NEWS re Early Language

[Larry Trask]

On Tue, 7 Sep 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> (NOTE: the reporter takes the Out of Africa as majority in this piece,
> although other recent stories suggest that majority is fast fading.

I doubt it.  So far as I can tell, out-of-Africa is still very much the
majority view among specialists.  One of the "other recent stories"
alluded to is doubtless the recent brief article in Scientific American.
But...

That article was written by a staff writer, not by a specialist.

SA is not a scholarly journal, but a popular magazine.

SA's record is patchy.  It publishes some great stuff, but also some
shoddy stuff.  In my own field of linguistics, its record is poor: it
focuses on spectacular but dubious ideas, rather than on solid
achievements.

> Both Delson and Swisher, mentioned in the article, generally take a
> multiregional approach.)

> An Intriguing Find on the Upper West Side
> By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

> An intriguing fossil skull, presumably from a Homo erectus and possibly a
> revealing piece of evidence for understanding human evolution, has been
> found not on a parched hill in Africa or along a river in Java, but at a
> cozy little shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
>
> However the skull got there, and this part of the story is murky,

And I should think so.  Fossils are generally only valuable when they
are found *in situ*.  I'm sorry, but a fantastically ancient hominid
fossil found sitting on a shelf in a shop in Manhattan stretches my
credulity to breaking point.

> paleoanthropologists concluded last week that it is a genuine specimen
> from Indonesia

And this is beyond belief.  It is practically impossible to identify the
original location of a displaced fossil unless it happens to be
identical to a type already known to be abundantly and uniquely attested
in some particular location.

In this case, we have a specimen of a type which the article goes on to
describe as unique and not previously known.  And yet some unnamed
"paleoanthropologists" have glanced at it and concluded at once that it
comes from Indonesia.  Is this supposed to be serious?  Did the skull
have an Indonesian exit visa stamped on it, or what? ;-)

How could any serious scientist *possibly* determine the source of a
unique fossil turning up in such a bizarre location, just by inspection?

> and could be critical in determining the place of the
> Homo erectus species in East Asia on the human family tree. Learning
> that is central to a scholarly controversy over where and how modern
> humans, Homo sapiens, evolved....

> The dark gray skull apparently belonged to a young male, probably in
> his 20's, but experts who examined it inside and out were struck by
> some puzzling characteristics. The individual's brain was small,
> about half the size of Homo sapiens but within the range for Homo
> erectus. Yet he had a humanlike high forehead, not the sloping kind
> typical of Homo erectus and other early hominids.

So: like nothing else ever seen before.  Well, I've heard this before.
Strangely enough, it was eventually realized that Piltdown Man didn't
come from Piltdown after all.  So why have our unnamed experts decided
at once that Manhattan Man comes from Indonesia? ;-)

> A cast made of the inside surface of the skull revealed the brain's
> configuration, which bore some resemblance to Homo sapiens brains.

But *all* hominid skulls bear "some resemblance" to human skulls.

As for conclusions about hominid brains, I'm not aware that hominid
brains are exactly thick on the ground.  So, on what basis can anybody
conclude that the (missing) brain of this fellow resembled our own in
anything other than outward shape, if that?

> An apparent swelling in one region of the brain, scientists said,
> suggested that the Homo erectus was developing the potential for
> language and speech....

Ah, there we have yet again that "scientists said", so beloved of
journalists.  Which scientists?  With what qualifications?  On the basis
of what evidence?  Who has concluded that this is a *Homo erectus*
skull, when apparently it looks nothing like any other *H. erectus*
skull ever found?  And what on earth is the intended content of
"developing the potential for language and speech"?

> Until this decade, paleoanthropologists generally divided the lineage of
> genus Homo into three successive species. Homo habilis appeared about
> 2.5 million years ago, at the time of the first evidence of stone
> toolmaking. Homo erectus, beginning about 1.8 million years ago, was the
> first to leave Africa, spreading across Eurasia as far as China and
> Indonesia. The species was once thought to be the direct ancestor of
> Homo sapiens....

> Now scientists are not so sure. Other distinct species may have emerged
> and overlapped between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. Genetic studies
> point to anatomically modern humans' appearing first in Africa some
> 100,000 years ago from descendants of the Homo erectus population that
> remained there. The African branch of Homo erectus is now usually
> labeled Homo ergaster to distinguish it from the Asian species. If
> modern humans sprang from Africa, then the Far East Homo erectus was
> probably an evolutionary dead end, though a few scientists still think
> otherwise....

The one thing that seems certain to me, an outsider, is that our picture
of human origins is becoming steadily more complex and bush-like than we
used to think was the case.

> The rounded shape of the new skull and the inferred structure of its
> brain, the examining team said, at least raised the question of whether
> the Homo erectus of Indonesia was, in fact, evolving toward a more
> modern human species...

> Studying the actual skull and casts, the researchers noted that the
> cranial bone was thick and the brow ridges well developed, both
> characteristics of Homo erectus.....

> Douglas Broadfield, a graduate student at City University, said the
> braincase examination revealed a high degree of cerebral asymmetry, a
> differential development of the two sides of the brain, that seemed
> advanced for Homo erectus. It also showed a bump in what is known as the
> Broca cap or area of the brain, the seat of language capability in
> modern humans. The combination of asymmetry and a Broca's cap, he said,
> was rare in Homo erectus.

I see.  So this skull doesn't look like an *erectus* skull after all.

> "This is not to say this guy could speak like a modern human," Mr.
> Broadfield said. "But the potential is there for some higher processing,
> some type of communication cognition, that we don't see for other H.
> erectus specimens...."

Oh, "the potential is there", eh?  What does this mean?

> Dr. Carl C. Swisher 3d of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in
> California will be analyzing sediment found embedded inside the skull,
> which could yield chemical traces of the specimen's apparent age.  Dr.
> Delson's team said the skull could be anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million
> years old.

Right.  Let's see if I follow.  A fossil skull has been found in a
Manhattan shop.  So it's been out of the ground for an unknown period of
time, and meanwhile in unknown locations.  So what reason is there to
suppose that any sediment found inside it dates from the original burial
of the skull, and not from its locations since removal?

And now, Dr. Swisher, who has apparently not yet carried out any dating
tests at all, is prepared to announce that the skull is between 100,000
and 1 million years old.  Uh-huh.  Sure.

To sum up.  That sober scientific journal, the New York Times, tells us
that a mysterious skull, of a type never seen anywhere else in the
world, turns up in a shop in Manhattan.  Mostly unidentified people look
at it, declare it unhesitatingly to be of Indonesian origin, to be a
*Homo erectus* specimen (even though it looks nothing like any other
known *erectus* skull), declare it to be over 100,000 years old without
carrying out any tests, and tell us that the missing brain that once
inhabited this curiosity was similar to our own brains and full of all
sorts of exciting but unidentified "potential" for this, that and the
other.

You'll forgive me if my pulsebeat has failed to accelerate. ;-)

Larry Trask

(who lives only a few miles from Piltdown)

COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk