paleonews

Reuters correspondent Zoran Radosavljevic reports on the recent opening of the new museum at Krapina, Croatia. The museum is devoted to Neandertals, and represents the long work of Croat paleoanthropologist Jakov Radovcic.

Visitors can touch parts of a digital Neanderthal body to get a medical explanation of their diseases and ailments - most of them very similar to our own, like knee and shoulder problems at a later age.

The central scene -- a big Neanderthal family gathered in a cave around the fire -- is particularly impressive because of the accompanying acrid smells of sweat and burning meat, and sounds meant to recreate those typical of the Stone Age.

The article includes a few photos of the reconstructions in the museum. This one gives an impression of the space:

I can't wait until I get a chance to visit, it looks truly impressive!

By popular request from scads of readers:

Was Neanderthal man the original metrosexual? New study suggests he wore make-up

That's in The Daily Mail. I actually like the window title even better, which I assume was an older draft of the story's headline:

Neanderthal 'make-up' discovered: Proof the human subspecies were not the 'half-wits'?

It's like something from the Onion. The story is more or less reasonable, and I love the quote at the end:

Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum in London, supported the findings but added that the view of Neanderthals as 'dim-wits' would be hard to change.

He said: 'I agree that these findings help to disprove the view that Neanderthals were dim-witted. It's very difficult to dislodge the brutish image from popular thinking.

'When football fans behave badly, or politicians advocate reactionary views, they are invariably called "Neanderthal", and I can't see the tabloids changing their headlines any time soon.'

Well, let's see how many of those football fans are wearing makeup!

Last year, I complained that paleoanthropology had been exceptionally boring. One piece of evidence was the year-end retrospective in Discover about the top 100 science stories, of which only three were paleoanthropology-related.

Now, I would never have claimed that this year has been boring for paleoanthropology. But reading through the current Discover, there actually weren't all that many big stories. Sure, enough to make it an interesting year, especially considering the October onslaught. But except for Ardi, it was a year of empirical news and little fundamental movement in our knowledge about human evolution.

Here's a list of the paleoanthro stories in this year's top 100:

3. Ardipithecus. This of course raises the question about which science stories were bigger -- number 1 was vaccines, number 2 the Augustine report on NASA's future. Ardi also made a second appearance as part of number 43, the Darwin-centric entry.

35. Neandertal DNA. This was more media event than story in 2009, but worth including in any year.

51. Hohle Fels flutes.

80. We get a target-rich environment starting here: Chimpanzees plan ahead -- this is the meat-for-sex story.

81. "Human gene changes mouse talk" -- transgenic FOXP2 mice.

82. "Early humans tended the disabled" -- the Atapuerca craniosynostosis case.

There are a few more that touch on issues discussed here on the blog, but except for the Paleoindian drive lines discovered under Lake Huron (number 95), they don't really hit paleoanthropology.

However, one paleoanthropologist does make another appearance: I was unaware until I read item number 93 that Dean Falk was working on Einstein's brain.

UPDATE (2009-12-11): Several readers wrote to request the reference to Falk's Einstein brain work. A copy is free online from PubMed.

This week's NY Times Science section is devoted to evolution, with articles by:

Carl Zimmer, on microbial evolution

John Noble Wilford, on human paleontology

Nicholas Wade, on recent human genetic evolution

Carol Kaesuk Yoon, on evo-devo

An essay by Douglas Erwin, about evo-devo and Darwinism

A video interview with my UW colleague, Sean Carroll

And several other things. I will be reading through these articles over the next several days and providing some annotation and commentary -- I think they are an interesting compilation of recent (and some older) developments in evolutionary science.

The new Human Origins hall at the American Museum is the occasion for a big Newsweek story, with the tagline, "The New Science of Human Evolution". Author Sharon Begley isn't stingy with the prose:

Whether or not you believe the hand of God was guiding these changes, the discoveries are overturning longstanding ideas about how we became human.

