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Paleoanthropology Series Part 4: Enter Genus Homo - Ep 211
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MEMBERS: There’s a bonus segment!
This is our final episode in our overview of paleoanthropology and human evolution. It’s been a bumpy ride with a lot of species falling by the wayside, but, we’re down to the final few and we’ll see what happens to them! Don’t forget to check out the other episodes in this series and for members, there’s a special bonus segment for this episode in the Ad Free Downloads area on this episode’s page.
Links
- Human Family Tree
- Human Evolution Interactive Timeline
- Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens in Europe - TAS 160
- Ancient Hazelnuts, Artistic Neanderthals and a Pompeiian Chariot - TAS 116 (where we mention Denisovans)
Bonus Segment Links
- Sima de los Huesos, the Pit of Bones
- The Sima de los Huesos Middle Pleistocene hominin site (Burgos, Spain). Estimation of the number of individuals
Contact
- Chris Webster chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Rachel Roden rachel@unraveleddesigns.com RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
ArchPodNet
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- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
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- Tee Public Store
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Listener Feedback and Banter
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 211. On today's show, we finish our paleoanthropology series with our closest human ancestors. Let's dig a little deeper, but not as deep as you think.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hey everybody, how's it going this week? By everybody, I mean you. I'm like, who are you talking to? It's just me over here. If you're new to the podcast, this is the inane chatter portion of the show. The part where we talk about where we're at and what we're doing and what the weather's like. Yeah, we're not going to do that too much because we got kind of a big show. We do. Yeah, we get comments like that on iTunes. I really appreciate the people who take the time out of their day to go to Apple and say, this podcast would be better if it wasn't for you guys.
00:01:00
Speaker
That is so fair. Just go find another podcast to listen to then, I guess. I suggest Zencaster as your recording method if you're going to do it. And let me subscribe. Oh, make your own podcast. Oh, yeah, definitely. Do it better. We're also arrogant. We know everything. Oh, yeah. And we don't care about your opinions. That was some fun feedback, right? It wasn't directed at us specifically, but the entire network. I mean, it kind of was.
00:01:23
Speaker
Was it really, Tuss? I don't know. I didn't say specifically. I mean, we really try hard not to be arrogant. I mean, I'm not even an academic. It's hard not to be arrogant when you know everything. Oh, wow. See, guys, that's what I live with. Right. Every day. That. Indeed. All right.
Hominids vs. Hominins Explained
00:01:40
Speaker
So this is the fourth and final episode of our paleoanthropological series about human evolution.
00:01:49
Speaker
We're going to cover the genus Homo here. Now, this is a massive group. Yes. I mean, it's probably because it's more recent, geologically speaking. So there's more examples of this. I'm willing to bet there were other Australopithecines, other Paranthropus, other older ones all the way back. Other ones we don't even have names for. But it's just like you start getting so far back and the fossil record starts getting more and more fractured because those things either don't exist or they were in fewer quantities.
00:02:18
Speaker
Yeah, and the geology moves forward, even if it's very slowly, and it's just harder to find stuff that is older. You've got fewer examples. Well, I felt the need, because I know we've tossed these terms around a few times in the last few shows, but I felt the need to start off with defining hominid versus hominin. And they're both right when we're talking about this entire show.
00:02:40
Speaker
hominin simply refers to humans and all of our ancestors. Goes back to Australopithecines. Anybody who is in the ancestral line to modern humans is a hominin. Hominin. Hominid refers to humans and all their modern ancestors, but also every great ape and all their ancestors. So hominids are chimpanzees, but chimpanzees are not hominins. The common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees is a hominin and a hominid. And a hominid.
00:03:09
Speaker
And it's a little confusing when you start thinking about it, because you're like, oh, well, what about when you get to this common ancestor between these two species? But yeah. But like Australopithecines are hominids, but not hominids. Right. Because they don't have any, as far as we know, modern great ape descendants. Because it's not necessarily that we're the only thing that Australopithecines produced. Obviously, we think Paranthropus is a descendant of Australopithecine, and that died out. Yeah, true.
The Genus Homo and Its Evolution
00:03:37
Speaker
You know, there could be other lines as well that I really highly doubt evolved into other primates because we have pretty good histories of the other primates that are known today. So that's the definition. So we're hominins and we're hominids. Like you said, it could be something that died out though, just like parenthesis. So yeah. Everything we're going to talk about today is a hominin.
00:03:56
Speaker
Yes. Because they are in line. Well. Well, kind of. Yeah. OK. Oh, man. It gets so confusing, doesn't it? I know. It's a big old bush. It is confusing. Also, as we've mentioned before, there are some species we're not going to talk about just because we don't have time. And they're not like huge players, evolutionarily speaking, yet anyway. Yeah. And just know that we're not going to cover everything. This is not an exhaustive research on this topic. It's a high level overview, as we've mentioned before. Yeah.
00:04:25
Speaker
regarding the
Discovery and Significance of Homo habilis
00:04:26
Speaker
genus Homo. We're doing our best here for sure to cover as much as we can, but the Homo is just a gigantic category and we're going to cover six different examples from oldest to newest in the next three segments, but there is more and there's lots of debates and we'll touch on some of them about which goes in which category and which should be split off to their own category and all that kind of stuff too. This is an evolving field. Wow.
00:04:51
Speaker
Wow. That we're just doing our best to do an overview on. Right. All right. Well, let's dig into this now. Oh, so bad. It's like the easiest joke to make. It is. It is, yeah. Anyway, the first one we're going to talk about here is Homo habilis, the now poorly named Homo habilis. Right. 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago, found in Eastern and Southern Africa.
