By Kumar David –
Citation: Fuss J, Spassov N, Begun D R, Böhme M (2017) Potential hominin affinities of Graecopithecus from the Late Miocene of Europe. PLoS ONE 12(5): e0177127.
The scientific community has reacted with disbelief, if not outright rejection of a thesis put out by four European researchers that hominid origin (the point at which early humans split from the apes) first emerged in Greece and Bulgaria. The conclusions are based on two sets of fossil findings from Greece and Bulgaria which the authors of a controversial paper, published on the Internet in May 2017, date to 7.2 million years ago. This contradicts the universally accepted view that the first hominids emerged 6.8 to 7.0 million years ago in Chad, Africa. If it is true it would stand what is now accepted as human evolution theory on its head. Is there reason to go along with the thesis? Before recounting what the scientific community says let me do a little simplification.
The terms hominoid, hominid, hominine and hominin, are used by palaeontologists (chaps who study fossils), to refer to apes, humans and ape ancestors, African apes and humans and the fourth is used to include our non-ape ancestors. The period of interest is called the Miocene, from about 23 million years ago to 5.3 million years ago when, in the opinion of these palaeontologist, the world was warmer and conducive to the type of evolution under examination. The accepted view is that our ancestors split from the chimpanzee in the late Miocene or early in the next geological epoch, the Pleistocene, and then into many lines of humanlike apes who were awarded jaw breaking names like autrolopithicus, homo habilis, homo erectus. These guys were bipedal, stood up straight, used stone tools, made fire and cooked food. All disappeared about half a million years ago leaving the ground clear for us, homo sapiens, everywhere, and in Europe for Neanderthals, who disappeared 30,000 years ago because we ate them.
Before that however some hominids ( homo erectus) took off on a jaunt, famously called Out of Africa 1 (OA-1), probably one-and-a-half million years ago, when they crawled out into Asia Minor, Europe and Asia as far as China – the famous Java Man and the infamous Peking Man. Remember that land masses and seas where differently conjoined at the time. Do not confuse OA-1 with OA-2 which was much later, maybe 80,000 thousand to 100,000 years ago when modern man, homo sapiens, who emerged in Africa 190,000 years ago, took a trip out of that continent and spread him/herself and his/her genes all over the longsuffering globe. I call Peking Man infamous because the Chinese are no less obnoxious than the rest of us in their nationalism. In my travels across China, and in translated historical and (pseudo)-scientific Chinese compendia, I have come across no end of claims that homo sapiens independently evolved in China into the Han Chinese and other East Asian races. How could the magnificent Chinese civilisation be the work of descendants of primitive black Africans? Perish the thought!
My Tamil masters in school, Vinasi and Satchi, despised each other, but they shared one narrow minded belief (in other ways they were wonderful people). They would have laid down their lives to prove that Tamil was the oldest language in India, and most particularly, older than Sanskrit. I don’t know the answer to this enigma, nor is anyone certain whether today’s Tamils are descendants of the Indus Valley civilisation people pushed south by Aryan invaders from the north and west. If so, maybe their language is very old. But the point I am making is that jaundice, prejudice and narrow nationalism is the common contagion of the human species which has failed to free itself from bigotry and the intolerance of identity consciousness. So cheer up Lanka, we are not alone.
For the duration of this essay let me use OG-B for the chap whose jawbone (mandible) and teeth are the subject of the research paper cited at the beginning. The specimens are not new, (a) was found more than fifty years ago (1944) and (b) too has been hanging around some museum but I don’t know for how long. See accompanying figure for (a) and (b). What is new in the paper is the more modern instrument used to re-examine the fossils. The gadget is a micro CT (computerised tomography) scanner. It’s a spanking new (well not so new, CT was introduced 20 years ago) way of using X-rays to peer into specimens from all angels and in all sorts of sections. Micro means that it does it on a very fine scale. That’s all I know and that’s enough for you.
What the researchers claim is that the study has shown up a range of affinities with previously known species of hominin that allows them to place their specimens very early in the split between Homo (our ancients) and Pan (chips and bonobos; the bonobo is sex crazed variant of the chip, previously called the pygmy chip, found in the forests of the Congo Basin). I daresay the researchers did a fine job on the technical (micro-CT) side, but the poor sods didn’t realise the criticism would be withering. To make an extravagant claim on the basis of flimsy jaw-bone evidence is like the Old Testament yarn (Judges 15) where Samson vanquishes 10,000 Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass – my father used to say: “More likely, the arse-bone of a Jew”.
Let me give you a few samples of the criticism rebuffing the thesis. The first is Julien Benoit, a vertebrate palaeontologist and paleo-biologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
“Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence to support them. The African origin of humankind (hominine) is currently supported by two really important elements. Firstly, thousands of hominin fossils have been found on African soil since the first fossil African hominin, Australopithecus Africanus, was discovered in South Africa in 1924. Nearly a century of fossil findings has followed, chronicling the complete evolution of hominin on African soil. These fossils range from (specimens) which lived between six and seven million years ago in what is today Chad, to the earliest homo sapiens from east Africa”.
“Secondly, our closest ape relatives, the Chimpanzees and the Gorilla are also from Africa. Our last common ancestors lived somewhere between eight and 12 million years ago, which strongly suggests that the origin of humankind is deeply rooted in Africa. This leave little room for a putative European origin. Any study that counters this consensus would have to provide very strong evidence and perfect methodology to support its claim. In my opinion, this article doesn’t meet those criteria”.
“(Thirdly) the material isn’t well preserved. It consists mostly of a jaw with no complete teeth preserved. That’s a problem because the teeth’s anatomical characteristics are the most important element when classifying any primate, including humans”.
Benoit is a South African, so his rejection of the theory fits my rule of thumb that scientists are not devoid of nationalist impulses. On the other hand British newspapers like the Independent, Telegraph, and the Daily Mail and the once respectable New Scientist have not been shy to splash claims of OG-B origin of the genus homo. America’s Newsweek also gave prominence to what is but a minor storm in the global science teacup though American scientists have been sceptical.
“For now, there is no way to know whether the jaws and teeth belonged to an ape with some hominid-like features or a hominid with some apelike features, my guess is the former” said paleo-anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, DC. And Richard Potts who leads the Smithsonian’s human origins programme says “The idea that human ancestors with upright posture, bipedal walking and small canine teeth) first emerged in Europe has little to support it. They have little to back up their claim that an isolated place in southern Europe could have been home to an ancestor of the African hominin”. He criticized the researchers’ claim that the fossil’s canine root clearly indicates its status as an early hominin, arguing they did not have enough contextual evidence to draw conclusions from the single canine root. Anthropologist Susan Antón echoed “The long line of later hominins found in Africa suggests an African origin”.
A European origin of branching into the homo line has won traction only among European reporters. Unfortunately, every human culture and social class suffers from phoney identity hubris.