tv

I got to sit down and watch most of the first episode of "The Human Spark" on PBS tonight (my earlier post). Our local station shows these things later than the national release dates, and I missed out on the first ten minutes or so as I was putting the kids to bed. The host is Alan Alda, and here are my live-blogging thoughts after I sat down to watch:

8:16: Svante Pääbo interview. Alda watches Adrian Briggs drilling into ancient bones. Explains the problems with contamination.

"But that small difference between us could be crucial, couldn't it?"

8:18: Now, on to protein extraction from Neandertal bones to do isotopic analysis. Alda sits down in the cafeteria with Michael Richards, explaining the high proportion of animal protein in the Neandertal diet.

8:19: On to Grenoble. Nice shot from an Alp. The European synchotron. Tanya Smith is here beaming X-rays into them to get micro-CT data from inside the teeth. The skull here is from Roc de Marsal.

Some interesting animations of human versus chimpanzee cranial growth. Human brains develop slowly, etc.

"Neandertal children ... seem to have grown up more quickly..."

We're in the archaeological site of Roc de Marsal, with Harold Dibble and Shannon McPherron. How many Neandertals were there at any one time. They banter about 20,000, decide that's too many.

8:23: Dan Lieberman is showing Alda the original Skhul 5 skull. We've got a graphic of modern humans evolving in Africa, like little campfires from a night view of the Earth. And then they spread out to light little campfires in Europe. It's like the George Bush version of human evolution -- "a thousand points of light!"

Close shots of archaeological levels with Randall White.

8:27: "Even if Grandma kept her teeth in a glass..." Pierced human molars, being worn as ornaments. They go through the little museum near the site. "Microscopic analysis that we've been doing shows that they were sewn on, like to articles of clothing." This is a nice conversation they're having.

It's a little unfortunate that the film pushes the "no Neandertal ornaments" angle, particularly since this week's paper with the pierced shells.

"Here's what I don't get: The Neandertals survived, but didn't change. They came from the same people that we came from, and at some point we started changing; we became able to change.... Having come from the same background, why were we able to change and they weren't?"

White's answer -- Neandertals have a generalized technological approach; modern humans invent new technologies to address every problem that comes along. You can't separate society from technology (as a response to a followup about social organization). Population numbers may have limited lines of communication among Neandertals. With moderns, "once somebody invents something, everybody knows about it."

8:35: John Shea is teaching undergraduates how to knap. Explaining the value of projectile technology. Ooooh -- time to hit a deer decoy with an atlatl dart. "A hunter who's using this kind of thing would have to work with a group...it takes planning, cooperation...I can't imagine this functioning without the prior existence of language."

I find myself thinking wondering why this wouldn't have been true of Neandertals hunting the same animals? And didn't we hear a little while ago that it was the small animals and fish that set modern humans apart? There is a problem with the presentation here -- these seem contradictory.

8:40: Now, we're in Nairobi with Veronica Waweru. Looking at arrows with reusable shafts. Alda is narrating -- did modern humans start using poison?

8:43: Olorgesailie. Alison Brooks and (an unnamed) Rick Potts are there. Brooks has points that are 150,000 years old that may be arrow points (although the one they handle on camera is bigger than Shea's atlatl point...). Three different excavations, each representing a different age. Another small point "has just been unearthed". This one looks a likelier arrow point than the other. Then, 320,000 years old, they have left a bunch of small stone flakes on pedestals for the film crew. The stone raw material is taken from at least 45 to 50 km distance. Alda: "These people were choosy about their materials...quite unlike the Neandertals."

This is unfortunate, too -- there are some clear instances of Neandertals transporting raw materials over 250 km.

Now they're looking at a possible anthropogenic accumulation of pigment minerals. Brooks stresses human "inventiveness" as a cause of the success of modern humans.

8:50: Back to Ian Tattersall. I didn't see his earlier appearance. "When did people who would fit into human society now first appear?" Tattersall puts it down to 50,000 years ago or so. He suggests that the biological ability to behave in modern society might date back to 150,000 years ago, but lay latent until culture developed much later to bring out the modernity.

