa near water sources.

Hippos (hippopotamus) are today a valued food source for many native Africans. The meat is highly prized, as is the fat, and the teeth yield superior ivory. The hide is also considered valuable.

Hippos live in large groups of 30 or more and spend the day time in water. At night they come ashore and graze on the grassland. They apparently all follow the same path to their feeding area and constant use can form almost a tunnel 5-6 feet deep. That's because hippos are so heavy. Adult males can weigh well over 4 tons. Their canine teeth can be up to 28 inches long, and their mouths can open 4 feet wide. The males fight for supremacy over females, sometimes to the death, and their hides have many scars from such conflicts. Defeated males may become solitary.

Confronting them 154-160,000 years ago in Ethiopia were human men with bigger brain cases than almost all the human population today. These people were expert hunters and experts with stone tools. They had a large tool kit and inventory which has survived until now. Their methods of production were not primitive. They had hand axes which require precision in chipping the basalt they used. Basalt is a fine grain igneous (volcanic) rock which can rise to the surface in fissures and faults. Basalt has about 40% silica, a glassy substance, so the tools would be sharp. They also used obsidian tools. Obsidian, another volcanic rock, has about 65% silica. When flaked it can be so sharp that a man can shave with it, or it can be used as a scalpel in surgery.

What particularly intrigues me is that these people had what the scientists call a pick. Here's a definition of a modern pick:

Tool consisting of an iron bar, usually curved with point at one end and point or chisel edge at other, with wooden handle passing through the middle perpendicularly, used for breaking up hard ground, masonry, etc. and in quarries etc.

We substitute basalt for iron bar and then we have a pick. What did they use it for? Depending on size it could have been used to remove nodules from rock formation for cores to be chipped into tools and flakes. Or it could have been used to break ground to dig a pit in the walkway of the hippos. I say that because how do men with stone hand tools kill a 4 ton hippo? One way would be to trap a single hippo in a concealed pit. As a hippo has small legs it would be at their mercy if in a pit from which it could not escape.

The 28 inch hippo ivory tooth could be hafted on to a pole to create a formidable pike or spear, something capable of killing a hippo. All that survives of their way of life is a very varied stone tool collection with some partial skulls and butchered hippo remains. We don't know what they did with the ivory or hide or available wood,

There are at least two peoples living today we might consider for comparison. First, the Bushmen of southern Africa, living in near-desert conditions. They are totally independent from civilization, and are skilful hunter-gatherers. Next, the Chukci nomads living well over 100 miles inside the arctic circle in north east Russia. It is very cold there. More extreme conditions can hardly be imagined on this planet. It's a frozen desert, These people live in small groups and each group is completely dependent on over 1000 reindeer. There is no vegetation, nothing green to see or eat. The reindeer dig down to find lichen. The Chukci eat and drink continuously and keep active. They use every part of the reindeer for sustenance. Their living quarters are a tent within a tent, with wooden poles (which at some time past must have been obtained further south) and covered with reindeer skins. When our civilization is no more, as has happened to all previous civilizations on every continent, these two peoples, the Bushmen and the Chuckci, can continue their way of life, uninterrupted and unaffected. They are not apes, they are intelligent human beings, with language, customs, traditions and expertise all their own.

One other factor may be mentioned. In the 20^th century it is said that there were found tribes living in New Guinea described as stone age people. That is, they used stone tools exclusively. But they too are intelligent human beings with their own social customs, traditions and way of life.