The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (34 page)

63
C. Howell, “Omo research expedition,”
Nature
219 (1968): 567–572.

64
D. C. Johanson and M. Taieb, “Plio-Pleistocene hominid discoveries in Hadar, Ethiopia,”
Nature
260 (1976): 293–297.

65
T. D. White et al., “
Australopithecus ramidus
, a new species of hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia,”
Nature
371 (1994): 306–312.

66
T. D. White et al., “
Ardipithecus ramidus
and the paleobiology of early hominids,”
Science
326 (2009): 75–86.

67
M. G. Leakey et al., “New four-million-year-old hominid species from Kanapoi and Allia Bay, Kenya,”
Nature
376 (1995): 565–571; Y. Haile-Selassie, “Late Miocene hominids from the Middle Awash, Ethiopia,”
Nature
412 (2001): 178–181; B. Senut et al., “First hominid from the Miocene (Lukeino Formation, Kenya),”
Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences
, series 2a, 332 (2001): 137–144.

68
B. Wood and T. Harrison, “The evolutionary context of the first hominins,”
Nature
470 (2011): 347–352.

69
M. Brunet et al., “A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa,”
Nature
418 (2002): 145–151.

70
C. P. E. Zollikofer et al., “Virtual cranial reconstruction of
Sahelanthropus tchadensis
,”
Nature
434 (2005): 755–759.

71
M. H. Wolpoff et al., “
Sahelanthropus
or ‘
Sahelpithecus
’?,”
Nature
419 (2002): 581–582; M. Brunet et al., “
Sahelanthropus
or ‘
Sahelpithecus
’?,”
Nature
419 (2002): 582.

CHAPTER 6

1
Equotes,
http://bevets.com/equotesg.htm#G
, accessed 4 April 2012.

2
S. Reuland,
Sunbeams from Cucumbers
,
http://stevereuland.blogspot.com/2006/04/wittlessly-quote-mining.html
, accessed 4 April 2012.

3
Psalms 14:1. I am grateful to Andrew Thaler for pointing out that particular gem.

4
J. Conard, “Palaeolithic ivory sculptures from southwestern Germany and the origins of figurative art,”
Nature
426 (2003): 830–832.

5
Although the recent news story about a Jewish religious court that sentenced a dog to death by stoning was, apparently, a hoax.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/06/18/shocking-sentence-jewish-court-condemns-dog-to-death-by-stoning/
, accessed 6 November 2012.

6
I first found this story in Felipe Fernández-Armesto,
So You Think You’re Human? A Brief History of Humankind
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

CHAPTER 7

1
M. Srinivasan and A. Ruina, “Computer optimization of a minimal biped model discovers walking and running,”
Nature
439 (2006): 72–75.

2
W. E. H. Harcourt-Smith and L. C. Aiello, “Fossils, feet and the evolution of human bipedal locomotion,”
Journal of Anatomy
204 (2004): 403–416; D. L. Gebo, “Climbing, brachiation, and terrestrial quadrupedalism: Historical precursors of hominid bipedalism,”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
101 (1996): 55–92; C. O. Lovejoy, “Evolution of human walking,”
Scientific American
, November 1988, 118–125.

3
K. D. Hunt, “The evolution of human bipedality: Ecology and functional morphology,”
Journal of Human Evolution
26 (1994): 183–202.

4
P. E. Wheeler, “The thermoregulatory advantages of hominid bipedalism in open equatorial environments: The contribution of increased convective heat loss and cutaneous evaporative cooling,”
Journal of Human Evolution
21 (1991): 107–115; P. E. Wheeler, “The evolution of bipedality and loss of functional body hair in hominids,”
Journal of Human Evolution
13 (1984): 91–98.

5
E. Morgan,
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
(London: Souvenir Press, 1997).

6
Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago told me a story about a drive in Morocco, during which he and the other passengers noticed a tree in the distance that had been colonized by what looked like large birds. Vultures, maybe? As they got closer, it became clear that the birds were in fact a herd of goats that filled the entire tree from the trunk to the outermost twigs.