Whoa -- the points of light again. People are swarming like tiny sparking ants, and all the yellowish Neandertal fires are going out.

Not a bad program. Alda was a great host for this. You can tell he's genuinely interested in this stuff, and he really put the scientists at ease in the interviews. It's great that they got usable material again and again just having him talking with the archaeologists. And having one host actually travel to these field sites was great -- much better than the usual disembodied narration.

I was really liking it until around halfway through, but as the film went on, it started to raise contradictions that bothered me. Very one-sided about Neandertal behavior, too simplistic.

I don't think the interviewees were the problem here, I think in particular Shea and White were making fairly nuanced statements about Neandertals. I can guess that if either had given any black-and-white quotes, the editors would have included them. My impression was that the choice of topics dictated the result -- ornaments, pigment, and projectiles were chosen to emphasize the "behavioral modernity".

Where I think that approach fails in in the specifics. Projectiles may have been technically more difficult than large-point weapons, but they should have been socially easier. Does it take less cooperation to bring down large animals with close-contact weapons? I think it's the opposite -- I think Neandertals must have been under more pressure to cooperate in their hunts. The transport across long distances is important in MSA contexts, but it's also present in Mousterian France. Neandertals didn't spend hours and hours making beads, but they did wear ornaments and use pigments. If there's a distinction, it's the frequency of these behaviors -- which is a lot harder to measure or estimate.

It's too bad in a way -- it really wasn't necessary to talk about the "human spark" as a human versus Neandertal comparison. This didn't have to be a "modern human origins" program. The DNA segment was interesting, but it didn't really contribute anything to the show's theme -- the narration concluded the segment by saying that the genes don't tell us about the "spark" yet.

I'd have emphasized some older stuff, which is new science that actually does tell us about the emergence of humanness. The Brooks segment would fit into that theme, with the much earlier material from Olorgesailie (and this week we have 500,000-year-old blades from the Kapthurin Formation...). I'd have emphasized the new stuff from Atapuerca, especially the evidence about language. An earlier focus would bring a little more credible use of genetics, either FOXP2 (which I really don't need to see again...) or some human-accelerated genes.

It's curious to compare this program with the NOVA series last fall. The themes were very different (NOVA emphasized climate, this one technology). There was very little overlap of scientist lists -- although it never hurts to be based in New York. I think the programs go well with each other, but it sort of forces the casual viewer to notice that the same evidence can be read almost at cross-purposes, depending on what the scientist assumes is fundamental.

OK, I'm going to live-blog this show. I've been looking forward to it for a while -- I loved the old NOVA series with Don Johanson and have often showed it in classes but I had to stop several years ago because it's getting out of date. These are great overview-type programs, unlike the more special-purpose one-topic shows.

The producers gave me the opportunity to review the program's script a few months ago (that's explains the acknowledgement at the end), so I'm not expecting any unpleasant surprises.

The pre-credits opening: Naked people smiling. Naked chimps grooming...

7:01: "What set us on the path to humanity? The questions are huge, but at last, there are answers..."

"For millions of years, many human-like species coexisted on our planet, until one day, there was only us."

7:03: "Apes that had walked on four legs stood up and walked on two." We see apish CGI hominins. Then, to the Sahara to see Toumaï. Michel Brunet is describing the skull.

"We, Homo sapiens, are the first ever to be alone."

7:06: To the Afar, explaining the Rift Valley and its erosive contexts. The Insta-Zoom effect across the desert is actually kind of cool. We see Zeresenay Alemseged driving an SUV, then walking in badlands with scattered bones. Nice photographs of the Dikika skull in context.

7:09: Zooming backward into a timeline, as if the years are sucking us back, the program explains the timespan of human evolution as a series of doublings backward in time.

7:10: Alemseged is in the National Museum of Ethiopia, preparing the skull. It's a nice video treatment, shoing the slow preparing with dental drill. The long shots of the postcranial elements are very illustrative -- this is a good demonstration of how the anatomy informs us about the developmental schedule and lifeways.

