Summary
Analysis
In 1887, young Dutch doctor Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois is in Sumatra looking for the earliest human remains on Earth on a “hunch,” because he thinks that Sumatra is full of caves and that ancient humans lived in caves. Almost miraculously, he finds what he’s looking for. At the time, early human fossil records consist of only five incomplete Neanderthal skeletons. Even these are met with resistance: one anthropologist suggests the Neanderthal’s heavy brow ridge is caused by excessive frowning and that the skeleton is much more recent.
As before, Bryson introduces a new topic—here, bipeds, including other human-like species—with an anecdote that humanizes the scientific endeavor, in order to help engage the reader. Bryson has already mentioned that many scientists have historically resisted evolution on religious grounds, and once again, he notes how much hostility there is surrounding efforts to map the chain of human evolution.
Dubois’s team find part of a skull that they think is the missing link between apes and humans. It’s popularized as “Java Man.” To Dubois’s surprise, he’s met with hostility from the scientific community upon his return to Europe, most of whom argue that the skull belongs to a gibbon. In 1924, anatomist Raymond Dart receives a complete child’s skull that looks like it might be the missing link, and he dubs it “southern ape man of Africa.” His claim, too, is met with hostility by the scientific community. Efforts multiply, and by the 1950s, there are so many disagreements about how to interpret skeletons that that some scientists argue for 100 different species of hominid.
Bryson shows that hostility to skeletons that might connect humans and apes on the evolutionary chain continues until the mid-20th century, eventually triggering widespread confusion about how to make sense of new skeletons that are found. Once again, Bryson highlights that religious prejudices often slow down scientific progress, subtly implying that fostering openness and combatting prejudices in the scientific endeavor is important.
F. Clark Howell’s efforts to simplify the classification into two categories are largely rebuffed in the 1960s. Today, the picture is still in disarray. Bryson says some scientists think there are only two types of hominoid, others think there are 20, and very few agree on which ones are the right ones. Bryson says that part of the problem is lack of evidence. Scientists have to speculate about entire species based on a mere 5,000 partial skeletons from scattered ages in history—collectively, they’d fit in the back of a pick-up truck with room left over. The patchiness of the record is what makes each skull seem like radically different to the others, and it triggers many disputes.
Part of the reason why scientists struggle to piece together the period of history that captures the dawn of humankind is—as with other fossils—a lack of evidence. The record is so patchy that it’s difficult for scientists to come to a consensus at all, indicating how little scientists know about early humans and how much discovery still lies ahead.
With all that mind, Bryson tentatively argues that for 99.99999 percent of our history, chimpanzees and humans were in the same ancestral line. Seven million years ago, the “australopithecines” (of many shapes and sizes) emerged from Africa’s tropical forests and began roaming the savanna, becoming the dominant hominid species for five million years. The most famous specimen from this time is named Lucy: she’s 3 feet tall, and she can walk as well as climb. In 2001 and 2002, additional bipedal specimens were found.
Bryson pieces together a sketchy history of the descent of apes from the trees and the evolution of bipeds, although his caution indicates that this picture is not much more than speculation based on highly limited evidence, once again showing that scientists have yet to gain an adequate grasp on this period in Earth’s history.
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Bipedalism is a risky evolutionary move—it demands completely reworking the pelvis and making the birth canal much narrower. This means that babies have to pass through with smaller brains, and they demand longer infant care post-birth. This is even harder for Lucy and her contemporaries, who have orange-sized brains. Bryson speculates that Lucy and her clan came down from the trees because they had to. Changing tectonic plate activity made forests sparser in Africa. Of the six or so hominid types living in Africa around 2 million years ago, only one survived: “Homo.” Conventionally, “Homo habilis” (the first and most primitive species) comes first, and “Homo sapiens” (meaning us) comes last—but there’s a disputed number of species in between, including “Homo erectus.”
Bryson stresses that evolving to walk on two limbs entails a great deal of risk for early hominids. This highlights how lucky humans are to be here and how easily things could have gone south for our ancestors before we evolved. Bryson also shows that a lot of scientific confusion about hominids—specifically, how many species of hominid there are—persists in this research area, once again indicating that the vast majority of the scientific journey still lies ahead.
Scientists have no idea why the Homo brain suddenly started growing 2 million years ago. Ian Tattersall thinks it might be an evolutionary accident. Nobody knows why the other hominoids disappeared, though Matt Ridley suggests that humans ate them. Tattersall says it’s hard for humans to accept that our existence is just an accident and that there’s nothing “inevitable” about it, but that may well be the case. Homo erectus is considered the dividing line between humans and apes. Scientist Alan Walker describes Homo erectus as a fearsome creature: “the velociraptor of its day.”
As scientists try to piece together the evolution of humans, they discover more questions—such as why hominid brains grew and what happened to the other hominids—indicating the limited scope of their knowledge. The fact that brain growth might be an accident of history shows, once again, how lucky humans are to exist at all.
Richard Leakey discovers the first near-complete Homo erectus skeleton in the 1980s, of a nine- to 12-year-old boy who died 1.54 million years ago. Leakey believes that Homo erectus skulls show evidence of a capacity for speech (which chimps lack), though Walker disagrees. The spread of Homo erectus around the globe is so fast that some scientists think another hominid genus might have spontaneously arisen in Asia. Bryson says that all scientists do know is that about a million years ago, bipedal beings left Africa and spread around the globe. Everything else remains a matter of speculation.
Scientific knowledge of early bipeds is still largely a matter of speculation, and scientists still disagree on fundamentally important factors like how hominids spread throughout the world and whether all humans come from the same hominid ancestors. The sheer amount of speculation about these fundamental aspects of human history shows that scientists have barely begun to piece together this part of our story.