Early Pleistocene

I've read through the new paper by Martinón-Torres et al., on Eurasian continuity in the Middle Pleistocene. They've put out an interesting hypothesis, with some support from previous work, but ultimately I think their methods are too weak to test it.

The press coverage of the paper so far (e.g., this AP article) has been a little confusing, because it misses this point: this paper is not about modern human origins, it's about much earlier evolutionary relationships. National Geographic News resorts to the always-safe:

The finding suggests that the hominid family tree could be much more complex than previously thought.

Ah, so that's what it means! More complex than previously thought! Why isn't there ever a story that makes things simpler than previously thought? I mean, isn't it a sign of a failed science if you have to add complexity to your hypothesis every time you make a new observation? It's like Ptolemaic paleoanthropology!

Anyway, enough of that rant. Let's look at what the paper really says, which is much more interesting than the press! Here's the abstract:

A common assumption in the evolutionary scenario of the first Eurasian hominin populations is that they all had an African origin. This assumption also seems to apply for the Early and Middle Pleistocene populations, whose presence in Europe has been largely explained by a discontinuous flow of African emigrant waves. Only recently, some voices have speculated about the possibility of Asia being a center of speciation. However, no hard evidence has been presented to support this hypothesis. We present evidence from the most complete and up-to-date analysis of the hominin permanent dentition from Africa and Eurasia. The results show important morphological differences between the hominins found in both continents during the Pleistocene, suggesting that their evolutionary courses were relatively independent. We propose that the genetic impact of Asia in the colonization of Europe during the Early and Middle Pleistocene was stronger than that of Africa.

OK, so this is about the initial colonization of Europe and the subsequent evolutionary trends in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The observation is that European teeth show a continued similarity to Asians during the Middle Pleistocene, and there is no evidence that European teeth evolved in the direction of Africans during that time period.

Why is that interesting? Two reasons:

1. The hypothesis directly conflicts with the idea that Middle Pleistocene Europeans were linked to Africans. A large number of anthropologists have been pushing the European-African link, under the old hypothesis that these ancient people belonged to a species that was distinct from East Asians. The European-African clade in this hypothesis is often called Homo heidelbergensis; the Asian clade remains Homo erectus.

2. The hypothesis also seems to conflict with genetic data, which suggest that the relationship of European and African hominids is more recent than the early Middle Pleistocene. In particular, the genetic divergence time between human and Neandertal genomes appears to date to more recently than 700,000 years ago (Green et al. 2006, Noonan et al. 2006), which means that the population divergence must be still more recent. Also, Alan Templeton's papers (e.g., 2002, 2006) claim evidence for migrations from Africa into Europe and Asia during the Middle Pleistocene. Those claims are consistent with the Neandertal genome data, as far as we know it, and they suggest gene flow from Africa into Eurasia.

So, the authors ought to deal with these issues. They do so in their discussion, which in this short paper is one long paragraph. I'm quoting it here in full to comment on the details:

If the population of the Eurasian continent during the Early and
Middle Pleistocene was mainly the result of several out-of-Africa incursions, we should have found African influences in the morphology of the Eurasian populations. However, the continuity of the "Eurasian dental pattern" from the Early Pleistocene until the appearance of the Upper Pleistocene Neanderthals suggests that the evolutionary courses of the Eurasian and the African continents were relatively independent for a long period and that the impact of Asia in the colonization of Europe was stronger than that of Africa.

That is the conclusion of the analysis, in brief. The strength of the conclusion depends on the power of the analytical methods to detect gene flow based on morphological similarities. More on that below.

This finding does not necessarily imply that there was not genetic flow between continents, but emphasizes that this interchange could have been both ways (25, 26).

This seems a little misleading. They have no particular evidence of gene flow from Eurasia to Africa (that would be the "both ways"). Nor do they have evidence in their analysis of gene flow from Africa to Eurasia, after the initial colonization. So they don't have any evidence for gene flow at all. So the finding doesn't emphasize anything about gene flow, other than that the teeth don't show obvious evidence for it.