7:13: Don Johanson is explaining how he found AL 129-1. Then, he explains the difference between the chimpanzee and human pelvis. Too bad they couldn't have included Ardipithecus; it would be interesting.... I'm really liking the fact that you have people interacting with actual casts instead of lots of CGI images. You have a much better impression of the scale

7:15: Now the scene moves to Kenya, this is going to be about paleoenvironments. Yannic Garcin and Daniel Melnick are describing how the now-desert landscape was once much wetter. We go back to the Afar, with Alemseged explaining the fauna that's just eroding up out of the ground (wonder how set up that scene was...).

7:18: Bipedalism. It's like Saturday Night Fevur. Brian Richmond appears to explain theories about why bipedality was adaptive. This is all accompanied by contemporary dancers wiggling around. Chimpanzee-like ancestors are illustrated with video of actual chimpanzees (wonder what Lovejoy is thinking...). Dan Lieberman is talking about energy budgets. People and chimps on treadmills hooked up to oxygen meters.

7:22: Mark Stoneking explains the molecular clock. "The dates that one almost always gets are 5 to 7 million years ago for when humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor."

7:24: We go to Chad. Brunet explaining why they needed to recover fossils from somewhere other than East Africa. "Everyone said 'no', there just aren't any [human-like] fossils there."

7:26: "There were no bones apart from the skull..." Er...

7:27: The skull is reconstructed with a CT scanner and then cast. Oops...the rest of the shots of casts are all taken directly from the skull, not the 3-d scan version. Nice artist's rendering of Toumaï here.

7:30: I'd hate to be one of the dancers walking by on the screen with the voiceover, "Walking upright didn't mean that they had big brains."

7:33: Brain growth in Selam. Hints of a longer childhood -- of course, at 330 cc, it's almost the size of a full-grown chimpanzee. Todd Preuss is discussing the evolution of the brain, showing us actual pickled brains of human and chimpanzees. Lunate sulcus -- was Selam like a human or a chimpanzee?

7:35: Ralph Holloway is describing the brain reorganization -- great shot of him with his collection of endocasts. The conclusion is that the lunate sulcus was human-like.

7:37: Now we have stone tools appearing, Brian Richmond explains how we recognize tools. Unlikely they were made by Australopithecus, because they didn't make them earlier. Skip forward to KNM-ER 1470, "the dawn of a new era, beginning around 2 million years ago." Tools were used for meat processing. Homo habilis was small in body size, but had a much bigger brain than Australopithecus.

7:41: Viktor Deak is reconstructing Homo habilis. I like it, more apish than the usual rendering.

7:43: "Africa's gradual drying trend was punctuated by bursts of rapid climate fluctuation." We see Rick Potts explaining the stratigraphy of a lake alternating with desert and volcanic layers over time. The idea of "variability selection" is explained.

7:45: Analyzing diatoms in layers of rock -- the species tell the alternation of shallow and deep lake levels. It's a record of strong fluctuations. We see rapid clips of three different scientists (Potts, John Kingston, and Mark Maslin) talking about water fluxes. It's a good way of explaining the climate instability -- although they could have gone a bit further: when they mention "Lake Victoria-sized lakes appearing and disappearing", for example, they might have pointed out that Lake Victoria itself has appeared recently.

7:48: Dust from ocean cores. Once again, it comes down to tiny sea creatures whose anatomy correlates with date.

7:50: We get a rapid montage reviewing the climate instability idea. Hmmm...I have to say that the very fast cutting of clips and louder music doesn't really add to the credibility of the idea -- it seems like something is being left out.

7:51: Rick Potts restates the variability selection argument. "Simple but revolutionary idea -- human evolution is nature's experiment with versatility...we are creatures of climate change."

That's the end. I think the paleoenvironment story was well done. The shots of how this science is done were very illustrative -- from the field to the lab, the program showed the fine layers of sediment and careful study of microscopic creatures.

On the other hand, the show may have gone a little too far in the "climate made everything happen" direction. I don't think the "variability selection" idea explains the origin of Homo, and while the program did briefly list alternative views about the adaptive value of bipedality, it left no doubt that African desiccation and loss of forest was the ultimate cause.