00:05:15
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And they were first, well, the first one was identified in 1964 in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, of course, by our favorite first family of paleoanthropology, the Leakeys. Yep. Now, the type specimen was actually found by Jonathan Leakey and was nicknamed Johnny's Child. And that name stuck until Lewis and his team, you know, did more studies on it and decided it was an entirely new species and gave a new name.
00:05:41
Speaker
This one was found with what became known as Olawon Tools. We've talked about those before. Actually, you wouldn't have heard this. We talked about it in a bonus segment off the last episode. So if you remember, go to your member pages and you can hear the bonus segment. If you're not a member, arcpodnet.com forward slash members, and you can join us and then hear our bonus segments.
00:05:59
Speaker
But anyway, it was found, I guess you don't need to listen to it because I'm going to tell you about it right now. Yes, you are. But basically, old one tools are just cobbles with a couple of flakes taken off. They've been smashed together, maybe smashed against something bigger, and they just got a slightly sharpened edge. But it was intentional, that's the point.
00:06:17
Speaker
It was intentional, but it wasn't very, I'm not artistic, that's not the right word, but there's not a lot of workmanship that went into them. It's just like knocking some flakes off. But it worked for over a million years and it's what they needed. It was very expedient, that's for sure. It was learned very early on that while you can smash stuff with rocks, which other species do, other species use rocks in very clever ways, human ancestors realized early on that, hey, if we just modify this rock ever so slightly,
00:06:45
Speaker
then we can get a lot more effectiveness out of it. So because these Oldowan tools, so-called, were found with Homo habilis, that name Homo habilis means handyman, literally. Because they said he was like a handyman because he had tools, right? Well,
00:07:02
Speaker
The article that we talked about in the bonus segment actually showed that Paranthropus is also a species that had tools and possibly earlier than Homo habilis. So while Paranthropus is not on the direct line to us and Homo habilis is, Homo habilis is arguably the first one we have evidence for in the human line that use stone tools.
00:07:22
Speaker
but not necessarily the first hominid. Right. Because paranthropus technically isn't a hominid or it is in a hominin. It's a hominid because they're not a direct line to us. As far as we know. Right. But tools, especially these expedient tools, it's very easy to imagine how these hominids
00:07:42
Speaker
would have realized how useful and helpful they would have been. And they developed separately, you know, and millions of years apart, or maybe not millions, hundreds of thousands of years apart. It just makes sense that that happened. Yeah. In 1986, another fragmentary skeleton was found in association with a Homo habilis skull and was found by Tim White.
00:08:03
Speaker
Yeah, and this was the first time we had seen more of the skeleton than just skull fragments and teeth, I think. So this really helped the researchers identify the different characteristics and they're better able to classify habilis as, yes, it is definitely part of the Homo line.
00:08:20
Speaker
Right. In 2003 or four, I went with the University of North Dakota anthropology club to San Francisco because the triple A's were going to be there. The association, the American association of anthropology. And it was ended up being canceled because there was a big hotel strike, but there was a few things still going on at Berkeley. And so we all went to Berkeley and we're kind of, you know, fan, fanboying and grilling out on some stuff. And I was a huge paleo fan at the time, read a lot of books. Tim White was
00:08:47
Speaker
just iconic, right? And I remember going to the anthropology department and seeing Tim White's mailbox. I didn't get to see him, but I was like, I took a picture of Tim White's mailbox. Oh my God, you're such a nerd. What a nerd. I love it. That's amazing. Anyway, Homo habilis had human-like features, including a slightly larger brain case, a smaller face and teeth than Australopithecus or some of the older hominin species had.
00:09:13
Speaker
And the ape-like features included long arms and a moderately prognathic face. And prognathic just means protruding, so kind of sticking out a little bit. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, they averaged in height from, again, super short, 3 foot 4 inches to 4 foot 5 inches, or 100 to 135 centimeters for you highly advanced metric people.
00:09:34
Speaker
and a weight of around 70 pounds or 32 kilograms. So it took a while before we started getting taller and bigger. Yeah, it did. It definitely did. And in the more similar to our ancestors category, they had thicker tooth enamel and strong jaws, which were kind of similar to what Australopithecus had. But then like we said, of course, the teeth were smaller. So they sort of had this like combination of stuff going on, especially in the jaw and mouth region.
00:10:02
Speaker
But back to the teeth being smaller, closer to humans, dental micro-ware studies suggest that the diet of Homo habilis consisted of mostly softer foods, but could have included some tougher foods like leaves, woody plants, and some animal tissue. And that just makes sense because
00:10:19
Speaker
As you see from the species coming down the line, they were having that smaller sagittal crest, which would have meant smaller muscles leading up the side of your head that actually control your jaw. We still have muscles that go up the side of our head. We just don't have a big crest to attach them to because we eat cheese and stuff.
00:10:35
Speaker
And when we cook our meat, it softens and becomes tender. And that's what we do. So not that these guys were cooking their food, but they were just opening their diets up to more opportunities, I guess. And that was almost guaranteed to be environmentally driven. It's just like the food they had available to them. And that's what they were doing. So they're people who were able to eat those foods were more successful and reproductively. Yeah, definitely. So that's why it keeps going.
00:11:01
Speaker
So, as always in paleoanthropology, Homo habilis' place in the evolutionary line is under constant debate. Right, as they always are. As they always are and have been. There's some agreement here, but over the years there's been a lot of arguments about where they fit and what their place is, and like for a long time in the 90s it was proposed that they be moved into the Australopithecine line. Yeah.
