The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack: and other Cautionary Tales From Human Evolution,

Ian Tattersal, “The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack: and other Cautionary Tales From Human Evolution,” Palgrave and Macmillan, 2015, 222 pp.

For readers questioning my fascination with evolution, I can only suggest they should have been in the same study halls I sat in during high school.

In his new book The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, human paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall argues that a long tradition of "human exceptionalism" in paleoanthropology (study of human evolution) has distorted the picture of human evolution. Drawing partly on his own career-from young scientist to elder statesman, Tattersall offers an intriguing look at the competitive world of paleoanthropology, beginning with Charles Darwin 150 years ago, and continuing through the Leakey dynasty in Africa, and concluding with the latest findings in the Caucasus. The book's title refers to the 1856 discovery of a clearly very old skull cap in Germany's Neander Valley. The possessor had a brain as large as a modern human, but a heavy low braincase with a prominent brow ridge. Scientists tried hard to explain away the inconvenient possibility that this was a homo species but not a homo sapien. One extreme interpretation suggested that the preserved leg bones were curved by both rickets, and by a life on horseback. The pain of the unfortunate individual's affliction had caused him to chronically furrow his brow in agony, leading to the excessive development of bone above the eye sockets. 

The subsequent history of human evolutionary studies is full of similarly fanciful interpretations to avoid the possibility that other species of homos existed (As recent as 1993 the genealogical trees of the hominid featured only 12 species scattered over the past 4 million years, by 2015 this figure has doubled with species scattered over 7 million years p. 215).

My Notes:

Pg. xi:  Over the past half century profound changes in the field studying human evolution have occurred.  Most obvious among these are the huge additions made to the human fossil record closely rivaled by the advent of powerful molecular genetic techniques that allow us alternative ways of glimpsing our biological history. 

Pg. 13:  In the eighteenth century Linnaeus’s recognized that the living world was clearly structured and within this structure classifications used an arrangement of sets-within-sets.  This insight allowed Linnaeus to give us the system of classifying living things we still use, in which our species, Homo sapiens, belongs to a genus Homo that in turn belongs to the family Hominidae, which forms part of the order Mammalia, and on up until we are united with all Animalia.  In this inclusive hierarchy, each category includes everything below it in the scale, so that H. sapiens is only one of several species—the others are now extinct—that are classified in the genus Homo, while the family Hominidae contains several genera, and so on. 

In Linnaeus’s time, as today, the basic unit into which living things were seen to be packaged was the species.  And, what gives any species its (occasionally permeable) borders is that it is bound together as a reproductive unit.  That is, the species is the largest population within which interbreeding can freely take pace. 

Pg. 75:  1950 was the year in which radiocarbon dating was invented by the University of Chicago physical chemist Libby.  For the first time, it became possible to assign ages in years to certain human fossils, rather than simply placing them in sequence.  Radioactive carbon has a rather short half-life of 5,730 years.  This caps the useful time range of the method at about 40,000 to 50,000 years. (Later methods allowed dating millions of years ago).

Pg. 106:  In 1972 Eldredge and Gould argued provocatively that evolution, far from being the gradual process envisaged by Darwin, was typically episodic.  Lineages routinely remain stable until they split, in a rapid process known as speciation.  Speciation in higher vertebrates like primates almost certainly depends on the cessation of physical contact between two parts of the same species.  When such splitting occurs, it will almost certainly be as a result of external factors: maybe a shift in the course of a river, or the creation of an island by rising sea levels, or local climate change.  The resulting isolation permits the species fragments to develop reproductive incompatibilities that ensure they will behave more or less as different entities should they ever find themselves reunited. 

Pg. 146:  In the 1970’s a hominid occupation site in the suburbs of Nice was excavated and uncovered the remains of what had evidently been a seasonal hunting camp whose occupants had constructed quite elaborate shelters some 380,000 years ago.  There was also evidence of an ancient fireplace, and it furnished the earliest really good evidence that hominids were controlling fire.  (However, recently there has been good evidence of fire domestication in Africa at a million years ago.) 

Pg. 165:  So far the oldest Homo sapiens fossil ever discovered is around 195,000 years old.

Pg. 182:  In 1987, examination of the mtDNA samples of 147 people from around the world determined that our species had originated around 200,000 years ago.  (Note: at 2.5 million years ago the first stone tools marked a significant cognitive leap, while at around 1.8 million years ago the modern body form appeared and brain sizes began their remarkable increase). (P. 188)

Pg. 186:  Documenting environmental ups and downs has been made possible by measuring and calibrating cores drilled in the muds of the ocean floor and in the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps.  The study of these cores reveals that, while world climates had been irregularly deteriorating for a long time, a significant episode of global cooling began a little before 2.5 million years ago.  After this point, average global temperatures shuttled from warmer to colder and back on a pretty regular 41,000-year cycle related to cyclical changes in the tilt of the Earth’s axis. 

Pg. 197:  The most unsurprising finding from the nuclear DNA work was that the Neanderthal and modern genomes are extraordinarily similar.  One method of comparing them suggests that we have 99.7 percent of our protein-coding genome in common with the Neanderthals.  This compares with 98.8 percent similarity between humans and chimpanzees, which are also—in the greater scheme of things—very close relatives.  The ‘molecular clock’ initially suggested that the Neanderthal and modern lineages had parted ways at some time between about 300,000 and 700,000 years ago.  (Since reading this book I have found this parting is now determined to be close to 500,000 years ago.)

Pg. 211:  There is a lot of evidence that the unique human way of viewing the world, and of manipulating information about it, was actively emerging in the African continent after about 100,000 years ago.  Before that time, unequivocal evidence for symbolic behaviors is rare or lacking in the record; after it, such evidence rapidly accumulates.  So, what could possibly have happened to spur members of the already-established species Homo sapiens to begin using their brains in this radically new way?  So far, the only reason we have for believing such a transition could ever happen is that it so evidently did happen.  It appears the presence of the enabling biology had to be present before the transition.  So the transition must have been culturally stimulated to use the already present biological capabilities.  The obvious candidate for this cultural stimulus is the invention of language.