Not that fossils are passé. New discoveries are pruning and reshaping humankind's family tree as radically as bonsai. The neat traditional model in which one species gave rise to another like Biblical "begats" has been replaced by a profusion of branches, representing species that lived at the same time as our direct ancestors but whose lines died out. It's like discovering that your great-great-grandfather was not an only child as you'd thought, but had a number of siblings who, for unknown reasons, left no descendants. New research also shows that "progress" and "human evolution" are only occasional partners. More than once in human prehistory, evolution created a modern trait such as a face without jutting, apelike brows and jaws, only to let it go extinct, before trying again a few million years later. Our species' travels through time proceeded in fits and starts, with long periods when "nothing much happened," punctuated by bursts of dizzying change, says paleontologist Ian Tattersall, co-curator of the American Museum's new hall.

It's a little sad to see the article organized around a 15-year-old storyline. No More Unilineal Evolution! Hey, if it's a "new science", why do we keep hearing from the same old people?

Still, there are some brain evolution subplots, and a few genes mentioned. Aside from the flowery analogies, Begley is a good writer and can capture the essence of most of these stories in a few lines. As an exercise, let's try to take those few lines and change one crucial word to find the weakness of each hypothesis. For each quote, I'll strike out a word in the article and add the correct word in brackets.

You dirty louse

For example, let's start where the article does, with the "body lice = no fur" story:

That fork in the louse's family tree, [Mark Stoneking] and colleagues at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology concluded, occurred no more than 114,000 years ago. Since new kinds of creatures tend to appear when [correct word: after] a new habitat does, that's when human ancestors must have lost their body hair for good - and made up for it with clothing that, besides keeping them warm, provided a home for the newly evolved louse.

You see how easy that is? Yes, new species adapt to new niches, but there is no reason to think this happens immediately. For that matter, there is no reason to think that hominids lost their fur instantaneously.

And hey, if the theme of the article is that human evolution has lots of extinct branches, then why doesn't that apply to louse evolution? We just saw last week how complex the louse phylogeny has been in hominoids. Who says that the current body louse was the first to fill that niche?

Oh, savanna, don't you cry for me!

Here's a short one:

The apes that stayed in the forests hardly changed; they are the ancestors of today's chimps. Those that ventured into the newly formed habitat of dry grasslands [correct phrase: open woodlands] had taken the first steps toward becoming human.

None of the earliest hominid sites are open savanna. All of them come from sites that preserve other woodland creatures.

By the way, my favorite quote in the whole thing comes here:

Instead, evolution played Mr. Potato Head, putting different combinations of features on ancient hominids then letting them vanish until a later species evolved them.

I just love that analogy! Forget "mosaic evolution". I'm calling it "Mr. Potato Head evolution" from now on.

My what small teeth you have

This part is a little confused:

And it helps explain why Lucy's kind were the way they were. Afarensis women and men stood three to five feet tall and weighed 60 to 100 pounds. They had small [correct: big] teeth good for fruits and nuts, but not meat. (The available prey was [correct: competing predators were] enough to make one a confirmed vegetarian: hyenas the size of bears, saber-toothed cats and other mega-reptiles and raptors.) That suggests that early humans were more often prey than predators, says anthropologist Robert Sussman of Washington University, coauthor of the 2005 book "Man the Hunted." The evidence is as stark as the many [correct: two] fossil skulls containing holes made by big cats and [correct: one containing] talon marks from raptors.

Well, that's taphonomy for you. There is plenty of evidence for predation on ancient hominid bones, and a National Geographic News article from 2002 details work showing the contribution of felids. But only two skulls have holes that may have come from ancient cats (those would be SK 54 from Swartkrans and D2280 from Dmanisi). Only Taung has evidence of raptor damage.