I think everything with actual fossils, dirt, or rocks was well done. In particular, we got a good view of most of the Selam skeleton, with the notable exception of the hyoid bone. These are the best available images of the specimen to date. Holloway's descriptions of endocast evolution were well done, placed in the middle of a big table of fossil casts. I like the solidity with which the program showed the fossil record. Hopefully the next two segments will also follow this technique -- much preferred over the CGI-reconstruction technique.

I will be out of the country for the next two parts of the trilogy, so I'll have to see if I can get them online. The NOVA Evolution website has the first episode online now, so there's some hope.

I haven't been able to see all of the "Discovering Ardi" show tonight, but we did get most of the second hour. I just thought I'd jot down some general comments about the production.

First thing -- human evolution show + Mike Rowe narration = awesome. Please, more Mike Rowe. Maybe they could get him to interview the scientists. Ewwww! The roundtable has Paula Zahn. What the heck is that? Why not "Ardipithecus: After the Catch"?

OK, I can't watch that tonight; I've got Mad Men. So back to "Discovering Ardi".

The first hour seems to have been mostly excavation and discovery -- we caught the tail end of that in the second hour, and it seems to have been really well done. The film clips from the Afar are great. It's not obvious how many of them are "dramatic recreations" -- I'd have to see the first hour to get a better picture of that. But to the extent that they've posed the scientists with bones on the ground, it's been well done.

For my taste, they could have included more about the fauna and the fossil plants. The trend in recent years has been to have the "Walking with Dinosaurs" type CGI reconstructions of ancient organisms. I think that producers have the idea that the moving pictures are giving some kind of life to the ancient creatures. A little bit of that isn't a bad thing, but if the entire focus of the show is the CGI, it leaves the impression that the ancient creatures are fictional. That's especially true when you have a "main character" like Ardipithecus. You put it into an ancient CGI environment, and have it interact with one or two other creatures, and walk through some trees, and they're just window dressing. But if you see the actual fossils of the fauna and the plants, I think it conveys the reality that these fossils are themselves the objects of real science, that understanding the ancient paleoenvironment means studying the evolution of all those creatures. Aramis gives such great material to work with, and the film did give show some of the interesting parts of the fauna, and some of the fossil seeds in this hour. But like I said, there could have been more.

Speaking of CGI, they staged a motion-capture session with a small stunt actress, supervised by Owen Lovejoy. The staging wasn't badly done, but we didn't really get the payoff. By the end of the show we had only seen a few short clips of Ardi walking. This definitely fell into the area of "uncanny valley" -- not realistic enough, dark background, kind of creepy-looking. To go from bright desert scenes of the paleontologists in the Middle Awash to this dark, gloomy prehistory was kind of depressing.

The CGI version of Ardi is rendered as a total obligate biped. The knees are fully extended during the stance phase of a stride, there is a toe-off when the leg gets to the most posterior point in the stride, and there is a fully human arm-swing pattern.

This was really the weird part for me. The papers describing Ardipithecus do not come to the conclusion that Ardi had anything like a human pattern of bipedality. Nor, I would add, do the data support that conclusion. Yet here, they spent most of the whole hour leading up to the conclusion that Ardi was an obligate biped -- complete with many supporting sound bites from Lovejoy and Tim White. The only thing detracting from the tidy picture in the film's depiction is that troublesome grasping toe. And even that can be waved away if the toe-off could be accomplished with the second toe.

When the Science flurry of papers came out, I was puzzled by the Matternes reconstruction. It shows a fully upright Ardi striding up a tree branch. Yet the papers emphasized again and again that the hindlimb anatomy of Ardipithecus was likely the primitive condition, present from the human-chimpanzee common ancestor.

Weirdly, the documentary doesn't seem to have much of the "it's not like a chimp" storyline. Only a short mention. But that was the "big story" when the Ardipithecus papers hit the street. Instead, the documentary pushes the "it was a unique biped" storyline.

