The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (32 page)

25
B. La Scola et al., “The virophage as a unique parasite of the giant mimivirus,”
Nature
455 (2008): 100–104.

26
The natural history of LINEs and SINEs can be found in E. S. Lander et al., “Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome,”
Nature
409 (2001): 879–880.

27
R. O. Prum and A. H. Brush, “The evolutionary origin and diversification of feathers,”
Quarterly Review of Biology
77 (2002): 261–295.

28
P. M. O’Connor and L. P. A. M. Claessens, “Basic avian pulmonary design and flow-through ventilation in non-avian theropod dinosaurs,”
Nature
436 (2005): 253–256; F. E. Novas and P. F. Puertat, “New evidence concerning avian origins from the Late Cretaceous of Patagonia,”
Nature
387 (1997): 390–392; M. A. Norell et al., “A
Velociraptor
wishbone,”
Nature
389 (1997): 447; M. A. Norell et al., “A nesting dinosaur,”
Nature
378 (1995): 774–776.

29
For a review see M. A. Norell and X. Xu, “Feathered dinosaurs,”
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences
33 (2005): 277–299.

30
X. Xu et al., “The smallest known non-avian theropod dinosaur,”
Nature
408 (2000): 705–708; X. Xu et al., “A dromaeosaurid dinosaur with a filamentous integument from the Yixian Formation of China,”
Nature
401 (1999): 262–266.

31
X. Xu et al., “A gigantic bird-like dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of China,”
Nature
447 (2007): 844–847.

32
When Gee Minor was a little older—about four—I took her to the Natural History Museum in London to see a traveling exhibition on the new and
unfamiliar feathered dinosaurs of China. I had published reports on most of the specimens on display, but had seen them only in photographs, so was excited to see them in real life, or, as it may be, death. One had to pay to get into this special exhibition, and it was tucked away in a side gallery—so it was away from the main dinosaur exhibit and thus patronized by very few visitors. The exhibit consisted of just nine specimens, moodily lit. As I became engrossed in the study of each fossil, Gee Minor whizzed around from fossil to fossil in the manner of a bumblebee flitting between flowers in a herbaceous border. A fossil that particularly engaged my attention was
Caudipteryx
, preserved on a large tabletop slab, a creature previously featured in
Nature
under my watch (J. Qiang et al., “Two feathered dinosaurs from northeastern China,”
Nature
393 [1998]: 753–761). As I was examining the specimen, deep in thought, a little face popped up on the other side of the slab and said, “Dad, did you punish this in
Nature
?” Out of the mouths of babes.

33
For an overview of
Archaeopteryx
, see P. Shipman,
Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Origin of Bird Flight
(New York: Touchstone, 1999).

34
P. Domínguez Alonso et al., “The avian nature of the brain and inner ear of
Archaeopteryx
,”
Nature
430 (2004): 666–669.

35
P.-J. Chen et al., “An exceptionally well-preserved theropod dinosaur from the Yixian Formation of China,”
Nature
391 (1998): 147–152.

36
X. Xu et al., “An
Archaeopteryx
-like theropod from China and the origin of Avialae,”
Nature
475 (2011): 465–470; L. Witmer, “An icon knocked from its perch,”
Nature
475 (2011): 458–459.

37
F. Zhang et al., “A bizarre Jurassic maniraptoran from China with elongate ribbon-like feathers,”
Nature
455 (2008): 1105–1108.

38
C. Y. McLean et al., “Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits,”
Nature
471 (2011): 216–219.

39
N. Humphrey et al., “Human hand-walkers: Five siblings who never stood up” (2005), London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online,
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/463
.

40
W. Enard et al., “Molecular evolution of
FOXP2
, a gene involved in speech and language,”
Nature
418 (2002): 869–872.

CHAPTER 4

1
G. Weber, “Top languages: The world’s 10 most influential languages” (2008),
http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm
, accessed 31 March 2012.

2
For an absorbing account of the history of the British Empire, see N. Ferguson,
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
(London: Allen Lane, 2002).