7
J. Diamond,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
(London: Random House, 1991); J. Diamond,
Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997).

8
M. Andersson and Y. Iwasa, “Sexual selection,”
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
11 (1996): 53–58; J. Maynard Smith, “Theories of sexual selection,”
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
6 (1991): 146–151.

9
W. D. Hamilton and M. Zuk, “Heritable true fitness and bright birds: A role for parasites?,”
Science
218 (1982): 384–387.

10
R. A. Fisher,
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930).

11
A. Zahavi, “Mate selection: A selection for a handicap,”
Journal of Theoretical Biology
53 (1975): 205–214.

12
At this point you will ask yourself why expensive sports cars are seen as sexy, whereas more inexpensive and practical station wagons are not.
Or are they?
Advertisers, as we have seen, are very good instinctive judges of human motivation—so how would a copywriter sell the idea of station wagons to men of a certain age and maturity who still hanker after that red sports car? One answer—I forget the particular campaign—went like this. A man was pictured alongside his beautiful girlfriend in a snappy red roadster. In the next panel, the same man was pictured next to the same beautiful woman, now his adoring wife, in a station wagon full of children
and other appurtenances of middle-aged success—dogs, sports equipment, and so on. The caption went something like this: Sports cars are full of the empty show of youth. But now you’ve got the girl, fathered all these children, and achieved some status, you have obviously proved your virility. You will therefore need a suitable vehicle in which to display the fruits of your loins and your material acquisitions to males in sports cars, who have yet to achieve alpha-male dominance status.

13
The following paper links sex with bipedality, though the thesis is much more complicated than mine: S. T. Parker, “A sexual selection model for hominid evolution,”
Human Evolution
2 (1987): 235–253.

14
F. Szalay and R. K. Costello, “Evolution of permanent estrus displays in hominids,”
Journal of Human Evolution
20 (1991): 439–464.

15
L. Benshoof and R. Thornhill, “The evolution of monogamy and concealed ovulation in humans,”
Journal of Social and Biological Structures
2 (1979): 95–106.

16
H. Greiling and D. M. Buss, “Women’s sexual strategies: The hidden dimension of extra-pair mating,”
Personality and Individual Differences
28 (2000): 929–963. In his book
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
, Jared Diamond relates an anecdote about the prevalence of extra-pair paternity related by an obstetrician. Basically, there’s very much more of it than people either claim or are prepared to admit, given that the social norm is the maintenance of overt monogamy.

17
L. Bellamy and A. Pomiankowski, “Why promiscuity pays,”
Nature
479 (2011): 184–186; C. K. Cornwallis et al., “Promiscuity and the evolutionary transition to complex societies,”
Nature
466 (2010): 969–972; D. F. Westneat and I. R. Stewart, “Extra-pair paternity in birds: Causes, correlates, and conflict,”
Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics
34 (2003): 365–396; S. C. Griffith et al., “Extra-pair paternity in birds: A review of interspecific variation and adaptive function,”
Molecular Ecology
11 (2002): 2195–2212; M. Petrie and B. Kempenaers, “Extra-pair paternity in birds: Explaining variation between species and populations,”
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
13 (1998): 52–58.

18
D. R. Rubenstein and I. J. Lovette, “Reproductive skew and selection on female ornamentation in social species,”
Nature
462 (2009): 786–789.

19
Nature
, along with most other scientific journals these days, receives submissions online. It was not always so. I well remember the days when manuscripts arrived in the mail, and in quadruplicate, together with any supporting information, so that the office would have a copy, and there’d be one each for up to three potential referees. One day I received a huge parcel, containing a somewhat way-out manuscript on the origin of human secondary sexual characteristics. The author’s thesis was supported by a particularly lurid example of what used to be called “men’s magazines.” There were four copies of this, too. I swear that I sent all of them back to the author. If it’s in an archive somewhere, I’m not aware of it. Honest.

