Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils

Lydia Pyne “Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils,” Viking, 2016, 243 pp.

During the twentieth century, the search for human ancestors has spanned four continents and resulted in the discovery of hundreds of fossils. While most of these discoveries lay quietly in museum collections, there are a few that have become world-renowned.  In Seven Skeletons, historian of science Lydia Pyne describes a cultural history for each of seven selected celebrity fossils—from their discovery to their afterlife in museums. These seven include the three-foot tall “hobbit” from Flores, the Neanderthal of La Chapelle, the Taung Child, the Piltdown Man hoax, Peking Man, Australopithecus Sediba, and Lucy.  These seven tell us about our evolutionary ancestry covering millions of years.  Lucy, so far the oldest of these seven, roamed the earth 3.5 million years ago.  

This book receives my new “Necessary for Education” designation.

  Pg. 14:  The Neanderthal of La Chaplelle fossil described in this book, was discovered in 1908 and was the first complete Neanderthal skeleton.  Earlier, a Neanderthal skull had been found in the Neander valley in 1856. (See my April 12, 2016 review of The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack).

Pg. 34:  Today Archaeologists consider Neanderthals to have been just as smart, just as technologically apt, just as culturally nuanced as Homo sapiens.  Despite this shift in interpretation, the Neanderthal as a hapless caveman is so firmly entrenched in our cultural consciousness that it is exceptionally difficult to dislodge it.  Why they did not survive along with us is still unsolved—climate change is the probable cause of their extinction thirty thousand years ago, they had adapted to the colder, glacial age.

Pg. 53:  Piltdown Man (a hoax).  Piltdown man was allegedly discovered by Charles Dawson in 1912.  When assembled together the fossil appeared to have an apelike jaw and humanlike skull, suggesting the fossil could be the perfect missing link between apes and humans.  It wasn’t until 1953 when the Piltdown materials were found to be a hoax.  It was a fossil forgery of the first degree, comprising real but very recently old human crania, orangutan bones, and chimpanzee teeth all masquerading as a fossil much older than it was.  The reason the hoax was so successful, other than the absence of accurate dating mechanisms, was that the hoax fit the world-view of the archeologists.

Pg. 90:  Dominant evolutionary theory of the early twentieth century believed human fossil ancestory ought to be apelike, big-brained ancestors from Southeast Asia or Europe.  All establishment scientists were all firm proponents of Piltdown Man as an ancestor; Piltdown’s anatomy supported the current trends in evolutionary thinking, and it was not until 1953 that the Piltdown fossil was found to have been a hoax.

Pg. 103:  With the discrediting of the Piltdown Man in 1953, intellectual space for accepting the Taung fossil as a hominin ancestor opened up. 

Pg. 119:  Forty boxes containing skulls, jaws, teeth, and other bones from fossil collections at the archaeological site of Zhoukoudian in China during the 1920s and 1930s became known as Peking Man.  Today Peking Man is taxonomically assigned to Homo erectus—an extinct Pleistocene species in humans’ evolutionary tree roughly 750,000 years old.  Extensive analysis reveals that the species had sophisticated stone tools and offered the first systematic use of controlled fire outside of our own species, Homo sapiens. 

Pg. 153:  Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, was assigned to the extinct hominin species Australopithecus afarensis—a species that lived 3.25 million years ago.

Pg. 187:  The Hobbit was discovered in 2003 on the island of Flores, Indonesia.  This small three-foot tall adult hominin was named Homo floresiensis and christened ‘Flo’, she is best known to the rest of the world as the real-life hominin hobbit.  This discovery of Flo and eight other small hominins was a game changer in human evolution studies.  Finding a hominin so small, with such a small brain, so relatively late in the geologic record, and in Southeast Asia shook up how scientists thought about human evolution.  The species so far discovered lived from 100,000 to 18,000 years ago. (P. 195). 

Pg. 200:  Although Flo’s brain is small, evidence indicates she and others in her species were able to make and use stone tools and had a keen mastery of fire.  (Flo’s brain size is measured at 400-426 cubic centimeters in volume, compared with approximately 1,300 cubic centimeters for modern Homo sapiens.)

Pg. 213:  Sediba discovered in 2008.  This species has still does not have an accepted classification as belonging to the Homo or Australopithecus species.

Pg. 216:  The year 2010 was a great one for studies in human evolution: two major new hominin discoveries entered the scientific record.  These new fossils were both members of the genus Australopithecus, around two million years old.