The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack: and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution

296 Pages·2015·3.93 MB·English

by  Ian Tattersall

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE
RICKETY COSSACK
AND OTHER CAUTIONARY TALES FROM
HUMAN EVOLUTION
IAN TATTERSALL
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With gratitude to Elwyn Simons and Niles Eldredge
(both blameless).
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
PREFACE
Prologue: Lemurs and the Delights of Fieldwork
1: Humankind’s Place in Nature
2: People Get a Fossil Record
3: Neanderthals and Man-Apes
4: The Synthesis and Handy Man
5: Evolutionary Refinements
6: The Gilded Age
7: Meanwhile, Back at the Museum . . .
8: Turkana, the Afar, and Dmanisi
9: Molecules and Midgets
10: Neanderthals, DNA, and Creativity
Epilogue: Why Does It Matter How We Evolved?
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
PREFACE
I am approaching the end of a long career as a paleoanthropologist—a student of
human evolution—with a nagging feeling of incompletion. Not that I would
trade that career for anything: it has been hugely fulfilling and has provided me
with an endless supply of incident—however unwanted on occasion—that has
guaranteed the absence of boredom. Even more important, over the last half
century profound changes in the field of paleoanthropology have made it a
wonderfully exhilarating place to be. Most obvious among these are the huge
additions made to the human fossil record, the traditional archive of our
evolutionary past, nowadays closely rivaled by the advent of powerful molecular
genetic techniques that allow us alternative ways of glimpsing our biological
history. But numerous other new technologies have also given us unprecedented
approaches to clarifying the ages and the lifeways of our various hominid
precursors, and novel viewpoints on how evolution works have offered us new
ways of thinking about our biological record.
Yet for all the excitement, in some respects paleoanthropology has remained
curiously static compared to other areas of paleontology. Indeed, it seems fair to
say that today’s paleoanthropologists are in general a lot more like their
precursors of the mid-twentieth century than, say, modern dinosaur or fish
paleontologists are. Perhaps this is inevitable, since it is particularly difficult to
escape from preconception when looking at our own egocentric species, Homo
sapiens, and its extinct relatives. What is more, we tend to scrutinize the
evidence for our own past in considerably more detail than we do that of other
species. Still, for all the extenuating circumstances, the science of human
evolution has not borne the burden of history lightly; in this field, more than
most, what we think today continues to be very intensely influenced by what we
thought yesterday—and the day before that.
I realized this fact with particular force a few years ago while writing Masters
of the Planet, a book in which I attempted to put together a coherent account of
just how, from a remote starting point as a bipedal but otherwise unremarkable
ape, we human beings contrived to become, rather rapidly, the extraordinary
creatures we are. As the writing progressed I realized that if I was to provide a
narrative of human evolution that would make ready sense, I would have to omit
any substantial mention of the convoluted—and in many ways highly insular—
histories of discovery and ideas in paleoanthropology. This was a serious
omission since, given the sheer weight of paleoanthropology’s historical burden,
it left a huge gap in the story. It is that gap that led to the book you are holding
now, which is in effect a complement to the earlier one. It is an idiosyncratic
history of paleoanthropology that is intended to show just how received wisdoms
about human evolution have always conditioned what we have believed about
our own origins, often in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. For the
half century or so during which I have actively participated in the field, I have
tried to make this point by describing the development of my own ideas about
evolutionary processes and about the fossil record they have produced, while
enlivening the narrative with some anecdotal experience. My hope is that by the
book’s end I will have convinced you that how we interpret the process by which
we became human really does matter, because it so greatly impacts our view of
ourselves.
Perhaps you will allow me to begin with what may initially appear to be a
digression.
PROLOGUE
LEMURS AND THE DELIGHTS OF
FIELDWORK
The sail first appeared as a tiny triangle above the shimmering horizon.
Gradually it resolved into the image of a rickety dhow, butting slowly nearer
through the ocean swells. At first, though, I barely noticed it. I had other
preoccupations. Sitting forlornly on a gleaming deserted beach on Mohéli, the
smallest of the Comoro Islands, which sit in the middle of the vast Mozambique
Channel between Madagascar and Africa, I was actually wondering if I would
ever see the outside world again.
Three weeks earlier, I had arrived in Moroni, capital of Grande Comore
Island, after one of the more hair-raising aircraft rides of my life. I had shown up
