Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
can safely assume, though, is that no matter how much evidence we get,
the prehistory of tools, bodies, and beliefs will forever remain a fertile
field for projection and wishful thinking.
Notes
1. This sentiment can be found in many different sciences of prehistory: witness
the recent skepticism with regard to the formerly rock-hard claims for human-
generated fire at the 500,000-year-old site of Zhoukoudian, south of Beijing (S.
Wiener, Q. Xu, P. Golderg, J. Liu, and O. Ban-Yosee, “Evidence for the Use of
Fire at Zhoukoudian,”
Science
281.5374 [1998]: 251-253). Hominid control of
fire had been pushed back to 1.5 or even 1.8 million years ago in Britain and
Africa, though there is the perennial problem of how to distinguish human-made
from accidental fire. Scholars have looked for, but not yet found, the telltale
carbon signatures of anthropogenic fire in the seabeds downwind from the
hominid sites of East Africa; see M. I. Bird and J. A. Cali, “A Million-Year
Record of Fire in Sub-Saharan Africa,”
Nature
394 (1998): 767 ff.
2. See Frans B. M. de Waal, “Cultural Primatology Comes of Age,”
Nature
399
(1999): 635-636; and William C. McGrew,
Chimpanzee Material Culture: Impli-
cations for Human Evolution
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
3. Louis Leakey had suggested
Ramapithecus
's tool use in a 1968 article in
Nature
. Elwyn L. Simons had earlier granted
Ramapithecus
's hominid status and
bipedalism, based solely on his reconstruction of its jaws and teeth (“The Early
Relatives of Man,”
Scientific American
, July 1964, 50-62). Richard Leakey sig-
naled the demotion of this fossil in 1982, shortly after his film series
The Making
of Mankind
, in a lecture wherein he stated that the “conventional wisdom”
tracing humans back through
Ramapithecus
was probably wrong;
Ramapithe-
cus
had been a “red herring” (cited in John Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas,
The
Monkey Puzzle: Reshaping the Evolutionary Tree
[New York: Pantheon Books,
1982], 12). Simons and the elder Leakey were not unusual in upholding this
view; Pat Shipman, who did her PhD on the Kenya
Ramapithecus
site, notes that
in the mid-1970s, “everybody thought
Ramapithecus
was a hominid” (personal
communication).
4. Adrienne Zihlman and Jerold Lowenstein, “False Start for the Human
Parade,”
Natural History
(August-September 1979): 86-91.
5. Allan C. Wilson and Vincent M. Sarich, “Immunological Time Scale for
Hominid Evolution,”
Science
158 (1967): 1200-1203.
6. Frédéric Joulian, “Techniques du corps et traditions chimpanzières,”
Terrain
,
March 2000, 37-54. Joulian has found sites where nut cracking has gone on for
at least two hundred years, estimated from the number of nutshells and wear on
the stone anvils at such sites. William H. Calvin speculates that early hominids
may have begun deliberately chipping stone after having accidentally caused
stones to flake in the course of chimplike hammering (
The Throwing Madonna:
Essays on the Brain
[New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983], 27, and “Rediscovery and