00:11:27
Speaker
Now, that has been rejected for the most part now, and everybody accepts that they're part of the HOMO line. There are some that say that it's not directly in the human evolutionary line, so I think there's just still some questions out there about where they fit exactly. I mean, aside from, like I said, the teeth and some of the other stuff, it is still Australopithecus-like in size and things like that.
00:11:49
Speaker
It's just how much, is it another flavor of Australopithecine, or is it truly homo? And if we had a paleoanthropologist or a paleoanthropology podcast, which I'll say again, I really want, then we would know exactly what traits we think make it homo. My guess is, just from what I know of these things, is it's the teeth and the brain. The bigger brain, the smaller teeth are starting to get more homo-like. But do you make an intermediate species? This is where you come into like lumpers and splitters.
00:12:18
Speaker
Yeah. We're lumping them into Homo rather than splitting them into a separate species. Right. And it's really complicated because we're pretty sure now that Paranthropus split off of Australopithecine, right? Australopithecus and went that direction, right? So it's possible that Homo habilis is another one that split off of Australopithecus and isn't actually in our direct line, but without any other
00:12:43
Speaker
species stepping up and taking that intermediate spot right now, we just don't really know. We don't have good evidence one way or another. I think most, I mean, we clearly do share a common ancestor somewhere. It's just like, where is that ancestor at? I guess, where is that split at?
00:12:59
Speaker
And the most interesting thing about this whole debate is that there is more recent evidence from the 2000s that indicate Homo habilis and Homo erectus, which is the one we'll talk about in segment two, that they might have overlapped for a little while. And when you have two species overlapping, it challenges the idea that one directly evolved into the other. When they cohabitate or coexist at the same time,
00:13:24
Speaker
it makes you think that you're talking about different evolutionary lines to cause that to happen. Not necessarily, but it kind of makes you think that way. Speaking of cohabitating... Wait, were we? No, kind of.
00:13:41
Speaker
At least coexisting. Homo rudolfensis is the next one we're going to talk about here in the last few minutes of this segment. They lived relatively short evolutionarily.
Homo erectus: Existence and Innovations
00:13:50
Speaker
Now, of course, this is because that's the evidence that we have. Right. So it could be a lot longer. Yeah. And we only have one fossil, which is why this is really just a quick discussion. Not even a thing. Yeah. So they lived from 1.9 million to 1.8 million years ago.
00:14:05
Speaker
Literally 100,000 years, because that's the layer they were found in. Exactly, yeah. And they were in eastern Africa, northern Kenya, and possibly northern Tanzania and Malawi. And I think they're only expanding it to that broad, because probably for geographic reasons, and where they might have been based on where they were found. Yeah, and even though there was only one fossil found, one piece of this thing,
00:14:30
Speaker
It took them a while to actually name this as a new species. It was discovered in 1972, but not named as a new species until 1986. And the reason it's called Rudolph Ensis, it was found at Kubiforra in the Lake Turkana basin of Kenya, and Lake Turkana was formerly called Lake Rudolph. So Kubiforra, there's a Kubiforra field school every year, run by Meev Leakey, who's Richard Leakey's daughter. And it's a massive wealth of information. They're pulling stuff out of there all the time.
00:14:59
Speaker
They originally thought it was homo habilis, but it has a larger brain case, a longer face and larger molars and premolars. So they kind of pulled it out of the homo habilis line because homo habilis has smaller of all those things. Yeah. They're just like, this is different. This is too different. We need to put this into its own separate category. Yeah. And that was done by VP Alexa who was part of Richard Leakey's team. He gave it a completely new name, which was originally pithycanthropus
00:15:26
Speaker
And the reason I brought this up is because I think it's really interesting to see how the names have changed over the years too. So Pythicanthropus is something you might see in older texts. And that's one of the ones that was sort of sucked into Homo at some point and anything Pythicanthropus became Homo.
00:15:46
Speaker
because there's so many different, like while we were still figuring out paleoanthropology and what was what and where it fits and where it goes and whatever, just all these different names popped up and at some point it all got, like you said, lumped. And lumped in a good way, I think, because we recognized they were all the same thing or part of the same group.
00:16:05
Speaker
And of course, one of the reasons why all this keeps changing and evolving is because nature hasn't provided us with a definition of these species. We have. Yeah. Like scientists have said, we are going to define these species based on this metric, but we've changed how we define species recently. Not recently, but like through time. Yeah, it's constantly changing.
00:16:26
Speaker
Yeah, there's the biological definition, which is often just simply related to, can they produce viable offspring? But then there's many other definitions of species, and how you actually separate these things out, and what that actually means. And the more that we, I guess, learn about these things, and the more subtle differences that we can come up with, the more we can decide, yeah, this really is a new species, or it was something that we can lump in, and the genus, actually, they can put in the genus, and then make a new species out of it, or keep in the same one.
00:16:56
Speaker
And Rudolf Ensis is such a great example of that because the debate about it originally was the brain case size. It's 750 cubic centimeters and that is outside the largest size of Homo habilis brain case sizes.
00:17:12
Speaker
Sorry, that was a very confusing way to put that. But basically, their head space is a lot bigger than any other example of Homo habilis. So it was like, OK, this is just too big and too different. And we're now making this brain case cutoff point less than the 750 that that guy was coming in at. And so that's how that break happened.
00:17:34
Speaker
All right, well, with so few fossils, the debate's going to continue until we find more. And that's really the case with a lot of different things. It will, yeah. So all right, well, that was a long segment. We're going to end that, come back on the other side, and talk about Homo erectus. Welcome back to the archaeology show episode 211. And this is our fourth series in our mini series about paleoanthropology. Fourth episode. Fourth episode? You know, I was doing it the British way. Series, episode, whatever. I was doing it the British way. Oh, I see. I see. OK, sure.
