Lawn Chair Anthropology

Ameloblast from the past

2012-02-03T14:57:00.001-05:00

I've posted a couple times about the prospects of using high-resolution computed tomography imaging to assess cellular-level processes of growth and development. Today, Paul Tafforeau and colleagues present a synchrotron-based visualization of the adventurous paths that individual enamel-forming cells'(ameloblasts) take to form tooth crowns. I've been focusing more on using these techniques for studying bone growth, but I got the idea of that from previous studies of teeth (see Macchiarelli et al. 2006 and Smith et al. 2010).

Tafforeau et al 2012, Fig 3. Scale bar = 0.25 mm

Time was, the internal microstructure and growth of enamel could only be examined using sectioned (either cut or naturally fractured) tooth crowns. Synchrotron imaging of teeth allowed Tafforeau and colleagues to get at this internal information in complete teeth whose insides are unexposed.

To the left is a "virtual" section of a molar tooth, the 'base' of the enamel (at the enamal-dentine junction) is at the bottom right, and the external surface of the tooth is at the top left. The lines radiating from the EDJ to the crown surface are enamel prisms, the mineralized paths of cells called "ameloblasts" that form tooth crowns. This is the cellular process by enamel is deposited to form a rock-hard tooth.

Note that the prisms start off packed closely together as they start their journey from the EDJ, but slowly diverge along roughly-parallel paths to be a bit further apart from one another (cross-sections in the cubes). The prisms' shadow on projected onto the exposed crown shows how non-linearly ameloblasts course to their final destination in some dimensions - I for one don't know why the path contains these kinks.

As with any awesome method, there are nevertheless limitations. Tafforeau and team say that enamel closer to the inside of the tooth is somewhat muddled, due to differences in the extent to which prisms had mineralized. And I don't know any numbers, but I'd guess that scanning a lot of teeth would get pretty expensive. But ultimately is a pretty badass research tool. This fine-scale internal view of tooth microstructure can allow researchers to reconstruct how a tooth grew, and from there to examine the cellular growth processes involved in certain crown shapes, mechanical properties of teeth, and how enamel hypoplasias (markers of health stress) are created by affecting the behavior of cells. Very cool stuff.

Those papers
Macchiarelli, R., Bondioli, L., Debénath, A., Mazurier, A., Tournepiche, J., Birch, W., & Dean, M. (2006). How Neanderthal molar teeth grew Nature, 444 (7120), 748-751 DOI: 10.1038/nature05314

Smith, T., Tafforeau, P., Reid, D., Pouech, J., Lazzari, V., Zermeno, J., Guatelli-Steinberg, D., Olejniczak, A., Hoffman, A., Radovcic, J., Makaremi, M., Toussaint, M., Stringer, C., & Hublin, J. (2010). Dental evidence for ontogenetic differences between modern humans and Neanderthals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (49), 20923-20928 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1010906107

Tafforeau, P., Zermeno, J., & Smith, T. (2012). Tracking cellular-level enamel growth and structure in 4D with synchrotron imaging Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.01.001

Taking back Epigenetics

2012-01-30T23:56:00.004-05:00

If I'm good at anything, it's looking into one topic and then getting distracted by something else during my search. In a recent case, I was scouring the literature on growth and life history. One ribald thing led to another, and next thing I know I've stumbled upon Gunter Wagner's recent review of the book Epigenetics: Linking Genotype and Phenotype in Development and Evolution. WTF is epigenetics, you ask? That's actually a pretty good question (see here). In the past several years, the term has most often been associated with the causes/effects of structural modifications to chromatin (the DNA-containing stuff that makes up chromosomes). For sure, coincident with Wagner's review, a paper in last week's Nature Reviews Genetics defines epigenetics as "the study of mitotically and/or meiotically heritable changes in gene function that cannot be explained by changes in DNA sequence." (Feil and Fraga 2012).

This is an extremely narrow focus for a term that was originally meant to be about basically everything besides genes that contribute to an organism's phenotype (this idea was developed by the great, rather underrated, 20th century biologist Conrad Waddington). Lotsa epigenetics research by the narrow definition (i.e. modifications to histones and chromatin) focuses on how cells - not organisms - retain their identity/function (or, phenotype). Epigenetics in the narrow sense are important determinants of an organism's phenotype, but these alone are insufficient to understand how and why organisms' become the way they are. Yes, the narrow definition leaves room for environmental influences on gene expression (though "environment" could refer to the state of affairs within a cell or an organism, in addition to the outside world). But it nevertheless imparts agency solely to genes in affecting an organism becomes.

And this is what the aforesaid book and review are about. Wagner asks, "what would be lost if the original perspective of epigentics [as defined by Waddington] was lost to science?" This is important because an organism is not simply a robotic readout of its genes, but people cannot seem to shake this centuries-old biological determinism.

Is that a homunculus
in your [sperm's]
pocket?

In the early days of 'modern' (or let's say 'recent') biology, there was a popular idea of "Preformationism," that animals grew from these pre-formed miniature versions of themselves (homunculi) in germ cells. It did not take long for this idea to be quashed, but the underlying idea persisted. Wagner recounts, "With the rise of genetics during the 20th century, however, a new form of quasi-preformism arose, basically replacing the old homunculus with the genome, whereas the developmental process creating the phenotype was put in a black box" (emphasis mine). [See Gilbert et al. (1996) for a nice historical overview describing how the rise of population genetics in the early 20th century left embryology and developmental biology by the wayside of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis]

This latent desire to essentialize biology to some singular determinant (be it an homunculus or a gene) is something people just can't get away from. Srsly, there's a persistent sentiment in biology that Real Science is only the high-profile, lab-coated work in genetics. Along these lines, even I adopted the recently popular narrow view of "epigenetics" a while back when I dated a woman who worked at an epigenetics lab, in hindsight probably so I would sound more like a capital-S Scientist (below).

Hipster scientist. H3S10 phosphorylation correlates with decreased levelsof heterochromatin, possibly regulating chromosome condensation (Chenet al 2008). Image: bit.ly/zEfPaq

Of course, genes code for how a cell should behave, but we have this tendency to want to extrapolate from the cell to the organism, and this is where developmental biology becomes a critical link. And this is what the new Epigenetics book is about (so far as I can tell, I haven't yet had a chance to read it all).

It's abundantly clear that phenotypes arise out of an inextricably complex series of interactions - between genes, proteins, cells, tissues, environments, etc. These interactions do not occur solely at the genetic (or narrow-sense epigenetic) level. Developmental biology helps 'connect the dots' between genes and morphology, but cannot do so by focusing solely on genes and chromatin.

References
Chen, E., Zhang, K., Nicolas, E., Cam, H., Zofall, M., & Grewal, S. (2008). Cell cycle control of centromeric repeat transcription and heterochromatin assembly. Nature, 451 (7179), 734-737 DOI: 10.1038/nature06561

Feil, R., & Fraga, M. (2012). Epigenetics and the environment: emerging patterns and implications. Nature Reviews Genetics DOI: 10.1038/nrg3142

Gilbert, S. (1996). Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology. Developmental Biology, 173 (2), 357-372 DOI: 10.1006/dbio.1996.0032

Hallgrímsson B and Hall BK, eds. 2011. Epigenetics: Linking Genotype and Phenotype in Development and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wagner, G. (2011). Epigenetics in all its beauty Trends in Ecology & Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2011.09.003

A little reassurance

2012-01-23T21:52:00.001-05:00

I was putting together a lab lesson for this week, focusing on the skeletal differences between living apes and Old World monkeys, when I'd noticed the distal humerus of this gorilla (Gorilla gorilla, not the most "scientific-sounding Latin names," right?). Looks kinda like a thumbs-up, I thought. It seemed to say, "Keep up the good work, kid!" And that's when I knew it was time to get some sleep.

Historical contingency and an herbivorous calamity

2012-01-21T18:58:00.000-05:00

A while ago I asked, "What the hell was Australopithecus boisei doing?" To recap: there's this weird side branch of human evolution that was dubbed "Australopithecus boisei" and lived in Eastern Africa from around 2.3 - 1.4 million years ago. They lived right alongside our ancestors, early Homo. If you think human diversity is remarkable today, you'd be totally blown away by the diversity of the early Pleistocene. Since 1959 when A. boisei (then Zinjanthropus boisei) was first discovered, people noticed its massive molar and premolar teeth, thick and powerful jaws, and muscle markings indicative of diabolical chewing power. 'Probably subsisted on a diet of low-quality, hard to chew foods,' people reasoned.

But a few years ago, this picture changed: evidence from toothwear and the chemical composition of teeth suggested A. boisei was actually eating grass or sedges (see the referred post or a nice recent review by Julia Lee-Thorp for more info). Such a diet is totally at odds with what people had hypothesized based on the size of the chewing muscles and teeth.

Colobus molars (image: http://bit.ly/xefm6t)

I was discussing this last point with a colleague the other day, who could not believe A. boisei ate grasses or the like: Many animals known to eat grass or leaves tend have molars with high crowns with slicing edges for shearing apart a mouthful of vegetation (left), but A. boisei molars are large and low-cusped, becoming fairly flat with wear (below).

KNM-ER 15930 (Leakey & Walker 1988, Figure 8)

But, it occurred to me, maybe high-crowned, shearing molars simply were not an 'option' in the evolution of Australopithecus boisei. Natural selection is a powerful force of evolution, but it is limited because it can work only with existing variation: it does the best it can with what it's got. The earliest surefire hominids*, Australopithecus anamensis and afarensis, certainly did not have 'cresty' molars with pointy cusps, and neither did many late Miocene apes, for that matter. Rather, the ancestors of A. boisei had fairly low bulbous molar cusps, and that's some serious evolutionary baggage for a hominid hoping to corner the grass and sedge market.

So we can draw up the following hypothesis for the evolution of A. boisei: as the early members of the species moved into a niche of eating grass/sedges, rather than evolve cresty teeth, they increased the size and enamel thickness of their ancestors' molars to better-withstand their diet. Perhaps this was the 'easiest' solution to adapting teeth to a crappy diet (maybe some developmental constraint?). Or perhaps there's another, yet unidentified food responsible for the species' curiously high-C4 diet ... who knows? Nota bene: this isn't necessarily what I think happened, it's just a hypothesis consistent with current evidence about A. boisei's anatomy and diet.

If Life on Earth has taught us anything, it's that there are many ways to do the same thing. What's more, evolution is highly constrained by pre-existing biology and historical circumstance. Australopithecus boisei may have been 'a victim of its times,' forced into an herbivorous niche for which it was ill-equipped.

READ MORE!

Leakey RE, & Walker A (1988). New Australopithecus boisei specimens from east and west Lake Turkana, Kenya. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 76 (1), 1-24 PMID: 3136654

Lee-Thorp, J. (2011). The demise of "Nutcracker Man" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (23), 9319-9320 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1105808108

* I only mention australopithecines because I'm still on the fence about the hominid status of Ardipithecus, and not convinced by Orrorin or Sahelanthropus.

miRNA special reprint in Nature

2012-01-04T15:34:00.002-05:00

A while ago I had a small post about RNA interference (RNAi), linking to a really awesome and educational animation and slideshow on the topic. Again, RNAi refers to gene regulation by very small strands of RNA. There are a number of types of RNA in your cells, and a several of these are involved in RNAi: in the last post I cursorily mentioned piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNA), small interfering (siRNA) and long intergenic non-coding (lincRNA).

One type I neglected to mention is "micro" (miRNA), and this is the one about which the journal Nature has a special on-line issue. miRNA, like other types in RNAi, binds to messenger RNA in cells to prevent gene translation. The special issue of Nature focuses on miRNA in various diseases involving tumors and skeletal abnormalities, and so far as I can tell, it's completely free to all!

What really caught my eye about this issue is its highly interactive medium, produced by some company called zmags. This "zmag" (I guess you'd call it?) has been rendered so that you view and leaf through actual magazine-like pages in your browser. I've got a 1+ yr old Macbook and the 2-finger zoom on the trackpad also works within the browser. Want to read and mark up some of it in your preferred program? Well you can save selected pages from the issue as a pdf, giving you flexibility in what content you download (though I did have some issues with this). A while ago I noticed Nature also used a somewhat interactive in-browser, pdf-viewing app called Readcube, though I admit I haven't really toyed with that program.

It's a bit challenging but also interesting to follow the possible obsolescence of the (literally) printed word. Amazon's Kindle and other e-book platforms have all but buried the expensive, clunky hardcover tome. Academic publishers like Springer offer not only articles but also whole book chapters as pdfs available online (though they tend to require some type of university or other affiliation), and major newspapers offer most of their content on their websites.

On this topic, Carl Zimmer had a neat piece in Nature a few weeks ago about the "rise of the e-book." He raises some excellent points regarding the pros and cons of e-books, some which I think could be extended to digital media more generally. I for one am like millions of others, relying on my handy computer and the internet for nearly all information I need to be a fully-functioning student, teacher and member of society. Still, as Zimmer points out at the end of his article, the permanence of e-books and the like is uncertain. I mean, what to do if we're hit by another devastating Y2k?

Read on
Nature special issue here

Zimmer, C. (2011). Technology: Rise of the e-book Nature, 480 (7378), 451-452 DOI: 10.1038/480451a

Evo-devo of the human shoulder?

2012-01-01T17:04:00.003-05:00

It's a new year, and while my mind should be marred by a hangover, instead all I can think about are fossils and scapulas.

A pretty cool study was published online in the Journal of Human Evolution last week, and I've finally gotten to peruse it. Fabio Di Vincenzo and colleagues analyzed the shape of the outline of the glenoid fossa on the scapula (not to be confused with the glenoid on your skull), from Australopithecus africanus to present day humans. The glenoid fossa is essentially the socket in the ball-and-socket joint of your shoulder. The authors found that there is pretty much a single trend of glenoid shape change from Australopithecus through the evolution of the genus Homo: from the fairly narrow joint in Australopithecus africanus and A. sediba, to the relatively wide joint in recent humans. The overall size and shape of the joint influences/reflects shoulder mobility, so presumably this shape change hints that more front-to-back arm motions became more important through the course of human evolution (authors suggest throwing in humans from the Late Pleistocene onward).

The finding of a single predominant trend in glenoid shape evolution is pretty interesting. On top of that, the authors add an ‘evo-devo’ twist by comparingspecies’ average "shapes" (first principle component scores, on the y-axis in the figure at right) with their estimated ages atskeletal maturity (which appears scaled to the modern human value, on the x-axis). Though it’s not an ideal dataset for running a linearregression, the figure at right shows that there appears to be a fairly linear relationshipacross human evolution, such that groups with an older age atskeletal maturity tend to have a more rounded (modern human-like) glenoid fossa(note that the individuals in the analysis were all adults). Overall size does not contribute to shape variation among these glenoids.

This work raises two issues, and ultimately leadsto a testable evo-devo hypothesis. The first issue is to what extent we can trust their estimates of age at skeletal maturity. These estimates were allegedly taken from a chapter by Helmut Hemmer (2007) in the prohibitively expensive Handbook of Paleoanthropology. Cursorily glancing at this chapter, I can't find age at skeletal maturation estimated for any hominids. It is possible that in my skimming I missed the estimates, or alternatively that Di Vincenzo and colleagues misinterpreted another variable as skeletal development. Either way, these estimates would still need to be taken with a grain of salt, given that it is almost impossible to know the true age at death of a fossil (but see Antoine et al. 2008), especially if there are no associated cranio-dental elements.

That said, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that the age at skeletal maturation has increased over the course of human evolution; life-span increased through human evolution, and so all else being equal (which it almost certainly isn't) we could expect that maturation would occur later over time, too. So this leads to a second issue: given the “evo-devo change” the authors hypothesize, what is the evo-devo mechanism?That is, how was development modified to effect the evolutionary changes we seein the hominid scapula? Because they found adult glenoid shape correlates withestimated age at skeletal maturity, this leads to the hypothesis that postnatalskeletal growth accounts for the shape difference. Indeed, they state:

“Iffunctional and static allometric influences are unlikely, we…interpret thetrend…as reflecting growth and developmental factors. A major, albeit gradual,trend of ontogenetic heterochrony occurred in the evolution of the genus Homo... and thus differences within andbetween taxa in overall growth rates may have produced the pattern of variationbetween samples, as well as the overall temporal trend observed. The regressionof life history variables [they only looked at 1]... with PCA [principle components analysis] scores supports this ‘ontogenetic’ hypothesis.”

The authors suggestthat humans’ slower growth rates but longer growth period “led to longerperiods of bone deposition along the inferior-lateral edge of the [glenoid fossa]” The heterochronic process theysuggest is “peramorphosis” – the descendant reaches a shape that is ‘beyond’ that of theancestor.

The figure above is from a seminal "heterochrony" paper by Pere Alberch and colleagues (1979), portraying how peramorphosis can occur. In each, the y-axis represents shape and the x-axis is age. A the descendant's peramorphic shape ("Ya") could result from accelerated growth (left graph) or from an extension of growth to later ages than in the ancestor (right graph).

And so this leads to a testable hypothesis. Di Vincenzo and colleagues cite (dental) evidence that humans' overall body growth rates are slower than earlier hominids', undermining the hypothesis that acceleration is responsible for humans' glenoid peramorphosis. Rather, they hypothesize that humans' slower growth rates coupled with a longer period of skeletal development, to result in a relatively wider glenoid, due to increased development of the secondary growth centers (e.g. the graph at right, above). This developmental scenario predicts that subadult human glenoids should resemble earlier hominid adults', that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" as far as glenoid shape is concerned. Analyzing glenoid growth can even be extended to include fossils - the >3 million year old human ancestor Australopithecus afarensis has glenoids preserved for an infant (DIK-VP-1; Alemseged et al. 2006) and 2 adults (AL 288 "Lucy" and KSD-VP-1; Johanson et al. 1982, Haile-Selassie et al. 2010). An alternate hypothesis is that species' distinct glenoid shapes are established early during life (i.e. in utero), and/or that no simple heterochronic process is involved.

Di Vincenzo's and colleagues' study points to the importance of development in understanding human evolution, and their hypothesized "evo-devo change" in glenoid shape is ripe for testing.

References
Pere Alberch, Stephen Jay Gould, George F. Oster, & David B. Wake (1979). Size and shape in ontogeny and phylogeny Paleobiology, 5 (3), 296-317

Alemseged, Z., Spoor, F., Kimbel, W., Bobe, R., Geraads, D., Reed, D., & Wynn, J. (2006). A juvenile early hominin skeleton from Dikika, Ethiopia Nature, 443 (7109), 296-301 DOI: 10.1038/nature05047

Antoine, D., Hillson, S., & Dean, M. (2009). The developmental clock of dental enamel: a test for the periodicity of prism cross-striations in modern humans and an evaluation of the most likely sources of error in histological studies of this kind Journal of Anatomy, 214 (1), 45-55 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2008.01010.x

Di Vincenzo, F., Churchill, S., & Manzi, G. (2011). The Vindija Neanderthal scapular glenoid fossa: Comparative shape analysis suggests evo-devo changes among Neanderthals Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.11.010

Haile-Selassie, Y., Latimer, B., Alene, M., Deino, A., Gibert, L., Melillo, S., Saylor, B., Scott, G., & Lovejoy, C. (2010). An early Australopithecus afarensis postcranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (27), 12121-12126 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1004527107

Hemmer, Helmut (2007). Estimation of Basic Life History Data of Fossil Hominoids Handbook of Paleoanthropology, 587-619 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-33761-4_19

Johanson, D., Lovejoy, C., Kimbel, W., White, T., Ward, S., Bush, M., Latimer, B., & Coppens, Y. (1982). Morphology of the Pliocene partial hominid skeleton (A.L. 288-1) from the Hadar formation, Ethiopia American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 57, 403-451 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330570403

An end to Ediacaran embryology?

