Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
jungly bush of racial diversity, as when Grafton Elliot-Smith distin-
guished separate branches for Negroes, Mongols, Mediterraneans,
Nordics, Alpines, Australians, and the now-extinct Neanderthals and
Rhodesian Man. German anthropologists did likewise—rather distress-
ingly late into the century.
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The history of ideas of diversity cannot, however, be seen as a slow
and steady triumph of “bushiness” over “linearity.” Diversity has come
and gone, and come again, keeping different kinds of political company.
Racial
diversity had become unfashionable after the revelation of the
crimes of the Nazis (and eventually with the campaign to end racial
segregation), but
fossil hominid
diversity was also interestingly under-
played as attitudes toward the ancestral (or extinct) hominid “other” got
caught up in race relations. The 1950s was not a time to exclude certain
types of fossils from the fold of humanity. So even though “gracile” and
“robust” australopithecines had both been found in South Africa by the
end of the 1930s, it took some time to dispel the notion that these were
simply males and females of one and the same species (the original
version of the single species hypothesis). Interesting also is the fact that
it was not until after the Second World War that these small-brained
creatures were recognized as hominids. Part of the problem was the wide-
spread notion that early humans must have developed in Asia; African
australopithecines were more often seen as apes than as early hominids.
Their elevation to hominid status may have been helped by the inclusive
atmosphere of the postwar era; a cynic could also wonder, though,
whether the global calamities of the 1940s and postwar nuclear foolish-
ness may have helped spawn the view that humans could have very small
brains.
The single species hypothesis was dealt its first solid blow in 1959,
when Mary Leakey discovered the 1.8-million-year-old
Zinjanthropus
at
Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, a fossil (now known as
Australopithecus
boisei
) with such hyperrobust features (including large, flat, grinding
molars) that it was difficult to imagine these were just the males to the
female gracile australopithecines.
Homo habilis
(“handy man”), found
in the early 1960s at Olduvai, further undercut the assumption of a
single-stalk, non-branching evolutionary tree:
habilis
was clearly more
“human-like” than
Australopithecus
, yet quite a bit older than had pre-
viously been imagined for our genus (about 1.75 million years from