3
Niall Ferguson looked at America, too, in
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
(London: Penguin, 2004).

4
F. McLynn,
1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World
(London: Vintage, 2008).

5
N. Ferguson, ed.,
Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
(London: Picador, 1997).

6
D. W. Meinig,
The Shaping of America: Atlantic America, 1492–1800
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); D. W. Meinig,
The Shaping of America: Continental America, 1800–67
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

7
M. Alexander,
Old English Literature
(New York: Schocken, 1983).

8
I have two editions of the poem, separated in time by almost exactly a century. The first is a second edition (1898) of the standard text by A. J. Wyatt; the second is the text with the recent translation by the poet Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1999).

9
J. R. R. Tolkien,
Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode
, ed. Alan Bliss (London: HarperCollins, 1982).

10
S. McBrearty and N. Jablonski, “First fossil chimpanzee,”
Nature
437 (2005): 105–108.

11
Z. Zhou et al., “An exceptionally preserved Lower Cretaceous ecosystem,”
Nature
421 (2003): 807–814.

12
This was kindly demonstrated to me by Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

13
D. Dashzeveg et al., “Extraordinary preservation in a new vertebrate assemblage from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia,”
Nature
374 (1995): 446–449.

14
P. A. Allison and D. E. G. Briggs, “Exceptional fossil record: Distribution of soft-tissue preservation through the Phanerozoic,”
Geology
21 (1993): 527–530.

15
R. S. Sansom et al., “Non-random decay of chordate characters causes bias in fossil interpretation,”
Nature
463 (2010): 797–800.

16
G. Borgonie et al., “Nematoda from the terrestrial deep subsurface of South Africa,”
Nature
474 (2011): 79–82.

17
N. A. Cobb,
Nematodes and Their Relationships
, United States Department of Agriculture Yearbook (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, 1914), 472. I am grateful to Roderic Page for tracing this quote.

18
G. Poinar Jr., “Trends in the evolution of insect parasitism by nematodes as inferred from fossil evidence,”
Journal of Nematology
35 (2003): 129–132.

19
G. Poinar Jr. and A. J. Boucot, “Evidence of intestinal parasites of dinosaurs,”
Parasitology
133 (2006): 245–249.

20
E. P. Hoberg et al., “Out of Africa: Origins of the
Taenia
tapeworms in humans,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
268 (2001): 781–787.

21
It is possible that
Opabinia
is obscurely related to velvet worms (onychophores) and tardigrades (water bears). G. E. Budd, “The morphology of
Opabinia regalis
and the reconstruction of the arthropod stem group,”
Lethaia
29 (1996): 1–14.

22
For a general review see
The Adequacy of the Fossil Record
, ed. S. K. Donovan and C. R. C. Paul (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1998). The thesis of this book is
that the incompleteness of the fossil record need not dent its adequacy for solving a variety of paleontological problems.

23
The literature on the Doushantuo phosphorites is voluminous. For two recent articles see J. A. Cunningham et al., “Distinguishing geology from biology in the Ediacaran Doushantuo biota relaxes constraints on the timing of the origin of bilaterians,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
279 (2012): 2369–2376; and G. Jiang et al., “Stratigraphy and paleogeography of the Ediacaran Doushantuo Formation (ca. 635–551 Ma) in South China,”
Gondwana Research
19 (2011): 831–849.

24
F. H. T. Rhodes and R. Phillips, “The zoological affinities of conodonts,”
Biological Reviews
29 (1954): 419–452.

25
S. Conway Morris, “
Typhloesus wellsi
(Melton and Scott, 1973), a bizarre metazoan from the Carboniferous of Montana, U.S.A.,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B
327 (1990): 595–624.

26
R. J. Aldridge et al., “The anatomy of conodonts,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B
340 (1993): 405–421; R. J. Aldridge et al., “The affinities of conodonts: New evidence from the Carboniferous of Edinburgh, Scotland,”
Lethaia
19 (1986): 279–291.

