Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Becoming
Deckline vent et volum dolut odis aut molupta consecta venimus
consequ iassim sintur, sitiatat qui auta necum doluptium qui
omnimilit velectias doluptat.
BY AUTHOR HERE
Sapiens
S
ometimIs dolor ratur aspel ipit ullamus, tet arcipictati et untur aut molupta turepta volent vellabo riature lit, optatibus,
Africa’s sparseesfossil
officil mo blandit atecuptat vella volo torecus sitibus acea dus, terecord
non consequam, sequos ex
alone cannot eat. the complete
reveal
venimincias poritempore quaererchil inctorporum litae est Bus expe nem quo ea volum
story of human origins. Genomic inquiries of both que nonsequiam
modern vita nobiste
asperem volorecerro dendi ut qui alitibus verro dolorum volore corepti quam endaesc ienienistrum
and ancient DNA are trying to fill in the gaps. incta nit, aut doluptas modi-
quasi que vent et volum dolut odis aut molupta consecta veni- tis invelesciet lam ea consecus.
mus consequ iassim sintur, sitiatat qui auta necum doluptium qui Ris min nimperum dolum re pa vellit, sit harunt am, est, sum
omnimilit Lum que velitios nonse dissimi, consequaturBY KATARINA ZIMMER
maiorio voluptis dollam exerum qui dis si cusdae con etum, et rempore
nsectatius quiaepro doluptat eatemolupis etus dolorrorro corrum ommosa est, ute pliqui berum res dolutat iuribus, omnimust volu-
facit quis aliberia numque consequaspe estia qui diasper uptatu- pid ucimus deruptatium none vollati iscitatiae occab ium excese-
rio iunt harit, sinctibus, cum a volorrum unt. quiam ra dolorest ad es reriat.
Ibus quo quis simolor molor ate is mi, offici conseque volup- Im id quiam hit dollabores cus eos dollest opturion con par-
tia id ulliqui ditio. Um rerum que adit, nonem volorion re laccus chiliam aut reium venduci debitat ipis doluptatus quo cuptate
illam facestia nam alicium dicidenem que nus modi aut exeris caboriti optum quos doluptat ab illessit aliquis nimolup taspelit
volupta tusae. Nam simpore runtio quas sequam facest, quiaes accumet quunt faccae volorepuda se volescil evelent, volor sunte-
re dolorpos expliaspit volum dolorporum invenit atecab invel- molut autem quam eumqui non plandi quam quiatur rate nobit
lent a quatiuste si odit aut omnis reprate core, qui commo dende volupiti sameni dolluptame doluptae porum volo experum qua-
et, quatur asitatur aut re, quo mi, erspersped qui dolupta tquatur mendae nobis velisci minverat ratem et ut laborem idisitae. Et
aut etum dipsaped quibea voluptatem non reperup taturectur? liciis nonsequo tempore eostem etus magnihi cimpori orenis eos-
Rae. Ut quis eturiant ab is si ut as ma enimillenis eni dis sunt uscimpore natemoloris ut fugiati beatecum latque dolupta
quaspiet, opta exere natem rent. tinimagnis dolutet voluptatem quaectae provit mossit mostistem.
Harum doluptia si ad quuntis auta accuptatiur aut quatatum Ut illatur, eaquia comnis ratusam, seque cus etur, omnihit autas
erum autemporibus moluptur, odisquas dese velluptat fugitaes dus, eos que coriate sinum ea nonemposam am es et exerum
reium ilibus ad molorep udaerum alit ut mi, nem in cone pror mo dolessimaion num a sum fugit volent.