Around 1 Ma, hominins appear to have dispersed into temperate latitudes as far north as 40 - 45° N (27-29), not only from Africa, but also within Eurasia (29 - 31). These populations were probably descendants of an ancient out-of-Africa exodus, rather than a later one at the end of the Early Pleistocene (30).

This is an important assertion. Other workers have emphasized the similarities of some African fossils to East Asian fossils (mainly from Java, plus Gongwangling in China) in the late Early Pleistocene. That has always been the case with OH 9, and it influenced the description of the Daka and Buia crania as well. The question is how early Asian populations became morphologically distinctive. Here, the authors argue that it was very early, without substantial signs for later interaction, which in the context of the cranial comparisons is now an extreme claim.

In addition, a recent study on the European Lower Pleistocene hominin populations has revealed a possible Eurasian origin for these groups (32).

This refers to the description of the ATD6-96 mandible, which contains an earlier assertion about Asian-European connections. I return to this below.

Furthermore, it has been pointed out that during the Middle Pleistocene there was hardly any faunal exchange bet ween East Africa and the Levant (33) and that the desert between the Sahara and Arabia was an important barrier at that time (26), therefore contributing to the isolation of both continents.

This is an important argument in support of their hypothesis. If movement between Africa and Eurasia was difficult during this time span, that reinforces their claim, and makes it less plausible that there were large-scale dispersals out of Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. That leaves us with a mention of a major exception to their proposed pattern: the evolution of humans in the Late Pleistocene:

With the exception of the SAP [i.e., H. sapiens] out-of Africa dispersion based mainly on genetic data (2), the history of human populations in Eurasia may not have been the result of a few high-impact replacement waves of dispersals from Africa, but a much more complex puzzle of dispersals and contacts among populations within and outside continents. In the light of these results, we propose that Asia has played an important role in the colonization of Europe, and that future studies on this issue are obliged to pay serious attention to the "unknown" continent (Martinón-Torres et al. 2007:3).

The citation of the ATD6-96 mandible leads us to a passage from that earlier paper (Carbonell et al. 2005), which also describes the hypothesis that the founding population of Europe was Asian. Remember that this research group calls the Gran Dolina sample, Homo antecessor, and they initially had written that this species probably colonized Europe from Africa in the late Lower Pleistocene. Here's the relevant paragraph from the cited paper (Carbonell et al. 2005):

The differences in dimensions and robustness between the TD6 mandibles and the East and North African mandibles cast doubt on the African origin of H. antecessor. In contrast, our comparative analysis suggests looking toward the Asian continent. In this respect, it is relevant to mention some data that remained unpublished in 1997, when the new species was named (10), and that are relevant to this discussion. The partial cranium Nanjing I, recovered in 1993-1994 from the Hulu Cave (Tangshan Hill, eastern central China), shows clear modern midfacial traits similar to those observed in the specimen ATD6-69 (19). Wang and Tobias (20) also found similarities between Nanjing I and the Zhoukoudian hominins. Geochronological dates, combined with ecological and paleoclimatic evidence, indicate that the Nanjing skull is ~600 thousand years old (21). Furthermore, the Locality 1 levels at Zhoukoudian, which yielded most hominin specimens, are now considered at least 800 thousand years old (22). Thus, these Chinese hominins may be contemporaneous with or slightly younger than the TD6 hominins. If the Gran Dolina and Chinese populations are phylogenetically related, they should share a common ancestor that also had a modern midfacial pattern and a gracile mandible. In the cranium, this hypothetical common ancestor would have had a low and flat temporal squama, and an unfused styloid process. These traits would have been retained in the Asian hominins but lost in the TD6 hominins, who exhibit a fused styloid process, a convex temporal squama, and probably a significant increase in cranial capacity (19). The Ceprano calvaria (Italy), which has been tentatively assigned to H. antecessor (23), exhibits a convex temporal squama and a cranial capacity of about 1,057 ml (24). Interestingly, TD6 and Zhoukoudian are the only hominins that have a zygomaxillary tubercle before the Upper Pleistocene (19).

So that provides cranial and mandibular evidence of an Asia-Europe connection, supporting the dental evidence provided in the current paper. Still, that evidence is from the initial founding of Europe in the Early Pleistocene and doesn't necessarily apply to the trends during the Middle Pleistocene.