2011-12-28T16:51:00.001-05:00

The things people can do these days. Therese Huldtgren and colleagues reported in last week's Science that they identified nucleus-like structures in 570 million year old fossilized cells from China. These date to the Ediacaran period, before the "Cambrian explosion" of animal life forms. Superficially, these fossilized balls of cells rather resemble the early stages of animal embryos (see A in the figure below), in which cells are dividing and increasing in number but the overall embryo size stays the same. To get the "inside story" (...sorry), Huldtgren and team used very fancy "synchrotron x-ray computed tomography" to look at the insides of these fossilized cells. The resulting images have micrometer resolution - that's one thousandth* of a millimeter. The things people can do these days.

Fig. 2 from Huldtgren et al. 2011

And lo! each of these fossilized cells contains a small, globular structure that looks like a nucleus (left; if you cross your eyes you can merge the 2 halves of fig. C to make it look even more 3D).

Could these really be the earliest animal embryos? Probably not - some of these balls-of-cells had what resemble budding spores, unlike animals but similar to "nonmetazoan [non-animal] holozoans." In other words, something neat and old, but not one of our earliest ancestors.

I'm really impressed with the biological applications of computed tomography (CT). Recall that a while ago, I posted about the potential to use synchrotron tomography to examine the small-scale, internal structure of bone (e.g. Cooper et al. 2011). Such non-destructive, high-resolution imaging techniques could be used to compare near-cellular-level growth in living and fossil animals. This is really significant because it adds a completely new kind of information we can get from fossils, which before now could only be studied well at the gross, macroscopic level (though scanning electron microscopy of teeth has been very informative about diet; see for example Ungar and Sponheimer 2011). Indeed, one of the most common applications of CT imaging in anthropology is making 3D computer models of body parts for morphometric (shape) analysis.

But high-resolution, synchrotron CT imaging opens up a whole new world of paleontology, new questions that can be asked. For example, many researchers have examined the microscopic appearance of bone surfaces to determine whether bone was being added or removed during growth, and comparing different species (Bromage 1989, O'Higgins et al. 2001, McCollum 2008, Martinez-Mata et al. 2010). These have been very informative studies, but it is not totally clear how growth at the cellular level relates to growth at visible level. Moreover, fossil surfaces are often abraded, obfuscating surface details. So, I can envision using synchrotron microscopy similar to Cooper et al. (2011) and Huldtgren et al. (2011), to examine bone growth in fossil hominids, at and beneath the surface. This can help us understand how facial growth was modified over the course of human evolution, from the snouty visage of Australopithecus afarensis to the tiny, starry-eyed faces we have today. People could also examine how activities like chewing, running or even talking affect (and effect) bone growth. There is much work to be done.

Neat as these projects would be, it's pretty humbling to consider that we have the technology to analyze microscopic fossils hundreds of millions of years old, and shed light on the developmental processes in our earliest ancestors.

Read those things I'd mentioned

BROMAGE, T. (1989). Ontogeny of the early hominid face Journal of Human Evolution, 18 (8), 751-773 DOI: 10.1016/0047-2484(89)90088-2

Cooper, D., Erickson, B., Peele, A., Hannah, K., Thomas, C., & Clement, J. (2011). Visualization of 3D osteon morphology by synchrotron radiation micro-CT Journal of Anatomy, 219 (4), 481-489 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2011.01398.x

Huldtgren, T., Cunningham, J., Yin, C., Stampanoni, M., Marone, F., Donoghue, P., & Bengtson, S. (2011). Fossilized Nuclei and Germination Structures Identify Ediacaran "Animal Embryos" as Encysting Protists Science, 334 (6063), 1696-1699 DOI: 10.1126/science.1209537

Martinez-Maza, C., Rosas, A., & Nieto-Diaz, M. (2010). Brief communication: Identification of bone formation and resorption surfaces by reflected light microscopy American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 143 (2), 313-320 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21352

McCollum, M. (2008). Nasomaxillary remodeling and facial form in robust Australopithecus: a reassessment Journal of Human Evolution, 54 (1), 2-14 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2007.05.013

O'Higgins, P., Chadfield, P., & Jones, N. (2001). Facial growth and the ontogeny of morphological variation within and between the primates Cebus apella and Cercocebus torquatus Journal of Zoology, 254 (3), 337-357 DOI: 10.1017/S095283690100084X

Ungar, P., & Sponheimer, M. (2011). The Diets of Early Hominins Science, 334 (6053), 190-193 DOI: 10.1126/science.1207701

Ancient DNA & admixture: One of Science's breakthrough in 2011

2011-12-23T12:23:00.000-05:00

The high-profile journal Science has compiled a list of the top breakthroughs of 2011, some of the most major discoveries and and advances across scientific fields. The top breakthrough was research finding that antiretroviral drugs can act not only to treat patients infected with HIV, but also these antiretrovirals significantly reduce the likelihood of transmission of the disease. This is a pretty effing big deal, as HIVand AIDS are tragically rampant in many parts of the world.

One of the runners-up to this breakthrough: "Archaic Humans' DNA lives on." The brief exposé highlights the studies from this year that corroborated the 2010 evidence for Neandertal and "Denisovan" DNA in living people. The exposé concludes with a short and rather out-of-the-blue paragraph about the Australopithecus sediba fossils from Malapa. How about that - anthropological research as a major scientific breakthrough; FL governor Rick Scott certainly didn't see that one coming.

See for yourself:
Anonymous (2011). The Runners-Up Science, 334 (6063), 1629-1635 DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6063.1629

My X-mas gift - a clear passing lane

2011-12-22T01:35:00.002-05:00

I just drove from MI to MO to visit my awesome family for the holiday. I'm glad to have the chance to spend this special time with the people I love.

But the 12-hour drive today reminded me: one of the greatest gifts you can give me and the rest of America is courteous driving on the highway. Specifically, if you are not passing anyone (on your right), then YOU NEED TO GET THE F OUT OF THE LEFT LANE (sound familiar?). If we hang out in the right lane and enter the left only to pass another car when necessary, well the world will be a better place.

Map of the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. That's what it's actually called. "Defense" refers to the most insidious of our intrinsic insecurities - bad drivers. Image: fhwa.dot.gov

Don't get me wrong. I am very impressed that you have the brightest f*ing headlights on the market, so that once I finally get to pass you - dangerously on the right - seeing you in my rearview mirror is like staring at the sun. But all the headlights in the world don't make it alright for you to just camp out in the left lane, not passing anyone, clotheslining 2 lanes of traffic, and probably eventually leading to the shutdown of the highway system that Eisenhower and the dying American auto industry created for your enjoyment.

Also, just so we're clear: If you 1) camp in the fast lane, and/or 2) have gratuitously bright headlights, you are the worst person in the world.

Small-stranded insanity inside your cells

2011-12-16T14:49:00.002-05:00

The Nature News Blog posted a fascinating video showing how RNA interference (RNAi) works within a cell. RNAi refers to the regulation of gene expression by short-length RNAs. So far as I understand it, there are a number of types of small stretches of RNA (e.g. siRNA, piRNA) that do not code for proteins but rather target other RNAs, and then latch onto them via proteins to ensure the other RNA's demise. RNAi is implicated in expression of lots of genes, for instance HOTAIR is a long intergenic noncoding RNA that is itself located in the HOXC cluster but later acts to repress HOXD expression (Woo and Kingston 2007).

The video (there's also a slideshow) provides a stunning and digestible visual of what exactly is going on during this complex process. It's online and it's completely free (see links above), and so could be a valuable resource for teaching about this aspect of gene regulation.

Oh, the humanity. An Argonaute protein is guided by a small interfering RNA to where it will start rending a messenger RNA. From this great slideshow by Nature Reviews Genetics and Arkitek.

Some RNAi reviews
Czech, B., & Hannon, G. (2010). Small RNA sorting: matchmaking for Argonautes Nature Reviews Genetics, 12 (1), 19-31 DOI: 10.1038/nrg2916

Moss, E. (2001). RNA interference: It's a small RNA world Current Biology, 11 (19) DOI: 10.1016/S0960-9822(01)00467-5

Woo, C., & Kingston, R. (2007). HOTAIR Lifts Noncoding RNAs to New Levels Cell, 129 (7), 1257-1259 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2007.06.014

Anton Wutz (2011). RNA-Mediated Silencing Mechanisms in Mammalian Cells Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science, 101, 351-376 DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-387685-0.00011-1

UPDATE: The Journal of Experimental Zoology B has an entire issue dedicated to "RNA in Developmental Evolution."

Humans and snakes, beyond the Garden

2011-12-13T13:53:00.000-05:00

There's a paper in press in PNAS describing human-snake relations among Agta hunter-gatherers in the Philippines. The paper is pretty neat, as it describes a pretty complex relationship between, in this case, reticulated pythons and humans (and generally between other snakes and primates). Humans have been attacked (and presumably eaten) by large pythons. Conversely, Agta have killed and eaten pythons. There is also a good deal of overlap in prey species eaten by humans and pythons. So at once, the relationship between humans (at least the Agta) and pythons could be described as predator-prey, prey-predator and competitors; given this dynamic, maybe Genesis readers should be more surprised that Eve and the serpent didn't try to eat one another.

The paper also has some great pictures of a huge python that was killed and flayed by an Agta group in the early 1970s (check it out free with more coverage at ScienceMag). At right is another sweet pic from the paper, an X-ray of a snake that has swallowed whole TWO juvenile monkeys!

On the far right you can clearly see the head and spine of one, and on the left half by the 'bend' in the snake you can see the head, spine and upper limb of the other, its legs visible in the bottom left corner. Nuts!

The authors write that because of the swallow-whole style that pythons ingest their prey, it may be impossible to determine whether fossil hominids fell prey to such a swallowing serpent. But I think this is itself a potentially testable hypothesis. If the snake X-rayed above was alive, researchers could have waited for the snake to expel its stomach contents, to see if death-by-python leaves any special signatures on the skeleton. Stomach acids the used by the snake to digest prey may leave a special mark on bone; because constricting snakes usually squeeze the ** out of their prey to subdue them, this could result in a characteristic pattern of bone breakage [Briana Pobiner and colleagues (2007) did a similar study based on the skeletal aftermaths of chimpanzee hunts]. So f we know what a snake's primate meal looks like when vacated, we could potentially see if there are any such serpentine signatures in the fossil record. Assuming that swallowed-by-snake could be detected, even if no fossil hominids (or apes and monkeys, for that matter) bear such signatures, that doesn't mean it didn't happen, but simply that we can't say for sure whether it did.

References
Headland, T., & Greene, H. (2011). PNAS Plus: Hunter-gatherers and other primates as prey, predators, and competitors of snakes Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1115116108

Pobiner, B., DeSilva, J., Sanders, W., & Mitani, J. (2007). Taphonomic analysis of skeletal remains from chimpanzee hunts at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda Journal of Human Evolution, 52 (6), 614-636 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2006.11.007

The next big thing? Automated methods in biology, or "Hooked on phenomics"

2011-12-10T10:48:00.001-05:00

"This is very beautiful. It is neat, it is modern technology, and it is fast. I am just wondering very seriously about the biological validity of what we are doing with this machine." - Melvin Moss, 1967*

"This machine" to which Moss referred nearly 50 years ago was not a contraption to clone a Neandertal or a Godzilla-like MechaGodzilla, but a computer. Along these lines, a paper came out recently describing a new, automated method for analyzing (biological) shapes, and while I think the method is pretty sweet, I think future researchers employing it should keep Moss's monition in mind.

Doug Boyer and colleagues (2011) present "Algorithms to automatically quantify the geometric similarity of anatomical surfaces." It seems the main goals of the study were to make shape analysis [1] faster and [2] easier for people who don't otherwise study anatomy (such as geneticists), making it possible [3] to amass large phenotypic datasets comparable to the troves of genetic data accumulated in recent years. Using some intense math that's way over my head, the computer algorithm takes surface data (acquired through CT or laser scans) of a pair of specimens and automatically fits these forms with a "correspondence map" linking geometrically (and not necessarily biologically) homologous features between the two. It then uses the map to fit landmarks (a la geometric morphometrics) which are used to calculate the shape difference metric between individuals in the pairings.

See at the right just how pretty it is! The authors posit that this technique could be used with genetic knock-out studies to assess how certain genes affect the development of bones and teeth, or to model the development of organs. That certainly would be useful in biomedical and evo-devo research.

But while I appreciate the automated-ness of the procedure, I don't think we can simply write off the role of the biologist in determining what features are homologous, in favor of a computer. The paper itself illustrates this nicely. The authors state that there is debate about the origins of a cusp on the molar tooth of the sportive lemur (Lepilemur) - is it the same as the entoconid of the living mouse lemur, or the enlarged metaconid of the extinct "koala lemur"? Their automated algorithm can map the sportive lemur's mystery cusp to match either alternative scenario. It is the external paleontological and phylogenetic evidence, not the intrinsic shape information, that renders the alternative scenario more plausible.

So let me reiterate that I think this paper presents an important step for the study of the biology of form, or the form of biology. Automating the analysis of form will certainly expedite studies of large datasets (not to mention freeing up the time of hordes of research assistants). But I hope that researchers employing this procedure will have a little Mossian Angel (poor play on "guardian angel," sorry) on their shoulders, reminding them that the algorithm won't necessarily show them homology better than their own experience. And I hope all biologists have this Mossian Angel there, reminding them that even though this method is "neat ... modern technology, and ... fast," it may not be the most appropriate method for their research question.

References
Boyer, D., Lipman, Y., St. Clair, E., Puente, J., Patel, B., Funkhouser, T., Jernvall, J., & Daubechies, I. (2011). Algorithms to automatically quantify the geometric similarity of anatomical surfaces Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (45), 18221-18226 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1112822108

*This quote comes from a discussion at the end of a symposium: Cranio-Facial Growth in Man (1967). RE Moyers and WM Krogman, editors. New York: Pergamon Press.

The secret to running an amazing race: show up late

2011-11-27T23:38:00.001-05:00

I don't usually stray far from the Sciences and into my personal life on this blog, because I wouldn't want anyone to get the impression that I have a life or actually do stuff. But not today. Today I wanna talk about one of my favorite things: running.

On Thanksgiving I ran the Detroit Turkey Trot 10k race with some friends (couldn't make it home to be with my awesome family this year, unfortunately). It was a cold and foggy morning, perfect for a race starting at 7:45 am. Knowing that over 20 thousand people would be in downtown Detroit just for the races (there was also a 5k and 1-miler), we peaced out of Ann Arbor at 6:00 to make sure we'd get to the starting line on time. But in a combined assault of incompetence, the City of Detroit and The Parade Co. made sure this would be impossible. After crawling from I-94 into downtown, we got the car parked with about 10 minutes to drain everyone's bladder (it's important to be properly hydrated for physical activity) and join the 7500 other runners doing the 10k. Race organizers had the foresight to make sure there were a whopping 10 Porta Potties near the starting line, perfectly adequate to serve the 20,000+ runners and onlookers; it was a long line.

My race bib, next to my sexy dinosaur poster and classy Kokoschka tiger-cat.
So much product placement.

So, we finally got to the starting line about 15 minutes after the race began. FORTUNATELY science and technology were on our side, and some benevolent genius thought to invent chips that go in one's race bib (right) so that one's official time does not begin until one crosses the start line.

Being young and brash, we were hoping to start with the faster "comet" or "Wave 1" group, which started earlier than the other waves. Having to start the race some 15 minutes later than scheduled, you'd think we'd've been off to a bad start - FALSE! Because our wave got a head start on us, we ended up running alongside the slower waves, meaning that we spent literally the entire race passing people. Unlike every other race I've done (where I started on time), no one passed me for all 6.2 miles, which was a real morale booster. This ended up being my fastest 10k (and really the fastest of the brief history of all my races)

Nothing makes you run faster than feeling like you're a fast runner. So if you want to have an amazing race (not the show), start late.

Updated note on jaw growth in Australopithecus robustus

2011-11-26T10:04:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago I posted some early observations I've made about mandible growth in Australopithecus robustus compared with humans. My dissertation tests the null hypothesis that overall mandible growth is identical in the two species. This is complicated by the fact that there are many aspects of jaw growth (i.e. lots of variables) and not all fossils preserve the same parts. In these early preparatory stages I'm looking only at the height and width of the jaw at the second baby molar (in kids) and the second permanent premolar that replaces this baby tooth in older individuals, since this is something most of the fossils have. This work will get me ready for the hard comparisons, where the fossils aren't so kind.

One concern I had in the earlier post was that my human sample was (and still is) fairly small, making comparisons rather tentative. Since then, I have about doubled my human sample (but I still have lots of work to do), so it's timely to see if my earlier observations have held up. AND THEY DO!

To the right is a plot of jaw height at said tooth position across the growth period, humans being the black circles and A. robustus the thick red ones. Note that measures are standardized, taken relative to the smallest (not necessarily the youngest) individual in each sample. Before, I'd found that the two samples overlapped up to dental stage 4 (when the first permanent tooth comes in). After this point, the A. robustus jaw gets much larger through early adulthood, whereas in humans the height increase isn't so drastic. With a larger sample, there is a bit more overlap in relative jaw height (especially early on), but the overall result is the same as I found earlier. Neat!

To the left is a similar plot, this time looking at width of the jaw across the growth period (these are also size-standardized as above, colors are the same). What's remarkable is that the width of the human jaw is pretty much the same from infancy to adulthood. I remember thinking this when I first started looking at human jaws early last summer, but I'd never looked at how they compare with A. robustus, whose jaw continues to increase in absolute and relative width with age (and possibly even through adulthood; Lockwood et al. 2007). This plot is admittedly a bit confusing, as sizes are measured relative to the smallest and not youngest individuals, and the narrowest human jaw is in dental stage 4. The A. robustus sample also includes a very old adult (the highest point on the plot) while the human sample only goes to early adulthood. But the basic patterns are still pretty different: A. robustus jaws get wider up to dental stage 5 (you could think of it as pre- or early adolescence) then level out (not including our large older adult), but humans' average jaw width is fairly constant throughout ontogeny. Of course, this is at only one position along the jaw, and others will probably different.

The fragmented jaws of the youngest A. robustus (i.e. SK 63 and SK 438) do not look too different from their human counterparts, but adults are very different. Here we can see part of the reason why. Bear in mind, though, that other aspects of mandible shape do differ between these species from birth. For example, humans have a bony chin from infancy, whereas A. robustus always lacks a true chin (SK 74 is an older, probably female adult A. robustus that does have a rather anomalous "chin" but it is not homologous to ours). Not all aspects of species-specific mandible shape arise during postnatal growth!