Splitting straws on habiline brains

Dmanisi has left people pretty confused about what explains hominid dispersal from Africa. Some are groping for other hypotheses. Just check out this paragraph:

Erectus shows that brain size is too crude a measure of a species' talents. At Dmanisi, the brains range from 600 to 770 cubic centimeters, comparable to the more primitive habilis. But while erectus did not distinguish themselves in brain size, brain structure is more telling [correct: nor does its brain structure provide any clues]. They were [correct: They were not] the first of our ancestors to have an asymmetric brain, as modern humans do; Australopithecus species do not [correct: did]. Asymmetry is a mark of increasing specialization and therefore complex cognitive ability [correct: of questionable value, since apes and australopithecines have asymmetries to varying extents]. Erectus used it to, among other things, discover and tame fire [add: apparently much later]. What they did not use it for is technology. Tools found with the Dmanisi fossils include cutting flakes, rock "cores" from which flakes were made and a chopper, all primitive even for their time [correct: like those made in Africa]. "The old idea that you needed a master's degree in stone tools to leave Africa is crazy," says Bernard Wood.

Wow, how confusing. The Dmanisi crania had H. habilis-sized brains. They're like KNM-ER 1470. So brain size isn't the key characteristic that allowed hominids to disperse from Africa. Nor is body size, since the Dmanisi hominids were relatively small. That's a genuinely interesting problem.

But asymmetry doesn't solve it. KNM-ER 1470, either Homo habilis or Homo rudolfensis depending on your taste in hominids, has a well-defined Broca's area on the left hemisphere, which I would say is the main informative aspect of asymmetry in fossil endocasts. Chimpanzee brains are asymmetrical in some respects, so "asymmetry" itself is an irrelevant criterion without some specific anatomical feature in mind. The thing that people used to think might be important was petalial asymmetry -- one hemisphere of the cortex shifted forward compared to the other. Early Homo endocranial surfaces show fairly strong petalial asymmetries, including KNM-ER 2598 and KNM-WT 15000. But some Australopithecus endocasts share a similar pattern of asymmetry with later hominids (Holloway and De La Costelareymondie 1982). We don't know how to interpret petalial asymmetry in functional terms, by the way. There appears to be some correlation with handedness, but it's not clear that hand preferences and petalial asymmetries evolved at the same time or for the same reason.

Somebody could write a really interesting story just out of the material in this one paragraph. Just not this story!

Out of Africa

The bottleneck scenario always seems like a hard one for journalists to get right. This article is no better than usual:

Peter Underhill, a molecular anthropologist at Stanford University, tracked 160 such changes in the Y's of 1,062 men from 21 populations across the world. Applying the molecular-clock technique, he concludes that the most recent common ancestor of all men [correct: all Y chromosomes] alive today lived 89,000 years ago in Africa. The first modern humans-and therefore, unlike the earlier wave of Homo erectus into Asia a million years ago, the ancestors of everyone today-departed Africa about 66,000 years ago.

These pilgrims were strikingly few. From the amount of variation in Y chromosomes today, population geneticists infer how many individuals were in this "founder" population. The best estimate: 2,000 men. Assuming an equal number of women, only 4,000 brave souls ventured forth from Africa [correct: were isolated from other humans for thousands of years inside Africa]. We are their descendants.

Hard to get straight: genetic drift takes a long time to fix a gene. We don't necessarily know the number of founders of the out-of-Africa population; what we do know is how many individuals the ancient African population must have had under the hypothesis of genetic drift.

Other genes might well have more recent common ancestors, who would also have been more recent common ancestors of all men. This is especially true if any genes were under selection.

People who see my meetings talk will appreciate the irony of that last sentence...

References:

Holloway RL, De La Costelareymondie MC. 1982. Brain endocast asymmetry in pongids and hominids: some preliminary findings on the paleontology of cerebral dominance. Am J Phys Anthropol 58:101-110. doi:10.1002/ajpa.1330580111

This news story in the Sydney Morning Herald describes it, and has a secret-nighttime-flash picture.

"We have consulted several Bornean wildlife experts. Some thought it looked like a lemur, but most were convinced it was a new species of carnivore," [WWF biologist Stephen] Wulffraat told a news conference.

I liked this line:

"We're 90 per cent sure that this was a new species of carnivore," he said, adding that a live specimen is needed to be 100 per cent certain.

Well, a live animal would sure make up your mind! On these standards, I suppose finding a new fossil shouldn't make paleoanthropologists more than 20 percent certain of finding new species!

Der Spiegel is running an interview with Richard Leakey, noted paleoanthropologist and conservationist. The interview covers the Kenya elephant population, the circumstances of early hominid evolution, and dangers to the fossil record.

