Rachel Caspari

Why not the Neandertals

Some workers have suggested that a hypothetical genetic mutation in an African population less than 100,000 years ago led to a cascade of neurological changes in the human brain that culminated in the appearance of modern language. Language then triggered the socioeconomic and cognitive changes we associate with behavioral modernity and Africans, armed with behavioral modernity, then spread out from that continent, out-competing, displacing, extirpating, outbreeding or, most generally, replacing the Neandertals and other archaic humans throughout the middle latitudes of the Old World. The Neandertals of Europe are the best-known, best-represented and longest studied test case for this theory. In this paper we present evidence from skeletal anatomy, mitochondrial DNA, morphology and genetics of speech and the archaeology of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe that directly contradicts all of the elements in this replacement scenario. The processes leading to modernity involved the entire human species, and were based on the ethnogenic principle of communication and reticulation among populations.

1918: Three perspectives on race and human variation.

Race was an important topic to the physical anthropologists of 1918, but their views were not monolithic. Multiple perspectives on race are expressed in the first volume of the AJPA, which encompass biological determinism and assumptions about evolutionary processes underlying the race concept. Most importantly, many of the significant alternative approaches to the study of human variation were already expressed in 1918. This paper examines race from the different perspectives of three key contributions to the first volume of the AJPA: papers from Hrdlicka, Hooton, and Boas. The meaning of race derived from this work is then discussed. Despite new understandings gained through the neo-Darwinian synthesis and the growth of genetics, the fundamentals of the modern discussions of race were already planted in 1918.

Brief Communication: Evidence of Pathology on the Frontal Bone From Gongwangling

The hominid fossil from Gongwangling (Lantian) is well known and described (Woo, [1965] Scientia Sinca 14:1032-1036; Woo [1966] Curr. Anthropol. 7:83-86; Wu and Dong [1985] in R Wu and JW Olsen (eds.): Palaeoanthropology and Paleolithic Archaeology in the Peoples Republic of China [New York: Academic Press, pp. 79-89]; Wu and Poirier [1995] Human Evolution in China: A Metric Description of the Fossils and a Review of the Sites [Oxford: Oxford University Press]). However, evidence of pathology on the frontal bone has been previously unreported. Two lesions occur on the right supraorbital region that can be distinguished from marks of erosion prevalent on this specimen. These are discrete and irregularly shaped, with evidence of secondary bone formation surrounding them. The cause of the condition is unclear. Possibilities include trauma or abscess from an unspecified infection.

Weidenreich, Coon, and multiregional evolution

Many theories of human evolution emphasie that there was significant geographic variation. They may have little else in common, though, and the idea that Coon provided the evolutionary basis for Weidenreich’s polycentrism, while multiregionalism cleansed Coon’s writings of racism has been misleading. Coon and Weidenreich were as different as polygenism and monogenism, and in the basis of their differences lies the genesis of multiregionalism.

Neandertals and the Roots of Human Recency

The concept of modernity, or “humanness,” has been difficult, if not impossible, to define. This has not prevented discussions of its appearance and evolution. In a 2003 essay the historian of science, Robert Proctor, suggested three intellectual transitions that have given rise to current understandings that “humanness” was attained recently. Two of the three transitions represent changes in the way phyletic diversity in the hominid record – the number of human species and genera that are recognized – is viewed. In this paper we explore the effect of these two transitions on our understandings of Neandertal humanity. We find that if these transitions lead to a conclusion that modernity is a phylogenetic attribute of humans, “humanness” must actually be old rather than recent and must apply to Neandertals. We propose that in contrast to the three areas explored by Proctor, a focus on major post-Neandertal demographic shifts and concomitant cultural and genetic changes presents a different intellectual foundation for understanding modernity.

Race, then and now: 1918 revisited

In 2009, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA) published a special issue, “Race Reconciled” (Edgar & Hunley, 2009). There was a diversity of opinions expressed in the volume, but one thing was clear: in 2009 there were still discussions in biological anthropology about whether race exists, the patterning of human geographic variation, and the relationship between social and biological race. For that volume, I contributed a historical paper, “1918: Three perspectives on race and human variation,” in which I examined race within the structure of physical anthropology at the time of the founding of the journal. The contributions of Ale s Hrdlička, Earnest Hooton and Franz Boas, all of whom published in Volume 1 of the AJPA, were shown to reflect different aspects of the race concept and different views of geographic variation, even as they represented different institutions within American anthropology. A major point was that modern views of race, especially in the work of Boas, were presaged in these pages a century ago. What follows is a revision of Caspari (2009), included because of its relevance to the 100-year anniversary of the journal. The history and analysis of race in Volume 1 of the AJPA remains much the same as in the original piece. However, in the current version, as a Centennial Perspective, I share my views on how and why the acceptance of the race concept has changed in biological anthropology over the last century. I see it as driven by four major factors: recognition of scientific racism and the social responsibility of scientists, the examination of the phylogenetic assumption underlying the race concept, recognition of the power of essentialism, and a new focus on the biological dimensions of social race.

Brother or Other: The Place of Neanderthals in Human Evolution

Few have provided insights and thoughtful explanations for Neanderthals that equal what have been a central theme in Yoel Rak’s publications. One of his deep understandings is that Neanderthals are another way of being human: not inferior, not superior, but different. Looking at what we now understand, Rak has been fundamentally correct in this insight, and where new discoveries have been unexpected, they serve to expand its scope and meaning. Unexpected new information about Neanderthal body form, demography, and even breeding behavior support and flesh out Rak’s essential insight about the place of Neanderthals in human evolution. In this paper some of the new discoveries and interpretations of Neanderthals and their evolution are discussed in this context. We examine three aspects of how Neanderthals are another way of being human: body shape (as revealed in the pelvis ), population structure (as revealed in their paleodemography), and breeding behavior (as revealed by paleogenetics, in the pattern of ancient gene flow). In these ways Neanderthals are like their ancestors, or more broadly are the plesiomorphic condition.