After working through the data supplements for the paper, I think that the analysis is much weaker in statistical power than it could be. In their analysis, they disregard much of the variation within these ancient samples and focus on the differences between samples according to their scoring methods. This may reveal the broad relationships among samples -- if we disregard the possibility of selected parallelisms -- but it does not say anything about the possibility of gene flow among the samples.

Indeed, the result of their analysis (a dendrogram, or branching tree) is quite incapable of showing genetic exchanges at all. It can only show branching events, which means that the result will show either an exclusive relationship between Europeans and Asians, or an exclusive relationship between Europeans and Africans, but never a mixed relationship.

The only result in the paper that indicates a European-Asian relationship is from their cladistic analysis of a subset of the data. And it isn't especially strong evidence, since the Middle Pleistocene Africans are limited to the relatively early sites of Rabat and Tighenif (Ternifine). Granted, the later sample is also small in number, but this isn't really a test of relationships; it's more of a suggestion.

The phenogram inexplicably omits Middle and Lower Pleistocene Africans entirely, and considers only australopithecines and habilines as the African sample.

So, at the moment I consider this to be a very interesting hypothesis in search of a good test. There is no test of gene flow here, just an assertion. Yet, the cranial comparisons give the assertion some plausibility -- and remember, another idea out there is the hypothesis that early Homo originated in Asia and migrated to Africa later.

I think that these topics together constitute the important problem in early human relationships right now, so I'll be writing some more about them. There are many additional interesting facts to consider...

References:

Martinón-Torres M, Bermúdez de Castro JM, Gómez-Robles A, Arsuaga JL, Carbonell E, Lordkipanidze D, Manzi, G, Margvelashvili A. 2007. Dental evidence on the hominin dispersals during the Pleistocene. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA (early) doi:10.1073/pnas.0706152104

Stringer C. 2002. Modern human origins: progress and prospects. Phil Trans Roy Soc Lond B 357:563-579. doi:10.1098/rstb.2001.1057

Rightmire GP. 1998. Human evolution in the Middle Pleistocene: the role of Homo heidelbergensis. Evol Anthropol 6:218-227. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1520-6505(1998)6:63.0.CO;2-6

Carbonell E and 19 others. 2005. An Early Pleistocene hominin mandible from Atapuerca-TD6, Spain. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 102:5674-5678. doi:10.1073/pnas.0501841102

Bruner E, Manzi G. 2005. CT-based description and phyletic evaluation of the archaic human calvarium from Ceprano, Italy. Anat Rec A 285A:643-657. doi:10.1002/ar.a.20205

From a new paper by Greg Laden and Richard Wrangham:

We propose that a key change in the evolution of hominids from the last common ancestor shared with chimpanzees was the substitution of plant underground storage organs (USOs) for herbaceous vegetation as fallback foods. Four kinds of evidence support this hypothesis: (1) dental and masticatory adaptations of hominids in comparison with the African apes; (2) changes in australopith dentition in the fossil record; (3) paleoecological evidence for the expansion of USO-rich habitats in the late Miocene; and (4) the co-occurrence of hominid fossils with root-eating rodents. We suggest that some of the patterning in the early hominid fossil record, such as the existence of gracile and robust australopiths, may be understood in reference to this adaptive shift in the use of fallback foods. Our hypothesis implicates fallback foods as a critical limiting factor with far-reaching evolutionary effects. This complements the more common focus on adaptations to preferred foods, such as fruit and meat, in hominid evolution.

Tubers are not the only kinds of USOs; there are also corms, bulbs, and rhizomes. I tend to use "tuber" as an easier-to-type version of USO, though. I was practically dared to review the paper here (nota bene: I do respond to dares, albeit more carefully and slowly than for most things), and Carl Zimmer has also written a short item on the idea. The mole rats are the lede, but there is much more to it than them, and in many respects they are the least problematic part.

So here is my semi-rambling take.