20
A. S. Jackson et al., “The effect of sex, age and race on estimating percentage body fat from body mass index: The Heritage Family Study,”
International Journal of Obesity
26 (2002): 789–796.

21
P. Frost,
Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Racial Prejudice
(Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions, 2005).

22
D. W. Yu and G. H. Shepard, “Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?,”
Nature
396 (1998): 321–322.

23
D. R. Rubenstein and I. J. Lovette, “Reproductive skew and selection on female ornamentation in social species,”
Nature
462 (2009): 786–789.

24
F. D. Wyatt, “Fifty years of pheromones,”
Nature
457 (2009): 262–263.

25
Note that I didn’t write “nobody.” We humans can get turned on by the most peculiar things. For example, a friend of a friend reportedly sells rubber Wellington boots online to an eager market of fetishists; and it remains unknown, at least to me, why so many women of my acquaintance are so enraptured by, of all things, shoes.

26
See for example S. Dagenais et al., “A systematic review of low back pain cost of illness studies in the United States and internationally,”
Spine Journal
8 (2008): 8–20.

27
K. K. Whitcome et al., “Fetal load and evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins,”
Nature
450 (2007): 1075–1078.

28
For a review see D. Lieberman,
The Evolution of the Human Head
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

29
C. O. Lovejoy et al., “The pelvis and femur of
Ardipithecus ramidus
: The emergence of upright walking,”
Science
326 (2009): 71, 71e1–71e6.

30
C. V. Ward, “Interpreting the posture and locomotion of
Australopithecus afarensis
: Where do we stand?,” in “Yearbook of Physical Anthropology,” supplement,
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
119, suppl. 35 (2002): 185–215.

31
D. M. Bramble and D. E. Lieberman, “Endurance running and the evolution of
Homo
,”
Nature
432 (2004): 345–352.

32
L. Rook et al., “
Oreopithecus
was a bipedal ape after all: Evidence from the iliac cancellous architecture,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
96 (1999): 8795–8799; S. Moyà-Solà et al., “Evidence of hominid-like precision grip capability in the hand of the Miocene ape
Oreopithecus
,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
96 (1999): 313–317.

33
T. Harrison, “A reassessment of the phylogenetic relationships of
Oreopithecus bambolii
Gervais,”
Journal of Human Evolution
15 (1986): 541–583.

CHAPTER 8

1
To use the argument on the illusion of complexity I presented in
chapter 3
, modern technology proceeds by the combination of parts that individually have become very simple. Yes, you probably could make something that
had the processing power of an iPad from vacuum tubes—but it would be enormous, incredibly expensive, shockingly unreliable, and wildly inefficient.

2
R. Wrangham,
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
(London: Profile Books, 2009); L. C. Aiello and P. Wheeler, “The expensive-tissue hypothesis: The brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution,”
Current Anthropology
36 (1995): 199–221.

3
A well-known phenomenon is the social facilitation of eating, in which people tend to eat more when in company than when dining alone. See for example V. I. Clendenen et al., “Social facilitation of eating among friends and strangers,”
Appetite
23 (1994): 1–13. Many years ago I wrote an account of this paper, or one very like it, as an excuse to tell a favorite joke. “Have another bagel, rabbi,” says the hostess. “I couldn’t possibly,” says the rabbi, “I’ve already had three.” “You’ve had four,” the hostess replies, “but who’s counting?”

4
T. Taylor,
The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

5
W. B. Arthur,
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
(London: Allen Lane, 2009).

6
J. Bradshaw,
In Defence of Dogs: Why Dogs Need Our Understanding
(London: Allen Lane, 2011); P. Shipman,
The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

7
J. Diamond, “The double puzzle of diabetes,”
Nature
423 (2003): 599–602.

8
S. Semaw et al., “2.5-million-year-old stone tools from Gona, Ethiopia,”
Nature
385 (1997): 333–336; S. P. McPherron et al., “Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia,”
Nature
466 (2010): 857–860.