On the danger of cattle trampling fossils:

Leakey: ... But you are right, the situation is very grave indeed. Koobi Fora, the region you are referring to, is not only a National Park, it was also declared a World Heritage Site back in the early 1970s by Unesco. In spite of this, more and more livestock herders have muscled their way into the Sibiloi National Park with their huge herds of beef cattle. This is where our major excavations are situated. Immeasurable treasures are thus being lost.

On transferring fossils out of Kenya (and Ethiopia) for exhibition:

SPIEGEL: There are currently plans to ship what is perhaps the most well-known and most well-preserved hominid skeleton, the "Turkana Boy" from Kenya and "Lucy," an Australopithecus skeleton from Ethiopia, to museums in the United States and Germany.

Leakey: I consider these plans totally wrong and irresponsible and will do everything in my power to prevent them from happening. I will fight against them. The risk that something could happen to the fossils is too great. They should stay in the countries where they came from. They are extremely fragile. These plans are only about money. In the end, the loser will be science.

SPIEGEL: If Lucy were to spend six years in a glass case in an American museum, thousands of Americans -- rather than just a few researchers -- would be able to see her and marvel at an original hominid...

Leakey: ... which they couldn't differentiate from a copy. Throughout all of those years, any sort of important scientific work would be impossible. Researchers travel here from across the world to work on the find. Scientific innovations continually provide us with new means of analyzing the finds. Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task.

All I can say is, don't ship them to the National Geographic Explorer's Hall -- when I was there, their display of the cast versions made (the very short) Lucy and the (fairly tall) Turkana Boy look the same height. How? The boy's tibiae were sticking through a hole cut in the floor of the display case!

Anyway, a good interview that covers the basics well and updates on Leakey's current work.

From HollywoodReporter.com:

Having already made the transition from indie hipster in "Swingers," which he wrote, co-produced and starred in, to family entertainer with "Elf," which he directed, Jon Favreau is next sequeing [sic] into toonland.

Sony Pictures Animation said Monday that Favreau will write and produce the CG-animated feature "Neanderthals," based on his original story. Further details about the plot line, the company said, "are being kept in a cave under a large boulder protected by a mastodon."

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I really like Jon Favreau. On the other, well...

I guess it has to be better than Spielberg's "Neanderthal" would have been.

The AP reports on the Texas Bigfoot Conference:

JEFFERSON, Texas - Next to a lifelike replica of a giant ape head, the believers milled around tables Saturday covered with casts of large footprints, books about nature's mysteries and T-shirts proclaiming "Bigfoot: Often Imitated, Never Invalidated."

While they can have a sense of humor about it, the search for the legendary Sasquatch is no joke for many of the nearly 400 people who came here to discuss the latest sightings and tracking techniques at the Texas Bigfoot Conference.

Me: "Who do you think is worse, the Bigfoot people or the ID people?"

Gretchen: "The Bigfoot people just have a dream. The ID people are smarmy."

I am seeing news reports this morning about this week's upcoming paper in Nature about the Homo floresiensis bones.

The paper is supposed to be under embargo until tomorrow afternoon; Nature is reporting on it early under its pay-per-news site; Reuters has a short article, and New Scientist has a longer one (Google says subscription-only, but once again I got it without a subscription).

Here's my favorite quote from Reuters:

The newly found remains, dug up in 2004, consist of a jaw, as well as arm and other bones which the researchers believe were from at least nine individuals.

That's right, we're going back ... TO THE FUTURE! Here it's not even so bad -- I mean, these bones were found just last year. Just wait until they have to report on future past discoveries.

I'm keeping the embargo, so you can expect to see my review of the papers tomorrow afternoon. Yes, that's right -- this humble blog is keeping its word while MSM giants break theirs. Anyway, come back tomorrow for the real story.

In the meantime, enjoy this quote from New Scientist:

And in the light of the new finds, Morwood's team is itself moving away from the dwarfing theory. The hobbits have disproportionately long arms relative to their legs, and so cannot be scaled-down versions either of modern humans or Homo erectus, who have had the same body proportions for 1.6 million years.