Take one

In 1999, Wrangham and Laden, along with David Pilbeam, James Holland Jones, and NancyLou Conklin Brittain, suggested that tuber cooking was central to the adaptation of early Homo. The evidence for that suggestion was and remains essentially absent. As Henry Bunn put it in his comment to the paper:

Why is there abundant evidence of hunting and some form of scavenging, carcass transport, butchery, and sharing and consumption of meat and fat in the behavioral and dietary adaptations of early Pleistocene Homo (e.g., Oliver, Sikes, and Stewart 1994 and references therin)? Why are the earliest stone tool kits of the Oldowan dominated by sharp-edged cutting tools? Why is there intensive meat polish on the edges of stone flake knives studied for microwear (Keeley and Toth 1981)? Why is there not microwear evidence of grit or sediment damaged on the teeth of supposedly tuber-feeding hominids themselves, including the robust australopithecines (Kay and Grine 1988)? (Bunn 1999:580)

Additionally there is the problem of the complete lack of evidence for cooking and the weakness of evidence for early control of fire, compared to the strong and substantial evidence for both much later in the Pleistocene.

So early Homo just doesn't show any signs of having been a serious tuber-eater. Not to say it is impossible; just that there isn't any particular evidence for the idea.

Take two

Now, Australopithecus, that's another story. Robust australopithecine teeth in particular have a lot of pits and scratches on them, as if they were eating some hard, gritty foods. Underground storage organs fit that bill. Eating a lot of dirt along with them might well explain the high rate of dental wear that robust australopithecines clearly had -- many had their first molars worn almost completely flat before the third molars came into occlusion.

In this context the fallback food idea seems like an especially good one. The tooth anatomy and microwear evidence indicate that robust and nonrobust australopithecines probably did not differ in most of their dietary spectra, but instead in the accentuation of different food sources that were shared by both. If food shortages were important in the evolution of these hominids, one way that the difference between them might have been sustained was an ecological difference in fallback food utilization. Hominids like A. afarensis and A. africanus undeniably had teeth adapted to heavy grinding, fracturing off brittle foods, and intensive attrition compared to any other living or fossil primate. So it makes no sense to propose that the difference between these "gracile" australopithecines and later robust australopithecines was that the "gracile" ones lacked the high-chewing element. Rather, it makes considerably more sense to suppose that both kinds of hominids were eating the high-chewing foods, with the robust ones making a more intensive use of them, and possibly lacking some of the tough pliable foods eaten by earlier nonrobust species. A difference in fallback strategies might comprise exactly this kind of dietary prediction.

To me, the coolest thing about the hypothesis is that it explains the postcanine adaptations of australopithecines without reference to the now-well-known carbon isotope data. Indeed, the question of C₄ versus C₃ foods is entirely irrelevant. I discussed the carbon and other stable isotope data in an earlier post; the short story is that all kinds of australopithecines appear to have included around a 25 to 30 percent component of C₄ foods, which include grasses, some sedges, and the animals who ate them.

Peters and Vogel (2005) proposed that the C₄ component of the early hominid diet could be explained as a sum of several different plant and animal sources, including around 5 percent each of seeds, roots and pith, insects, small mammals and vertebrates, and large mammal meat. That does a good job of describing a diversified hominid diet without reference to tubers.

But the thing about USOs is that relatively few of them are C₄ plants. If hominids did eat tubers, in other words, they still wouldn't account for the C₄ fraction of the overall diet.

However, they might account for the postcanine dental adaptations of later hominids, under the assumption that they represent a substantial part of the C₃ fraction. And the replacement of C₃ fruits by C₃ tubers would explain why robust and nonrobust hominids both have approximately the same C₄ fraction, while differing so greatly in their dental adaptations and dental microwear.

As far as I can tell, nobody has mentioned this implication, but it should be the next thing to test.

The evidence

But although I think Laden and Wrangham's study has some interesting possibilities, I think the data is a bit short of where it needs to be. What about the four lines of evidence used by Laden and Wrangham? Are they to be believed?

The first thing to point out is that a reading of the paper finds little detail to go along with two of the lines of evidence. It is true that australopithecine teeth are not like ape teeth, and that robust australopithecines were different from nonrobust ones. The innovative suggestion here, although brief, is that an enlarged oral cavity in australopithecines, particularly robust ones, may be an adaptation to increase the exposure of masticated tuber to salivary digestion.

