The strange case of the.., p.1
The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, page 1
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 Dep
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.
It was in the midst of all of this folderol that I found myself sitting despondently on that beach in Mohéli. One rarely hears anything about the Comoros in the outside world, and when I’d arrived in Moroni I had been blissfully unaware of all the chaos and mayhem going on. All I had known was that the islands were unusually hard to get to in that summer of 1977. And this is where my little fieldwork débâcle becomes relevant to what I shall be writing about in the rest of this book. I had come to the Comoros to continue the studies of lemurs I had begun some years earlier in Madagascar. Lemurs, as you may know, are the primates unique to that huge island; and they are of particular interest because they last shared a common ancestor with humans around 50 million years ago. That’s a pretty long time, and while the lemurs are nonetheless our cousins, it makes them remoter from us than monkeys and apes are. At the same time, while the lemurs have diversified enormously in their island redoubt, in some important respects they have remained a lot more primitive than humans have. This means that if you want to know how your own ancestors lived and functioned early in the Age of Mammals, it is to the lemurs you have to turn. And if—like me—unkind fate had excluded you from Madagascar (which is another story), you were out of luck. With one exception. Possibly because they were transported there by humans within the last thousand years or so, a couple of species of lemurs (out of well over 50) have managed to make it over to the Comoros and have established wild populations there. As a result, a lemurologist without access to Madagascar had little option but to head for the archipelago.
So there I was. But the instant I stepped off the airplane in Moroni I knew I had made a huge mistake. There was a creepy feeling to the place, and the air was full of little bits of paper ash—the result, I soon learned, of burning all those property, birth, and marriage records. What’s more, it proved hard to find any of the bureaucrats from whom I had been used to seeking permits and logistical support. So, since I knew that there were no lemurs on Grande Comore, it was clear that I should head with all dispatch to another of the islands where there were lemurs to be found, and where in my previous experience nothing much ever happened anyway.
A female mongoose lemur from Mohéli, in the Comoro Islands. Eulemur mongoz belongs to a genus that contains at least five other living species, and by some reckonings as many as eleven. This makes it a pretty typical mammal, and reminds us that it is very unusual to be the sole living member of one’s genus, as we are. Drawn by Nick Amorosi.
So much for experience. Off I went to the local Air Comores office and bought a one-way ticket to Mohéli, the next island in the chain. There were no formalities on departure, but stepping off the aircraft onto the dirt strip at my destination, I found myself greeted by a couple of teenagers, one of whom was toying with a Kalashnikov. The other gave me a broad smile, introduced himself as a member of the Revolutionary Youth, and invited me to stay in the organization’s hotel, at an exorbitant rate. Hotel? That was something new for Mohéli. Still, not for the first or the last time in my life I had been made an offer I couldn’t wisely refuse, and I joined my hosts in a military jeep driven by Kalashnikov. After a bumpy few minutes we arrived at our destination, which turned out to be the ruins of what not long before had been the well-appointed home of an ylang-ylang plantation manager. Now it was a disaster zone. The plumbing had been ripped out, the generator and wiring had been stolen, and the roof was sagging. I was taken to a filthy room devoid of anything except rats, rubbish, and piles of old bricks, and was invited to pay a week’s rent in advance. With my cash in their pockets my hosts bid me farewell, and vanished in their jeep.
At this point, my state of mind was not the best. I wandered out of my hovel and walked several dusty kilometers into Fomboni, the island’s main and only town. It was almost deserted, but I was able to purchase a couple of cans of Spam and some rice and matches in a ramshackle store before I returned to my grand residence. That night, Baco Mari turned up. Baco was a young man who had driven me around on his official motorcycle during my previous residence on Mohéli, and who was now full of deeply unsettling revolutionary fervor. Disappointingly, he informed me that the mongoose lemurs I had previously studied had disappeared from the neighborhood—as, with massive immigration of refugees, they later did from almost the entire island. Gone was any reason to remain in Mohéli.
The next day thus found me at the Air Comores office, asking for a ticket to the next island, Anjouan. The agent amiably said he was willing to sell me one, but that he couldn’t do so without seeing my exit visa. Exit visa? I was traveling within the same country. And nobody had asked me for an exit visa when I had left Moroni. “Nonetheless, Monsieur,” I was assured, “you need an exit visa to leave Mohéli. We cannot issue you a ticket without one.” And where would I get this visa? Why, from the Revolutionary Youth, of course.
The same evening, well after dark, I received a visit from an emissary of the dignified and courtly gentleman who had been Préfet of Mohéli before independence. In hushed tones my visitor invited me to visit the Préfet at once, but warned I should not be seen for fear of reprisals on both sides. I duly sneaked over to the Préfet’s darkened house, where I found the former official in a state of extreme distress. He explained to me that the government had been disbanded, and that the island was now being terrorized by the submachine gun–wielding teenagers of the Revolutionary Youth, Ali’s version of Mao’s Red Guards. Their authority was backed up by a unit of the Tanzanian military that lurked in a camp a little way along the coast. Nothing happened in Mohéli that the Revolutionary Youth didn’t want, the Préfet told me; and a lot of bad things were happening. “Monsieur,” he said, “you have to leave as soon as possible!”
But to comply, I had to have that exit visa. And that meant facing the Revolutionary Youth. I trudged down to Fomboni again and found a gaggle of 14-year-olds of both sexes chatting, smoking pot (which Ali Soilih had legalized), and idly fondling an assortment of evil-looking weapons. I requested an exit visa, and was immediately refused. When I asked why, the teens replied that they didn’t have a rubber stamp. Logical enough, I suppose, and on my numerous subsequent visits the answer was invariably the same.
So I had pretty good reasons for my despondency as that dhow hove into view. It was obvious that the Youth weren’t prepared to issue me my exit visa as long as they had a cash cow occupying their ruin, and I had no idea what they would do when my money was gone. Nor was I anxious to find out: it might get really ugly if I couldn’t pay my rent. What’s more, with no access to lemurs I had absolutely nothing to distract me from my plight, especially after I had run out of batteries for my shortwave radio. Naturally enough, then, that dhow on the horizon became an object of particular interest. Gradually it grew bigger, until it became clear that it was heading for the beach more or less right where I was. When it ground into the sand a few yards away from me, it disgorged a pair of very seasick figures whom I instantly recognized as my young French companions from the flight from Dar es Salaam to Moroni. They duly joined me in my slum, and next day we trooped down together to the Revolutionary Youth’s headquarters.