00:18:03
Speaker
Anyway, that's not even the British way. That's completely wrong. Everything you say is wrong. I know. We're going to talk about now a species that had a lot of longevity in the human evolutionary line. There's a lot of debate about what came off of this species, what it was, and just a whole bunch of stuff.
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah, there's like so much theory here. And honestly, we're not going to like dive too much into all of the theory stuff. We'll just talk about the fossils and who they are and what they look like and where they lived. Right. So Homo erectus has a date range of between 1.89 million and 110,000 years ago. So long. I mean, like my grandma probably knew a Homo erectus.
00:18:49
Speaker
not very long ago. But like evolutionarily speaking, that is like a blink of an eye. I know it is. It's so close. It's amazing that one species was able to last for that long. And that's probably why there's so much debate between the people that want to split out the different species and call them something different because it's like such a long time.
00:19:09
Speaker
It just makes me wonder if, 110,000 years, it makes me wonder if one of them's lying in a peat box somewhere and we could actually get some DNA. Oh my god, wouldn't that be amazing? I don't think that's even possible because there's been ice ages over those peat box since then. Yeah. But even so. Well, you know what? It might be possible because some of the species that we're going to talk about in the next segment, we don't need to get into it yet, but they have mitochondrial DNA that they've pulled out. So maybe. For sure. Well, anyway.
00:19:34
Speaker
The other amazing thing about Homo erectus is the geographic spread. They're found in northern, eastern, and southern Africa, western Asia, including Dmanisi and the Republic of Georgia, and then east Asia in China and Indonesia. So that's basically all of Africa and all of the southern Asian subcontinent area. It's crazy. It's huge.
00:19:59
Speaker
You might hear different things about out of Africa versus multi-regional hypothesis as far as the human evolution and human spread. Some of the debates go to where did that actually start? What species did that start with? Did Homo erectus
00:20:16
Speaker
spread out around the world like we know that it did, and then evolve into humans independently several different times? Or did humans evolve in one location and then spread out and basically take over Homo erectus in all those locations? So there's kind of a big debate around that still. And there's a lot of heated opinions either side. Is there really still debate? I thought the out of Africa idea was basically the one that most people accept.
00:20:39
Speaker
Given our current evidence. Right. It basically is, but they're starting to read. I just heard a podcast actually, the Life and Ruins podcast. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. They had a geneticist on and he was talking about sort of a redefining of multi-regional, multi-regionalism, more of like almost from a genetic standpoint and saying how, yes, humans evolved actually
00:21:01
Speaker
I don't want to say they evolved independently in different areas, but evolving from the same species. So is that multi-regionalism or what is that? I don't know enough about it to really speak intelligently about it. That's the theory stuff that I said we wouldn't talk about too much because it's really complicated and it's definitely beyond our academic level or whatever.
00:21:24
Speaker
Now, some of you may remember me talking about fossils being found in Indonesia. I couldn't remember who it was. But where the guy was basically, he had a bunch of people digging and he was paying them to take him fossils to the tent. And they decided if they broke them in half, he'd pay them more.
00:21:39
Speaker
Oh, yeah. That was Eugene Dubois. I couldn't remember what his name was. Yeah. Yeah. So Homo erectus was originally identified in 1891 in Indonesia by Eugene Dubois and he was a Dutch surgeon. He was actually just kind of interested in all this stuff. His story is so interesting. He was, he thought that human origins would be found in Asia. That's what he thought.
00:21:59
Speaker
and he wanted to go find it and so he couldn't get the funding for it but he I guess had enough skills as a surgeon which I guess in the 1800s like it didn't take a lot to get there and so he was able to enlist and go to Indonesia as part of the army or whatever branch he was in the military and
00:22:19
Speaker
on the side while he was also being a surgeon. He was doing medical stuff of some sort. He was looking for fossils. And that's how he got his start. Crazy story. I know. I'm looking for a book right now. It was by Pat Shipman and it's called The Man Who Found the Missing Link. Eugene Dubois and his lifelong quest to prove Darwin right. And that was an excellent book. I read it a long time ago. Yeah. And it was just highly recommend. Kind of a more readable type of
00:22:47
Speaker
non-fiction sort of, telling the story of somebody. A little bit, yeah. And actually, Pat Shipman has, she's written a lot of really great books about the Leakies, about Eugene Dubois, other people, and she reads it in a very conversational, like, adventury sort of way. It makes you want to go to Indonesia and do these things, right? Like, she's just really good at doing that.
00:23:08
Speaker
Anyway, Eugene Dubois originally called Homo erectus Pythicanthropus erectus. That's where that came from. He later changed it to Homo when modern paleoanthropologists realized that they were our evolutionary ancestor. He didn't change it to Homo, but the field changed it to Homo, basically.
00:23:26
Speaker
Homo erectus is the oldest known early human ancestor to have possessed modern human-like body proportions as related to the legs and arms and their length, like relatively elongated legs, shorter arms compared to the size of the torso. Yeah. They primarily lived on the ground rather than in the trees, we think, just because of their body style. Because of the length of the arms and legs and stuff like that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they could have climbed trees. Like, we can climb trees. But did they need to climb trees and live up there? Yeah. Probably not.
00:23:53
Speaker
And this next thing that we have in our notes here is just crazy to me. And I think it's a reflection of how long Homo erectus lived and also where they lived, the wide variety, but their height can range anywhere from four foot nine to six foot one. They lived for over almost two million years. I know. Like that's a really long time that they were walking this world. So yeah, you have a huge, we have four foot nine to six foot one people right now in this world. So.
