The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story of Human Origins

274 Pages·2015·5.53 MB·English

by  David R. Begun

THE REAL PLANET OF THE APES
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THE
RE AL
PL ANET
OF THE
APES
A NEW STORY OF HUMAN ORIGINS
DAVID R . B EGU N
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
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Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
Jacket art: Dryopithecus Africanus (pencil on paper), English School,
(20th century) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 14924- 0
Library of Congress Control Number 2015947083
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in
Sabon Next Pro Lt & Grotesque MT Std
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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CONTENTS
PREFACE vii
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1
THE EARLY YEARS 27
CHAPTER 2
OUT OF AFRICA: AFROPITHECUS AND FRIENDS 62
CHAPTER 3
OUT IN THE WORLD: EARLY APES SPREAD IN EUROPE 73
CHAPTER 4
HOME AGAIN: THE NEW AFRO- EUROPEAN APES 97
CHAPTER 5
THE BIG EAST- WEST DIVIDE 118
CHAPTER 6
EAST SIDE STORY: OUR COUSINS SIVAPITHECUS
AND THE ORANGUTANS 123
CHAPTER 7
WEST SIDE STORY: THE AFRICAN APES OF EUROPE 147
CHAPTER 8
THE DESCENDANTS OF DRYOPITHECUS 162
CHAPTER 9
BACK TO AFRICA AGAIN 187
POSTSCRIPT 227
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 231
NOTES 233
REFERENCES 237
INDEX 239
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PREFACE
For the past thirty years or so I have lived in a world I like to call the
real planet of the apes. It’s not a New York or San Francisco over-
run by bipedal talking chimps, gorillas, and orangs with weapons
and on horseback, like in the movies, but instead, a large part of
the world as it was millions of years ago. Believe it or not, between
about 7 and 22 million years ago the planet was full of apes, or at
least the Old World part of it (Europe, Asia, and Africa.) We know
of about fifty species of fossil apes that roamed the forests of the Old
World during that time span, which is called the Miocene. There
were probably several times more than this number that may or
may not ever be found. I find this amazing considering that there
are only a handful of apes left today and they are disappearing fast.
Aside from humans (we are in a real sense just bipedal apes), living
apes are confined to patches of forest in Southeast Asia and central
Africa. They are rare, all endangered in fact, but they have an amaz-
ing array of adaptations. Some are very big, others quite small, some
dwell in trees, others mostly on the ground, some eat fruit, others
leaves, and some are social, others solitary.
I want to know how we went from dozens of ape species at any
one time, hundreds in all over the millennia, to just a few today. I
want to know how apes evolved all of the unique adaptations they
share. Why do I want to know? Because I know that without these
adaptations humans would not exist.
Why are apes so rare today? How did they get to be the way they
are? And, even more important to me, why do they resemble us in
so many ways? We apes all have big brains, highly dexterous hands,
mobile shoulders and hips, broad flat chests, and many other more
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viii • Preface
subtle, shared similarities. As a group we are the most intelligent
animals on the planet (except possibly dolphins). There is a reason
for this— and that reason is bound up in the fossil record of the
apes, waiting to be understood. I attempt to answer these questions
in this book, based on my interpretation of the evidence, which I
have been trying to make sense of these last three decades.
I try to share my passion for paleoanthropology in this book,
along with what I hope is a logical narrative, starting with ape ori-
gins and ending with the origins of humans, by which I mean the
human lineage after chimps and we diverged. Along the way I want
to share some of my experiences with all the amazing people I have
met, as well as my discoveries and screwups. I have tried to point
out areas of disagreement or controversy where my ideas do not
exactly follow those of other colleagues.
Few of the ideas and interpretations expressed in this book are
exclusively my own but, rather, are the result of more than a century
and a half of research. The few that are mine more or less exclusively
tend to be controversial. One in particular is my conclusion that it is
Europe, and not Africa, that is the center of origin of the ancestors
of living great apes and humans. The conventional wisdom is that
the common ancestor of all living great apes and humans evolved
in Africa. After all, chimps and gorillas, the closest relatives of hu-
mans, live in Africa today, and the earliest human ancestors are also
African. The idea of an African origin dates back to Darwin, but