early in the morning at Dar es Salaam airport, in neighboring Tanzania, for the
scheduled short flight aboard one of Air Comores’ two ancient DC-4s. Once at
the airport I was told that Air Comores hadn’t actually been seen for a month,
but that if I felt optimistic I could wait. So I waited, along with two unkempt
French youths, one of whom sported a bushy golden beard and long, lank hair
that made him resemble that weird image on the Shroud of Turin. Hours of
desultory conversation later, a battered DC-4 with a star and crescent on its tail
finally rolled up to the ramp and spluttered to a stop in the blazing midday sun.
For what seemed an eternity, nothing happened. Finally, the flight to Moroni
was called, and we three optimists duly trooped out to the aircraft. As we
climbed the rolling steps its door opened, emitting a blast of hot, fetid air that
almost knocked us off our feet. Inside, we found a cabin crammed with heat-
prostrated passengers, and our way forward blocked by oil drums lashed down
along the aisle. Not an empty seat in sight. We looked around at the cabin
steward. He nodded at the barrels.
Once we were settled uncomfortably on our improvised seats, the door closed
and the aircraft taxied out. After what felt like an eternity, it staggered into the
air. Circling up to a cruising altitude of what seemed no more than a couple
thousand feet, we headed out over the choppy Mozambique Channel, every
whitecap sharply visible below us. Arriving in Moroni, a bone-jarring landing
took up the entire runway, and after we reached the terminal it took me awhile to
disentangle myself from all the junk in the aircraft interior. By the time I finally
got inside the tiny building, the Air Comores captain was already seated at the
bar at the end of the narrow room, fiercely grasping a tumbler brimming with
neat whisky.
Recognizing him from earlier times—Air Comores flight crews in those days
were grizzled veterans who had flown Dien Bien Phu, Biafra, and Katanga, had
seen it all, and usually liked to reminisce—I greeted him warmly. He didn’t
respond in kind. Instead, he raised his eyes from his glass, fixed me with a wide-
eyed stare, and said, “We were two tons over maximum gross weight on takeoff,
and if one engine had so much as hiccoughed, we’d all be dead!” Taken aback, I
said, “But, Monsieur X, why do you fly under these conditions?” His answer:
“Monsieur, I am 75 years old. Who else will pay me to fly?”
That was the Comoros in a nutshell. Assembled one by one into the French
Empire at various dates between 1840 and 1912, the four tiny islands of the
archipelago (Grande Comore, Mohéli, Anjouan, and Mayotte) had earlier been
independent sultanates lying at the far end of the Arab trading route down the
east African coast from Oman. During colonial times they were administered as
a dependency of the huge but equally remote French island of Madagascar,
making them about as forgotten and neglected as it’s possible to be. But isolation
and tranquility are not the same thing; and once Madagascar had achieved its
own independence in 1960, the Comoros embarked on a tortuous history, the
complexities of which have been far out of proportion to the archipelago’s size.
Until 1974 the islands remained under the wing of distant France, but at the
end of that year a referendum on independence was held. Three islands voted to
go it alone; but the southernmost island of Mayotte, which had been French the
longest, voted to stay that way. Ultimately this was allowed, and in response the
enraged Comorian authorities blockaded the wayward island. I was living in
Mayotte at the time, and I clearly remember my growing dismay as first the beer,
and then the cigarettes, and then all civilized forms of food ran out. Eventually,
we were reduced to subsisting off a supremely tedious ratatouille of obscure
local vegetables. When, after some months, we finally learned that a shipment of
imported food had beaten the embargo and arrived in one of the island’s few
primitive stores, we were less than entirely amused to discover that the entire
consignment consisted of cans of ratatouille niçoise. Times have changed,
though; since 2011 Mayotte has been an Overseas Department of France,
complete with supermarkets, paved roads, high prices, a bloated bureaucracy,
and a polluted lagoon.
In the other Comoros, in contrast, time has in many ways stood pretty still—
even if events haven’t. As if to make up for a marked lack of economic progress,
though, politics have been very lively indeed. Almost as soon as the archipelago
had unilaterally declared its independence, its president was deposed in a coup—
the first of four—by the notorious French mercenary Bob Denard, already a
veteran of mischief in Algeria, Katanga, Rhodesia, and other trouble spots.
Following a short period of confusion, a revolutionary named Ali Soilih was
installed as president, and things got really interesting. Ali was a francophobe
Maoist with peculiar ideas about democracy. To purge the Comoros of its
colonial heritage he supervised the burning of all the government’s civil status
records; and to assure his legitimacy he reduced the voting age to 14 (he was a
Che Guevara–like idol to kids)—a maneuver that allowed him to squeak by in a
referendum on his rule.