I don't know any more than these two depictions seem to contradict each other. It seems to me that there was a change of emphasis, or maybe a full-on change of mind, sometime after the documentary's filming and before the release. Reviewers? Whatever is the case, I don't think the anatomy supports the film's representation of the locomotor behavior. The film shows Ardi walking just as if she were Lucy. She didn't walk that way.

I really liked the way the film showed Matternes' work. The process of dialogue that he conducted over the anatomy of the fossil and the reconstruction of missing pieces really showed both the scientific and artistic processes at their best. It is rare that we see this kind of detail in any program about fossil humans. Whether it's CGI hominins or people dressed up in Neandertal get-ups, the assumptions that go into those depictions are always hidden from the viewer. Here, the attention to the artist helps to make those assumptions explicit.

Maybe I'll get to see more later.

UPDATE (2009-10-12): A reader writes:

Discovering Ardi deals with "it's not like a chimp" in the first hour: When we found this skeleton, everyone expected it to look more like a chimp and we were all stunned to find that it does not. Timelines, compared pelves, etc. So someone who sees the program from the beginning hears "it was a unique biped" as reinforcing the notion that it was surprisingly different from apes.

They also speculate on how bipedality and small canine teeth may relate to the success of critters in our branch of the evolutionary shrub, as compared to the apes.

Ah, well then. We do hear about the pelvis. I'll try to catch a rebroadcast of that to see how they handle it.

UPDATE (2009-10-22): I wrote this post before the film premiered, but it's gotten a lot of Google traffic. My notes on watching the film might be more interesting. I haven't yet gotten to see the whole thing, but together with some correspondents, I think I've put together some useful notes.

ORIGINAL POST (2009-10-01):

OK, so if you thought Ardipithecus was going to be different from the Darwinius media fiasco... this one is for you:

A DISCOVERY CHANNEL EXCLUSIVE, WORLD PREMIERE SPECIAL
BRINGS YOU THE STORY OF THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT HUMAN EVOLUTION

DISCOVERING ARDI airs Sunday, October 11 at 9 PM (ET/PT)

Following publication in the journal Science on the discovery and study of a 4.4 million-year-old female partial skeleton nicknamed "Ardi," Discovery Channel will present a world premiere special, DISCOVERING ARDI, Sunday October 11 at 9 PM (ET/PT) documenting the sustained, intensive investigation leading up to this landmark publication of the Ardipithecus ramidus fossils.

...

"The novel anatomy that we describe in these papers fundamentally alters our understanding of human origins and early evolution," said project anatomist and evolutionary biologist, Professor C. Owen Lovejoy, Kent State University.

Project co-director and paleontologist Professor Tim White of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California Berkeley adds, "Ardipithecus is not a chimp. It's not a human. It's what we used to be."

Oh, my. Well it stands to reason that something this coordinated wasn't just science. I wonder whether anyone will ask the questions about the timing of Science's publication and the documentary release only a week later.

I have to tell you, I've been wondering about all the bogus-looking Darwin paraphrases these guys have been throwing out -- you know, the ones about how Darwin taught us about how chimpanzees changed from their common ancestors, and how fossil humans would tell us about the apes. I can't find anything like that in any of Darwin's publications -- please e-mail if it's there and I'm missing it.

But now I see where they're coming from. It's the tagline from the Discovery show!

DISCOVERING ARDI

DARWIN COULD ONLY DREAM OF FINDING THIS

Really? I'm soooooo tempted to make that the blog's tagline right now.... OOOH OOOH, better yet --

DARWIN COULD ONLY DREAM OF BEING THIS HANDSOME

I've been sent two videos this week by several readers. I post them here together -- I've never embedded video before, and after some experimentation I didn't get it to load very well on the blog, so I'm just including links. My including them in one post is not a comment on either video! Just that, well that's the media about human evolution this week.

1. The Daily Show does a bit where correspondent John Oliver interviews Jeff Schwartz and Todd Disotell about orangutan versus chimpanzees as our closest relatives.

This is really funny, lampooning both sides. There is some off-color commentary, language, and sexual references (for those readers who might care). And Oliver does make an unkind reference to Disotell's mohawk.