00:24:18
Speaker
And here's the thing I don't get is I would like to see those heights on a date chart. Are the shorter heights further back or are some of those females? I mean, we would need to sex them if we can and then place them on a date timeline because all the early hominin species were shorter back in the day, right? When you go like 1.5 million and back, they were all shorter in that under five foot range and some in the under four foot range when you get back to like two million years.
00:24:47
Speaker
It would be weird to me if Homo erectus basically just got taller over two million years, but didn't really change much else enough to be called a different species. Yeah. Right. And similarly, the weight was also, is also a pretty big range of 88 to 150 pounds. Yeah. Which again, I mean, that probably does account for people today though that range, 88's a little small, but you know,
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, when they started getting bigger, they obviously needed more energy to survive. And like a lot of your big animals out there, they're not all vegetarians. If they are, they have to literally eat all day long, like brontosaurus or something like that, was just like eating leaves pretty much continuously because they were so gigantic.
00:25:27
Speaker
But if you don't want to eat literally every second of your day and you want to do some other stuff, you can eat stuff like meat, which is a higher calorie intake and is easier to digest and became a staple in their diet because it was just, well, ultimately healthier for them. It was just a more efficient food source, basically. They could eat less and
00:25:45
Speaker
Yeah, the nutrients were absorbed faster and they had shorter digestive tracts than their ancestors, which is likely an evolutionary result of doing this behavior. So if they're eating meat and that becomes their primary food source, well, you've got to find a way of getting that meat, right? So they needed tools. And we definitely know that Homo erectus had tools.
00:26:11
Speaker
They participated in a stone tool tradition called the Acheulean tradition and we have many many many examples of these tools in association with Homo erectus fossils Yeah, the Acheulean hand axe is a very broad category of tools that includes multi-purpose bifacial tools. We'll talk about that in a minute
00:26:29
Speaker
that could have been used as picks, knives, and cleavers. They would have been used in hunting and preparing large game to eat. Now the Ashley and hand axe is something you may have seen. And in fact, if you go to arkpodnet.com forward slash shop, you can be taken to our tea public store. And one of our early logos that we had designed, not logo, but one of our early designs is actually an Ashley and hand axe and you can get it on a number of things. But it's the one that's kind of on the side. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a large,
00:26:54
Speaker
like leaf shaped object, probably about the size of your hand. It is flaked on both sides. That's what bifacial means. Both faces were flaked. So they had flakes taken off. And this thing was legitimately shaped through cultural transmission of knowledge to produce this predictable shape for a really long time.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah, unlike the old one tools that were kind of expedient and might have even happened by accident a little bit and then they took advantage of it. These are so intentional and they almost have artistry to them and they're shaping them and they're purposely making certain shapes to do certain tasks and things like that.
00:27:32
Speaker
Right. And we also have evidence of some hearths or fire pits associated with Homo erectus. There is direct evidence that they were for cooking food, but probably also for social interaction, warmth and protection. I mean, if you've got a fire and you're on the cold savannah at night and the fire helps you see a little better, helps you, I mean, they were pretty well night adapted like, like species can be.
00:27:52
Speaker
And probably a lot more attuned to sounds and things like that than we are today. You know, we don't really know how to interpret the sounds we hear in the dark because we don't live in the dark. Right. And that would go back to the archaeology of the night. Yeah, it's a very good point. Anyway, there's a lot of things that we're just no longer adapted to do at night, whereas
00:28:11
Speaker
species that just lived outside their whole lives and didn't know what inside meant and didn't know what fire meant necessarily, they would still not have lost that. But fires are still pretty cozy. Did you keep you warm? They lived on the savanna. It got cold at night. It would keep big animals away potentially, scare them away. So it was probably a lot of reasons that they would huddle around a fire at night.
00:28:32
Speaker
I know, and I think they always talk about cooking food and things like that as being hallmarks of advancement, but when they stopped being afraid of fire and started harnessing it, not necessarily making fire, they probably took advantage of lightning strikes and other things, and then maybe even kind of kept that fire going once they realized what was trying to put two and two together, and maybe just kept it going all the time because they didn't know how to start one, and they didn't know when the next fire was gonna be created.
00:29:00
Speaker
So, you know, that was just, that's huge. I think that's just massive. Yeah, it definitely is. Another thing that we have evidence for is that Homo erectus probably cared for their old and their sick. We don't have a lot of examples of this, but we have found a skull where the teeth were gone or mostly gone and somebody in that situation like wouldn't be able to eat unless there was somebody helping them
00:29:25
Speaker
find and process foods to the point where they're able to like gum them, you know? So that's one example of it. Don't we have evidence of like healed bone fractures too? Which is not necessarily in, you know, meaning somebody cared for you. You can break your arm and still go about your day-to-day business.
00:29:42
Speaker
Right, true. But they didn't abandon the person, probably. So what you might be thinking of, and I actually had this in my notes at first, and I ended up taking it out because it's some misinformation that has sort of gotten into the paleoanthropology world, which happens. But Turkana boy is one of the fossils we're going to talk about in a second here. And originally, it was thought that he had scoliosis.
00:30:06
Speaker
And the fact that he lived as long as he did meant that there were people taking care of him. And so that was why he lived. But it actually turns out that the original researchers had like parts of the rib cage upside down when they were analyzing him initially. And it made it look like he had scoliosis. And then like about 10 years ago, somebody went through and did a full reanalysis.