But the dental discussion appears less as two independent lines of evidence converging to one conclusion, and more as throwing up whatever seems relevant to see what will stick. A review of early hominid dental evidence also reveals plenty that is less consistent with the hypothesis that USOs were an important food for most early hominids.

For one, the comparative dental evidence is questionable. As Laden and Wrangham review the issue, Hatley and Kappelman originated the argument that the early hominid dentition was adapted to tuber-eating:

In 1980, Hatley and Kappelman pointed out parallels in dental morphology that suggested that bears, pigs, and hominids are all adapted to eating significant amounts of plant underground storage organs (USOs). They summarized their argument as follows: "We believe that postcanine similarities evident among ursids, suids, and hominids are in part an adaptation for processing this tough, fibrous, and gritty plant part. Bears, pigs, and humans are adapted to exploiting plant roots and tubers, although their methods of food gathering are functionally rather than morphologically analogous. Convergence upon the resource of belowground plant storage parts appears to make the responses of nonretractable claws, cartilaginous snout, and digging stick equivalent" (Hatley and Kappelman 1980:380, quoted in Laden and Wrangham 2005:1).

This isn't obviously true. For one thing, Pliocene pigs appear to have been mainly grazers (Harris and Cerling 2002 -- not cited by Laden and Wrangham 2005). They increased in molar size and complexity in several different lineages, as a reflection of their increased reliance on C₄ vegetation. The diet of current-day suids in particular seems to share little in common with early hominids, at least as far as their stable isotope ratios are concerned. Nor are large and flat early hominid molars particularly analogous to those of most bears -- perhaps the closest are pandas, which are far from dedicated tuber-eaters.

Then there is the problem with the earliest hominids. These, like the later ones, are found alongside mole rats, at sites like Aramis and Lukeino. But they don't have the postcanine adaptations of later hominids. The essential problem with the earliest hominids is not postcanine specialization, but instead the changing role of the canine-premolar complex, and the reduction of the canines. There is no reason (at least that I can think of) to suppose that small canines are adaptive to tuber-eating (and a search of the paper finds no occurrences of the word "canine").

One way to avoid this problem is to suppose that the USO-eating adaptation was simply a feature of later hominids --- say, A. anamensis and later. Perhaps it's true, but if so, the hypothesis loses some of its punch, and possibly one of the converging lines of evidence, since the expansion of USO-rich savanna central to Laden and Wrangham's paper starts in the Miocene.

And the paper would prefer to displace the importance of tubers earlier rather than later in time:

There is growing evidence that middle to late Miocene hominoids, mainly in Europe, exploited relatively open habitats, and may have exhibited dietary adaptations (Teaford and Ungar, 2000, Smith et al., 2003 and Smith et al., 2004) that we claim here to be related to USO consumption. This lends support to our assertions that a USO niche may have emerged during the Miocene, that this niche may have been important for non-fossorial mammals, and that certain features, such as thick enamel and large teeth, can arise in response to this niche. However, we do not wish to make claims beyond the hominid taxon at this time, other than to note that this may be a fertile area of future research (Laden and Wrangham 2005:13).

If you are a student looking for a thesis topic, don't pick this one.

The most original suggestion is that hominid and mole rat remains are significantly coassociated. On the surface, this looks like fairly convincing evidence that the hominids lived in USO-rich environments, which is precisely what Laden and Wrangham conclude. And indeed, the number of sites either possessing both kinds of animals or lacking both (27) is higher than expected considering the small number that have one kind but lack the other (11).

But wait a minute. Neither "mole rats" nor "hominids" are species, they are groups composed of several species. Let's consider the same kind of comparison for other kinds of animals. How many hominid sites lack bovids? Or suids? Or crocodilians? Keep in mind that some groups are rare at early hominid sites because they hadn't diversified yet, like papionins, or hadn't yet appeared in Africa, like equids. But these groups are found at many later hominid sites. And of course, for many sites the total species list may reflect less intensity of sampling rather than the paleohabitat.