quid quatemquas eos simus architibus nis etuscias explis estem Sedis aliquia vid quo inturibus sit, quat faceruptur rese nulpa
dolor re volenim inciasp ernatin ullandant que ne qui debis dolo- poratquias ipid quiaectis enda acimus enimusa doluptam voleste
CREDIT LINE
ribus volo exceatia doluptatur reribus vel exeria corem rectur? mpostion ne dignimaximus sum aut et volorepratis
Gento molupta secerorunto everupt aectores volupta nonet
que perro et volor alitat vit aut quiscim quiae seque iur aut quatet
30 T H E SC I EN TIST | the-scientist.com
I
t’s not unusual for geochronologist mass spectrometer, which measures the con- helpful new tools: genomics and ancient
Rainer Grün to bring human bones centrations of uranium isotopes that undergo DNA techniques. Armed with this combina-
back with him when he returns radioactive decay at a specific rate over time. tion of approaches, researchers have begun
home to Australia from excursions Having returned from his trip to pro- to excavate our species’ early evolution, hint-
in Europe or Asia. Jawbones from cure the Homo heidelbergensis sample, Grün ing at a far more complex past than was pre-
extinct hominins in Indonesia, Nean- watched as the laser poked two tiny holes viously appreciated—one rich in diversity,
derthal teeth from Israel, and ancient into the bone fragment and the particles dis- migration, and possibly even interbreeding
human finger bones unearthed in appeared into the mass spectrometer. Upon with other hominin species in Africa.
Saudi Arabia have all at one point spent evaluating the mass spec data, he could tell “To piece together that story, we need
time in his lab at Australian National Uni- that the fragment was much younger than information from multiple different fields of
versity before being returned home. Grün previously believed. As he, Stringer, and oth- study,” remarks Eleanor Scerri, an archae-
specializes in developing methods to discern ers reported in Nature this past April, their ologist at the Max Planck Institute for the
the age of such specimens. In 2016, he car- best estimate was 299,000 years, give or Science of Human History in Jena, Ger-
ried with him a particularly precious piece take 25,000.1 That meant that the Kabwe many. “No single one is really going to have
of cargo: a tiny sliver of fossilized bone cov- individual had lived not before, but around all the answers—not genetics, not archae-
ered in bubble wrap inside a box. the same time as the first Homo sapiens–like ology, not the fossils, because all of these
The bone fragment had come from a people dwelled in North Africa. Along with areas have challenges and limitations.”
skull—still stored at the Natural History other archaeological evidence, the findings
Museum in London—with a heavy brow suggest that perhaps Homo heidelbergensis A sparse fossil record
ridge and a large face. It looked so primi- was not our ancestor, but a neighbor. Bones easily disintegrate in many parts
tive that the miner who had discovered it Together with yet another hominin, of Africa, in acidic forest soils or dry, sun-
in 1921 at a lead mine in the Zambian town Homo naledi, known to have existed in exposed areas. Moreover, the continent is
of Kabwe, then in the British territory of southern Africa at that time, Africa may largely unexplored by archaeologists. While
Rhodesia, first thought it had belonged have been a crowded place. “Ten years ago, northwestern Africa and former British ter-
to a gorilla. But later that year, museum I think most of us would’ve thought, well, ritories in eastern and southern Africa have
paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward Africa in the last 300,000 years is just a long tradition of professional archaeologi-
noticed what he interpreted as typically going to show you the evolution of Homo cal research, few researchers have looked
human features, such as the skull’s thin sapiens, and that’s really all—the other for fossils anywhere else, notes archaeolo-
and relatively large braincase, that moti- species would have disappeared, gone gist Khady Niang of Cheikh Anta Diop Uni-
vated him to designate the specimen as its extinct,” notes Stringer. “Now we know versity in Senegal. That’s especially the case
own hominin species. that there were probably at least three dif- for the western and central parts of the con-
In the 1980s, however, museum ferent kinds of hominins around.” tinent, where preservation conditions are
paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer took That’s akin to the situation that also poor and excavations difficult at times
another look at the skull and classified it unfolded in Eurasia, where Neanderthals due to political instability. “We might be
as belonging to the species Homo heidel- and Denisovans thrived for hundreds of missing some really, really important parts
bergensis, an ancient hominin thought to thousands of years before Homo sapiens of the story,” adds Yale University anthro-
be a human ancestor. Based on its prim- migrated out of Africa and at times even pologist Jessica Thompson.