Ancestral line

They say that a more likely ancestral line goes back to australopithecine species such as 3-million-year-old "Lucy", found in Ethiopia (Australopithecus afarensis).

"The combination of skeletal attributes that [the hobbits] share is not found in any modern human," says team member Peter Brown. "The bones of the hands and feet don't look like those of arboreal apes, but like everything else to do with Homo floresiensis, they are not like humans either."

I'm certainly enjoying it.

Speaking of Phillip Tobias, The Sunday Independent is carrying a long interview of Tobias discussing his autobiography. Google says the site is subscription-only, but I got it without a problem, and I'm no subscriber.

At 80, Tobias is the dean of South African paleoanthropologists. He oversaw excavations in South Africa for many years, had a huge research output, named Homo habilis and worked closely with many other leaders in the field. The article touches on the beginnings of his career:

His brilliant career was ridden with personal conflict. Some colleagues left the country because they found apartheid untenable. He declined several invitations to take up chairs at universities overseas. He opted for Wits and assumed his position in the chair of anatomy in January 1959, the year in which apartheid legislation in education was passed in parliament - "a dark time".

To leave the university and the country would be intellectual suicide, he wrote in his journal. And in our interview he remarks: "And how close that would have been to physical suicide."

And so he stayed the course and fought against apartheid from within.

And on the "ultimate messages" of it all:

I try to get past the bigger questions Tobias poses in his memoir, for instance: do we owe our success as bipeds to anatomical adjustments of our skeleton, or to a more exquisitely developed proprioceptive system?

He has written about his continuing search for Sterkfontein's "ultimate messages" and the need for synthesis: between ancient and modern peoples; genetics and evolution; long-term and short-term development; brain, mind and behaviour.

I call on the professor to make his personal story more, well, human. In this way we move past some of the contradictions of his nature, modesty coupled with insistent probing, public with private - only to discover further, great contradictions.

The article says that next week The Independent will run an excerpt of the memoir, Into the Past.

Several articles in the South African press have covered the opening of the new visitors' center at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site. The one with the most detail is in the Mining Weekly.

The neatest part is the dedication of the center to Phillip Tobias:

The centre was named after Professor Phillip Tobias, who has worked at the caves for about 60 years conducting scientific research on fossils.

...

Professor Tobias, who celebrated his 80th birthday on Friday, told BuaNews that there were times when years passed without any fossils being discovered.

"We just kept optimism and faith," he reminisced. "But there were also times when fossils came pouring like an avalanche." Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa said more than R160-million had been invested in the Sterkfontein area through tourism, among others.

The Guardian is running a great editorial about why (and how) science reporting is bad:

OK, here's something weird. Every week in Bad Science we either victimise some barking pseudoscientific quack, or a big science story in a national newspaper. Now, tell me, why are these two groups even being mentioned in the same breath? Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? Like a proper little Darwin, I've been collecting specimens, making careful observations, and now I'm ready to present my theory.

It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science. This week we take the gloves off and do some serious typing.

Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories.

They have some apt examples from non-paleoanthropology sciences, but it is easy to think of examples of each kind in paleoanthropology as well:

• Wacky story: Metrosexual Neandertals, anyone? Generally, most stories about Neandertals fit in this category. People just love hearing the name. That's one reason the "Neandertal tuba" made such headway -- people are just used to hearing weird things about them. Unless it's the "first ever" something (like the "first ever" evidence Neandertals and modern humans overlapped), in which case it is usually billed as a "breakthrough".
• Scare story: These are actually more rare in paleoanthropology -- it's hard to really be afraid that Neandertals are going to come get you. But I think all those "Pleistocene bottleneck" stories really fall into this category: humans were endangered in the past, and we could be endangered again if climate catastrophe X happens, whether it is another Toba supervolcano, another ice age, global warming, megavirus, or whatever. Lots of guilt stories in this vein also, like "we killed all the mammoths, and now we're killing the elephants." Pretty much any paleoanthropology that works by analogy to the present is filling the role of a scare story.
• Breakthrough story: How many times have you heard it: "This discovery challenges all previous theories..."? Pretty much every new discovery fits in this category. Especially if it reveals how human evolution was a bush and not a ladder. Or if someone calls it "the last nail in the coffin" of something. That's never a good sign of honesty.