In other words, the mole rats may show that hominids had the opportunity to eat USOs -- at least, if they could compete effectively with the mole rats for them. But they don't show that the hominids actually ate USOs. At least not if we aren't equally willing to believe that the presence of crocodiles at hominid sites meant that hominids swam in rivers and ate migrating wildebeest.

The weaknesses NOT mentioned

I see two significant weaknesses in the hypothesis. The first is the simpler of the two: digging up tubers is a lot of work.

For groups like the Hadza who eat a lot of them, this work takes many hours (at least by some group members). That kind of work seems unlikely for australopithecines, even hungry ones. Especially considering the full scenario: australopithecines digging intensively for savanna-living tubers for hours at a stretch would have been highly exposed to predation and heat stress for hours at a stretch.

Might they have done it if they had nothing else to eat? Sure. But could they have done so efficiently enough to get a net return on their effort? There's a question worth answering.

Might they have banded together into large defensive groups? Maybe, but that would seem likely to decrease foraging efficiency -- how many tubers are there in any small patch of ground? However, there is slight evidence for large multimale groups (chiefly AL 333), as well as pretty good evidence that predation was high and survivorship into adulthood low. Another question worth answering.

There may be a solution for this problem: perhaps the plants themselves have evolved under intensive hominid predation. Maybe today they put their roots further underground, or maybe the plants with tougher and more fibrous roots have predominated since the Pliocene. If so, australopithecines might have had an easier time of digging them up.

The other problem is more vexing. How can we demonstrate that an extinct species was adapted to eat a food that it did not eat very often? Bone chemistry must predominantly reflect the foods that make up the majority of the diet, not those that are consumed only intermittently. Microwear also ought to reflect the majority foodstuffs, although perhaps more weakly -- especially if mortality occurs mostly during periods of dietary stress, when animals are eating more of their fallback foods than usual. This is perhaps worth looking into.

Maybe the most promising test would be variability in tooth wear. Presumably the need to rely on fallback foods would vary in accordance with climatic conditions, on a multigenerational timescale. If so, then some individuals might exhibit relatively great amounts of attrition due to their reliance on fallback foods during long periods of resource stress, while other individuals might have lived in times of relative abundance, and therefore not have experienced significant amounts of wear. This kind of heterogeneity would itself have created differences in selection on tooth size, enamel thickness, and occlusal anatomy over time: perhaps in ways that could be differentiated from alternative strategies. But even so, that kind of comparison is relatively far from the direct evidence, and may be impossible with the fossil record we have available.

Summary

Looking back at the post, I've written a balance of critical comments and supportive ones. I guess my opinion overall is that the USO hypothesis is certainly worth presenting, but it has a ways to go before it is really testable. I think there is a balance of good ideas here and evidentiary weaknesses, and it is certainly worth talking about them, perhaps with a bit more skepticism and documentation than has yet been done.

And if you are serious about tubers, as Wrangham clearly has shown himself to be, then you are going to have to choose a time when they were important. With this paper, I have now read that tubers were the key adaptation for Miocene apes, the earliest hominids, australopithecines, robust australopithecines, early Homo, and recent humans.

It can't be all of these. If it were, they would all look the same. And there wouldn't have been any reason for one to change into anything else! So you have to pick.

And making a choice means more than saying, "well, Miocene apes tasted tubers, early hominids needed them when the fruit ran out, for australopithecines they were a fallback food, robust australopithecines ate them all the time, early Homo cooked them, and recent humans pickled them with vinegar and caraway seeds. As yet, the many tuber hypotheses have been just-so-storytelling at its most self-contradictory.

If I were picking, I would put the best odds on Laden and Wrangham's current argument: USOs were important fallback foods for nonrobust australopithecines like A. afarensis and A. africanus, and equally or more important for robust australopithecines. In contrast, early Homo was adapted to meat eating, and the earliest hominids -- who lack the postcanine specializations of later hominids -- remain as yet a mystery, although a fundamentally apelike diet is a good first guess.