2. Elaine Morgan at the TED conference describing the Aquatic Ape Theory

The Daily Show is the top-rated news broadcast among viewers 18-34. TEDGlobal is a conference with "elite" speakers for which people pay $6000 to attend the program. Which this year included aquatic apes.

OK, so they have one thing in common, these two videos -- I won't be showing either in class!

Many of the free TED talks are very useful for showing in classes, by the way -- check out previous paleoanthropologists include Louise Leakey and Zeresenay Alemseged, also notable is Nina Jablonski on skin color.

I'm sitting down in front of the TV to live-blog the Nova episode on the Flores fossils, "Alien from Earth." It has the typical Nova high production values. We'll see what they show:

7:02: Opening montage has a little bit of everyone. Focuses on controversy. Has a great shot of a crowd of people in Liang Bua Cave.

7:03: "Flores is home to an ancient legend -- an elf-like creature with big feet and a voracious appetite...as mythical as leprechauns, elves, and hobbits...Were the storytellers of Flores inventing, or reporting?"

7:04: 1990's excavations on Flores turn up artifacts. Too old to be modern humans. Chris Stringer appears; describes himself as a skeptic to begin with. This is Morwood's entry: the tools are 700,000 years old; that begins his association with Flores. The program explains Wallace's line, talks about the Komodo dragon. Who made the mysterious stone tools?

7:06: Many shots of Liang Bua -- means "cold cave". Morwood interviewed in cave, many shots of the excavations, including people digging in very deep square pits. Roberts describes the problems with shoring up the sandy deposits.

7:08: Find a single bone, small. Another year yields little else other than a single tooth. Ultimately, they discover the LB 1 skeleton; the narration emphasizes how small the skeleton is -- there is no description here of the analytical process; no Peter Brown, etc. The "new species" status is being described as completely obvious from the point of excavation.

7:10: Now, Peter Brown. The lower jaw is "outside the range of modern human variation". The brain is tiny -- "smaller than a chimpanzee's." Brown "measured it and remeasured it" -- he was "flabbergasted."

7:11: Stringer: "If it is what it seems to be, it's an extremely primitive human-like form...living in a place where we never knew that humans had got to, altogether a challenging find."

7:12: Date of less than 30,000 years -- Roberts -- film goes to Chris Turney for radiocarbon dating. 18,000 years. I like the way the film is presenting the tremendous excitement of the new find -- everyone is describing their initial reactions upon getting the findings. Turney is probably the best at this.

7:14: Thumbnail version of human evolution, from australopithecus to us.

7:15: Ralph Holloway appears, playing his trumpet. Very, very cool. I mean, he's playing his trumpet in the middle of his lab, with skulls all around him. Man, I wish I were that cool!

7:16: Henry Gee. "Fossils....deal with it!"

7:17: "Just as the team were grappling with these details, the fossils were taken away." The narration describes Teuku Jacob -- "No one could refuse his request." Henry Gee -- "It's quite unethical...people should be given as much time as it takes" to analyze their fossils.

7:18: Stringer -- what is human? Bipedal? Tool using? Large brained? Now Maciej Henneberg enters: "Probably disease" -- Alan Thorne: "Pathology." Film goes to Paris -- a 3-foot dwarf who was a "court jester." Now, to St. Louis; Dean Falk and Hildebolt are studying CT scans of mircocephalics, Falk: "The CAT scans show that microcephalics and the hobbit are totally different." Cerebellum, frontal lobe differences. The film clearly illustrates them; this is a nice segment. They have shots of microcephalics. Falk is very convincing in this part; the graphics work well.

7:21: Bill Jungers -- "There are some bumps and bruises...there is nothing about the skeleton that suggests this was a sick hobbit."

7:22: James Phillips talks about the difficulties of tool manufacture. Could the hobbit make those tools? "A 400-cc brain, in my opinion, is not going to be able to produce a tradition with flake and blade technology."

7:23: Mark Moore and Jatmiko are in Indonesia, making experimental stone tools on a gravel bar. Good illustration of flake production. Notice that he's soft-selling the difficulty of this; he's using a leather pad to help him, he's collecting small flakes on a cloth, he's making the opposite case, really. Now, the film describes Moore's real point, which is that the Liang Bua tools are not very different from Oldowan tools in Africa.