27
A. Blieck et al., “Fossils, histology, and phylogeny: Why conodonts are not vertebrates,”
Episodes
33 (2010): 234–241; A. Kemp, “Hyaline tissue of thermally unaltered conodont elements and the enamel of vertebrates,”
Alcheringa
2 (2008): 23–36.

28
J. J. Sepkoski, “A compendium of fossil marine animal genera,”
Bulletins of American Paleontology
363 (2002): 1–560. It lives on as the Paleobiology Database,
http://paleodb.org/cgi-bin/bridge.pl
.

29
See for example J. Alroy et al., “Phanerozoic trends in the global diversity of marine invertebrates,”
Science
321 (1998): 97–100; J. Alroy, “The shifting balance of diversity among major marine animal groups,”
Science
329 (2010): 1191–1194; C. R. Marshall, “Marine biodiversity dynamics over deep time,”
Science
329 (2010): 1156–1157.

30
Paleontologists express this uncertainty as the “Signor-Lipps effect,” after the two paleontologists who discussed the issues. See P. W. Signor III and J. H. Lipps, “Sampling bias, gradual extinction patterns, and catastrophes in the fossil record,” in L. T. Silver and P. H. Schultz, eds.,
Geological implications of impacts of large asteroids and comets on the earth
, Geological Society of America Special Publication 190 (Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America, 1982), 291–296.

31
See for example S. E. Peters, “Environmental determinants of extinction selectivity in the fossil record,”
Nature
454 (2008): 626–629; S. E. Peters and M. Foote, “Determinants of extinction in the fossil record,”
Nature
416 (2002): 420–424; A. B. Smith, “Large-scale heterogeneity of the fossil record: Implications for Phanerozoic biodiversity studies,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B
356 (2001): 351–367; P. M. Barrett et al., “Dinosaur diversity and the rock record,”
Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London B
276 (2009): 2667–2674; G. T. Lloyd et al., “Quantifying the deep-sea rock and fossil record bias using coccolithophores,”
Geological Society, London, Special Publications
358 (2011): 167–177.

32
A few are known from rocks of the same age in nearby Orkney.

33
See for example W. J. Sollas and I. G. B. Sollas, “An account of the Devonian fish,
Palaeospondylus gunni
, Traquair,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B
196 (1904): 267–294; J. A. Moy-Thomas, “The Devonian fish
Palaeospondylus gunni
Traquair,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B
230 (1940): 391–413; K. S. Thomson et al., “A larval Devonian lungfish,”
Nature
426 (2003): 833–834; M. J. Newman and J. L. Den Blaauwen, “New information on the enigmatic Devonian vertebrate
Palaeospondylus gunni
,”
Scottish Journal of Geology
44 (2008): 89–91.

CHAPTER 5

1
R. Lee, “The outlook for population growth,”
Science
333 (2011): 569–573.

2
T. Benton, “Oceans of garbage,”
Nature
352 (1991): 113.

3
H. Kaessmann et al., “Great ape DNA sequences reveal a reduced diversity and an expansion in humans,”
Nature Genetics
27 (2001): 155–156; H. Kaessmann et al., “Extensive nuclear DNA sequence diversity among chimpanzees,”
Science
286 (1999): 1159–1162; Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, “Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome,”
Nature
437 (2005): 69–87.

4
C. D. Huff et al., “Mobile elements reveal small population size in ancient ancestors of
Homo sapiens
,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
107 (2010): 2147–2152. I should perhaps add a note here about the term “effective population size” used in studies such as this. The effective population size (
N
_e
) is not the gross number of individuals in a population, but the number that contribute genes to the next generation. This is typically a much smaller number, given that many individuals in a population will die before reproducing, and a few individuals (such as dominant males) will contribute disproportionately to the gene pool—but it’s the number that matters when one is tracking changes in genetic diversity.

5
S. R. Copeland et al., “Strontium isotope evidence for landscape use by early hominins,”
Nature
474 (2011): 76–78.

6
A. Manica et al., “The effect of ancient population bottlenecks on human phenotypic variation,”
Nature
448 (2007): 346–348.