itiveness, Stringer says, most research- interbred with the other hominin groups. What African hominin fossils do make
ers guessed it was an early individual The story in Africa remains murky, clear is the depth of humanity’s roots on
who lived around half a million years ago, however, as researchers have not been that continent. Researchers have found
some 200,000 years before the earliest able to reconstruct human history in vivid some of the most abundant fossils in sed-
Homo sapiens were starting to emerge. detail, in part because hominin fossils iments between 3.5 million and 3.2 mil-
© MARK GARLICK, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
But nobody knew exactly how old the informative about our species’ emergence lion years old. That appeared to be the
skull was. For decades, no dating method and coexistence with other species are heyday of the australopiths (including the
existed that could identify the fossil’s age rare in Africa. As a result, finds such as the genus Australopithecus), apes that walked
without the destructive process of grind- Kabwe skull continue to raise more ques- upright and are believed to have used stone
ing up bits of bone for analysis. But Grün tions than answers. If Homo heidelbergen- tools, but still climbed trees and had rela-
was determined to find a solution. sis wasn’t one of our recent ancestors, then tively small brains. It’s thought that some-
Grün is one of very few geochronologists who was? If our species really did overlap in how our own genus, Homo, emerged from
proficient in a laser technique that extracts time with Homo heidelbergensis, what role transitional ape species some 2.8 million
and reduces a barely visible grain of bone— did they play in our evolutionary history? years ago as a clan of hominins with dis-
smaller than the bone’s natural pores—to In recent years, a field that has tradition- tinctive teeth, probably adapted to an
atoms, he says. The laser is coupled with a ally relied on fossil discoveries has acquired eclectic diet that allowed them to thrive
© ISTOCK.COM, GIORGIOMORARA
gatherer remains in southern Africa with Such studies have also provided insight modern people allowed the researchers to
modern-day Khoe-San people, evolutionary into deep divergences that occurred in reconstruct some of the earliest branches
biologist Carina Schlebusch of Uppsala Uni- human populations long before migrations of our species’ evolutionary tree. In addi-
versity in Sweden and her colleagues found of farmers and herders. Mary Prendergast, tion to the deep split between Khoe-San
that some Khoe-San groups carry DNA that an anthropologist at Saint Louis Univer- groups and other African populations—
ancient farmers brought with them.14 They sity in Madrid, and her colleagues recently from which non-Africans also descend—
also carry mixed Eurasian ancestry that had sequenced the first ancient DNA from West their model suggested that two other major
been introduced to North Africa with ear- Africa, material extracted from the remains lineages split just as deeply, diverging from
HOMO HEIDELBERGENSIS
Named after its initial discovery near Heidelberg,
Germany, fossils similar to Homo heidelbergensis
were later found to also occur in Africa. It routinely
hunted large animals and may have built dwellings
made of wood or rock.
HOMO ERECTUS
Homo erectus may have been the first
hominin to wield fire and stone axes.
*Note that the scale of this graphic changes across its width. While Homo sapiens has The species spread across Asia, where it
existed for the past few hundred thousand years, it’s noteworthy that Homo erectus, continued to evolve. In Africa, it gave rise
living from around 2 mya to perhaps 100 kya, is still the longest-lived hominin species. to Homo heidelbergensis.
7 mya 6 5 4 3 2 1 mya
It was not a streamlined process of australopiths in Africa that we haven’t really appreciated
steadily evolving into modern humans, but a very much yet,” Prendergast says.
Only time will tell whether researchers’
messy and haphazard journey that includes current arsenal of technologies is enough to
interwoven ancestries of many groups. untangle the complete story of human evo-
lution. Perhaps novel technologies—such as
paleoproteomics, a nascent field that aims to
reconstruct ancestry from fossilized proteins,
one another more than 200,000 years ago. “ghost” lineage whose fate is uncertain. which are more durable than DNA—will help
One lineage is ancestral to central African “There’s all this deep, deep population struc- researchers “push further back in time,” notes
hunter-gatherers known as Aka and Mbuti, ture with various differentiated branches of biological anthropologist Rebecca Acker-
and the second is a previously unknown the human tree throughout the Pleistocene mann of the University of Cape Town.
DENISOVANS
Denisovans, only known from
from ancient DNA and a handful
of bones and teeth, were closely
related to Neanderthals.
HOMO NALEDI
Only known from skeletons found in South Africa,
this species had a remarkably tiny brain but
modern-human–like features such as the shape of
its teeth and possibly the habit of burying its dead.