But there you go, an enlarged human sample produces a result consistent with my earlier observation. Note that these pictures do not represent statistical tests of my hypothesis! Yes, a visual inspection of the plotted numbers suggests the two species differ in how jaw height and width grows. But saying something statistical and "definitive" is difficult. In terms of height, growth does seem pretty much the same during childhood, but then divergent later on. Width growth in the two species seems totally different. To further complicate things, a "shape" ratio of jaw width divided by height (not shown) suggests parallel (but not identical) growth trajectories in the two species. What do these observed differences mean for the null hypothesis? Which and how many variables can differ before I can feel confident about whether to reject the hypothesis? Oy, I have my work cut out for me. Stay tuned!

That paper I referenced
Lockwood, C., Menter, C., Moggi-Cecchi, J., & Keyser, A. (2007). Extended Male Growth in a Fossil Hominin Species Science, 318 (5855), 1443-1446 DOI: 10.1126/science.1149211

Look inside bones for free on the interwebs

2011-11-20T13:11:00.001-05:00

I forget how I stumbled upon this badass resource, but Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute made a "Digital Morphology Museum: an awesome online database of CT scans of sundry primate skeletal parts. Ever wonder what an articulated siamang skeleton looks like? Or whether the flaring bony snout of a mandrill is hollow or filled with bone (below)? If you're a normal person, probably not. But either way, this website provides easy access to the internal views of all sorts of body parts.

Coronal slice through a male mandrill face. You can see a bone-filled lower jaw, internal views of some teeth, the nasal cavity. The pics above and on the right give an idea of where in the skull we are. Note the fat flanks above the nasal cavity are filled with bone (they hollow out as you move further into the face).

What's cool is you can view and manipulate 3D views of these things on the website, or you can register with KUPRI to download the raw CT data. Really a great resource.

A few weeks ago, a paper came out wherein researchers used CT scans to compare the the sides of the nasal opening in skulls of Australopithecus species (Villmoare and Kimbel 2011). They found that although the external nose of the South African Australopithecus africanus and A. robustus appear similar in looking like rounded "pillars," on the inside these pillars differed between the two species. A. africanus's (and the earlier, east African A. afarensis's) nasal pillar was hollow, while A. robustus's was filled with "spongy" bone, like the contemporaneous A. boisei in East Africa. So the early (and "gracile") australopiths had hollow pillars while the later (and "robust") ones had a bony pillar, hmm... It'd be neat to try to see how such bone-filled or hollow pillars develop (i.e. are they hollow in babies but then fill with trabecular bone during growth in the "robust" group? Does this difference arise for functional (e.g. chewing) reasons, or could it be a developmental 'byproduct' of the tall robust australopithecine face [cf. McCollum 1999]).

It's a neat study, and they include lots of great CT images of the hominid sample. But another question arises - what is the inside of the bony nose like in modern primates, and how much variation is there within a species? (NB Villmoare and Kimbel found pretty much no variation within each fossil species, save for two curious examples, but which were based on casts). If I had the time (i.e. weren't dissertation-ating) I'd love to peruse the KUPRI files to see what "pillar" variation is like in, say, chimps (paleoanthropologists' go-to referent species). Cursorily looking at just one (female chimpanzee, left), it looks like the sides of the nose are empty higher up, but then fill with bone to form the tooth socket surrounding the canine root. I'll leave it to someone else to see what the rest look like.

But just lookit what other fun stuff you can see! At the top (anatomically toward the back) are the bone-filled mandibular condyles, beneath (anatomically a bit more toward the front) and between them are the pterygoid plates, and beneath them is a big gross maxillary sinus. Man, if only I had the time, I'd make an anatomy scavenger hunt on this site, and it'd be pretty epic.

Those papers I mentioned
McCollum, M. (1999). The Robust Australopithecine Face: A Morphogenetic Perspective Science, 284 (5412), 301-305 DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5412.301

Villmoare, B., & Kimbel, W. (2011). CT-based study of internal structure of the anterior pillar in extinct hominins and its implications for the phylogeny of robust Australopithecus Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (39), 16200-16205 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1105844108

ARDIPITHECUS BEER!!!

2011-11-12T15:09:00.001-05:00

I just made what what may be the most amazing discovery of the century at a local booze emporium. Dogfish Head brewing company makes a beer whose label is adorned with Jay Matternes's reconstruction of an upright Ardipithecus ramidus. Note that the left foot grasps the earth with it's ape-like big toe.

In a whimsical use of artistic license, whoever adopted this image added a curlicue pig's tail. In animals with a tail, a number of caudal vertebrae continue off the set of fused vertebrae called the sacrum. Humans and other apes don't have true tails but a coccyx, a small clump of tiny, fused vertebral segments. Our tail vestige may not help us hang onto trees like in Ateline monkeys, or sting our enemies like a scorpion, but the coccyx is still pretty important. In people this evolutionary memory of a tail anchors some muscles of the pelvic floor (including sphincter ani externus and levator ani), which are critical for the to control of our bowels.

Below is a close up of the Ardipithecus ramidus pelvis fossils (from White et al. 2009, fig. 3). No coccyx was discovered for Ardi, and little is said about the sacrum, other than that it's merely broken piece of the end of the bone (Lovejoy et al. 2009). Nevertheless, I'm sure this end of sacrum would lead one to reject this artist's hypothesis that Ardipithecus had a tail.

Had I been in charge of labeling at Dogfish Head, the beer would've been called "Party-pithecus" instead of "namaste," and this label would've been slapped on some exotic IPA or porter instead of a wheat beer. Still pretty awesome, though.

Learn about Ardi and its pelvis
Lovejoy, C., Suwa, G., Spurlock, L., Asfaw, B., & White, T. (2009). The Pelvis and Femur of Ardipithecus ramidus: The Emergence of Upright Walking Science, 326 (5949), 71-71 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175831

White, T., Asfaw, B., Beyene, Y., Haile-Selassie, Y., Lovejoy, C., Suwa, G., & WoldeGabriel, G. (2009). Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids Science, 326 (5949), 64-64 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175802

A poor depiction, indeed

2011-11-10T13:12:00.001-05:00

As I've alluded to in some previous posts, in the Spring semester of 2012, I'll be teaching "Anthrbio 297: Human Evo-devo" at the University of Michigan. It should be a really fun and interesting class, examining the role of development in human evolution.

Ernst Haeckel's drawing of embryonic stages in some vertebrates. Taken from Richardson et al. 1997

My department recommends I create a flier that can be posted around campus. One of my first ideas was to adapt a Haeckel's classic illustration of embryos of different animals passing through similar stages in utero (which we know today isn't exactly correct; Richardson et al. 1997), but spin it to include primates and fossil humans. I started sketching it out (very crudely), but kept getting distracted with my pitiful attempts at multitasking. When I stopped zoning out, I was aghast to find my adaptation had taken a peculiar turn.

I won't quit my day job.
More about vertebrate embryology
Richardson, M., Hanken, J., Gooneratne, M., Pieau, C., Raynaud, A., Selwood, L., & Wright, G. (1997). There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development Anatomy and Embryology, 196 (2), 91-106 DOI: 10.1007/s004290050082

We should not try to clone Neandertals

2011-11-08T16:11:00.000-05:00

Interesting that right after I posted about fossils, genotypes and phenotypes, the Leakey Foundation (via Twitter) posts a link to a discussion about cloning Neandertals in order to learn about the genetic bases of human uniqueness. It begins innocently enough, stating that the genotype-phenotype comparisons between humans and the Neandertal Frankenstein could lead us to insights about our genetic predispositions to certain pathogens. Sure, why not. But then this happens (emphases mine):

"Yet, further discussion with [Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church] revealed an even more interesting benefit. Dr. Church thinks the cloning of a Neanderthal would encourage us to have a greater appreciation for and sensitivity to what he terms "neural diversity." He believes that by listening to the thoughts of a cloned Neanderthal, who might seem foreign and unusual to us, greater anti-discrimination and de-stigmatization efforts on behalf of those people whose actions are usually considered outside the range of "normal" human behavior might result. These would include individuals diagnosed with dyslexia, narcolepsy, autism, and bipolar disorders."

Dr. Church belies his own statements of concern for ethics and people's rights. "Neandertal" has historically been synonymous with ideas of what is ugly, stupid and an anthropological Other (i.e. unlike and less than human), and Church seems to follow this. However, decades of archaeology show us that Neandertals were probably just as capable of complex thinking as recent humans Neandertals buried their dead. Italian Neandertals over 40 thousand years ago appear to have made symbolic use of feathers (Peresani et al. 2011). We also know that the hearing range of the Sima de los Huesos hominids was probably tuned to frequencies used in human speech (Martinez et al. 2004). In addition, the presence of the human-derived FOXP2 gene in Neandertals (Krause et al. 2007) suggests (but of course does not prove) that they could, and probably did, speak to one another with language.

Neandertals were not dumb, so there's no a priori reason to think that reanimating Neandertal consciousness would provide us with novel insights into a 'neural other.' Worse, by equating people who have forms of cognitive/neural impairment with Neandertals, Church (probably inadvertently) otherizes the people he hopes we stop otherizing. Why the hell would a Neandertal clone - a being whose existence is solely an experiment to show us what makes us human based on what's not like the clone - make us treat differently-abled people better? Worse, what to do if Neandertal shows no cognitive impairments whatsoever? Have Eegah and Encino Man taught us nothing?!

And then there's the icing on the cake:

"Chicago-Kent College Law Professor Lori Andrews has stated unequivocally that Neanderthals should be accorded all forms of human rights."

Good, I was very worried about that. Luckily, I don't think any normal review board (or the FDA) would approve Neandertal cloning in the first place.

UPDATE: Obviously, "Prehistoric Ice Man" (1999), the last episode of the 2nd season of Southpark, provides further reasons not to bring cave-persons of the past into the present day.

References
Krause, J., Lalueza-Fox, C., Orlando, L., Enard, W., Green, R., Burbano, H., Hublin, J., Hänni, C., Fortea, J., de la Rasilla, M., Bertranpetit, J., Rosas, A., & Pääbo, S. (2007). The Derived FOXP2 Variant of Modern Humans Was Shared with Neandertals Current Biology, 17 (21), 1908-1912 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2007.10.008

Martinez, I. (2004). Auditory capacities in Middle Pleistocene humans from the Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101 (27), 9976-9981 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0403595101

Peresani, M., Fiore, I., Gala, M., Romandini, M., & Tagliacozzo, A. (2011). Late Neandertals and the intentional removal of feathers as evidenced from bird bone taphonomy at Fumane Cave 44 ky B.P., Italy Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (10), 3888-3893 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016212108

Sterling, J. "Concerns over the cloning of a Neanderthal." GEN News. 02 November 2011. http://bit.ly/uGAnRK

Leopard horse: Fossils, phenotypes and genotypes

2011-11-08T08:59:00.000-05:00

I wish I were talking about some beastly horse-big-cat hybrid, or at least a carnivorous horse. Instead... a ton of anthropology-related papers came out today in PNAS, and possibly the coolest one is a study that compares the DNA of Pleistocene fossil and modern horses with different coat colors/patterns, and then ties this in with Paleolithic cave art. A crazy confluence of four-field anthropology right there.

Modern horses and their depictions in Late Pleistocene French caves (Pruvost et al. 2011)

Melanie Pruvost and colleagues (in press) noted that the depiction of spotted horses at the site of Pech-Merle (they give 24 kya) could mean one of two things: (1) either the early human painters were depicting horses they actually saw on the landscape at the time, or (2) they were just being fanciful and frivolous, creative and carefree with their cavern canvas. Now, some modern horse breeds have a similar spotted, "leopard" phenotype, and a genetic basis for this is understood. So Pruvost and pals examined DNA from fossil horse bones from European sites dating to 20 - 2 kya to see if these mottled mares roamed the lands of the cave-painters. Sure enough, several samples show evidence for the mutation causing leopard spots.

This is pretty cool for evolutionary biology and paleontology. A major question in biology is how an individual's genes (genotype) relate to overall appearance/behavior (phenotype). To a certain extent, physical variation between organisms arises from genetic variation, so when we see things evolve through the fossil record, this ought to correspond with some genetic changes as well. But linking genes to appearances isn't so easy (especially for extinct animals). Pruvost and colleagues' study is a step in this direction, though. Plus, the recent sequencing of the fossil Neandertal (Green et al. 2010) and Denisovan (Reich et al. 2010) genomes makes it possible to try to figure out if/how humans' unique physical traits reflect our genes. In fact, even before these genomes were fully sequenced, Carles Lalueza-Fox and team (2007) identified a mutation on Neandertals' MC1R gene, strongly suggesting the Neandertals sampled had light skin and red hair.

But the genetic basis for skeletal phenotypes is harder to discern. For example, Green et al. (2010) identified the unique human version of the RUNX2 gene as having come under strong natural selection since the disappearance of Neandertals. The authors noted that because mutations of RUNX2 in humans are associated with a cleidocranial dysplasia affecting the form of the skull and shoulders, and because humans and Neandertals differ in some aspects of their skulls and shoulders, then RUNX2 variation between humans and Neandertals is likely related to visible differences in their skeletons. But that's about as much as could be said at the moment - RUNX2 is involved in bony development of the entire skeleton, interacting with other various genes in various places during ontogeny. So while it's tempting, it's still a little early to link RUNX2, or pretty much any other development-related gene, with physical differences between humans and our fossil relatives. But one day!

A Neandertal's ruddy locks have never preserved in the fossil record, but its bones are very well known. In an ironic twist, we may have a better understanding of the genetic basis of variation in a soft-tissue (for which there are no fossils), than we do for the skeleton (for which we have lots of fossils).

And maybe one day I'll get that leopard horse I was hoping for.

References
Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M., Hansen, N., Durand, E., Malaspinas, A., Jensen, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Prufer, K., Meyer, M., Burbano, H., Good, J., Schultz, R., Aximu-Petri, A., Butthof, A., Hober, B., Hoffner, B., Siegemund, M., Weihmann, A., Nusbaum, C., Lander, E., Russ, C., Novod, N., Affourtit, J., Egholm, M., Verna, C., Rudan, P., Brajkovic, D., Kucan, Z., Gusic, I., Doronichev, V., Golovanova, L., Lalueza-Fox, C., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Schmitz, R., Johnson, P., Eichler, E., Falush, D., Birney, E., Mullikin, J., Slatkin, M., Nielsen, R., Kelso, J., Lachmann, M., Reich, D., & Paabo, S. (2010). A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome Science, 328 (5979), 710-722 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021

Pruvost, M., Bellone, R., Benecke, N., Sandoval-Castellanos, E., Cieslak, M., Kuznetsova, T., Morales-Muniz, A., O'Connor, T., Reissmann, M., Hofreiter, M., & Ludwig, A. (2011). Genotypes of predomestic horses match phenotypes painted in Paleolithic works of cave art Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1108982108

Reich, D., Green, R., Kircher, M., Krause, J., Patterson, N., Durand, E., Viola, B., Briggs, A., Stenzel, U., Johnson, P., Maricic, T., Good, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Fu, Q., Mallick, S., Li, H., Meyer, M., Eichler, E., Stoneking, M., Richards, M., Talamo, S., Shunkov, M., Derevianko, A., Hublin, J., Kelso, J., Slatkin, M., & Pääbo, S. (2010). Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia Nature, 468 (7327), 1053-1060 DOI: 10.1038/nature09710

Inanimate fossils getting older still

2011-11-06T21:15:00.000-05:00

Two reports came out last week in the journal Nature, re-dating some European human fossils to before 40 thousand years ago (kya), a few thousand years older than previous evidence for modern-looking people in the region. The media have been reporting these studies as revealing "the first Europeans," but of course we all know that the first Europeans were the badass hominids, my favorites, from the 1.8 million year old site of Dmanisi.

KC4 maxilla (Higham et al. 2011)

From Kent's Cavern (United Kingdom) is a partial maxilla, now dated to 44 - 41 kya* (Higham et al. 2011; but see below). The jaw fragment with highly worn teeth was found just above some Aurignacian-like (Upper Paleolithic) blades in 1927. [NB below these 2 blades were 2 other blades of a tool "complex...tentatively associated with Neandertals] The laughable amount of bone makes it rather impossible to say whether the fossil represents a Neandertal or more modern-looking human. The authors examined what little of the morphology was left and concluded that the fossil shared the most similarities with recent humans but only a few with Neandertals. A more rigorous analysis of what this mix of traits means would have been nice (i.e. why would an individual have derived traits of both 'modern' humans and Neandertals?). The researchers tried to extract DNA for analysis, but apparently organic remains were too poorly preserved for a good analysis. Bummer.

Cavallo B and C (Benazzi et al. 2011)

A similar older-than-we-thought story is reported by Stefano Benazzi and buddies, who reanalyzed teeth from the Italian site of Grotta del Cavallo (left). After the site was excavated in 1967, the teeth were attributed to Neandertals and the lithics classified as "Uluzzian." I would be a dirty liar if I said knew anything about the "Uluzzian" industry (try this other site which may be more informative), but apparently it's seen as transitional between the Neandertal-associated Mousterian and 'more advanced' Upper Paleolithic toolkits. So this assemblage could be used to argue that Neandertals were smart enough to upgrade to a sexier stone tool industry shortly before their anatomy (but not their genes!) disappeared. BUT! also like in Kent's Cavern paper, Benazzi and colleagues examined what little morphology is preserved in the fossil teeth, and (re)assigned them to modern-looking humans. The authors provided nice qualitative and quantitative arguments for the human status of the teeth, though again I have to raise caution that these are only teeth and we have no idea what the rest of the skeleton would have looked like. Researchers also analyzed shells associated with the now-human teeth and dated the site to around 44 kya, making them the oldest probably-human remains in Europe.

Now, according to conventional wisdom, the Neandertals were dullards who made and used the Mousterian stone tool industry. The Mousterian was nice and all, but not nearly as wicked-pisser as the smart and sassy modern-looking humans' Aurignacian toolkit. The thing is, though, there really hasn't been really a lot of evidence unequivocally linking modern-looking fossils with Aurignacian artifacts. So both of the recent studies in Nature lend support to the idea that maybe modern humans were the sole makers (and users) of an advanced stone tool industry. But it's important to remember [1] that the blades 'associated' with the Kent's Cavern jaw can't really be definitively attributed to a stone tool industry; [2] the blades were deeper in the cave than the jaw, and so may actually be appreciably older than the jaw; and [3] while the teeth from Kent's Cavern and Cavallo do look most comparable to those belonging to 'anatomically' modern humans, we don't know what the skulls or skeletons containing the teeth looked like. All that said, it's neat to see the possible appearance of certain anatomy and technology in Europe thousands of years earlier than previously thought. It also re-raises the issue of the degree to which modern-looking humans and Neandertals overlapped in space and time, and what these interactions would have been like (I'd guess terrifying, hilarious and/or sexy).

KC4 originally
(Higham et al. 2011)

A fun lesson also comes from the Kent's Cavern study. Higham and colleagues report that the KC4 human maxilla was excavated in 1927 and analyzed by Sir Arthur Keith, a well-trained anatomist and paleoanthropologist famous in his day. Keith described the fossil as containing a canine, second premolar and first molar (right, compare with above). Higham and colleagues, however, noticed that what Keith described as a second premolar was in fact a first premolar. The teeth are so worn they mostly lack information about their form and features, so this mistake probably didn't really mislead anatomists in any way. Still, it goes to show that even experts like Keith can make mistakes or overlook the things they know best, and this is not the first time I've seen this happen with fossils. So always (politely) question those giants whose shoulders you're standing upon.