00:30:27
Speaker
And I found the paper and everything. It's like a true, real scientific paper in like nature or something like that, where they found, you know, okay, no, this was not scoliosis. This kid was just a kid, basically. So anyway, we'll talk about him in a second. All right. So let's talk about some famous Homo erectus fossils. Yeah. The first one we're going to talk about is one of the ones Eugene DeBaugh found, and he called it Java Man because it was found near or in Java, Indonesia. Yeah.
00:30:50
Speaker
It only consisted of a skullcap and a femur, and it was from what they called the Trinity site on the Solo River. Again, he called it Pythicanthropus erectus, or upright ape man, that's what that means. The erectus is upright, and Pythicanthropus is ape man, or Pythic, I guess, and then anthropus, ape man. But he had no luck convincing the scientific community to accept his idea. He wasn't really credentialed, not that you would have been in paleoanthropology in the 1890s.
00:31:17
Speaker
But he wasn't like an academic or anything. And I think he sort of. Well, not in this field anyway. Yeah, no. So he really struggled with that. And interestingly, there are actually many other early examples from this area that are also called Java Man, different variations on it. But Java Man kind of seems to be like a name that a lot of people used for fossils found in Indonesia. So you might see that term referring to other fossils too. And in another example of really well thought out naming methods.
00:31:48
Speaker
Pei-King Man was found in, wait for it, Pei-King China. China. Yeah, and was found in 1927 by Davidson Black. He actually called this fossil because again, the whole lumper splitter debate. These people all wanted to have their own fossils, right? This is another example of one that just got pulled into the Homo species at some point.
00:32:07
Speaker
Exactly. But he called his fossil, Sinanthropus pecanensis, and pecanensis for Peking, which was renamed in the 50s when it was recognized that all the Asian and African fossils were the same species. Yeah. Yeah. That's when that grouping happened. I don't know if one person just started analyzing all these fossils, realizing, wait a minute, this one's the same, this one's the same, this one's the same, this one's the same. But in the 50s is when they sort of all got lumped together. Right. So Turkana boy, which we mentioned earlier. Jeez, where could Turkana boy have been found?
00:32:40
Speaker
He is the most complete example of the species. He's missing just his hand and foot bones and a couple other random little bits. So he's so complete. It's amazing. He dates to 1.6 million years ago and was found near where now?
00:32:55
Speaker
Lake something or other. I can't remember what the name of it was. Turkana. Lake Turkana, yeah. Which is in Kenya. Yeah. And I already mentioned him in the Scoliosis debate, of course. But the other thing about him is interesting is he was originally called a Homo ergaster instead of Homo erectus. And I just wanted to talk about this here at the end of this segment just a little bit, because you probably will still see Homo ergaster referred to in various websites, different texts or whatever.
00:33:21
Speaker
it's mostly not a name that's used anymore,
Homo ergaster vs. Homo erectus Debate
00:33:23
Speaker
or if it is, it's Homo erectus slash air gaster. And the reason for that is that researchers did not understand that this one archaic species could be spread across so many continents. And so they were given two different names. We had Homo erectus over in Asia, and then we had Homo ergaster in Africa. Yeah.
00:33:44
Speaker
And then in the 50s, like we just talked about, all of that sort of was combined together and lumped under the Homo erectus name. And that's how we ended up with Homo erectus.
00:33:56
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it was originally thought that these small differences in the shapes of their bones, teeth, things like that really indicated different species. But then as we started to refine our definition of that, we weren't really just bringing them in. We refined our definition, reanalyzed a lot of stuff that was looked at beforehand and ended up bringing them to the same species, which I'm sure is going to happen again at some point.
00:34:19
Speaker
through time, we're more than likely going to lose some of these species names that we know and love, and they're going to get sucked into, you know, single species names or just a few, right? Because as we redefine what that means, we'll start having better criteria for that.
00:34:34
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And Homo erectus is being one of the oldest ones that was identified back in the 1800s was the first example of it. It just has a long history of different people in different parts of the world, finding fossils, wanting to lay claim to it, giving them different names. And then that's how you ended up with these two
00:34:55
Speaker
lines that were essentially the same thing under two different names. So it just makes sense that it was all brought together under one name. It is. It's crazy that they're all the same thing, but that's what the science is telling us right now. Anyway, from the information that we have at this moment. All right. Well, we're going to end this segment and we're going to talk about in segment three, the grandparents of Neanderthals and hobbits, hobbits, not grandparents of hobbits, just hobbits. Just hobbits. Yeah. Back in a minute.
00:35:22
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, episode 211. And we are now talking about Homo heidelbergensis and Homo floresiensis. Yep. The last two, not the last two. The last two we're going to talk about in this series. You might be thinking this isn't where our line ends, but that's because we have a whole other set of episodes about Neanderthals and Denisovans and that whole thing. So we'll link to those in our show notes.
00:35:46
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Homo heidelbergensis. Again, well-named. You can figure out where that comes from. Honestly, I was getting so annoyed at that name. Every time I was taking my notes here, because I'm like, man, why did they have to pick such a long, long name? Erectus, so easy. But anyway, I digress. A lot of stuff found in Germany.
00:36:03
Speaker
Yeah. They dated to about 700,000 to 200,000 years ago, found in Europe. And then they were actually found in Europe first. That's where the name comes from. And then also identified in Eastern and Southern Africa and possibly Asia in China.