In the editorial's opinion, the main problem with science reporting is that it is too dumbed down:

Why? Because papers think you won't understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word "biophoton" on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

The editorial also discusses the problems of questionable authority figures, poor statistical understanding, and insufficient information. But the bottom line is one with which I whole-heartedly agree:

For many months I had a good spirited row with an eminent science journalist, who kept telling me that scientists needed to face up to the fact that they had to get better at communicating to a lay audience. She is a humanities graduate. "Since you describe yourself as a science communicator," I would invariably say, to the sound of derisory laughter: "isn't that your job?" But no, for there is a popular and grand idea about, that scientific ignorance is a useful tool: if even they can understand it, they think to themselves, the reader will. What kind of a communicator does that make you?

Write more. Write better.

This month's Discover came in the mail today. In celebration of their 25th anniversary, their issue is devoted to "Frontiers of Science", with articles covering the (speculated) cutting edge in different fields. One spread is dedicated to "Human Origins", with a short piece by Carl Zimmer, an interview of Tim White, and a graphic.

Zimmer's article, "Digital ancestors walk again" covers the increasing use of CT imaging and reconstruction of hominid fossils. The subtext is that anything high tech must be better -- for example, the article labors under the misimpression that we cannot study endocranial contours without cutting a skull open.

Also, a read of the article gives the impression that every finding from this new advanced technology supports splitting hominids into several species (in particular, it mentions the Liang Bua endocast reconstruction and the virtual Neandertal growth series assembled by Ponce de Leon and colleagues). Probably this trend will continue as long as few people work with scans except the people who do them.

Here's the conclusion:

As the use of CT scans expands, paleoanthropologists are developing new avenues for uncovering clues to our past. They are discovering signs of healed wounds, of toothless old hominids who must have been cared for by others. Some researchers are even producing full-length virtual skeletons to which they can attach virtual muscles and make the ancient hominids walk again. Most significantly, CT scans can liberate hominid fossils from museum drawers. Once a research team makes a scan, they can post the data on a Web site for other researchers to analyze, bringing a precious hominid fossil to new sets of eyes and new sets of questions.

So utopian....

But Tim White has a different view of the kind of technology changing the field:

What technology advances are changing the way you study evolution?

W: The global positioning satellite system. WIth GPS, we no longer have to worry about the position of a fossil. Some of the biggest blunders in the history of paleoanthropology were made by people who lost the place where a fossil came from. There's no excuse for that anymore. The other big advance is in geochemical dating....

No CT scans there.

Personally, I think CT will have a limited set of impacts. The best thing is that it will allow any lab in the world to have as full a set of comparative data as have been released. Currently, it's useless for that purpose; there's just not enough access. But that is changing, and CT scans are as useful to a practiced eye as casts -- which are much less available today even as CT increases. In fact, high-resolution CT may essentially end casting of new fossils, since that is one of the major sources of damage. We'll be doing a lot of comparative work with imaging in the future.

On the other hand, I think CT will have a really limited impact on the study of new fossils. For one thing, those of us who are used to studying fossils are trained to deal with fragments. People do reconstruct fossils, but reconstruction is not essential to studying most morphology. Another thing we are trained to deal with is distortion. Especially plastic deformation can affect the very shape of the fossils we work with. We correct for it by examining which morphology is affected or unaffected, and by making conservative estimates. CT imaging is too tempting in this scenario -- it encourages people to think they have corrected problems, when instead it is merely adding geometric assumptions.

CT imaging and reconstruction is often proposed as a way to deal with distortion and fragmentation: Zimmer mentions the "sophisticated mathematical software to find the best way to assemble" reconstructions. But these can end up just as biased as any handmade reconstruction, even when the distortions are fairly apparent. There has been substantial disagreement about the CT reconstruction of Stw 505; we may find that the reconstruction of the Sahelanthropus skull faces similar problems.