*Update (07 Nov): John Hawks points out that the KC4 maxilla itself was not used to obtain the older radiocarbon age estimate. In 1989 the maxilla was directly dated to around 30 kya, over 10 ky younger than the new estimates. Higham and friends thought this date was too young, based on methodological grounds. An attempt to redate the KC4 maxilla based on one of the teeth yielded too little collagen (organic material) to produce a date. Bummer again! The new estimate is instead based on radiocarbon dates obtained from animal bones that were excavated from above and below the human jaw. So this 'redating' of the Kent's Cavern maxilla is very interesting, but should be taken with a grain of salt.

See for yourself
Benazzi, S., Douka, K., Fornai, C., Bauer, C., Kullmer, O., Svoboda, J., Pap, I., Mallegni, F., Bayle, P., Coquerelle, M., Condemi, S., Ronchitelli, A., Harvati, K., & Weber, G. (2011). Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behaviour Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature10617

Higham, T., Compton, T., Stringer, C., Jacobi, R., Shapiro, B., Trinkaus, E., Chandler, B., Gröning, F., Collins, C., Hillson, S., O’Higgins, P., FitzGerald, C., & Fagan, M. (2011). The earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans in northwestern Europe Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature10484

And so the plot thickens

2011-10-31T23:59:00.001-04:00

"These results suggest admixture between Denisovans or a Denisova-related population and the ancestors of East Asians, and that the history of anatomically modern and archaic humans might be more complex than previously proposed."

I'm sure it will turn out to be more complex still. Onward and upward!

"Freely available online through the PNAS open access option."
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/10/24/1108181108.abstract

Sweet!

Here you go
Skoglund P and Jakobsson M. Archaic human ancestry in East Asia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in press. doi:10.1073/pnas.1108181108.

Dmanisi Homo erectus: I'll have what she's having

2011-10-26T00:30:00.000-04:00

Speaking of diet in fossil humans ... Herman Pontzer and buddies just published a brief analysis of fine-scale tooth wear in the Dmanisi Homo erectus specimens.

Source: http://bit.ly/uD1LWo

Teeth are useful as hell in life. Humans' teeth are critical not only for eating, sporting a sexy smile, and biting people (right), but also for speech and song ("f," "th" and "v" sounds). Some parents even harvest their childrens' exfoliated baby teeth. The things we do with teeth.

Teeth are also really useful for studying long-dead people and animals - teeth may preserve pretty well for millions of years, they can be used to estimate an individual's age-at-death, and their shape and composition can be used to learn about diet. In a vile act of revenge, the food that sustains us also scrawls its Nom Hancock into the surfaces of our teeth. So, scientists can study the microscopic marks (= "microwear") on tooth surfaces to see what kinds of foods were eaten shortly before death. Peter Ungar, an author of the current paper, has done a lot of work here, and his website is worth checking out if you're interested in learning more. Microwear can't really tell you exactly what an animal was eating, but can tell you whether the animal mostly ate grasses, leaves, hard objects like nuts, and so forth.

So Pontzer and colleagues (in press) examined the microwear on some of the lower molars of the youngest members of the nearly 1.8 million year old (Ferring et al. 2011) Homo erectus group from Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. To the left is a picture of the jaws, from the paper (from another paper. How meta of me). The microwear patterns of these badass early humans fit cozily within the variation exhibited by other Homo erectus specimens.

Microwear in Homo erectus is pretty variable, but still rather distinct from other fossil groups like robust Australopithecus, and a little less distinct from their putative ancestor H. habilis. This suggests that something special about Homo erectus was the species' great dietary breadth - Homo erectus' key to colonial and evolutionary success might not have been the adoption of a key dietary resource, but rather the ability to utilize a wide range of food resources. Atkins diet be damned. What's neat is that the Dmanisi hominids, though kind of primitive (Australopithecus-like) in terms of brain size and some aspects of skull shape, nevertheless demonstrated key behaviors of H. erectus, namely colonization (Dmanisi is the oldest reliably-dated hominid site outside Africa), and dietary flexibility. This really suggests the success of our ancestors was due to some behavioral innovation, aside from advances in stone tool technology.

Source: http://bit.ly/vCTfeR

Now, these Dmanisi H. erectus kids' teeth wore like other H. erectus, and it would be reasonable to infer that this is because they ate similar foods. This makes it all the more mysterious that the other Dmanisi jaws, from older adults, have teeth completely worn to shit (sorry to swear). D3444/3900 (left) are the cranium/mandible of an individual who was missing all their teeth, except maybe a lower canine - the earliest example of edentulism in the human fossil record (Lordkipanidze et al. 2005). D2600 (below) is a very large mandible with teeth so worn that the pearly-white first-molar crowns were gone and the internal pulp cavity (and nerve) were exposed. (Interestingly, D2600 is so large that some researchers initially argued it represented a different species from the other jaws - yet Adam Van Arsdale presented evidence that this extreme tooth wear may actually be responsible for making jaws relatively taller in early humans).

Source: http://bit.ly/u6bk6h

So what's curious is why the older Dmanisi hominids should show such an extreme amount of tooth wear compared to other H. erectus, but microwear on the young suggests their diet was the same (that is, just as diverse in texture) as others in the species. Was Dmanisi-level tooth wear (and tooth loss) comparable to other H. erectus, and we just happen not to have found them at other sites? (KNM-ER 730 from Kenya is the next-most worn early Homo that next comes to mind) Is there another aspect of diet we don't know about, that caused the Dmanisi teeth to wear especially quickly? Or were these early Homo from Dmanisi actually living longer than other H. erectus? I suspect the second is more likely, but that's a hypothesis that remains to be tested.

Read more, dammit!

Ferring, R., Oms, O., Agusti, J., Berna, F., Nioradze, M., Shelia, T., Tappen, M., Vekua, A., Zhvania, D., & Lordkipanidze, D. (2011). From the Cover: Earliest human occupations at Dmanisi (Georgian Caucasus) dated to 1.85-1.78 Ma Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (26), 10432-10436 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1106638108

Lordkipanidze, D., Vekua, A., Ferring, R., Rightmire, G., Agusti, J., Kiladze, G., Mouskhelishvili, A., Nioradze, M., de León, M., Tappen, M., & Zollikofer, C. (2005). Anthropology: The earliest toothless hominin skull Nature, 434 (7034), 717-718 DOI: 10.1038/434717b

Pontzer H, Scott JR, Lordkipanidze D, Ungar PS. In press. Dental microwear texture analysis and diet in the Dmanisi hominins, Journal of Human Evolution (2011). DOI:10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.08.006

Data, development and diets

2011-10-23T13:51:00.001-04:00

As mentioned briefly but repeatedly on this blog, my dissertation is about growth of the lower jaw in Australopithecus robustus (right), comparing it with jaw growth in recent humans. This is important because we don't really know exactly how skeletal-dental (especially skeletal) maturation of our fossil relatives compares with us today. From a developmental perspective, it is also important to know how and when adult form arises during growth, and how these processes vary within and between species.

It's not easy to examine ontogeny in fossil samples. In a post a few weeks ago I included a drawing of some of the A. robustus juvenile jaws. At the time, I was pointing out variation in dental maturity (which is a nice thing when studying growth), but the picture also reveals a bigger bugbear - variable preservation of features (which is a terrible thing if you're trying to study growth).

For example, the youngest individual in the fossil sample (right, viewed from above, front is at the top of the picture) includes only the second baby molar tooth, a bit of the bone surrounding the sides and back of the tooth, and a small portion of the ascending ramus. The oldest subadult in the sample (SKW 5), on the other hand, is almost entirely complete. In between these ages, jaws variously preserve different parts. Under these circumstances (i.e. lots of missing data), growth cannot be studied by traditional (namely, multivariate) methods (how I will deal with this is a topic for another day).

So while studying the fossils in South Africa, in order to maximize the number of comparisons I could possibly make, I measured just about every single linear dimension conceivable on these jaws. I thus have a spreadsheet with 300 columns of measurements I could take on each specimen. Most of the cells are empty : (

What's a boy to do?! In order to compare A. robustus with humans, I need to take the same measurements on a growth series of human jaws, too. But life is short, and if I want to finish this project before I succumb to some sinister signature of senescence, I really can't take hundreds of measurements on a human sample which is much larger than the fossils. Plus, a lot of the individual measurements are a bit redundant: some of the distances overlap, many of the variables can be taken on the right and the left sides, etc.

If I am to finish collecting data in a reasonable time frame, I need to cull my variables from 300 to however many (a) maximizes the comparisons I can make within the less-complete A. robustus sample, and (b) are not too repetitive. Boo. Plus I have to get these spreadsheets ready to be read and analyzed in the program R, which for whatever reason is always a pain in the ass.

Again, the statistics of the overall comparisons is a topic for another day, and I haven't had the opportunity yet to write the analytical program(s). But I have looked at some individual traits in A. robustus compared with a subsample of humans. For example, at the left is a plot of changes in height of the jaw at the baby second molar or adult second premolar (which replaces the baby molar). Obviously my human sample is way to small at the moment to make any really meaningful statements about how growth compares between the two species. Note also that these are absolute measures and not size-corrected, and that these are stages of dental eruption rather than chronological ages. But from this preliminary view, the two species are very similar up to around when the first adult molar comes in ("stage 4" here). Thereafter, the A. robustus individuals dramatically increase in size rather fast, whereas humans only slowly increase in size.

Again, this is a very preliminary result, and only for a single measurement. But it is interesting in light of a recent study by Megan Holmes and Christopher Ruff (2011). These researchers compared jaw growth recent humans who differed in the consistency of their diets. They found that kids in the two populations were not too different, but the samples became more different with age to become fairly different as adults. Now, A. robustus seems to have eaten a diet with lots of hard objects (see recent review by Peter Ungar and Matt Spohneimer), but humans' diet (and technology) really obviates the need for chewing as powerful as seen in A. robustus. So this dietary divergence may well be reflected in the growth difference suggested above, but it may not be the sole factor. PLUS I NEED TO INCREASE MY HUMAN SAMPLE.

Stay tuned for more analyses and results!

References to make you smarter and stronger
Holmes, M., & Ruff, C. (2011). Dietary effects on development of the human mandibular corpus American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 145 (4), 615-628 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21554

Ungar, P., & Sponheimer, M. (2011) The Diets of Early Hominins. Science 334(6053), 190-193. DOI: 10.1126/science.1207701

Genetic basis of disgusting

2011-10-13T10:03:00.000-04:00

The genome of the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber, below right) has been sequenced (Kim et al. 2011), shedding insight into how mammalian evolution made gross.

Here are some factoids about these murine monsters, from a nice editorial accompanying the research paper in Nature. These critters live in underground colonies - because who could suffer to see them on the surface? These bald rats are unique among mammals in that they are "eusocial" like bees or ants. Also like bees and ants, a colony has a single, breeding "queen" in the group, whose mere presence prevents other female mole rats from becoming sexually mature. When a queen dies, females fight for the vacant throne. When one wins and becomes the new queen, she subsequently undergoes a "growth spurt," becoming up to 80% heavier and dramatically lengthening her lower spine (Dengler-Crish and Catania 2007; figure below) - a marvel of phenotypic plasticity. These rats dwell in crowded, dirty tunnels low in light and oxygen; it's kind of like Los Angeles. Plus, they can live for up to 30 years, which is an amazingly long time for an animal so small you can hold in it your hand. They are also apparently resistant to cancer and to some kinds of pain and itching. So, so strange.

With only one female contributing half a generation's genes, you can imagine the shamelessly-naked mole rats are a little more inbred than most of us. In spite of this potential drag to genetic variation (and thereby natural selection), the naked mole rat genome demonstrates a number of adaptations to the species' peculiar lifestyle. For example, the genes TEP1 and TERF1, which have been implicated in determining the lengths of the ends of chromosomes ("telomeres"), show evidence of positive natural selection in the mole rat. Kim and colleagues (2011: 2) say their analyses "point to altered telomerase function ... which may be related to its evolution of extended lifespan and cancer resistance." Cancer resistance!? I think the paper's final paragraph (p. 4) lays out nicely what's most important about research into the genome of this most ghastly rodent:

To summarize, sequencing and analysis of the [naked mole rat] genome revealed numerous insights into the biology of this remarkable animal. In addition, this genome and the associated data sets offer the research communities working in ageing, cancer, eusociality and many other areas a rich resource that can be mined in numerous ways to uncover the molecular bases for the extraordinary traits of this most unusual mammal. In turn, this information provides unprecedented opportunities for addressing some of the most challenging questions in biology and medicine, such as mechanisms of ageing, the role of genetic makeup in regulating lifespan, adaptations to extreme environments, hypoxia tolerance, thermogenesis, resistance to cancer, circadian rhythms, sexual development and hormonal regulation.

It's not news that Life on Earth can be pretty weird sometimes. Understanding how Life became and becomes weird can provide us with tools to make life better for people.

Things I cited
Anonymous (2011). More than teeth. Nature, 478 (7368), 156-156 DOI: 10.1038/478156a

Dengler-Crish, C., & Catania, K. (2007). Phenotypic plasticity in female naked mole-rats after removal from reproductive suppression Journal of Experimental Biology, 210 (24), 4351-4358 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.009399

Kim, E., Fang, X., Fushan, A., Huang, Z., Lobanov, A., Han, L., Marino, S., Sun, X., Turanov, A., Yang, P., Yim, S., Zhao, X., Kasaikina, M., Stoletzki, N., Peng, C., Polak, P., Xiong, Z., Kiezun, A., Zhu, Y., Chen, Y., Kryukov, G., Zhang, Q., Peshkin, L., Yang, L., Bronson, R., Buffenstein, R., Wang, B., Han, C., Li, Q., Chen, L., Zhao, W., Sunyaev, S., Park, T., Zhang, G., Wang, J., & Gladyshev, V. (2011). Genome sequencing reveals insights into physiology and longevity of the naked mole rat. Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature10533

Variation 2: The female with the flamboyant and massive male

2011-10-11T14:50:00.001-04:00

Continuing my investigation into stages of individual development, I've stumbled upon a study of the maturation of semi-wild mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx). Mandrills are one of the most visually striking species of Primates (check out this beastly male to the right), and exemplars of the power of Sexual Selection.

Sexual selection is a special subtype of Natural Selection, where the within-species competition here isn't so much for survival (as in natural selection) but more specifically for reproduction. Sexual selection is believed to be responsible for many differences between the sexes: male primates often (but not always!) have much larger bodies and canine teeth than females, traits that can be beneficial when competing with other males for access to female mates. And/or females may prefer larger-bodied or -canined males for whatever reason. In accord with the power of female preferences, sexual selection is invoked to explain why males of many species are so wildly colored or ornamented.

So mandrills are perhaps the best example of sexual selection in primates. Males' faces, butts and genitals are brightly colored, spanning the spectrum from blood-red to nearly bioluminescent blue. Conceivably, at some point in mandrills' evolutionary history most males were drab-colored, but then who comes riding into town on a silver stallion but a mutant male who was more colossal and colorful than the rest, and females were like, "OMG did you see that variegated guy? I want him so bad," and as a result, this male reproduced more, and the rest of the story writes itself. Coloration may actually communicate information to females about the health or dominance status of the male (e.g. Setchell 2004). I wish I had the time to investigate the physiological bases of how their hair and skin can produce such colors. To revolutionize the tattoo industry.

Mandrills are also remarkable in how much larger males are than females, in terms of canines (Plavcan and van Schaik 1992), molars (Scott et al. 2009) and body size (Wickings and Dixson 1992). And this brings me to my original thought.

The plot to the right tracks growth in body mass (in kilograms) of male and female mandrills (Wickings and Dixson 1992: 132, fig. 1). The male is the top line and the females the bottom one. The arrows indicate timing of sexual maturity. Holy crap, by the time males are sexually mature, they are about 3 times the body mass of females.

The union of the ~25 lb female with the seemingly-paint-splattered, 75 lb male must be a truly terrifying sight.

Things I cited

Plavcan, J., & van Schaik, C. (1992). Intrasexual competition and canine dimorphism in anthropoid primates American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 87 (4), 461-477 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330870407

Scott JE, Schrein CM, & Kelley J (2009). Beyond Gorilla and Pongo: alternative models for evaluating variation and sexual dimorphism in fossil hominoid samples. American journal of physical anthropology, 140 (2), 253-64 PMID: 19358294

Setchell, J. (2005). Do Female Mandrills Prefer Brightly Colored Males? International Journal of Primatology, 26 (4), 715-735 DOI: 10.1007/s10764-005-5305-7

Wickings, E., & Dixson, A. (1992). Development from birth to sexual maturity in a semi-free-ranging colony of mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) in Gabon Reproduction, 95 (1), 129-138 DOI: 10.1530/jrf.0.0950129

Variation: a blessing and a curse

2011-10-10T23:54:00.000-04:00

Trying to start on finishing my dissertation, I'm thinking about the issue dental development and how it relates to skeletal growth. Specifically I'm trying to decide whether I want to analyze my human and Australopithecus robustus samples based on estimates of "dental age," or if I want to be a bit more cavalier and divide the sample into rougher age categories.

To avoid copyright issues, here's a crappy picture I drew a few years ago, of the youngest A. robustus jaws. The youngest, "SK 438" is erupting its last baby tooth (bottom right), while the others have their full set of baby teeth, and none of them has its first adult tooth yet. I don't think I can estimate ages accurately enough to capture the true chronological difference between SK 438 and the rest. Would I be better off just dividing the group into "younger" (SK 438) and "older" (the rest) infants, or even lumping them all together as simply "infants"?

On the one hand, I could assign individuals a chronological age based on a modern referent of known age, at similar stages of dental development. This could allow me to get more fine-scale glimpses into patterns of growth in my samples, but that's assuming I've accurately estimated their ages. Individuals vary in the ages and sizes at which their teeth erupt; a person's first molar, for example, may erupt at anywhere from 4-8 years of age. How can I estimate an individual's age in light of such variation? And what if I'm as poor a judge of ages as Dennis Duffy?! Conceivably I could program my analysis to account for error estimation (which in itself could be educational and interesting, but is it worth the trouble?), but this would also add a further source of uncertainty. And it's like Dwight Schrute said (Michael Scott said), "K-I-S-S: keep it simple, stupid. Great advice, hurts my feelings every time."

On the other hand, I could divide my sample into coarse age categories - say, putting specimens who've attained a given level of dental development in the same group, such as 'infant, child, juvenile, adolescent, and young adult.' This method loses the temporal resolution of the first method, but also avoids the possible errors of assigning strict ages I'm pretty sure I would not infer accurately. But, tooth development does not show a clean 1-to-1 relationship with other systems in the body, such as hormonal axes or the bony skeleton. It's uncertain how accurately kids can be put in any of the above categories (based on general life history variables; Bogin 1999) based on dental development.

Choices, choices.