This post doesn't account for all the details of early hominid diets, but some previous posts review other sources of evidence, including:

Stable isotope analyses

Dental microwear

Occlusal anatomy

References:

Hatley T, Kappelman J. 1980. Bears, pigs, and Plio-Pleistocene hominids: a case for the exploitation of belowground food resources. Hum Ecol 8:371Ð387.

Laden G and Wrangham R. 2005. The rise of the hominids as an adaptive shift in fallback foods: plant underground storage organs (USOs) and australopith origins. J Hum Evol in press (online)

Wrangham RW, Jones JH, Laden G, Pilbeam D, Conklin-Brittain N. 1999. The raw and the stolen: cooking and the ecology of human origins. Curr Anthropol 40:567-594.

A number of readers have been asking what the deal is with the "Goliath" specimen discussed by Lee Berger (and reconstructed by him and Steve Churchill) in the National Geographic program, "Searching for the Ultimate Survivor." The femoral fragment found by Berger himself was apparently from Hoedjiespunt, around 300,000 years old. The specimen itself has not yet been reported.

The reconstruction shown on the program is based on the Kabwe cranial and postcranial remains. The Kabwe skull is the best known specimen from the site, but there are also another maxilla and postcrania representing three or more individuals. One (E719) of two innominate bones (os coxae) and one femur (E 907) are quite large, although they probably do not belong to the same individual as the skull (Wolpoff 1999). I would assume that the full-body reconstruction on the program used these to estimate and model a very large body size.

Kabwe (E 686) cranium, lateral view

"Ultimate Survivor" discusses the "Goliaths" living in Europe, which means that they are talking about Homo heidelbergensis. There is a clear division of opinion about this species in the field. Some researchers, myself included, think it is a superfluous name that doesn't describe a real ancient reproductive community, and so we tend not to use it at all. But among those who believe that H. heidelbergensis is valid, there are essentially two viewpoints. Some would limit its application to European fossils only, which is where the type specimen, the Mauer mandible, was found. Others would apply H. heidelbergensis much more broadly to essentially all Middle Pleistocene European and African fossils, and some specimens from China as well. In this usage, H. heidelbergensis is basically inclusive of all specimens that have been called "archaic Homo sapiens, on the basis of enlarged brain size compared to earlier humans combined with the lack of most of the distinctive features of Neandertals.

So the question is, were Middle Pleistocene humans a race of giants? There is no question that there were some individuals with large mass. The large Kabwe specimen is one; the individual represented by the very broad Sima de los Huesos pelvis is another -- probably the most massive individual in the Middle Pleistocene record. These large specimens had masses upward of 80 to 90 kg, and are more massive than any Early Pleistocene humans, who averaged only between 60 and 70 kg.

But these large specimens provide only a small part of the overall picture of body size. The multiple skeletal remains from the single site of Kabwe alone indicate a range of body sizes. Not only in Africa but elsewhere there is clear evidence of a mixture of smaller and larger specimens. As shown by Ruff et al. (1997), this range of variation is not more extensive than in living human populations. Part of the variation is related to climate (higher latitude populations are more massive), part is probably due to sex (the largest specimens are undoubtedly males, meaning that there must have been a range of smaller female individuals also). But whetever the sources of variation they were substantial and did not greatly change after the beginning of the Middle Pleistocene.

Body mass vs. time, from Ruff et al. 1997. Note the large body sizes of a few individuals after 600,000 years ago, and the subsequent stasis.

The large body size of some Middle Pleistocene fossil individuals, as well as the Late Pleistocene Neandertals, has led to considerable speculation about their adaptation. Much of this centers around the assertion that early humans were greatly powerful and muscular compared to recent people. This assertion is supported by the increased shaft thickness of the long bones of many early humans. These shafts generally have quite thick cortical bone and reduced medullary cavities; not only compared to recent people but also to early Holocene skeletal remains. Since early farmers certainly worked hard and did not lead lives of luxury, the archaic humans stand out as robust.