7:24: Back to Falk. she's measuring brains; points to area 10 convolutions. Narration: the convolutions "expand a part of the brain vital for higher thinking and planning ahead." Now, the film is describing the elephant hunting. This is really going off the deep end here. But some scientists are "leery" of diagnosing a new species on the basis of one individual.

7:26: "DNA would settle whether the hobbit was a diseased human or a new species." Now goes to Shara Bailey, who's looking at the teeth. "It became very complicated." She's looking at LB 1 and LB 2 -- the premolars: "Teeth used for grasping." The premolars are the same, they were "strikingly similar." This is overselling. Bailey appears with Tim Bromage -- he points out that the tooth sizes are humanlike; "they have been shortened to accommodate the human-sized jaw...there is no pathology that shortens every element of the jaw..."

7:29: Tocheri playing the piano. His passion is music. This is starting to look like an advertisement for a career in jazz anthropology. The wrist bones, THE WRIST BONES. My goodness, the film is giving us hand skeletal nightmares. Much flashing like strobe lights. If this were a Japanese cartoon version, I'd be having seizures. Tocheri describes the hand anatomy, and there is some illustration with some animated hand bones. This could be done much better. The endocasts were clear, but these are not. Dart-throwing is an example of a "complex task" that chimpanzees can't do? Ah, now Tocheri is looking at the bone on his computer. This would be a lot better if they'd let him just show the anatomy.

7:32: Thorne: "If there is a developmental problem, then you would expect the hand and wrist bones to be any shape, but bizarre." Tocheri disagrees -- the wrist bones are their adult shape at 10 weeks of gestation. Jungers is "also convinced." "The evidence is pretty persuasive that this is a new species." Tocheri: "Science doesn't deal in persuasion, it deals in evidence. And now we have the evidence in front of us."

7:34: Where did the hobbits come from? They have film of the conference at Liang Bua. They're looking at the cave. "It threatens to overturn our understanding of where we come from."

7:35: Now, a split screen showing fossils and bones. "Large gaps remain in the fossil record." Henry Gee -- "We still know relatively little about the evolution of humanity." Gee thanks, Henry! I appreciate that one; we'll be answering the creationists there. "One fossil is enough to blow apart your entrenched idea of the linear process of evolution." Wow, there's no end of these nuggets of wisdom from Gee. Can we please talk to anthropologists here?

7:36: Morwood talks about critics' "preconceived ideas" that are threatened by the hobbits. Stringer: "In arriving at this creature, what was the ancestor?" Stringer is really good in this; he's giving all the transitions.

7:37: Leiden University; John de Vos and Robin Dennell have come to look at Pithecanthropus. This is a really large cast in this film. Very cool. Narration: "Could Homo erectus, tall and long-legged, evolve into a pint-sized version of itself?" Introduces island rule. Whoops, this is not a clear explanation. Why did rats grow again? Why did elephants shrink? Roberts says "no big predators." But what about those big Komodo dragons? This is a rotten explanation. Dennell is skeptical that the island rule could shrink a hominid. Jungers also "sees no evidence of a shrunken Java man." "I'm less and less persuaded that this could have evolved from Homo erectus."

7:41: The film shows us Lucy. Australopithecus is a possible ancestor of the hobbits. Bill Jungers compares Lucy and LB 1. "I was shocked and amazed by how similar Lucy is to LB 1." I don't see why he was shocked and amazed -- as you'll remember, I posted that observation here the day of the initial Homo floresiensis report! Roberts: "more and more like an australopithecine escaped from Africa." Dennell: "a hidden Asian lineage of hominins, only recorded in Flores at the very end of its trajectory." The film illustrates the Serengeti migrations of wildebeest, suggesting that hominids crossed Asian savannas as well, moving "widely outside of Africa."