Variation is a problem for biologists. The theory of evolution was conceived as a way to explain the conundrum of why there is such remarkable variation in the forms of life that Earth is lucky to have harbored. The problem of within-species variation in the relative timing of skeletal and dental development isn't just a bug-bear for paleoanthropologists. It's important to medical doctors and pathologists investigating genetically-based developmental disorders, and to epidemiologists looking at aspects of population health, such as the prevalence of growth stunting. It's also important for forensics specialists who need to use biological clues about the age and identity of crime victims and defendants. I mean, how else would we know whether Jon Voight bit both Kramer and this pencil?

The silver lining, I suppose, on this storm-cloud of biological of variation is that without variation there cannot be evolution. And stasis is boring. If nothing changed since the Cambrian, none of us would be here today. We'd probably be some gross stupid monstrous thing, like this Hallucigenia to the right. It's the quirks and weird variants that arise randomly, that make evolution possible. If individuals all developed exactly the same, then all organisms through all time would be the exact same, and probably all would have gone extinct as they succumbed to some sinister fate, no new variants would have arisen that may have been able to survive the devastation.

So variation is a blessing and a curse. Individual and population variation make it difficult to state norms such as what is "average" or "healthy," and nothing to be concerned about. Variation is also the magic ingredient of adaptation, without which Life could not survive the randomness inherent in any environment.

Things I cited
Bogin, B. (1999). Evolutionary perspective on human growth Annual Review of Anthropology, 28 (1), 109-153 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.109

Also 30 Rock, The Office and Seinfeld. Well done, NBC.

Pictures worth thousands of words and dollars

2011-09-25T18:52:00.000-04:00

Looking into subdural empyema, which is a meningeal infection you don't want, I stumbled upon a study from the roaring 1970s - the glorious Nixon-Ford-Carter years - using computerized axial tomography (hence, CAT scan) to visualize lesions within the skull (Claveria et al. 1976). Nowadays people refer to various similar scanning techniques simply as "CT" (for computed tomography, though this is not exactly the same as magnetic resonance imaging, MRI).

It's pretty amazing how medical imaging has advanced in the 35 years since this study. For example, to the right is a CAT scan from Claveria et al. (1976, Fig. 4). These are transverse images ("slices") through the brain case, the top of the images corresponding to the front of the face. You can discern the low-density (darker) brain from the higher density (lighter) bone - the sphenoid lesser wings and dorsum sellae, and petrous pyramids of the temporal bones are especially prominent in the top left image. In the bottom two images you can see a large, round abscess in the middle cranial fossa. Whoa.

What makes this medical imaging technique so great is that it allows a view inside of things without having to dissect into them. Of course, the downside is that it relies on radiation, so ethically you can't be so cavalier as to CT scan just any living thing. If I'd been alive in 1976, CAT scanning would've blown my mind. Still, the image quality isn't super great here, there's not good resolution between materials of different densities, hence the grainy images.

But since then, some really smart people have been hard at work to come up with new ways to get better resolution from computerized tomography scans, and the results are pretty amazing. To the left is a slice from a synchrotron CT scan of the MH1 Australopithecus sediba skull (Carlson et al. 2011, Supporting on line material, Fig. S10). You're basically seeing the fossil face-to-face ... if someone had cut of the first few centimeters of the fossil's face. Just like the movie Face Off.

Quite a difference from the image above. Here, we can distinguish fossilized bone from the rocky matrix filling in the orbit, brain case and sinuses. Synchrotron even distinguishes molar tooth enamel from the underlying dentin (see the square). The post-mortem distortion to the (camera right) orbit is clear. It also looks as though the hard palate is thick and filled with trabecular bone, as is characteristic of robust Australopithecus (McCollum 1999). Interesting...

Even more remarkable, the actual histological structure of bone can be imaged with synchrotron imaging. Mature cortical bone is comprised of these small osteons (or Haversian systems), that house bone cells and transmit blood vessels to help keep bone alive and healthy. Osteons are very tiny, submillimetric. To the right is a 3D reconstruction of an osteon and blood vessels, from synchrotron images (Cooper et al. 2011). The scale bar in the bottom right is 250 micrometers. MICROmeters! Note the scan can distinguish the Haversian canal (red part in B-C) from vessels (white part in B). Insane!

Not only has image quality improved over the past few decades, but CT scanning is being applied outside the field of medicine for which it was developed; it's becoming quite popular in anthropology. What I'd like to do, personally, with such imaging is see if it can be used to study bone morphogenesis - if it can be used to distinguish bone deposition vs. resorption, and to see how these growth fields are distributed across a bone during ontogeny. This could allow the study the proximate, cellular causes of skeletal form, how this form arises through growth and development. If it could be applied to fossils, then we could potentially even see how these growth fields are altered over the course of evolution: how form evolves.

References
Carlson KJ, Stout D, Jashashvili T, de Ruiter DJ, Tafforeau P, Carlson K, & Berger LR (2011). The endocast of MH1, Australopithecus sediba. Science (New York, N.Y.), 333 (6048), 1402-7 PMID: 21903804

Claveria, L., Boulay, G., & Moseley, I. (1976). Intracranial infections: Investigation by computerized axial tomography Neuroradiology, 12 (2), 59-71 DOI: 10.1007/BF00333121

Cooper, D., Erickson, B., Peele, A., Hannah, K., Thomas, C., & Clement, J. (2011). Visualization of 3D osteon morphology by synchrotron radiation micro-CT Journal of Anatomy, 219 (4), 481-489 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2011.01398.x

McCollum, M. (1999). The Robust Australopithecine Face: A Morphogenetic Perspective Science, 284 (5412), 301-305 DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5412.301

Teaching next summer

2011-09-25T12:51:00.002-04:00

When I was working at Dmanisi this summer, I used a lot of my free time to develop a course on human evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo. I submitted this to my department, and I'm excited to announce that I'll be teaching this class at U of M in Spring 2012. So if you're at UM and want to take a badass class exploring the evolution and development of the human body, keep an eye out for this new anthropology offering (NB I need to come up with a catchy title for the class still).

The tentative textbook for the class will be Lewis Held's Quirks of Human Anatomy: An Evo-Devo Look at the Human Body, which I just got in the mail yesterday. It got very good reviews and should be an interesting read, and with just under 3000 references it has a pretty useful bibliography, too. I'm really looking forward to reading this, and even the first page of the preface points to something promising:

"In Chapter 13 of Origin, Darwin asserted that the evidence from embryology alone was strong enough to convince him of the principle of common descent. Human embryos make many structures we don't need, and we destroy others after we've gone to the trouble of making them. No engineer in his right mind would ever allow such idiocy."

I can't wait to read about these idiocies.

Teaching is an important part of my work, but I'll admit that sometimes I'd rather be doing other things than preparing lessons, assignments and such. I have to say, though, I've had a lot of fun preparing this class so far. I'll keep you posted about what I think of the book and how the course-planning comes along.

[insert clever quip about australopithecus hips]

2011-09-18T21:03:00.000-04:00

A week and a half ago, Kibii and colleagues (2011) published reconstructions and re-analyses of two hips belonging to the 1.98 million-year old Australopithecus sediba. As with many fossil discoveries, these additions to the fossil record raise more questions than they answer. Unless the question was, "did A. sediba have a pelvis?" It did. Here's a good summary from the paper itself:

Thus, Au. sediba is australopith-like in having a long superior pubic ramus and an anteriorly positioned and indistinctly developed iliac pillar...[and] Homo-like in having vertically oriented and sigmoid shaped iliac blades, more robust ilia, and a narrow tuberoacetabular sulcus...and the pubic body is upwardly rotated as in Homo. (p. 1410, emphases mine)

So far as I can tell, the main way the hips are 'advanced' toward a more human-like condition is that the iliac blades are more upright and sweep forward more than in earlier known hominid hips. Here's the figure 2 from the paper (more sweet pics of the fossils are available here). NB that in both A. sediba hips much of the upper portions of the iliac blades are missing (reconstructed in white; this region is missing in lots of fossils), so it's possible they were more flaring like the australopith in the center photo.

The authors' bottom-line, take-home point is that the A. sediba pelvis has features traditionally associated with large-brained Homo - but belonged to a small-brained species (based solely on the ~430 cc MH1 endocast). They argue that this means that many of these unique pelvic features did not evolve in the context of birthing large-brained babies, as has often been thought. They state that these features are thus "most parsimoniously attributed to altered biomechanical demands on the pelvis in locomotion," and suggest that this hypothetical locomotion was mostly bipedalism but with a good degree of climbing. Maybe, maybe not. This interpretation is consistent with the analysis of the A. sediba foot/ankle (Zipfel et al. 2011).

The weird mix of ancient (australopith-like) and newer (Homo-like) pelvic features in A. sediba really raises the question of how australopithecines moved around. More intriguing is that the A. sediba pelvis has different Homo-like features than the ~1 million year old Busidima pelvis (Simpson et al. 2008), which has been attributed to Homo erectus (largely in aspects of the iliac blades). This raises the question of whether A. sediba is really pertinent to the origins of the genus Homo, and whether the Busidima pelvis belongs to Homo erectus or a late-surviving robust australopithecus (e.g. boisei, Ruff 2010).

Also interesting is that the subpubic angle (in the pic above, the upside-down "V" created by the pubic bones just above the red labels) is pretty low in MH2. This is curious because modern human males and females differ in how large this angle is - females tend to have a large angle which contributes to an enlarged birth canal, whereas males have a low angle like MH2. But MH2 is considered female based on skeletal and dental size. This raises the additional questions of whether human-like sexual dimorphism had not evolved in hominids prior to 1.9 million years ago, and whether the sex of MH2 was accurately described.

Finally, though the authors did a great job comparing this pelvis with those from other hominids, I think a major, more comprehensive comparative review of hominid pelves is in order. How does the older A. afarensis hip from Woranso (Haile-Selassie et al. 2010) inform australopithecine pelvic evolution? What about the possibly-contemporary-maybe-later hip from the nearby site of Drimolen (Gommery et al. 2002)? Given the subadult status of the MH1 individual, it would be interesting to compare with the WT 15000 Homo erectus fossils, or A. africanus subadults from Makapansgat, to examine the evolution of pelvic growth.

Lots of interesting questions arise from these fascinating new fossils. "The more you know," right?

References
Gommery, D. (2002). Description d'un bassin fragmentaire de Paranthropus robustus du site Plio-Pléistocène de Drimolen (Afrique du Sud)A fragmentary pelvis of Paranthropus robustus of the Plio-Pleistocene site of Drimolen (Republic of South Africa) Geobios, 35 (2), 265-281 DOI: 10.1016/S0016-6995(02)00022-0

Haile-Selassie Y, Latimer BM, Alene M, Deino AL, Gibert L, Melillo SM, Saylor BZ, Scott GR, & Lovejoy CO (2010). An early Australopithecus afarensis postcranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107 (27), 12121-6 PMID: 20566837

Kibii, J., Churchill, S., Schmid, P., Carlson, K., Reed, N., de Ruiter, D., & Berger, L. (2011). A Partial Pelvis of Australopithecus sediba Science, 333 (6048), 1407-1411 DOI: 10.1126/science.1202521

Ruff, C. (2010). Body size and body shape in early hominins – implications of the Gona Pelvis Journal of Human Evolution, 58 (2), 166-178 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.10.003

Simpson, S., Quade, J., Levin, N., Butler, R., Dupont-Nivet, G., Everett, M., & Semaw, S. (2008). A Female Homo erectus Pelvis from Gona, Ethiopia Science, 322 (5904), 1089-1092 DOI: 10.1126/science.1163592

Zipfel, B., DeSilva, J., Kidd, R., Carlson, K., Churchill, S., & Berger, L. (2011). The Foot and Ankle of Australopithecus sediba Science, 333 (6048), 1417-1420 DOI: 10.1126/science.1202703

Tess Tossed Tyrone

2011-09-12T23:24:00.001-04:00

What's the secret to becoming a good father? What would William Cosby do?

I for one have no idea BUT! a study published today in PNAS early edition finds an association between studly vs. paternal behavior, and levels of everyone's favorite hormone, testosterone (T).

Using longitudinal data, researchers (Gettler et al. in press) found that, in general, a young guy with higher levels of circulating T is more likely than a guy with low T to become a father w/in a few years. MOREOVER! this erstwhile-high-T-and-now-father then experiences a relatively sharper decrease in T than would be expected simply because of aging. PLUS! fathers who interacted with their kids on a daily basis had lower T than fathers who didn't hang around their kids too often.

One thing neat about this study is that it uses longitudinal instead of cross-sectional data. A cross-sectional version of this study would've sampled a bunch of dudes (hopefully somewhat randomly) only once. This can be problematic because it's then hard to interpret the results in light of the many sources of variation between people. This study, on the other hand, sampled a tonne (n = 694) of guys at more than one occasion, so they can tell how individuals' testosterone levels tend to change in paternal vs. free-spirited circumstances.

The last line of the paper is pretty intriguing: "[these results] add to the evidence that human males have an evolved neuroendocrine architecture shaped to facilitate their role as fathers and caregivers as a key component of reproductive success." (Gettler et al. in press: p. 5/6) This is especially interesting in light of the Ardipithecus ramidus-related evidence for a great antiquity of humans' paternal proclivity (Lovejoy 1981, Lovejoy et al. 2009). Just how and why testosterone responds to/mediates this fatherly 'reproductive strategy' is mysterious to me. And of course, linking this hormonal phenomenon with anything as old as Ardi is a challenge I'm certainly not up to. Still neat, though.

My personal circulating T levels are consistently through the roof. So in the event that I become a father, it will be interesting to see if the subsequent, astronomical hormone drop, predicted by this study, won't cause my entire body to collapse in on itself.

Reference
Gettler LT et al. in press. Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences... doi: 10.1073/pnas.1105403108

Lovejoy, C. (1981). The Origin of Man Science, 211 (4480), 341-350 DOI: 10.1126/science.211.4480.341

Lovejoy CO (2009). Reexamining human origins in light of Ardipithecus ramidus. Science (New York, N.Y.), 326 (5949), 740-8 PMID: 19810200

Photo credit: google (image) "Bill Cosby Fatherhood"

New Australopithecus sediba analyses

2011-09-08T11:35:00.002-04:00

A slew of papers analyzing the brain, hands, feet, and pelvis of Australopithecus sediba were just published in the journal Science. I have not had a chance to read them yet - nor will I for a few days as I'm in a wedding Saturday [not mine :( ] and the partying starts in a few hours. So I'm afraid I won't be able to report on and interpret these on the blog for a while. Please stay tuned!

CT reconstruction, from Science (follow link above).

The exact same thing happened to me 2 years ago when the Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton was (finally) published. I remember waiting in the Detroit airport to board a flight to St. Louis to begin my platonic soul-mate's bachelor party, and I get a flurry of emails on my phone announcing the skeleton in the 15 year old closet.

So media beware - whenever I'm in a wedding, badass new fossil studies will be published.

How old is the Acheulian tool industry and why does it matter?

2011-08-31T14:32:00.005-04:00

Two views of an Acheulian handaxe adorn the cover of this week's Nature (right). Always happy to see paleoanthropology stuff be classy, front-page news. The cover highlights Christopher Lepre's and colleagues' announcement of what may be the oldest Acheulian tools known.

To recap stone tools: The first good evidence of tool use by humans' ancestors are the Oldowan lithics from the 2.6 million year old site of Gona in Ethiopia (Semaw et al. 2003). McPherron and others (2010) reported 2 possibly-cut-marked animal bones from the 3.4 million-year old site of Dikika; but this latter evidence is a bit too scant for us to really be sure our ancestors had adopted technology this early. Anyway, the Oldowan was a very basic tool industry, consisting largely of crude flakes taken off cobbles. It may sound lame, but even the most basic stone-tool-making requires some skills, trust me, it's kinda hard. So stone tools appear roughly 2.5 million years ago, which is also about the time that we have fossils that might document the earliest members of our genus Homo. Sweet.

The legend goes that the next technological revolution doesn't come until about 1 million years later - until around 1.5 million years ago, stone tools were quite basic. But after a while we start seeing these "handaxes" or "bifaces" (cuz flakes are removed from both of the core's faces; see above) that have become kind of the hallmark of what's termed the Acheulian industry. I'm sure there are other key indicators but what do I know, I'm not an archaeologist. Arguably, the rise of the Acheulian from its humble Oldowan beginnings is a milestone in human cognitive evolution - a more complex tool should require a more complex brain, right? Lepre and team announced today that they have some Acheulian handaxes from the Kenyan site of Kokiselei-4, dating to 1.76 million years ago. The authors draw two conclusions: 1) the Acheulian (and thereby more advanced cognition) is a few hundred thousand years older than previously thought, and 2) the co-occurrence of Acheulian and Oldowan tools at this time indicates the presence of contemporaneous human species with different cognitive capabilities.

Now what's a bit odd here is that the presence of handaxes among otherwise Oldowan assemblages is not a new or unique thing. In her archaeological research at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Mary D Leakey distinguished some assemblages as "Developed Oldowan." Here's a relevant blurb from a study by Y. Kimura (2002: 292-293):

"Leakey recognized two distinctive industries, Oldowan and Acheulian, from Bed I through Bed III at Olduvai. The former was characterized by the presence of various choppers and attributed to Homo habilis sensu lato, whereas the latter was traditionally defined to contain bifaces more than 40-60% of the tools, and attributed to H. erectus sensu lato.
The Oldowan was then classified into Oldowan (1.87-1.65 mya) and Developed Oldowan (1.65-0.6 mya) based on the increased light-duty tools, spheroids and bifaces in the latter. The Developed Oldowan coexisted with Acheulian" (emphasis mine)

So the co-occurrence of Oldowan (i.e. choppers) and Acheulian (some handaxes) is known from other sites, albeit not until around 1.5 million years ago. Too bad I'm not an archaeologist nor know more about lithics, because I wish I could put the new Kokiselei-4 assemblage into this context - just how is it different from "Developed Oldowan"? As John Hawks pointed out before I did, "developed Oldowan" doesn't appear in the Lepre et al. discussion. Hrm. Then they make this statement:

"Homo erectus is traditionally thought to be the first hominin to disperse from Africa, yet the oldest known out-of-Africa fossil hominin sites lack stone tools or preserve only Oldowan-style artefacts. ... Our data indicate that the earliest development of the Acheulian occurred in Africa at 1.76 [million years] ago and was contemporaneous with or perhaps pre-dated the earliest hominin dispersals into Eurasia (Lepre et al. 2011: 84).

They then go on to suggest that two contemporaneous species lived in Africa in the early Pleistocene - one of these species invented the Acheulian and stayed in Africa, while the other species was too dumb to make anything beyond Oldowan, and instead these dullards left Africa to colonize the rest of the world. This silly scenario seems to stem from an under-appreciation of what Dmanisi demonstrates (possibly since the recent dating paper by Reed Ferring and others only came out a few months ago, probably after the Lepre et al. paper was in press). The Dmanisi fossils establish that hominins more primitive than later Homo erectus (Rightmire et al. 2006) had dispersed into Eurasia by around 1.85 million years ago (if not earlier), with mere Oldowan technology (Mgeladze et al. 2010, Ferring et al. 2011). So Lepre et al.'s claim that the earliest Acheulian "was contemporaneous or perhaps pre-dated" the first out-of-Africa dispersals just isn't true. And without that, there's no support for the silly scenario of a smart, techno-savvy but stationary species being contemporaneous with a colonizing but less crafty-and-cunning species.

