Madelaine Böhme - Ancient Bones

ANCIENT BONES

Madelaine Bhme, geo-scientist and palaeontologist, is professor of terrestrial palaeoclimatology at the University of Tbingen and founding director of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeo-environment. She is one of the most esteemed palaeoclimatologists and palaeoenvironmental scientists examining human evolution with regard to changes in climate and environment. Bhme lives in Tbingen, Germany.

Rdiger Braun is a science journalist interested in translating cutting-edge science into gripping stories for the general public to effect societal change. He studied biology and philosophy at the Julius Maximilian University in Wrzburg. He contributes to Stern and Geo. Braun lives in Ahrensburg, Germany.

Florian Breier is a science journalist and works as a filmmaker and author for ZDF television, arte , SWR broadcasting, and others. Breier lives in Cologne, Germany.

Jane Billinghurst is an author and a translator of nonfiction books from German into English.

Scribe Publications
1820 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

Published by Scribe 2020

Wie wir Menschen wurden by Madelaine Bhme, Rdiger Braun & Florian Breier 2019 by Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, Mnchen, Germany

Ancient Bones (English language translation) 2020 by Jane Billinghurst Foreword 2020 by David R. Begun

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Interior illustrations by Nadine Gibler Informationsdesign
Artists renditions by Velizar Simeonovski

9781922310347 (Australian edition)
9781925938692 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au

CONTENTS

Part : El Graeco and the Split Between Chimpanzees and Humans

1. : The Detective Work Begins

2. : The First Fossil Apes From Pikermi

3. : Bruno von Freybergs Discovery

4. : A Journey Into the Catacombs Beneath the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg

5. : Ancient Bones in a High-Tech Lab

Part : The Real Planet of the Apes

6. : A Short History of the Search for Our Origins

7. : The Golden Age of Ape Evolution

8. : Great Apes in Oak Forests

9. : Was Udo a Missing Link?

Part 3: The Cradle of Humanity: Africa or Europe?

10. : Still an Ape or an Early Hominin?

11. : Puzzling Prints of an Ancient Biped

12. : The Shady Case of Sahelanthropus

13. : The Out-of-Africa Theory Begins to Wobble

Part : Climate Change as a Driver of Evolution

14. : Reconstructing the Environment Is Key

15. : Landscape and Vegetation in El Graecos Time

16. : A Gigantic Desert Becomes an Insurmountable Obstacle

17. : The Mediterranean Dries Out

Part : What Makes Humans Human

18. : Lots of Room for Creativity

19. : Curiosity About the Unknown

20. : The Running Human

21. : How Diet Influenced the Development of the Brain

22. : From Alarm Cries to Culture

Part : The Lone Survivor

23. : The Problem With the Family Tree

24. : Humans From Denisova Cave

25. : The Rational Human

FOREWORD

I AM HONORED TO call Madelaine Bhme a friend. I have never met anyone quite like her, and I have met just about everyone working on the fossil evidence of ape and human evolution over the past forty years. Her knowledge of the fossil record and geology are encyclopedic and her enthusiasm for research is infectious.

Madelaine and I had been following each others work for some time before we finally met in Istanbul at a conference in 2013 . Shortly after that, she invited me to work with her on an intriguing fossil, El Graeco, which she described with the unique combination of historical documentation, geological and paleontological expertise, and personal passion that typifies this book. The invitation came at a particularly exciting time for me, as I had been promoting the idea that Europe was not the backwater of ape evolution, contrary to what was widely claimed by many researchers, mostly those working in Africa.

Under Madelaines direction, our work on El Graeco has brought the hypothesis that Europe had a central role in great ape evolution back to the attention of our skeptical colleagues. It has also revealed her dogged determination to extract as much data as possible from the most unlikely of sources. I had studied this fossil in the mid- 1990 s, when it was on loan to the Natural History Museum in London, England. I concluded that it was unique, but I did not know what to make of it at the time, given its somewhat poor state of preservation. By using high-resolution X-rays (micro computed tomography) to look inside the fossil, Madelaine and her student Jochen Fuss were able to identify characteristics that distinguished El Graeco from other fossils from Europe and linked it with homininsthat is, humans and human ancestors that evolved after our lineage branched off from that of the chimpanzee. Madelaines genius is encapsulated by her realization that she could date the El Graeco site from a specimen hidden away in a long-forgotten archive using the orientation of crystals inside the bone. Who would have thought of that?

The narrative that Madelaine Bhme unveils in this book is as compelling as it is controversial. She brings together a wealth of information from history, geology, paleontology, and archeology to call into question some of the most treasured ideas in paleoanthropology, dogma in fact, about ape and human origins. She is refreshingly free of the biases that have led many to ignore data that contradict prevailing hypotheses. Her book sheds much-needed light on alternative interpretations that are supported by new discoveries but met with predictable skepticism. All the details of Madelaines narrative may subsequently be challenged as new data and new analyses are published, but she has opened a new frontier of research and is asking new questions, long repressed by the paleoanthropological establishment. Many of the ideas expressed in this book will one day find their way into textbooks on human evolution and inspire readers and students alike to ask themselves, Why didnt I think of that?

Madelaine describes some of the difficulties that paleoanthropologists working in Eurasia confront when their evidence points to interpretations that differ from the widely accepted view that African apes and humans first appeared and evolved exclusively in Africa. Though the Africanist perspective can be traced back to Darwin, the great evolutionary biologist was more open-minded than many of our colleagues today, suggesting, as Madelaine notes, that the ape from Europe known as Dryopithecus may be a relative of African apes and humans. Darwin was marvelously uncertain, as any scientist should be in the absence of direct evidence, of what he called the birthplace and antiquity of man. We should all be so open-minded. More importantly, Darwin recognized the significance of what we call in todays parlance land mammal dispersal events or, as Darwin put it, migration on the largest scale. An important theme in this book is about dispersals, the movement of animals, including apes, back and forth between Eurasia and Africa. We know this happened often. In fact, the animals that typify the African savannah today mostly arrived from Greece and Turkey. Graecopithecus or its kin were probably among them. Animals do not carry passports and do not worry about borders.