7:44: Are there australopithecine remains outside of Africa? Dmanisi. Begins with film of the medieval church. Lordkipanidze is walking down into the excavation. Narration: "Five unique skulls from what appears to be a colony of ancient hominids." Brain capacities are small, 600 cc. Modern humans have more than 1500 (that's a little big, there). Could the hobbits de descended from hobbits. Lordkipanidze says possibly. Stringer appears, to say possibly. Dennell: "Fossil evidence from more than a million years ago in Asia could cover this (small) table. More than two million years ago, who knows what was living in Asia?"

7:48: Gee: "You find the most unexpected things in the most unexpected places."

7:49: Now, Elisabeth Daynes is sculpting the hobbit based on forensic techniques. It's a nice piece of work.

7:50: Gee: "World is full of undiscovered hominids, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone sent a paper to Nature, saying they'd found one alive in Sumatra or Borneo or wherever. I'd be very excited, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised." Gee to Bigfoot researchers: please send papers to Nature.

7:51: More scenes of the dig site, Morwood has discovered other promising sites, split screen with bones, etc. Man, Stringer's cast of LB 1 is miserable. He gets the last word. Good quote from Stringer, but a little abrupt, at the end.

Last words: I really liked the film -- it's visually compelling; it shows the cave and excavations; it shows museum collections in a very good light. It would be a good film to show classes. I think that the critics were given a say, and they were shown to be serious scientists. On the whole, the "circus" aspect of the Flores story did not appear in the film; it appeared as a serious scientific controversy.

Criticisms:

1. I think the narration did a disservice to Jacob, who after all isn't alive to defend himself. The film really glossed over the case for pathology. Given that the film was only 50 minutes, I can see the rationale for spending time on other things. However, this aspect reduced basically to "it's a microcephalic, it's not a microcephalic." That really doesn't describe the science; it's an oversimplification.

2. The part about tool manufacture and elephant hunting was silly -- I'm sure that the experts on the issue (Phillips, Roberts, Moore) gave quotes that would have worked to show the reasons for skepticism and responses. The film was edited in a way that really didn't give this problem any weight -- it was basically Phillips saying "they couldn't make tools," and Moore talking about the complexity of elephant hunting, and these tools aren't so hard to make, as he's showing us a knapping technique that nobody in the audience could do. I'm not coming down on either side; I'm just saying the film didn't present the problems well.

3. Where was Peter Brown? Where was Ralph Holloway? I mean, really? These are major players in this problem, they were filmed, and they were edited out of all but a few seconds. I don't want to criticize the film for showing too many people -- in fact, I really like the way they showed a broad range of scientists. Dean Falk got the right amount of time, and Shara Bailey was a good addition. But even Morwood could have had more time -- why can't we hear about his new sites from his mouth, for instance? I thought Chris Stringer did a good job giving context and transitions, but I wonder if that time might have been better given to someone more directly involved. Ditto with Gee -- why the heck is a science journal editor making himself part of this story?

4. Why all this emphasis on australopithecine origins? I mean, it's an interesting angle, but there's no evidence here at all. Could we have an analysis before we spend 10-15 minutes of the film on it? I appreciated seeing Lordkipanidze, and I liked what Dennell had to say, but it seems very premature. The film discards the Island Rule without any logic at all. To me, this is a real problem: the key question with the hobbits, is what do they tell us about the evolutionary potential of humans? If we discard the idea that they could have dwarfed on an island, then we're just begging the question.

OK, so those are my criticisms. Otherwise I really like the film. I'd like to have a copy to show in class. It's well put together, and it gives a good impression of how paleoanthropology is done. And it shows the experts to be people, not just talking faces.

The part with the endocasts was nicely illustrated. I credit Falk and Hildebolt for that, they've clearly spent a lot of effort finding the best ways to illustrate their points. I wish the film had done as well with the wrists, and for that matter with other elements -- how about those premolars the film spends 3 minutes discussing? And there are some loose ends that could be followed up in another film. For instance, what about those 700,000 year old tools? How did the hobbits get to this island? What about the stegodons -- nobody has ever straightened out whether they were always dwarfed on Flores. The Nova team almost certainly has enough film for another episode; I'd like to see them put some of it online.