It's really cool if the Kokiselei-4 tools truly represent the earliest record of the Acheulian. But, it should be clear by now that we can't simply equate technology and taxonomy. So how old is the Acheulian and why does it matter? I'm fine with a 1.76 million year date, but I also don't think it matters too much. (sorry to be so Dmanisi-centric)

References

Kimura, Y. (2002). Examining time trends in the Oldowan technology at Beds I and II, Olduvai Gorge Journal of Human Evolution, 43 (3), 291-321 DOI: 10.1006/jhev.2002.0576

Lepre, C., Roche, H., Kent, D., Harmand, S., Quinn, R., Brugal, J., Texier, P., Lenoble, A., & Feibel, C. (2011). An earlier origin for the Acheulian Nature, 477 (7362), 82-85 DOI: 10.1038/nature10372

McPherron, S., Alemseged, Z., Marean, C., Wynn, J., Reed, D., Geraads, D., Bobe, R., & Béarat, H. (2010). Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia Nature, 466 (7308), 857-860 DOI: 10.1038/nature09248

Mgeladze, A., Lordkipanidze, D., Moncel, M., Despriee, J., Chagelishvili, R., Nioradze, M., & Nioradze, G. (2011). Hominin occupations at the Dmanisi site, Georgia, Southern Caucasus: Raw materials and technical behaviours of Europe’s first hominins Journal of Human Evolution, 60 (5), 571-596 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.10.008

Rightmire, G., Lordkipanidze, D., & Vekua, A. (2006). Anatomical descriptions, comparative studies and evolutionary significance of the hominin skulls from Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia Journal of Human Evolution, 50 (2), 115-141 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2005.07.009

Semaw, S., Rogers, M., Quade, J., Renne, P., Butler, R., Dominguez-Rodrigo, M., Stout, D., Hart, W., Pickering, T., & Simpson, S. (2003). 2.6-Million-year-old stone tools and associated bones from OGS-6 and OGS-7, Gona, Afar, Ethiopia Journal of Human Evolution, 45 (2), 169-177 DOI: 10.1016/S0047-2484(03)00093-9

And I thought I had it bad (or, "Toad terrors")

2011-08-30T21:34:00.010-04:00

The world can be a terrible place. Sure, there are the finer things that make life worth living - puppies, spooning, hoppy beer, etc. - but there are also things that make you wonder, 'Now why should anyone ever have to endure this?' I recall being a child, growing up on the mean streets of Kansas City, MO, it was a struggle just to get an education. There were bandits that set up a 'toll' to cross the bridge to get to the school, and if we didn't have any pence to put in their pouches, well we'd have to fight our way into the classroom (see map below, of Lincoln College Prep middle school). Getting home in the afternoon was even worse. There was an Iron Maiden. And this thing.

I thought my midwest urban childhood was tough, until today when I read about "cane toads" (Rhinella marina) (below, right). Now, toads in general are odd animals. They're vertebrates, with a sweet bony spine and skeleton, like us humans and wicked-pisser mammals. But they're also not like us ("NLU," as my sweet, politely diabolical grandma would say). Not like us at all. When a human is a baby, she or he looks more or less like an adult, albeit much smaller and cutely misproportioned. But a toad - well, amphibians just have a totally different life plan. Toad babies are these "tadpoles" (or "pollywogs" if you're feeling especially cavalier and sassy) that don't have a body with a head and four limbs that can be used for being awesome. Instead, pollywogs are these fat embryo-ish bodies trailing along a slithering tail. Limbs eventually form from tiny buds and the tail is lost. But superficially, the panning out of toad ontogeny looks like giant sperm deciding to become frog-like abomination unto something. So toads are already not quite right from the get go.

But this one species, the cane toad, has tadpoles that EAT THEIR EGG SIBLINGS and EMIT A CHEMICAL THAT STUNTS THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR BROTHERS and SISTERS. In the history of human society there have been a number of stories of family eating family, but there is nothing quite like this. It's a mix between the child-eating Kronos (or Roman "Saturn") or Thyestes (though his was accidental), and Cain and Abel from the Bible that's such a smash with the Judeo-Christians, or Romulus and Remus from the mythic founding of Rome. [Hey I guess my Classics BA has come in handy after all!]

So next time you're feeling down and out, upset with the hand the great Dealer has dealt you, just be glad you weren't a cane toad. Because then you'd've either been eaten/murdered by your older sib, or you'd've eaten/murdered your siblings. Yikes.

Feelings aside, this toad presents a very interesting case study. It will be interesting to uncover the biochemistry and genetics behind how the older pollywogs stunt the development of their little brothers and sisters. I can see this really helping with an understanding of how growth and development are controlled and inhibited, and possibly even how they can be manipulated. It would also be interesting to see if in the evolution of these species, there arose any biochemical defenses expressed in eggs and young larvae against older sibs' fratricidal fragrances, or if it was simply a 1-sided battle.

Life is a funny, funny thing.

Works Ci-toad [sorry for the terrible pun :( ]

Williams, Sarah (2011). Cane Toad Carnage. ScienceNOW.

Cane toad corpses haunt the bordello where their bullet-riddled bodies are found.

Dmanisi homs hit the town

2011-08-24T23:42:00.002-04:00

Proof that paleoanthropology is cool: the Dmanisi hominids (Mzia is the girl on the left and Zezva the dude on the right), tagged onto a storefront in downtown Tbilisi.

Back to the backbone of Homo erectus

2011-08-24T16:19:00.007-04:00

Of course the title is referring to all of the back bones. An alternate title may be "The backbone's connected to the - what bone?" but that's also kinda lame. I'll do better next time.

Martin Hausler and colleagues (in press) report on newly identified vertebral fragments of the WT 15000 Homo erectus skeleton, perhaps the most complete of an early hominid (this one ~1.5 million years ago). This skeleton, and other early hominids (i.e. Australopithecus africanus), were described as having six lumbar (lower back) vertebrae; the modal number in humans is 5, and 3-4 in the great apes. The issue of vertebral formula (the number of cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral verts) in hominids is interesting because it is unclear what the ancestral condition is: was ancestral pattern to have more lumbars (like australopiths) from which humans and apes lost verts, or is ape pattern is ancestral, and lumbars were gained then lost over the course of human evolution?

The fragments found by Hausler and team establish that the WT 15000 individual - and presumably all H. erectus - possessed only 5 lumbar vertebrae. In the past, the only evidence of the 6th-to-last pre-sacral vertebra was the vertebral body. It was unclear whether this vertebra would have had articular facets for ribs (like a thoracic vertebra) or not (like a lumbar vertebra). The pedicle fragments identified by Hausler and colleagues (figure to the right) have a rib facet, and so indicate that the 6th-to-last vertebra of this skeleton was thoracic. Thus, WT 15000 - and again presumably all Homo erectus - had a modern-human-like vertebral formula.

The evo-devo of the spinal column is interesting because it seems to me that it may not be so outlandish to try to identify and test hypotheses about how spinal column development (segmentation) changed over the course of hominid and ape evolution. In trying to determine how development of vertebral segments evolved it is important to know how ancient the human pattern is, and so the identification of 5 lumbars in WT 15000 at 1.5 million years ago is an important finding. I need to think on this a bit, I'll hafta get back to you . . .

* figures are from Hausler et al. in press

Reference

Martin Haeusler, Regula Schiess, Thomas Boeni (2011). New vertebral and rib material point to modern bauplan of the Nariokotome Homo erectus skeleton Journal of Human Evolution : 10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.07.004

eFfing Fossil Friday (another late edition)

2011-08-21T05:44:00.006-04:00

I'm sitting at a cafe in Tbilisi, departing at 4:00 am tomorrow for America. Readers will notice that I've been MIA while working with the second annual Dmanisi Paleoanthropology Field School. I hate to say it but I'm glad I was too busy to blog all the goings-on (though sorry if it disappointed anyone). All in all it was another great year, and we found some great fossils (about which I don't think I have permission to say anything at all). Here's this year's class with their certification of badassery at the site on the last day:

But Dmanisi won't be the subject of this belated eFfing Fossil Friday. I'd like instead to turn to the question of just what fossils are good for. I'm told that in China, fossil teeth were once interpreted as dragons' teeth, and so pulverized and sold as medicine. But what good are they to non-medical science? My recent research interests have come to focus on the relationship between evolution and development. Evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo") research has been dominated by studies of genes, gene expression, and model organisms like fruit flies and mice. In such an environment, the question of the relevance of fossils is especially poignant.

But this morning, while planning a human evo-devo course I hope to teach next summer, I stumbled upon a review paper by Rudolf Raff, titled "Written in Stone: Fossils, genes and evo-devo" (2007). I think the abstract sums things up pretty well:

Fossils give evo-devo a past. They inform phylogenetic trees to show the direction of evolution of developmental features, and they can reveal ancient body plans. Fossils also provide the primary data that are used to date past events, including divergence times needed to estimate molecular clocks, which provide rates of developmental evolution. Fossils can set boundaries for hypotheses that are generated from living developmental systems, and for predictions of ancestral development and morphologies. Finally, although fossils rarely yield data on developmental processes directly, informative examples occur of extraordinary preservation of soft body parts, embryos and genomic information.

It seems often that fossils are falling by the wayside. There's a sentiment that there's not much information to be gotten from fossils - they're too incomplete, too few, too inconvenient, at least as compared with extremely high-output data such as that coming from genomics. But Raff is right - we need fossils. Beyond the excellent points Raff raises in the review, I'm working on getting the most out of these seemingly data-poor fossil samples. Because modern computers are so powerful nowadays, I'm using their sheer processing power to test hypotheses about growth and development in fossil samples. These battered bunches of bones are too tiny to be analyzed by traditional methods. But one thing I think is important to take away from this computer-crazy Information Age, is that we now have machines that can handle almost any kind of question one can think to ask, and it's really inspiring. The sequencing and analyses of ancient Neandertal and Denisova genomes (Green et al. 2010, Reich et al. 2010) are excellent examples of the amazing research that can be done with computers and creativity (and probably also a horde of hard-working math majors).

So this eFFF (or Sunday) is not dedicated to any specific fossil or set of fossils, but rather to all fossils, even the crappy fragments. Gaumarjos, fossils: your secrets are not safe from us.

Reference

Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M., Hansen, N., Durand, E., Malaspinas, A., Jensen, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Prufer, K., Meyer, M., Burbano, H., Good, J., Schultz, R., Aximu-Petri, A., Butthof, A., Hober, B., Hoffner, B., Siegemund, M., Weihmann, A., Nusbaum, C., Lander, E., Russ, C., Novod, N., Affourtit, J., Egholm, M., Verna, C., Rudan, P., Brajkovic, D., Kucan, Z., Gusic, I., Doronichev, V., Golovanova, L., Lalueza-Fox, C., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Schmitz, R., Johnson, P., Eichler, E., Falush, D., Birney, E., Mullikin, J., Slatkin, M., Nielsen, R., Kelso, J., Lachmann, M., Reich, D., & Paabo, S. (2010). A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome Science, 328 (5979), 710-722 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021

Raff, R. (2007). Written in stone: fossils, genes and evo–devo Nature Reviews Genetics, 8 (12), 911-920 DOI: 10.1038/nrg2225

Reich D, Green RE, Kircher M, Krause J, Patterson N, Durand EY, Viola B, Briggs AW, Stenzel U, Johnson PL, Maricic T, Good JM, Marques-Bonet T, Alkan C, Fu Q, Mallick S, Li H, Meyer M, Eichler EE, Stoneking M, Richards M, Talamo S, Shunkov MV, Derevianko AP, Hublin JJ, Kelso J, Slatkin M, & Pääbo S (2010). Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Nature, 468 (7327), 1053-60 PMID: 21179161

Gamarjoba from Dmanisi!

2011-08-02T10:37:00.002-04:00

It's been a bit harder to keep things updated as I journey across latitudes this summer. My last post was from Nairobi, and a few days later I arrived in Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia (lamazi Sakartvelo). I've been involved with the 2nd annual Dmanisi Paleoanthropology Field School, which has been going on for about a week now. Things have been going fast and we've been having a lot of fun, so it's a bit too difficult to recap everything so far. But we've had a series of lectures from great people in various fields. Here are some highlights:

Our first lecture was by Dr. Bernard Wood, at the site of Dmanisi itself. He discussed some of the progress and pitfalls in the field of Paleoanthropology. Next was Dr. G. Philip Rightmire, who discussed some aspects of hominid morphology and taxonomy. Then Dr. Reid Ferring discussed the geology of the site. As someone who focuses more on the fossils themselves, Ferring's lecture was refreshingly fascinating for me. In brief, Argon-Argon dating was used to establish that the Mashavera basalt underlying the hominid (and other!) fossils is around 1.85 million years old. Then there were a series of ash falls that led to the soil formation of the site. A little (stratigraphically) above the fossil deposits is a layer dated by paleomagnetism to correspond to the Olduvai polarity reversal, around 1.76(?) million years ago. So the hominid fossils themselves are pretty well constrained to somewhere between 1.85-1.75 million years ago.

Then Dr. Martha Tappan gave a lecture about the taphonomy (site formation and burial processes) of the site; the neighbors invited me in for some delicious ch'ach'a shortly before the lecture, so I'm afraid my memory of this one is a bit foggy. :(

Last night Dr. Jordi Agusti lectured about the micromammals at Dmanisi, and at some Spanish Pleistocene sites. Micromammals have large litters and short generation times, so they are good indicators for relative dating. Tonight Dr. Adam Van Arsdale will be lecturing about early Homo from Dmanisi and other sites. It's been a great lecture series so far, and there are sure to be many great more lectures in the next few fast-paced, fun-filled weeks.

We've also been excavating the site, working mostly so far on taking down some of the layers stratigraphically above the hominids to hopefully more fossiliferous layers. I injured my hand on some monkeybars at the park yesterday (they seriously ripped off a big layer of skin, so I'm partially mummified), so I was down for the count today, doing lab work in lieu of excavating. I should be ready to go by tomorrow though.

I know I owe the world a few Effing Fossil Friday posts, so I'll hopefully have those up soon, too. Nakhvamdis!

New beef with boisei - maybe the dingo ate their babies?

2011-07-18T17:04:00.007-04:00

Unfortunately, the title is not in reference to a study demonstrating that early hominids fell prey to wild dogs. But Elaine Benes would have appreciated it.

As part of my Latitudes Tour, I'm in Nairobi for a couple of days, hoping to spend some quality time with the young Australopithecus boisei kids at the Nairobi National Museum. Recall (that is, if I've mentioned it here?) that my dissertation research is on growth of the lower jaw, in Australopithecus robustus as compared to modern humans. The study of growth obviously requires analyzing individuals across different age groups (an "ontogenetic series" is the fancy term). Admittedly, then, the focus on A. robustus is chiefly because this species has the largest ontogenetic sample of any early hominid (tho at nearly 15 subadults, it's still not as large as one could hope). Also because A. robustus was totally badass.

Australopithecus boisei makes an important comparison for A. robustus, because the two species are allegedly evolutionary 'sisters' - the "robust" australopithecines (though I'm personally not convinced that these two are each other's closest relative). So their growth should be pretty similar. At the same time, though, A. boisei shows much greater adaptations to heavy chewing - they've been referred to as "hyper-robust." So comparing growth in these species should elucidate how their differences arise.

Problem is, there just aren't enough kids! It's like that song by Arcade Fire. Wood and Constantino (2007) published a pretty comprehensive review of A. boisei, including a 1.5-page table of the skulls and teeth attributed to the species. So far as I know, only 4 specimens in this table are subadult mandibles, and so far as I can tell, they're all about the same age (right around the age that the first permanent molar comes in). There are so many jaws of adult A. boisei (although many of these are abraded mandibular bodies lacking teeth) - so how can there be fewer subadults?!?!

A very preliminary observation of infant-child pairs in the two species suggests they both increase in size fairly dramatically between when they only have baby (a.k.a. "deciduous" or "milk") teeth and when the first permanent molar comes in. But this is just a preliminary observation based on 2 specimens of each species! Take with a grain of salt!

On second thought, maybe I'll propose the nearly untestable hypothesis that bone-eating hyenas ate the boisei babes, and that's why we don't have their jaws. What could have been nicely preserved subadult boisei bones are instead coprolites (fossilized poops). A little spectacular, yes, but it's also been hypothesized that many of the A. robustus fossils we know and love came to us as carnivores' scraps.

further reading:

Wood, B., & Constantino, P. (2007). Paranthropus boisei: Fifty years of evidence and analysis American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 134 (S45), 106-132 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20732

eFfing Fossil Friday - Renaissance and Designer Fossils

2011-07-16T01:49:00.008-04:00

Sorry I'm a bit late on this one, and that I've fallen behind on keeping the blog updated. I've been scrambling to make all the observations on, and collect all the data from, these Australopithecus robustus mandibles in a short time. As my advisor likes to remind me, everything always takes 3x longer than you initially anticipate, and this is certainly true of my work here. Yesterday (the actual Fossil Friday), in fact, I probably spent only 30 min with these fossils. Instead, I accompanied Lee Berger and John Hawks on a trip to Malapa - the site that recently yielded fossils of the mysterious Australopithecus sediba - and other sites in the area. To get there, I rented a car and drove on the wrong side of the road for the first time - it was a trippy trip, every time I got in the car I reached to my left for a phantom seat belt, and kept searching for the gear-shift my mind thought was in the door. Nuttiness.

Anyway, I have two thoughts for this edition of eFfing Fossil Friday. First point, related to the great tour from Dr. Berger, is that a ton of hominid fossils are lying in wait for us to re-expose them to the light of day. In South Africa, the classic Plio-Pleistocene sites have been Makapansgat (A. africanus), Sterkfontein (A. africanus) and Swartkrans (A. robustus and early Homo). These sites have variously been worked since the early 20th century. Since then, a number of other hominid-bearing sites - largely in the same area as Sterkfontein and Swartkrans - have been discovered: Gladysvale, Gondolin, Drimolen, and most recently Malapa. Yet still a metric-tonne of work is still being done on the more classic sites (except maybe Makapansgat?).

View of the valley, Malapa is somewhere in the background, I think the green patch of trees near the center, just before the big hill-shadow (?).

But these sites are just the tip of a fossiliferous iceberg. A few years ago when I was working here I accompanied some other researchers on a survey for more fossil sites in the area. What I learned then is that if you look across the Sterkfontein valley in the winter, the dessicated grassland is pimpled with the occasional patch of green trees - these small verdant isles are the tells of underlying cave systems (the caves contain water that plants will cut throats for). What was driven home yesterday at Malapa and other sites Dr. Berger showed us, is that these caves are all over the place, many fossil treasure-troves. What's more, the A. sediba discovery (and the massive hominid molars from Gondolin) points to the idea that we are only beginning to understand what hominid life was like in the past. There is a rich prehistory still waiting to be discovered in South Africa, and undoubtedly also the rest of the African continent. Human paleontological work is far from exhausted. Let us usher in a Renaissance of field Paleoanthropology!

My next thought is that the process of fossilization can make the fossil-memories of past life quite beautiful. Now, in life the enamel of teeth is white-ish (yellow/brown is also not uncommon), and bone is this off-white/yellowish color. But during the process of fossilization, the original minerals used to make the bone (and less commonly teeth) are replaced by those in the surrounding soil. Often these minerals gussy up the fossils in neat new ways - manganese for example tends to make bone/tooth black.