Perhaps world-class athletes -- at least those before the widespread use of anabolic steroids -- offer a closer approximation to the body build and mass of archaic Homo sapiens. Tanner (1964) reported on the mass and proportions of athletes in the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, and the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. The competitors who most closely approximate the build of Neanderthals were the throwers, weight-lifters and wrestlers. Some of these men weighed as much as 91 kg, even though they were narrower across the hips than most Neanderthals. Using a larger, more muscular living human reference sample could produce even larger and perhaps more realistic body-mass estimates (Kappelman 1997:127).

Of course, I weigh as much as 91 kg, and without making any claims about how narrow I am at the hips, my body proportions are not especially Neandertal-like. I doubt that an Olympic weightlifter would make a better model of a Neandertal than I do. The specialized muscle building regimen necessary for performance athletes is not part of the standard mode of human growth and development. Almost certainly a Neandertal with the lean body mass of a performance athlete would be at a huge energetic disadvantage without a substantial fat store, since the availability of food for hunter-gatherers is neither uniform nor uninterrupted. Today's hunter-gatherers are not particularly muscle-bound -- although they are strong and lean, they are not "cut," and when healthy they have noticeable fat stores. So while I would not suggest that archaic humans were by any means portly, I would suggest that if they had high mass estimates, then a substantial part of that must be modeled as fat rather than pure muscle.

The relatively rapid decrease in modern human body mass during the past 90,000 yr is a dramatic contrast to the large body mass of archaic Homo during the preceding two million years. What selection pressures could have resulted in both smaller body mass and larger relative brain size in modern humans? These changes do not seem to be tightly linked to technological innovation, although the less sturdily constructed skeleton implicates different behaviours, suggesting that modern humans adopted increasingly less active lifestyles. Now, rather than focusing solely on models that favour selection for ever-larger brains, we should examine the possibility that the pattern in modern humans was driven by selection for smaller bodies, perhaps favoured by a social structure that relied on more cooperative foraging and better communication skills (Kappelman 1997:127).

We can add an additional possibility: that increased dietary constraints resulted from population size increases, and that Late Pleistocene humans decreased in body size as a secular trend. It is almost certainly true that a secular trend toward lower mass occurred during the Holocene with the advent of agricultural subsistence. The lower protein and other nutritional content of early agricultural diets combined with the increased incidence of epidemic diseases during childhood both resulted in smaller adult body sizes. Since the industrial revolution, this secular trend has reversed in societies with increasingly Westernized diets.

Moreover evidence from the past 40 years has indicated that the body size differences among human populations have begun to decrease as nutrition has improved in developing nations:

Current analyses indicate that body mass varies inversely with mean annual temperature in males (r=-0.27, P

This means that mass is approaching the same situation as stature, where any prediction of Allen's rule appears to be partly cancelled by the tall present-day stature of Northern Europeans, which is in large part a recent, post-industrial development.

So in my view, the body size of Middle Pleistocene humans was influenced by not only their activity pattern and adaptation to locomotion, but also their diet and body composition. They cannot be described as giants, or "Goliaths" compared to recent humans. In particular, the mean body sizes of people living today in industrialized societies are very similar to those of Middle Pleistocene humans.

The body size in Western countries today is a function of genes acting in an environment with nearly maximal nutrition and minimal disease and parasite load. In archaic humans, evidence suggests a diet very high in animal protein, and the small population sizes and low densities would likely maintain a low rate of acute communicable diseases and parasites. Unlike recent hunter-gatherers who occupy lands historically unused by agriculturalists, archaic humans could live and forage in the most productive habitats with the most abundant food sources. In short, archaic humans were probably healthier and better-fed than their later Upper Paleolithic and Holocene counterparts.

The Middle Pleistocene saw the most extensive increases in human brain sizes during all of human evolution. It is interesting to consider the role of diet and population density in creating the circumstances during which this increase happened.

References:

Kappelman J. 1997. They might be giants. Nature 387:126-127.

Katzmarzyk PT and Leonard WR. 1998. Climatic influences on human body size and proportions: ecological adaptations and secular trends. Am J Phys Anthropol 106(4):483-503.

Ruff CB, Trinkaus E, Holliday TW. 1997. Body mass and encephalization in Pleistocene Homo. Nature 387:173-176.

Wolpoff MH. 1999. Paleoanthropology. McGraw-Hill, New York.