even the great man himself had his doubts, as we shall see. Some
researchers like my idea and some do not, for reasons that will be
come clear later. I obviously like the idea myself, but it is just a hy-
pothesis, not a conviction. Anyone who thinks they know exactly
and without a doubt what happened 10 million years ago, or for
that matter at any time during the evolution of life on Earth, needs
to reconsider their views. I try to keep an open mind, but I have
come to a certain number of conclusions that are currently consis-
tent with the evidence, at least as I see it. All that might change,
and that is exactly the challenge— coming up with ideas that can be
falsified with new evidence. I hope my friends and colleagues and
readers in general will see that this has been my goal.
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Preface • ix
• • •
When I told my parents that I was quitting the premed program
at Brandeis University to go to the University of Pennsylvania and
study human evolution, my father said “Human evolution. A good
hobby for a doctor.” Fortunately my folks warmed up to my interests;
in fact, they were always completely supportive, and I thank them
for that. It may have been inevitable that I would turn to paleoan-
thropology, having spent all my summers from birth to nearly age
20 with my grandparents in the French region of the Périgord, the
birthplace of prehistory. The earliest modern humans from Europe
are often referred to as Cro- Magnons. The original Cro- Magnon
fossils were found about forty kilometers from my grandparents’
home. The word “Cro- Magnon” is Occitan (or Patois), the local
language my grandfather spoke before he learned French. Edouard
Lartet and his son Louis Lartet, working in the Périgord, essentially
discovered prehistory. Earlier and further south, Lartet the elder had
described the first fossil primates, Pliopithecus and Dryopithecus, two
creatures that have kept me busy for thirty- plus years. The world
famous painted cave site of Lascaux, which I visited many times as a
child, is also in the Périgord.
I am immersed in the culture of the Périgord, which is as much
about prehistory as it is about gastronomy (foie gras and truffles)
and castles. My grandfather, who received the French Legion of
Honor for service in the French Resistance during the Second
World War, was a personage in the Périgord. He knew the pre-
historians, whose sites he helped electrify as director of the EDF
(Electricité de France) in the Périgord. My grandparents and my
mother became close with Josephine Baker, the jazz performer,
civil rights activist, and member of the French Resistance during
World War II, whose castle in the Périgord my grandfather helped
to restore. Along with my grandparents, my French mother and
my American father, a soldier who married a French girl, instilled
in me a love for the Périgord and inadvertently for prehistory. I
have no doubt that my emotional attachment to this area of the
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x • Preface
world influenced the course of my life and my choice to become a
paleoanthropologist.
I left a premed program to go to Philadelphia and work with Alan
Mann, given his interest in middle and late Pleistocene humans,
such as Neandertals and their ancestors. I was sure, as sure I had
been earlier that I wanted to be a doctor, that I wanted to study
Neandertals. Not long before I came to Penn, Alan had made molds
of Neandertal and Homo heidelbergensis fossils in Central Europe.
While in Hungary he also, almost incidentally, molded specimens
from Rudabánya, a late Miocene fossil great ape site from which a
new genus of fossil ape, Rudapithecus, had been identified. Among
the fossils that Alan had molded were specimens, for the most part
phalanges (finger bones), that were undescribed. I jumped at the op-
portunity to work on original undescribed fossils and started my
life with the “real planet of the apes”: the Earth during the Miocene.
A fortuitous if not spastic jump from an interest in 200,000- year- old
Neandertals to 10- million- year- old apes. I am still amazed and grate-
ful to all the senior scientists who received me in their labs and even
in their homes, starting when I was barely twenty- one and really
had no idea what I was doing.
The point of this reminiscing is to document the degree to which
life takes unexpected twists and turns. The one constant is a pas-
sion for the discipline. When I think back on it, there is so much
that is random and unpredictable. I tell students to just go for it,
be serious and dedicated and try to be as confident and humble as
you can manage. To all of those parents out there who agree with
my father that paleoanthropology is a good hobby for a doctor, I
apologize if I have in any way influenced your children toward this
direction in life.
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