00:36:20
Speaker
Yeah, they were first discovered in 1908 near, where? You guessed it, Heidelberg, Germany. My mom was discovered in Heidelberg, Germany. Oh, is that where she was born, really? Yeah. On the base there, right? Yeah, my grandpa was in the military in the 50s. Yeah. Yep. German scientist Otto Schoen-Tensack. Schoen-Tensack. Schoen-Tensack. There's no way we're saying that, right? No, there's no way at all. Forgive us, please. Yeah. Guten Tag. Anyway, it was the first to describe and name the specimen.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah. So Homo heidelbergensis had a very large brow ridge and a larger brain case and a flatter face than earlier species did. Yeah. And they were a little bit taller too than their predecessors at an average height for the males of five foot nine inches and for females, five foot two inches. So still in like the erectus line, but when you go back farther, we're up in the five foot range now for average height. The average weight of the males was about 136 pounds. So still pretty skinny and females were 112 pounds.
00:37:17
Speaker
Yeah, on the smaller side, for sure. So they were the first to live in colder climates. And because they had these shorter, wide-ish bodies, that would have been better at conserving heat, which might have been an adaptation to the colder climate.
00:37:32
Speaker
Right. They had control of fire. We have pretty good evidence of that. We have fire modified tools and charcoal at the site of Gesher Benno Yaakov in Israel. There's also some other Israeli sites that would come up later, like for Neanderthals and things like that. There's a lot of them living in that area, but a fire modified tool is essentially you've got a material. A lot of times it's chert or something else or something like chert, like flint.
00:37:58
Speaker
And if you create something, or before you create it even, you could flake it later. But if you flake it and then throw it in the fire, which probably happened accidentally a few times, it can actually harden and strengthen the tool after it's been fired. And that was done intentionally at some point. Yeah. I mean, you might get more longevity out of a tool if it's a lot stronger or it could be sharper. You know, there's a lot of reasons why they might want to do that. So they definitely developed that ability.
00:38:22
Speaker
We have some evidence in Terra Amata, France that they also built rudimentary shelters out of wood and rock. And that's pretty cool. Yeah. At the Terra Amata site, they found these post holes sort of in an oval shape and it was creating an oval structure with the post sort of going up the sides and kind of curving to like a post that went down the center of the top, basically.
00:38:45
Speaker
Pretty neat, actually. Oh, and they used rocks to sort of hold those poles in place around the outside. Really, really neat that they have that kind of structure evidence from that long ago. Any creature that's lost most of its fur is going to have to learn how to build something like that or live in caves or something.
00:39:03
Speaker
if they're going to live in those types of climates. Yeah, for sure. And if they have fire too, I mean, they immediately have a way to make that warm. It's so funny. We just had a personal example of that because we're here at, in Mexico still, but it's pretty windy and chilly at night. And we have one of those clam tents that we set up outside and we put our propane fireplace inside of it. And it like takes a couple of minutes, but it is instantly cozy and warm in there.
00:39:27
Speaker
And that's just like a mesh tent, you know, with open side so that it's all safe and everything, you know, breathing wise and all that. And yeah, it's just amazing what that technology would have allowed them to do and allowed them to further their lives basically. Yeah. And maybe they even cooked because like, like we said, there's, there's evidence that they had control of fire and on all that and for modifying tools and things, but they hunted big game like wild deer, horses, elephants, hippos, and rhinos.
00:39:55
Speaker
Yeah, and we know that for sure because there's evidence of butchery at some sites that have those types of bones and that also have Heidelbergensis fossils. So that was definitely something that was happening. They were cutting into these animals for some reason. We can only assume that they were doing it for eating purposes.
00:40:12
Speaker
Yeah. And I mentioned at the end of the last segment that we were going to talk about the grandparents of Neanderthalensis. Homohydroborogensis is often thought of as the common ancestor between Homo sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis. Right. Yeah. So now that gets a little sticky.
00:40:27
Speaker
We've talked about this in other episodes, but we're indicating that Homo sapiens, us basically, are a different species than Homo neanderthalensis. But we also share genetic information with Homo neanderthalensis, which means they're not using a species definition that means can produce viable offspring, because these are two different species that are clearly producing viable offspring when they got together, right? Neanderthals and humans.
00:40:52
Speaker
It is very interesting. It's a very intermingled history between all of the species there.
Homo floresiensis: Discovery and Dwarfism Debate
00:40:58
Speaker
And it makes you wonder exactly where Heidelbergensis fits in. And if they were the only one that fits in there or if there's something else that we're missing, maybe there's a split in the group that we just haven't figured out yet. Who knows? That's why it's a constantly evolving field. Yeah, for sure. So the next one we mentioned talking about here in segment three is Homo floresiensis. This is where hobbits come in.
00:41:19
Speaker
They, they date to about a hundred thousand years to 50,000 years ago. Again, super recent. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting too, because these guys are a fairly recent discovery. One of the most recent, like big discoveries and big new species in paleo-mythology. Yeah, it was huge when it came out. Yeah. We were both in college when it happened. And like, I remember
00:41:42
Speaker
like walking through the halls of university and having people like debating like where they fit into the evolutionary line. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, they were found in 2003 in Liang Boa cave on the island of Flores. And so far, this is the only cider place where they have ever been found. Yeah.
00:42:01
Speaker
The cool thing is there was a nearly complete skeleton plus the bones and teeth that represented as many as 12 individuals, which is really neat. They're very small compared to contemporary species, which is why they were given the nickname of hobbit because they're definitely hominid.