There are three main benefits of CT reconstruction: it allows repeated trial and error assembly without actually grinding bone contacts against each other, it allows mirror-image substitution for missing parts, and it allows a skull to be geometrically fit to a model. The repeated trials are very valuable: they give an experienced anatomist a chance to try slightly different configurations to sense the range of variation resulting from the state of preservation. The mirror-image reconstruction is valuable for visualization, but potentially misleading for scientific comparison -- try taking a flat mirror and reflecting half your face: notice how hard it is to align the mirror properly and how odd it makes you look and you'll have an impression of the problem. The widespread use of geometric fitting is a potential disaster: by encouraging the use of a model, it reduces the range of biological variability expressed in fossils. When these mathematically-fitted reconstructions are then fed into mathematical comparisons, the structure of the data will be biased by the reconstruction technique in ways that may not be visually apparent.

Anyway, despite all the math, the computer is only as good as the scientist running it -- the principle of "garbage in, garbage out" is everlasting.

AFP is reporting possible progress in the hunt for the missing Zhoukoudian bones (via Palanthsci):

Several interesting clues have come to light in recent months, according to members of a recently established committee charged with looking for the Peking Man's bones and other missing relics, the China Daily reported.

If the clues lead anywhere, it could potentially mark a breakthrough in a search that has lasted since the early 1940s.

Five skull fragments belonging to Peking Man were lost under mysterious circumstances during World War II and have never been recovered.

Just in the last two months, the committee has received 63 tip-offs on the whereabouts of the elusive relics, said Liu Yajun, deputy head of the commission.

People's Daily Online has a more detailed account:

FOUR KEY CLUES AMONG 63 PIECES OF INFORMATION

The committee has received 63 pieces of information from areas like Beijing, Jilin Province, Fujian Province and Taiwan Province in the past two months. Experts with the committee screened the information and found four might be important:

A citizen surnamed Wu in Beijing claimed a professor surnamed Gu in Gansu Province once was invited to write autobiography for Jia Lanpo, one of the finders of the Peking Man skulls and also a guru on Peking Man studies. Gu once "recorded an American major's testimony at the Far East Military Court when researching at a Japanese archive, and the testimony mentioned the skulls."

A citizen surnamed Ren in Beijing claimed he knew one person whose father was a doctor in Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where the skulls were kept, and the doctor "took one skull home and the skull now is buried in a house."

A citizen surnamed Liu said he could help contact a wartime revolutionist who "has a Peking Man scull [sic] at hand."

A citizen surnamed Wu from Jiangxi Province said a 121-year-old man in Jiangxi once served as a high-ranking official under Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the forerunner of China's democratic revolution. The old man claimed that "the skulls are still in China" and he knows the whereabouts.

This quote seems like the significant one behind the committee's motivations:

"Mankind can give up many things, but there is one thing that we can never abandon -- that is our ancestors," said Gao Xing, an expert of ancient vertebrates, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

I think it's pretty safe to say that the bones don't have any hidden power to open a fifth dimension or anything. Not exactly the stuff of a Lara Croft movie.

Then again...CourtTV of all places has a long account of the Zhoukoudian discoveries, including the loss of the fossils. That article, by Rachael Bell covers some of the theories (in the crackpot notions sense, not the well-supported scientific ideas sense).

Anyway, don't hold your breath.

The story of the new Dmanisi skull hit the American news today. Nothing new compared to my post of two weeks ago, based on reports in the Georgian press.

I guess the AP held the press release until a slow news cycle. Which may have been justified -- no new details, no pictures, no news, right? But it seems to me that there are a few really active science reporters that write stories with background, and beyond that there is a lot of science-reporting-by-press-release.

So I guess in this little corner of science, you'll continue to get the story -- with background -- here before anywhere else.

The current "Carnival of the Future" is featuring this post from a few days ago, as a lead-off to the topic of future evolution in humans. Check it out for a rundown of different thoughts on the issue and recent news related to the human prospect.