WIKIMEDIA, 120; ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY; WIKIMEDIA, BAHN, PAUL G; WIKIMEDIA, GERBIL; WIKIMEDIA, RYAN SOMMA; ELIFE, 6:E24232, 2017; WIKIMEDIA, GUILLAUMEG
both tree-dwelling and capable of an upright gait,
providing an important evolutionary stepping
stone from more primitive ape species to
modern humans.
AFAR REGION, ETHIOPIA, 2013
Adult jawbone, 2.8 million years ago
A mandible fragment is the earliest
known trace of the genus Homo, although
NEAR SAFI, MOROCCO, 1961 the species it belongs to is a mystery.
Human remains at Jebel Irhoud, 315,000 years ago
Flint blades and Homo sapiens–like skeletons in a Moroccan
cave known as Jebel Irhoud may represent the oldest Homo
sapiens artifacts. The skeletons have modern features such
as round skulls and modern-human–like teeth and faces.
36 T H E SC I EN TIST | the-scientist.com
and complex African history,” Science,
What is already abundantly clear References
338:374–79, 2012.
is that human evolution was far more 1. R. Grün et al., “Dating the skull from Broken Hill,
9. S. Tucci, J.M. Akey, “A map of human
Zambia, and its position in human evolution,”
complex than previously appreciated by wanderlust,” Nature, 538:179–80, 2016.
Nature, 580:372–75, 2020.
anthropologists. It was not a streamlined 2. L.R. Berger et al., “Homo naledi, a new species
10. E.M.L. Scerri et al., “Did our species evolve in
subdivided populations across Africa, and why does
process of australopiths steadily evolv- of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber,
it matter?” Trends Ecol Evol, 33:582–94, 2018.
ing into modern humans, but a messy South Africa,” eLife, 4:e09560, 2015.
11. J. Lachance et al. “Evolutionary history
and haphazard journey that includes 3. P.H. Dirks et al., “The age of Homo naledi and
and adaptation from high-coverage whole-
associated sediments in the Rising Star Cave,
interwoven ancestries of many groups, genome sequences of diverse African hunter-
South Africa,” eLife, 6:e24231, 2017.
some of which have never been discov- 4. J.-J. Hublin et al., “New fossils from Jebel Irhoud,
gatherers,” Cell, 150:457–69, 2012.
12. M.G. Llorente et al., “Ancient Ethiopian genome
ered other than through the genetic Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo
reveals extensive Eurasian admixture in Eastern
traces they left in ancient and modern sapiens,” Nature, 546:289–92, 2017.
Africa,” Science, 350:820–22, 2015.
genomes. “We have a long history. A lot 5. B. Vernot, J.M. Akey, “Resurrecting surviving 13. M. v.d. Loosdrecht et al., “Pleistocene North African
of things happened, and a lot of ances- Neanderthal lineages from modern human genomes link Near Eastern and sub-Saharan African
tors contributed to our genomes today,” genomes,” Science, 343:1017–21, 2014. human populations,” Science, 360:548–52, 2018.
6. S. Sankaraman et al., “The genomic landscape 14. C.M. Schlebusch et al., “Southern African
Schlebusch says. “It’s not going to be a
of Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans,” ancient genomes estimate modern human
simple story.” g Nature, 507:354–57, 2014. divergence to 350,000 to 260,000 years ago,”
7. R.L. Cann et al., “Mitochondrial DNA and human Science, 358:652–55, 2017.
Katarina Zimmer is a New York–based evolution,” Nature, 325:31–36, 1987. 15. M. Lipson et al., “Ancient West African foragers
freelance journalist. Find her on Twitter 8. C.M. Schlebusch et al., “Genomic variation in the context of African population history,”
in seven Khoe-San groups reveals adaptation Nature, 577:665–70, 2020.
@katarinazimmer.
Foreign research teams should also foster stronger collaboration with African researchers, rather than simply seeking their help with fossil
excavations, which has sometimes been the case, notes University of Cape Town biological anthropologist Rebecca Ackermann. Research groups
have become more diverse, she notes, but the transition is slow. “I do see a change. It’s just not as fast as I would like.”