00:42:18
Speaker
Not necessarily hominid, but they're definitely hominid. They look like just short hominids that are really close to humans, Neanderthals, and all those other species that are modern as far as the last 100,000 years ago. I think there is still debate about it some, but for the most part, I think they have been put into the human evolutionary
00:42:40
Speaker
line where they fit exactly and how is probably still up for debate somewhat. Well, putting them in that line, though, would indicate that we evolved from them, right? Yeah. But they seem to be more of a dead branch, right? A terminated branch because
00:42:56
Speaker
I mean, back 50 to 100,000 years ago, these individuals that were found, and again, we have only one example of this, it's a whole group of them, but we have only one example, they stood about three feet, six inches tall, so super small, weighed approximately 66 pounds, and that was estimated from one of the skeletons, had really small brains, large teeth for their small size, and shrugged forward shoulders, no chins really, receding foreheads, and relatively large feet due to their short legs, the large feet is another.
00:43:23
Speaker
indication that we are calling them hobbits. Now, you may have heard a concept called island dwarfism, and this was initially postulated as the reason why they're so small. This is an island, and I would hope that they actually looked back in the geological record. Has it always been an island? You know what I mean? Yeah, it was separated. There was no way to get there without having some kind of boat or something to get across the water.
00:43:49
Speaker
So maybe they drifted there on some driftwood, an early ancestor of theirs did. You know, they got there somehow and then could never get off, right? It was some random circumstance that brought them there and they could never get away. And you know, they just evolved. The island dwarfism is about evolving to essentially
00:44:06
Speaker
not compete with the resources that are on the land. If you want to live and you require 3,000 calories a day to live and there isn't that kind of resource on the land, well, you're not going to live very long. So if you just eke it by for generations, but if you evolve to be smaller a little bit, the smaller ones will probably have a more longevity and be able to reproduce more because they require less energy to actually sustain themselves throughout the day.
00:44:31
Speaker
Yeah, and we see that in animals all the time. This island in particular, I think, had a pygmy elephant. And they still, to this day, have some of the smallest elephants in the world. So it's a pattern that has been seen before on this island and in this area. So it makes sense that... So here's the big question though, right? They definitely have a common ancestor with us, right? That for sure is true.
00:44:58
Speaker
And then the split would have happened and maybe it happened naturally because they got stranded on an island and then they just became their own population but if they went this way to this island and Evolved from there and then the rest of the Homo, you know, we got to Homo sapiens over here Does that make them a separate branch or does it is it just a small offshoot but still part of the Homo?
00:45:22
Speaker
Again, it's a dead branch. It's like the age-old question, really. Well, it's a dead branch unless we can prove we directly were descended from them. But I just don't think we are, because Homo sapiens and the lines coming from there were getting taller with bigger brains. These are shorter with smaller brains. So they went the wrong direction. And there wouldn't have been enough time between now and 50,000 to 100,000 years ago
00:45:44
Speaker
for us to develop from them or share genetic information from them? Yes, not physically. Like they were on their island and they were isolated there. They did not come back and contribute to the ongoing evolution. But before they got to the island, I mean, before they got to the island, they could have been Homo erectus. Do the changes that happened to them after they got to the island, is it enough to make them a separate branch or can we still consider them part of our evolutionary line?
00:46:14
Speaker
It's so complicated. I think what it boils down to is when they got to the island, they could have been Homo hydrabergensis, they could have been Homo erectus, right? They could have been either one of those, assuming they were both found in that area. Or something else entirely, too. Or something else entirely, right? But more than likely one of those two, right? If they were found in that area, historically. And then they just evolved to be something else and then died out. You know, same thing with Neanderthals.
00:46:37
Speaker
There's a lot of people that think that Neanderthals died out. That was the original theory, because there's no more, so dot, dot, dot, they died out. But a lot of people are coming around to the idea, especially since a large portion of the planet has Neanderthal DNA, because we've sequenced the Neanderthal genome. Minor, small amounts of it, but it's there. Small, small. It's way back. Right next to the Genghis Khan DNA is the Neanderthal DNA.
00:47:03
Speaker
That means that while they could have died out, they were more than likely bred out. And they just were similar enough to Homo sapiens that we can't really see that much of a change in our species with the breeding with Neanderthals, or maybe it just wasn't enough, enough to produce offspring that had their DNA that was perpetuated through time.
00:47:26
Speaker
not enough to make massive sweeping changes within Homo sapiens. Or it's just there are changes that we didn't really understand or don't understand now or aren't preserved in the fossil record. So anyway, who's to say? All right, well, there's no answers to any questions. And hopefully that wasn't too confusing. But it is. It's just what we know now. And scientists do the best they can with the information that they have in the current moment. Yeah, for sure.
00:47:50
Speaker
Now we've mentioned Neanderthals and Denisovans a couple times in this episode and we are not going to cover them because we did do that last year. We'll link to the episode in the show notes, but we have, I think it was like a two, a one or two episode little deep dive into those guys. So we have covered that before and you can, you know, head on over to that episode to finish out this little conversation.
00:48:13
Speaker
For members, you can go over to arcpodnet.com slash members if you're not a member, but go to archaeologypodcastnetwork.com, click on your member pages, and then click on the early downloads page, because we're putting bonus content segments along with the episode in your early downloads page.
00:48:28
Speaker
There is a bonus content area, but that's for bonus content that's not connected to an episode. Right. So to find this bonus segment that we're going to record and do after this one, again, go to the early downloads page and you can see the bonus segment there right alongside of the regular episode. Like I said, if you're not a member, arcpodnet.com forward slash members and you can support us and get this content.
00:48:52
Speaker
And as a little teaser, if you're wondering what this bonus content might be, we are going to talk about Sima de los Huesos, which means pit of bones. Nice. Very cool. Very exciting. Sounds pretty fun. Yep. All right. With that, we will see you guys next week, where we're probably going to kick off some news stories again, because there's a lot building up. A lot has happened. Yep. We'll see you next week. Bye.
00:49:22
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:49:45
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.