Check out SK 61, an infant/child Australopithecus robustus. After fossilization, this thing takes on a designer, tortoise-shell coloration (left, above). SK 12, an older adult A. robustus (right, above), is another good example: some subterranean joker has drawn a smiley face beneath his left premolar (circled). So while we are often left with a meager fossil record, at least the fragments we get are voluptuously variegated.

eFFING FOSSIL FRIDAYS!

2011-07-08T11:42:00.003-04:00

I'm going to do my best to keep up with the blog during by Big Summer Adventure, and one thing I'd like to do is "F-ing Fossil Friday!" in which I focus on fossils for a bit. We'll see if I can make this pan out.

Today I got out the rest of the Australopithecus robustus mandibles at the Transvaal Museum (above), save for I think maybe 1. As you can see from the picture, taphonomy (what happens to an animal's remains between death and our digging them up) creates a serious challenge for the study of variation in this species. I'm focusing on ontogenetic variation - differences associated with growth and development. In spite of its fragmentary nature, so far as I know this is the best ontogenetic series of any fossil hominid (I should probably look more into A. afarensis here, too). In the bottom left you'll see SK 438, the youngest in the sample, whose baby teeth haven't quite come in all the way. Poor little guy! At the top right corner is SK 12, probably the oldest individual and also a big bugger.

One thing that I've noticed so far, only a preliminary observation that I need to actually run some numbers on, is that as individuals get older, the length of their tooth row (molars and premolars) gets shorter. This is because of the tendency for teeth to move forward during growth - "mesial drift" - and for adjacent teeth to literally wear into one another, their ends becoming flatter and flatter. While I should have realized this, it was surprising at first to find some dimensions of the lower jaw actually decreasing during growth. Now, I still have to run some tests to see if this is a biologically significant phenomenon. But it's always nice to learn something new, even after just 2 days back with my best extinct buddies.

Stay tuned to future eFfing fossil Fridays!

Where and when the eff am I in time and space?

2011-07-06T11:41:00.007-04:00

I landed in Johannesburg, South Africa yesterday, and after a jet-laggy day and a half or so, I'm now at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History (nee Transvaal Museum) in Pretoria. It's winter here in the southern hemisphere, and when I'd landed yesterday, Joburg was in the midst of the kind of mists no one misses (left, Joburg from my hotel). It was seriously super gray and cold, it was like being back in Michigan. The hotel was pretty nice. Here's a view of sunrise this morning (which I saw since I'm still not adjusted to the time change).

I just finished my first day back with Australopithecus robustus fossils (pic below). It's nice to be working on fossils again, but I've been awake since 2:30 am so as much as I love fossils it was a bit of a struggle some of the time. I'd love to say more but my eyes are about to go on strike and pop out of my head, probably to face something upsetting to punish me for not letting them rest. I'll do my best to keep the world up to date as to my progress and travels. Good night!

Big trip 2011

2011-07-02T16:31:00.004-04:00

It's dawning on me now that I leave the country for the rest of the summer in just over 24 hours. First I'll be in Pretoria for a few weeks studying Australopithecus robustus fossils at the Transvaal Museum. Then I'm off to Nairobi for a few days to check out some fossils at the Natural History Museum there. I've never been to Nairobi, and I'll admit I'm a little nervous; I'll keep you posted as to how it goes. Then right before my mum's birthday I head to Tbilisi, Georgia for the 2nd annual Dmanisi Paleoanthropology Field School, until the end of August. Here's a schematic of what my trip will look sorta like, starting from bottom to top.:

My whole life was up in the air for most of the first half of the year. But everything seems to have come together, so hopefully the second half of 2011 will be better than the first. That said, I don't think I'm ready to go yet!

Let's hear it for the Null!

2011-06-29T15:13:00.005-04:00

via Carl Zimmer, Dr. Jon Brock in his blog, "Cracking the enigma," has some thoughts on why null hypotheses don't suck so bad as so many people think. Null hypotheses are generally along the lines of, "there is no difference between these groups," or "this variable has no effect on something," or "there is no relationship between variables." The more general statistical statement behind the null hypothesis is usually along the lines of "this phenomenon can be explained just as well by a completely random process." I'd agree with Brock that it seems that a good many researchers (not me!) view the null hypothesis as a bore or meaningless. But I like his final thought:

This brings me neatly to my final point. In research on disorders such as autism or Williams syndrome, a significant group difference is considered to be the holy grail. In terms of getting the study published, it certainly makes life easier. But there is another way of looking at it. If you find a group difference, you’ve failed to control for whatever it is that has caused the group difference in the first place. A significant effect should really only be the beginning of the story.

Bloodsport in Australopithecus africanus?

2011-06-27T15:46:00.006-04:00

A few months ago in a post about the ilium and cannibals, I relayed a quote by Dr. Raymond Dart who was the first to recognize (and name) the hominid genus Australopithecus, back in 1925. I'd also mentioned that he was described [in a reference that escapes me] as "blood-thirsty." This macabre descriptor came to mind again, as I'm reading his (1948) description of the MLD 2 mandible, of a juvenile A. africanus from Makapansgat cave in South Africa (figure is from the paper):

"[Individuals represented by MLD2 and another skull fragment] met their death by manually applied violence. The fractures exhibited by the mandible show that the violence, which probably occurred in fatal combat, was a localized crushing impact received by the face slightly to the left of the midline in the incisor region, and administered presumably by a bludgeon... this youth probably met his fate at the hands of a kinsman more expert than himself in the accurate application of directed implements" (p. 393-394)

This rather fanciful hypothesis may reflect Dart's alleged bloodlust, and the condition of the fossil likely reflects damage that occurred after death during the sometimes abusive process of fossilization.

Reference

Dart, R. (1948). The adolescent mandible of Australopithecus prometheus American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 6 (4), 391-412 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330060410

100,000 year old child skeleton on National Geographic

2011-06-16T21:03:00.006-04:00

National Geographic aired a special tonight about a recently-excavated child's skeleton (they focused on the skull) from Grotte des Contrebandiers in Morocco, dated to around 108,000 years ago. So far as I know this material has not been fully published (aside from a brief blurb in Science). Hmm, a highly publicized TV special on a big hominid fossil discovery around/before the scientific publication, sounds familiar...

The program presented work of archaeologists, paleontologists, reconstruction artists, taphonomists, and lots of other people, hoping to figure out who the kid was and such. All in all it was pretty cool, I'd recommend checking it out if you didn't see it. Or again if you did see it.

While I think it was a great program and the researchers involved are doing a terrific job, I had two main concerns: first, I wish they'd treated the topic of growth-n-development a little more. They noted that the child (5-6 years old possibly) looked really "modern" because of its flat face. But looking at it, it didn't really have that flat of a face, especially for a child. They talked about how human-like (rather than Neandertal-like) the kid was, but they only compared it with adults - children tend to have relatively smaller faces and larger brain-cases than adults (right), so it's no wonder it looked more like an adult human than the adult Neandertal from Amud (Israel) that they compared it with. It would've been great to see more comparisons with other late Pleistocene hominid kids, such as from Skhul/Qafzeh or La Quina. A future program, perhaps.

Second, they kept asking whether the kid was "a Homo sapien." I know it's counterintuitive for English-speakers, but "H. sapiens" is the singular and plural of humans' scientific name. Silly, right, cuz it doesn't even get paid twice as much. But you'll have take that up with C. Linnaeus. I am a Homo sapiens. You are a Homo sapiens. Fifty people are a gaggle of Homo sapiens. I fail my students if they say "sapien" when referring to humans. Because it's not very sapient of them.

Anyway it was a cool show. Check it out, dammit!

Figure credit: Fig. 2 from Bogin. 2003. The human pattern of growth and development in paleontological perspective. In Patterns of Growth and Development in the Genus Homo, eds. Thompson JL, Krovitz GE and Nelson AJ. New York: Cambridge University Press: 15-44.

Summer cooking science: Gazpacho

2011-06-14T20:09:00.007-04:00

Summer is a trying time for me. Many people take the time to relax, do things they couldn't during the academic year. I do that, but I also get really restless. I try to do all that relaxing or different stuff at the same time, which just overwhelms me. I even have a hard time focusing on working on the dissertation (australopithecine growth and development; more on that in future post, promise). The academic year forces upon me a self-discipline whose bonds I break to become a directionless, scatterbrain piece of crap once summer begins. Although, I have been running a ton.

But sometimes I can force myself to focus on a small task for just long enough to be "productive." The other day it was kitchen science. I'm not much of a cook ("add butter" that's my meal-time motto), but thought I'd (re)try my hand at making gazpacho, a summery soup. But as part of my summer attention issues alluded to above, I didn't have the patience to follow a recipe. I decided to exercise my human ability to do things my own way even though I don't know what I'm doing and others before me have already successfully invented the wheel, as it were. I'd made some gazpacho last year based on a recipe, so I figured I'd just try to recall what I did then. I used fancy orange tomatoes last year, and although delicious to eat, it looked something like this (not what it's s'posta look like). This year, my gazpacho debacle would be scientific because I'm testing the null hypothesis that my cavalier approach to cooking will turn out no different than real recipes.

So first we gather up some ingredients: some exotic looking (but bland) peppers (Hungarian or cubanelle), a more banal looking but better tasting orange pepper, tomatos, onion, cucumber, and an avocado for its beloved fat. Rye pale ale is not mixed in with the veggies, but drunk until everything sounds like a good idea. Next, go Lizzie Borden on the veggies until they're all diced up. Puree about half the abomination in a blender and pour the puree into a bowl or pitcher. Dump into the blended glop those diced veggies whom you've spared a cuisinartistic demise. Maybe throw in some spices or something. Then let sit in the fridge for hours. HOURS! Who could wait that long?

The results (to the left) show a few things (the milk on the right is not mine, I only drink half-and-half). First, I reject my null hypothesis, that that my version of gazpacho would be identical (in color and texture) to Ina Garten's. Second, and more interestingly, the mixture looks fairly similar to last year's recipe (which did look like barf), even though I used slightly different sets of ingredients. It is also delicious in spite of its appearance (what's that they say, about judging covers and burning books)? And as a friend once told me, "hey, it all looks the same on the inside [of your stomach]."

I think this second attempt at gazpacho, and my first summer edible experiment, ultimately demonstrates that I should never be allowed to cook for anyone ever again.

If you have any killer summer recipes, feel free to share!

Earliest human migrations

2011-06-08T13:54:00.006-04:00

One of my favorite paleoanthropological sites is Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia. It is the oldest securely dated hominid site outside Africa (just under 1.85 million years ago), and the hominids found there display a neat mix of primitive Homo habilis and derived H. erectus features. I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to excavate at Dmanisi last year, and to return to Georgia (lamazi Sakartvelo! [I hope I translated that correctly]) for more fieldwork next month.

Recently, Reid Ferring and others (2011) described the results of excavations of M5, a section of the site a bit aways from the area where the hominids were found. M5 is pretty cool because it presents a nice geological "layer cake," as Ferring described it to us: each of the strata (different layers of deposition) are nicely and evenly stacked on one another. Check out the labeled layers on the right of the figure, from Ferring et al. 2011:

This is in stark contrast to the jumbled strata (like 'spaghetti') where the hominids were found. In geology and archaeology, there is a general "law of superposition," which states that the lowest layers in a sequence would have been deposited earlier than the layers above them. The A sediments at Dmanisi, as seen in the figure above, are thus older than the Bs. Hominids have only been found in the B sediments. But work at M5 has shown that stone tools are found in the older A sediments, meaning that hominids arrived at the site and used it continually, beginning just after 1.85 million years ago.

Tools from the site differ between the older A and slightly later (still older than 1.75 million years!) B sediments in both material and manufacture. As they say in the paper (p. 2/5), a major difference in tool manufacture between the strata A and B occupations could be that during the earlier A times, "either cores were more intensively reduced or selected flakes were made elsewhere and carried to the site." I'm not sure why this may be, but it is neat that within a fairly narrow time span, researchers can see habits change in our early ancestors.

The authors also note that the older tools from A sediments indicate "that Eurasia was probably occupied before Homo erectus appears in the East African fossil record" (from the paper's abstract). If only hominids also came out of the A sediments! The News is touting this as meaning H. erectus evolved in Eurasia and then some members of the 'new species' moved back into Africa, but I don't think this is necessarily the case. The Dmanisi hominids are described as H. erectus, but lack some key H. erectus apomorphies (most notably a large brain size) and really look pretty similar to contemporary hominids in Kenya (such as KNM-ER 3733) and Tanzania (such as OH 16). Plus, the E. African hominid fossil record around 1.9 million years ago leaves some tantalizing hints at hominids more erectus-like than habilis-like, such as the ER 2598 occipital fragment.

So while Dmanisi definitely demonstrates the presence of hominids outside Africa earlier than most well-accepted "Homo erectus" (or "ergaster") fossils in E. Africa, I don't think they necessarily indicate that the species arose in Eurasia. Rather, what the fossil record likely shows is the evolution of populations of early Homo, in Africa and Eurasia, toward the more 'advanced' H. erectus we know and love (due to gene flow w/in a widespread species, rather than parallel evolution of similar traits in different species).

Reference

Ferring R, Oms O, Agustí J, Berna F, Nioradze M, Shelia T, Tappen M, Vekua A, Zhvania D, & Lordkipanidze D (2011). Earliest human occupations at Dmanisi (Georgian Caucasus) dated to 1.85-1.78 Ma. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 21646521

Culinary trends in an extinct hominid

2011-05-27T12:35:00.011-04:00

A few weeks ago I discussed a recent paper that analyzed the carbon and oxygen isotope ratios from Australopithecus boisei molars (Cerling et al. 2011). The major finding here was that an enlarged sample (n=24 more) corroborated earlier isotopic (van der Merwe et al. 2008) and tooth wear evidence (Ungar et al. 2008) that A. boisei probably did not subsist on as much hard foods as previously thought. Although this strange hominid probably ate mostly grass/aquatic tubers, some researchers think it may have looked something like this:

Left, A. boisei reconstructed skull, from McCollum (1999, Fig. 1). Right, artist's reconstruction of what the individual on the left may have looked like during life.

But looking at the numbers I'm wondering if the carbon isotopes reveal anything more about this curious hominid. If we plot boisei's carbon 13 values against the fossils' estimated ages, there's a small hint of a temporal trend, of increasing carbon 13 levels over time (more C4 plant consumption). Fitting a line to these data does indicate an increasing C4 component over time, but the slope of the line is not significantly different from zero. The early, high value could be an outlier (not eating the same stuff as his/her peers?), although the lowest carbon 13 value of all that would support this trend is also much lower than the other values; it could be a more anomalous one. So while it's tempting to hypothesize dietary change over time in A. boisei, at the moment it looks like you can't reject the hypothesis that diet is consistent throughout the Pleistocene until the A. boisei's demise.

In addition, Cerling and colleagues sampled at least one of each of the cheek teeth. Because teeth form in the jaws in a sequence (not all at the exact same time), the isotopic signatures from given teeth represent the dietary intake of carbon at various different points in an individual's childhood. In the figure below I lumped upper and lower teeth together; the un-numbered "M" indicates molars unassigned to a specific position.

The first molar crown starts to form right around birth, and note here that it's carbon 13 values are slightly higher than the other molars. The premolars and second molar start to form around the same time, so it is curious that each of these teeth show distinctly different ranges of carbon 13 levels. The sole P3 is also the lowest value (eating fewer C4 plants) in the entire sample, but the P4 has less negative values (eating more C4 plants). Not sure what's going on here, but maybe later analyses of more specimens will clarify the situation. Supporting dietary stasis, Ungar and colleagues (2008) reported similar molar tooth wear in specimens from 2.27-1.4 million years ago.

Our australopithecine ancestors and cousins have proven to be a rag-tag bunch of funny bipeds, and A. boisei has proven to be one of the weirder ones, in my opinion. Of course descriptions of Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus sediba skeletons have been recent reminders that we have lots left to learn about Pleistocene hominids. For my part, I'm interested in working out the deal with the group of "robust" Australopithecus.

References

Cerling, T., Mbua, E., Kirera, F., Manthi, F., Grine, F., Leakey, M., Sponheimer, M., & Uno, K. (2011). Diet of Paranthropus boisei in the early Pleistocene of East Africa Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1104627108

McCollum, M. (1999). The Robust Australopithecine Face: A Morphogenetic Perspective Science, 284 (5412), 301-305 DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5412.301

Ungar PS, Grine FE, & Teaford MF (2008). Dental microwear and diet of the Plio-Pleistocene hominin Paranthropus boisei. PloS one, 3 (4) PMID: 18446200

van der Merwe NJ, Masao FT and Bamford MK. 2008. Isotopic evidence for contrasting diets of early hominins Homo habilis and Australopithecus boisei of Tanzania. South African Journal of Science 104: 153-155

Good olde dentistrie

2011-05-16T20:26:00.005-04:00

I'm reading up on mandibular rotation, which is the change in orientation of the mandibular corpus relative to the rest of the skull during growth (the corpus is the horizontal part of your jaw that holds up your teeth; check out the shape changes in the mandibles in the blog header). So far as I can tell, the original classic paper on the topic is by Bjork (1955). Growth was studied by implanting metal pins into the jaws, then seeing how they move across ontogeny via X-rays (which were once called "roentgenograms," neat-o!) Here's a picture of the procedure, from Bjork (1955):

HOLY GOD WHAT DID THAT KID DO TO DESERVE THIS?! And although there must be a third person there, it sorta looks like there's a three-handed dentist wielding a hammer, a nail, and a kid's face. No wonder so many people are afraid of the dentist.

Reference

BJORK A (1955). Facial growth in man, studied with the aid of metallic implants. Acta odontologica Scandinavica, 13 (1), 9-34 PMID: 14398173

Neandertal terminal biogeography

2011-05-13T16:46:00.003-04:00

How late did Neandertals persist in the Late Pleistocene? Two papers out this week discuss the dates of the latest Neandertals in western Asia.

Pinhasi and colleagues (2011) stress the importance of directly dating Late Pleistocene human-ish fossils. There are numerous techniques used to estimate the ages of the fun stuff we find underground. For fairly old fossils like australopithecines, perhaps the most reliable radiometric method is Argon-Argon, though this requires the fossils to be relatable to volcanic sediments whose argon levels can be measured. The point is that dates of burial are often not estimated from the fossil materials themselves, but rather the sediments and such surrounding the fossil of interest. But younger fossils (than say 50,000) preserve some of the bone's original carbon -allowing age estimates of the fossils themselves by radiocarbon dating.

Pinhasi and colleagues note that while seven separate Neandertal specimens from across Europe and western Asia have been directly dated to be younger than 36 thousand years, these dates may be underestimates. In other words, Neandertals may not have lived after 40 thousand years. To this end, these researchers directly re-dated the infant Neandertal from Mezmaiskaya Cave in Russia, and estimate the poor lad to have died around 42-44 thousand years ago. The authors predict that future direct redating of other Neandertals will show Neandertals to have disappeared by 40 thousand years ago, and that they would have overlapped in time with more modern-looking humans either minimally or not at all. If only there were more information on the latest dates for Middle Paleolithic people!