On the Scientific American website, there is a long article by Michael Shermer (editor of Skeptic magazine), describing his trip to the World Summit of Evolution, held in the Galapagos Islands this month. Some of the attendees:

It was a veritable Who's Who of evolutionary theory, including William Calvin, Daniel Dennett, Niles Eldredge, Douglas Futuyma, Peter and Rosemary Grant, Antonio Lazcano, Lynn Margulis, William Provine, William Schopf, Frank Sulloway, Timothy White and others.

Shermer provides a rundown of many of the scientific presentations, and it is an interesting read. The paleoanthropology representative was Tim White, and Shermer gives him almost a whole page:

One of the best talks of the conference was delivered by the U.C. Berkeley paleoanthropologist Timothy White, in which he opened with a prediction made by Stephen Jay Gould in the late 1980s: "We know about three coexisting branches of the human bush. I will be surprised if twice as many more are not discovered before the end of the century." A glance at the extant fossil record looks like Gould was right. There are at least two dozen fossil species in six million years of hominid evolution. But the bush is not so bushy, says White. The problem lies in the difference between "lumpers" and "splitters" in species classification, and the social pressures to publish extraordinary new discoveries. If you want to get your fossil find published in Science or Nature, and you want the cover illustration, you cannot conclude that your fossil is yet another Australopithicus africanus [sic], for example. You better come up with an interpretation indicating that this new find you are revealing for the first time to the world is the most spectacular discovery of the last century and that it promises to overturn hominid phylogeny and send everyone back to the drawing board to reconfigure the human evolutionary tree. Training a more skeptical eye on many of these fossils, however, shows that many, if not most of these fossils belong in already well-established categories. White says that the specimen labeled Kenyanthropus platyops, for example, is very fragmented and is most likely just another Australopithicus africanus [sic]. "Name diversity does not equal biological diversity," White elucidated.

If I had a quote list, I'd add that one to it: "Name diversity does not equal biological diversity." On the other hand, White has himself had the cover of Nature once or twice....

And then there is this:

White then concluded his talk with a fascinating discussion of the recent discovery of fossil dwarf humans on Flores Island in the Malay Archipelago, located on the outside of Wallace's Line, meaning that even during the last ice age they could only have gotten there by boat. (White did note, however, that after last December's tsunami people were rescued from large floating rafts of natural debris, so it is possible that the founding population of Flores rafted there by accident and not design.) ... A second published specimen put to rest the pathology hypothesis that Homo floresensis was a microcephalic human. The best evidence, says White, points to insular dwarfing, a rapid punctuation event out of Homo sapiens that led to a shrinkage of these isolated people. Such dwarfing effects can be seen on this and other islands, where large mammals get smaller (like the dwarf elephant), and small reptiles get larger (like the Komodo Dragon). The chances of any living members of this species still existing in the hinterlands of Flores are extremely remote, but some observers have noted that the indigenous peoples of Flores recount a myth of small hairy humans who descend from the highlands to steal food and supplies.

You can read what I have to say about Homo floresiensis here. I'm telling you, the more this story gets repeated, the worse it's going to turn out.

Most of the meeting was relatively big-name evolutionary biologists of one kind or another. In the end, it sounds to me like the many of the invitees wanted to trash Darwinism to promote their own idiosyncratic theories. To some extent, Shermer displays his best skeptical take on these, although he describes one as "beyond [his] pay scale." A lot of famous scientists have problems with standard neo-Darwinism, and it seems that many were invited to this meeting, with very few representatives of the more standard point of view. So Shermer's article includes many "proclaiming the death of Darwin" stories. Interesting in this context that there appear to have been no evo-devo people at the conference, since this is probably the most important of the extensions to evolutionary theory, and one that resonates with pre-Darwinian biology to a much greater extent than ideas like Margulis' pansymbiosis or multilevel selection theory.

Read the article and see if you agree with Shermer that evolutionary biology is in a healthy state. My take is that a show of real health would have included a slightly different list of biologists.

If you haven't seen it before, the Tangled Bank is a science carnival -- a compilation of weblog posts on science and medicine from some of the best online authors.

It rotates every issue to a different host, and the current issue is a good one. It has one of my posts and many others that I am working through myself. Go check it out and see the range of science writing on the web!