Lucky me, in tomorrow's Science, Ludovic Slimak and colleagues report on Mousterian tools dating to 32-34 thousand years ago, from the site of Byzovaya Cave "in the western foothills of the Polar Urals" (Slimak et al. 2011: 841). "POLAR!" The site is way further north than any site with Neandertal bones like Mezmaiskaya and Okladnikov, which is pretty impressive. But, there are no human remains associated with the tools, so we don't know who made them. To what extent do these finds address Pinhasi's and others' contention of no Neandertals after 40 thousand years ago?

Slimak and colleagues carbon-dated animal bones that were butchered with the Mousterian tools, which were allegedly made only by Neandertals. There is a major problem with the wide-held assumption that Mousterian (Middle Paleolithic) tools were made only by Neandertals, whereas Upper Paleolithic industries beginning with the Aurignacian were made only by humans. This goes along with people's wont to make a connection between stone tool 'culture' and biologically determined, phylogenetically significant behavioral capacities. But of course, we know biology doesn't determine behavior, and so there's no reason to assume [Mousterian:Neandertal::Aurignacian:'Modern' Human]. Where Mousterian remains have been associated with diagnostic skeletal remains, they are Neandertal. But the Aurignacian, so far as I know, is not associated with diagnostic fossils - we can't say for certain who made it. Plus we know Neandertals were doing something kooky, yet logical in some sort of cognitively complex way, with bird feathers in Italy 44 thousand years ago (Peresani et al. 2011). So the Byzovaya stone tools may demonstrate a late, northern holdout of Neandertals, but then they could simply mean that the new technology either hadn't arrived or hadn't been successful in the far reaches of sub-Artic Pleistocene humanity.

If the latter is the case and Pinhasi & team's hypothesis that Neandertals didn't coexist in time and space (or did only minimally) holds, then the old assumption of Mousterian = Neandertal becomes dubious for other sites with Mousterian tools but no diagnostic fossils. This would also beg the question of the role of modern humans in the Neandertal demise - did the Neandertals disappear and open a niche for other groups of people ('moderns')?

So how were Neandertal populations distributed through space and time in their latest days? I dunno! But for the moment I suppose I'd be surprised if no fossils with Neandertal morphology turn out to be younger than 40 thousand years as suggested by Pinhasi and co. But then I could be wrong.

References

Hoffmann, A., Hublin, J., Hüls, M., & Terberger, T. (2011). The Homo aurignaciensis hauseri from Combe-Capelle – A Mesolithic burial Journal of Human Evolution DOI:10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.03.001

Peresani, M., Fiore, I., Gala, M., Romandini, M., & Tagliacozzo, A. (2011). Late Neandertals and the intentional removal of feathers as evidenced from bird bone taphonomy at Fumane Cave 44 ky B.P., Italy Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (10), 3888-3893 DOI:10.1073/pnas.1016212108

Pinhasi R, Higham TF, Golovanova LV, & Doronichev VB (2011). Revised age of late Neanderthal occupation and the end of the Middle Paleolithic in the northern Caucasus.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID:21555570

Slimak, L., Svendsen, J., Mangerud, J., Plisson, H., Heggen, H., Brugere, A., & Pavlov, P. (2011). Late Mousterian Persistence near the Arctic Circle Science, 332 (6031), 841-845 DOI:10.1126/science.1203866

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

2011-05-09T19:14:00.011-04:00

Life as we know it has taken some strange courses. Of all the things an animal could do with its time, pretending to be an ant is apparently pretty popular. According to a review article in the latest Current Biology, there are probably over 2000 abhorrent species of myrmecomorphs (ant impersonators), including spiders, caterpillars, mites, beetles, and other types of arthropod biodiversity I'm not familiar with, that have come to resemble ants in some form or another.

It's interesting how and why different life forms have come to p-ant-omime. For example, in the picture above, (Maderspacher & Stensmyr 2011, Fig. 3) on the left side is the crab spider (Aphantochilus rogersi) mimicking ant species in the genus Cephalotes - which the spider comes upon unawares and then feeds upon (getting pwned on the right side of the photo). If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then mimicry must be the most malevolent means of creepy.

Or here's a treehopper (Cyphonia clavata, an insect and not a spider like above) that doesn't just disguise itself as an ant, but rather has a whole ant-shaped appendage bursting from its back in a disgusting perversion of alien birth in the Alien series (Maderspacher & Stensmyr 2011, Fig. 1). It is quite remarkable that a surprisingly common yearning to be perceived as an ant has resulted in convergent evolution of an ant-ish figure in myriad of nature's more disgusting creations, not to mention in ants themselves.

Reference

Florian Maderspacher & Marcus Stensmyr (2011). Myrmecomorphomania Current Biology, 21 (9) : R291-293. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.04.006

The universe is too damn big

2011-05-09T11:57:00.009-04:00

I made the unfortunate discovery last weekend that Google Earth has not just badass satellite photos of our home planet, but also really badass maps of places we're ready to colonize: The Moon, Mars, and The Stars. Clearly I'm never going to get any real work done ever again.

Everything extraterrestrial has blown my mind for as long as I can remember. I have always been bothered by the fact that there are things in the universe of such superlative scale that I cannot imagine the amount of matter involved. [Warning the following information comes from WolframAlpha and Wikipedia, so I could be off on some figures]

On the one hand, life is small. Cells can be small enough such that a human body is comprised of an estimated 10 trillion of them. The DNA basepairs within cells are small enough that there are 3 billion in each cell's nucleus (the small green bits within the DNA helix in the picture). That's tiny. (image: Molecular Expressions)

But then on the other hand, there are things whose sheer size is just stupefying. Earth's diameter averages around 7900 miles. We are located on average about 93 million miles from the Sun, which itself is over 864,000 miles in diameter. Outside our solar system, the closest star to us is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away from the Sun. 4.2 light years means it takes light 4.2 years to travel the mere 25 trillion miles between the two stars. At a much grander scale, we are part of the Milky Way galaxy, which is an estimated 590 quadrillion miles across (quadrillion = 1 million billion).

Wikipedia tells me there are an estimated 200 billion additional galaxies vying against ours for the title of "Sweetest Galaxy." But galaxies are gregarious - the Milky Way is part of the "Local Group" (which I'm sure is like the cool kids' table as far as galaxies go), comprised of around 30 other galaxies, and spanning some 58 quintillion miles (or in other words, 58 billion billion miles). More infuriating, these groups and clusters of galaxies themselves aggregate into "superclusters," the most colossal cosmic conglomerates in the universe (though these aren't bound together by gravity, so I guess they shouldn't really count in a way). Our Local Group is part of the larger Virgo supercluster, which is an estimated 110 million light years across, or 65 quintillion miles.

The image at the right contains two galaxies from the Hercules Galaxy Cluster who were best buds, until they came to blows and literally collided with one another (image: geology.com). Could anything possibly be more epic than a galaxy fight? No.

So our bodies are comprised of countless bits of small matter, myriad micrometric molecules executing our basic vital functions. At the opposite end of the size spectrum, galaxy clusters are made up of a stupid sum of stars, more numerous and more massive objects than the scads of cells in our bodies. Baffling.

What the hell was Australopithecus boisei doing?

2011-05-07T11:15:00.012-04:00

A little over 2 million years ago there a major divergence of hominids, leading on the one hand to our earliest ancestors in the genus Homo, and on the other hand to a group of 'robust' australopithecines, the latter group a failed evolutionary experiment in being human. In our ancestors, parts of the skull associated with chewing began to get smaller and more delicate, while the robust australopithecines increased the sizes of their crushin'-teeth and chewin'-muscle attachments.

A face not even a mother could love, so now they're extinct (from McCollum 1999 Fig. 1). Note the very tall face, flaring cheeks, and massive lower jaw which would have facilitated wicked-pisser chewing power.

Weirder, there is a South African form (Australopithecus robustus) and an East African form (A. boisei, the figure here looks like it's based off this species) of robust australopithecine. These two may have inherited their robust adaptations from a common ancestor, or they may be unrelated lineages that evolved these features in parallel. A boisei has been referred to as 'hyper-robust,' its face and teeth are generally larger than those of A. robustus.

For a while it's been supposed that these 'robust' chewing adaptations in our weird, extinct evolutionary cousins (every family has those, right?) reflected a diet of hard objects requiring powerful crushing and grinding - things like hard fruits, seeds, Italian bread, etc. But a few years ago Peter Ungar and others (2008) examined the microscopic wear patterns on the surfaces of molar teeth of A. boisei and noted that they lacked the characteristic pits of a hard-object feeder. A. robustus on the other hand does have wear patterns more like an animal that ate hard foods. Why such a difference? Why the hell wasn't boisei behaving robustly?

Also in 2008 Nikolaas van der Merwe and colleagues analyzed the carbon isotopes preserved in the teeth of A. boisei and some other fossils. Briefly, plants utilize two isotopes of carbon (C12 and C13), but 'prefer' the lighter-weight C12. Some groups of plants like grasses have thrived because they're less picky and can get by just as well with C13. Different kinds of plants, then, incorporate different amounts of these two carbon isotopes into their tissues, then when animals eat it, these isotopes get incorporated into the animal's developing tissues, including tooth enamel. So by looking at the relative amounts of carbon in teeth, researchers can get a rough idea of whether an animal was eating more of the C13-loving or C13-loathing plants (or the animals eating the plants). van der Merwe and others found A. boisei to have a way higher percentage of the plants that don't discriminate against C13 as much, possibly things like grass, sedges or terrestrial flowering plants. GRASS?!

Last week, Thure Cerling and colleagues expanded on the earlier study led by van der Merwe, including a larger set of boisei specimens spanning 500 thousand years of the species' existence. Lo and behold, Cerling and others got similar results: the isotopic signature in A boisei is similar to grass-feeding pigs and horses in its habitat - was the badass "hyper robust" A boisei just a hominid version of a horse? Now, the silica in grass make it extremely wearing on tooth enamel, and while A. boisei had crazy thick molar enamel, I would be a little surprised if the boisei dentition could withstand a lifetime of a grassy diet. Nevertheless, boisei's diet clearly differed from robustus, based on both dental wear and carbon isotopes.

This raises interesting questions about the evolution of the robust group. Does their shared 'robust' morphology reflect common ancestry, with the subtle differences the result of their divergent diets? Or do the subtle differences indicate that they evolved separately but their diets for whatever reasons resulted in similar mechanical loading on their jaws and faces? It should also be noted that while the dates for South African cave sites are always a bit uncertain, it is possible that A. robustus persisted alongside genus Homo until around 1 million years ago, whereas the fossil record for A. boisei craps out around 1.4 million years ago - was A. boisei too specialized on crappy grass, resulting in its evolutionary demise?

A horse-ish, human-ish hominid? Australopithecus boisei, rest in peace. 2.1 - 1.4 mya.

References

Cerling TE, Mbua E, Kirera FM, Manthi FK, Grine FE, Leakey MG, Sponheimer M, & Uno KT (2011). Diet of Paranthropus boisei in the early Pleistocene of East Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 21536914

McCollum, M. (1999). The Robust Australopithecine Face: A Morphogenetic Perspective Science, 284 (5412), 301-305 DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5412.301

Ungar PS, Grine FE, & Teaford MF (2008). Dental microwear and diet of the Plio-Pleistocene hominin Paranthropus boisei. PloS one, 3 (4) PMID: 18446200

van der Merwe NJ, Masao FT, & Bamford MK (2008). Isotopic evidence for contrasting diets of early hominins Homo habilis and Australopithecus boisei of Tanzania. South African Journal of Science 104: 153-155

The descent

2011-05-01T19:03:00.003-04:00

I begin my prelims tomorrow. I have two days to write a ton of brief essays showing what all I've learned - or failed to - about biological anthropology since coming to graduate school.

In the course of studying, I realized I'd amassed a collection of doodles and scribbles, plenty paper put to less than optimal use:

Public Safety Announcement: Get the f- out of the passing lane

2011-04-28T22:35:00.004-04:00

Just a friendly reminder to anyone who drives on the interstate: THE LEFT LANE IS FOR PASSING OTHER CARS.

I'm in impatient but also practical person, and there's little else in the world that makes me more furious than being trapped behind someone abusing the left lane. On the one hand, it's simply annoying when you cannot go a preferred speed (the speed limit or faster) because some bastard is just hanging out in the left lane not passing anyone. But on the other hand, it also obstructs traffic and can be dangerous.

Traffic in the right-most lane has a greater likelihood of being sub-fast-enough because cars are entering or exiting the highway (ramps!). If a car needs to merge onto the highway, common courtesy (actually I think the law) demands you move over to the left lane to allow this newb onto the highway - this is impossible when some buttsack is parked in the passing lane and prevents you from moving over without dangerously speeding up or slowing down.

In addition, when people get trapped behind slow traffic in the fast lane they often become impatient and begin trying to pass on the right side of cars. This is also dangerous for the reasons outlined above - people may need to get right to get off the highway and even knowledgable drivers generally won't expect to be passed on the right.

The passing lane has the misnomer "fast lane." This is due to the fact that generally when you're passing someone it means you're going pretty fast. IT DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN SIMPLY DRIVE IN IT BECAUSE YOU'RE GOING OVER THE SPEED LIMIT. If you're going 75 in a 70 zone but the traffic behind you is coming along at 80, you need to move over as soon as you can.

Also if there are people parked on the right shoulder, it's the law (as well as safe and courteous) to move to the left lane as you pass, if possible.

So please please please if you're not passing another car, get the GDF out of the left lane.

Thank you.

Is eugenics really dead?

2011-04-26T12:22:00.004-04:00

My advisor passed along a USA Today story about the eugenics origins of the journal Annals of Human Genetics. Eugenics was a popular movement in the early 20th century, in which people thought it wise to take the onus of natural selection upon themselves, to encourage smart wealthy people to breed and 'dullard' poor folk to be sterilized. The movement was based on a misunderstanding of evolution, heredity and the genetic basis for complex traits like 'intelligence' (whatever the hell that term really means). Not to mention a sense of intellectual and moral superiority among moneyed white people. Eugenic thinking is what underlay the reprehensibly regrettable misgivings of the Holocaust.

I think it's great that the Annals of Human Genetics is public about the journal's off-color origins. Anthropology itself (and not just the biological subfield, don't let any cultural anthropologist let you think otherwise [yes I have a specific person in mind here]) was borne of Western countries going off to figure out why the lands they were colonizing and exploiting contained humans that differed from themselves (as well as how to deal with 'inferior races'). It's important to know of your field's past mistakes, lest history repeat itself.

Is it repeating itself? Nowadays, people can get 'genetic counseling' if they're contemplating pregnancy, to learn their purportedly genetically predisposed risks for having a child with certain conditions like Down Syndrome. With such knowledge, people can elect not to have kids together. Is this a blessing from medical genetics, or are we seeing a resurgence of biological determinism and old school eugenics?

What big teeth you have, indeed

2011-04-25T22:58:00.007-04:00

If our friend Little Red Riding Hood was dumb enough to've thought a wolf in babushka threads was her grandma, well, she probably would have played Bingo with a grandmother-mimicking Australopithecus anamensis.

Australopithecus anamensis is the earliest undisputed hominid, found in deposits ranging from 4.2 - 3.9 million years ago in Ethiopia and Kenya (Leakey et al. 1995, White et al. 2006). Now, hominids are allegedly distinguished from other apes by having relatively short canine teeth distinguished by having relatively tall 'shoulders,' creating a diamond-shape in front view. Nevertheless, compared with humans these early australopiths had pretty murdersome canines, within the range of female chimpanzee species. (my dictionary is trying to tell me 'murdersome' isn't a word, but I learned long ago not to learn right and wrong from a book)

Such canine form - relatively small with tall shoulders - was important in diagnosing Ardipithecus ramidus (> 4.4 million years) as a hominid back in the roaring 1990s (White et al. 1994). Of course, we learned in the 1980s that many ancient fossil apes looked superficially like hominids because of dental similarities, the result of either parallel evolution or hominids' retention of primitive features. Indeed, even in light of the recently described Ardipithecus ramidus skull and skeleton, the main similarities with later, undisputed hominids are dental.

With this in mind, I'm struck by the canine of Nakalipithecus nakayamai, an ape from Kenya dating to nearly 10 million years ago (Kunimatsu et al. 2007). This is ape was a pretty important discovery because it began to fill in a rather lonesome Late Miocene ape fossil record in Africa. So, below is a picture of Nakali and anamensis canines, which I've tried to properly scale with the cutting-edge techniques of Microsoft Powerpoint (that is absolutely not a plug for Microsoft). On the left is Nakalipithecus, and the 2 on the right are Au. anamensis. The middle one is anamensis from Asa Issie in Ethiopia, and is the largest canine found of any hominid, ever I think. On the right is anamensis from Kanapoi in Kenya, not as big but sharp as shi...

...sh kabob skewers. Well crap, the "hominid feature" of short canine crown with nice shoulders is found in this 10 million year-old ape!

Two mutually exclusive scenarios could explain this similarity: [1] this canine morphology truly is a shared-derived feature of hominids, but hominids and Nakalipithecus just happened to evolve the same morphology independently for no better reason than, say, ennui. [2] This morphology is the ancestral condition for hominids (and chimpanzees and possibly gorillas). The fanciest cladistic methods won't resolve this issue, only the discover of more badass fossils will. But if [2] is correct, that would deal a tough blow to the case of Ar. ramidus (and Sahelanthropus) behing a hominid. Really, it seems like the distinguishing feature of early hominids was their deplorable lack of distinguishing features.

Oy, if bones and teeth are prone to homoplasy (similarity due to parallel evolution and not because of common ancestry), could paleoanthropologists have a special proclivity for it, too (that is, in naming dental hominids)?

Further reading!

Kunimatsu, Y., Nakatsukasa, M., Sawada, Y., Sakai, T., Hyodo, M., Hyodo, H., Itaya, T., Nakaya, H., Saegusa, H., Mazurier, A., Saneyoshi, M., Tsujikawa, H., Yamamoto, A., & Mbua, E. (2007). A new Late Miocene great ape from Kenya and its implications for the origins of African great apes and humans Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (49), 19220-19225 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0706190104

Leakey, M., Feibel, C., McDougall, I., & Walker, A. (1995). New four-million-year-old hominid species from Kanapoi and Allia Bay, Kenya Nature, 376 (6541), 565-571 DOI: 10.1038/376565a0

Ward, C. (2001). Morphology of Australopithecus anamensis from Kanapoi and Allia Bay, Kenya Journal of Human Evolution, 41 (4), 255-368 DOI: 10.1006/jhev.2001.0507

White, T., Suwa, G., & Asfaw, B. (1994). Australopithecus ramidus, a new species of early hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia Nature, 371 (6495), 306-312 DOI: 10.1038/371306a0

White, T., WoldeGabriel, G., Asfaw, B., Ambrose, S., Beyene, Y., Bernor, R., Boisserie, J., Currie, B., Gilbert, H., Haile-Selassie, Y., Hart, W., Hlusko, L., Howell, F., Kono, R., Lehmann, T., Louchart, A., Lovejoy, C., Renne, P., Saegusa, H., Vrba, E., Wesselman, H., & Suwa, G. (2006). Asa Issie, Aramis and the origin of Australopithecus Nature, 440 (7086), 883-889 DOI: 10.1038/nature04629