Anthros are so smart! S-M-R-T! I mean, S-M-A-R-T!
The broad story of the evolution of our species, Homo sapiens, over the past 500K years is that we went from in-between-H. erectus-and-H. sapiens sapiens archaic forms to, well, anatomically modern H. sapiens sapiens, with perhaps the odd detour into neandertalensis-land.
The details have been all kinds of muddled, from the fight about multiregionalism or out-of-Africa-ism, to the relationship between neandertalensis and sapiens, to the question of just what is sapiens anyway, and when did they first come on stage? At the moment, paleoanthropology seems to be in a taxonomic splitting phase, too, wherein minor morphological difference is accorded specific significance.
Well, now's your chance to stake out a front-row spot, because the fireworks are about to start! The British Dental Journal is reporting that human cranial morphology has locally shown significant "modernization" over the past 6.5 x 10² years — yes, that's a mere 650 years. Barely 11% of a single radiocarbon half-life.
So what, you ask? Here's what, I answer:
The details have been all kinds of muddled, from the fight about multiregionalism or out-of-Africa-ism, to the relationship between neandertalensis and sapiens, to the question of just what is sapiens anyway, and when did they first come on stage? At the moment, paleoanthropology seems to be in a taxonomic splitting phase, too, wherein minor morphological difference is accorded specific significance.
Well, now's your chance to stake out a front-row spot, because the fireworks are about to start! The British Dental Journal is reporting that human cranial morphology has locally shown significant "modernization" over the past 6.5 x 10² years — yes, that's a mere 650 years. Barely 11% of a single radiocarbon half-life.
So what, you ask? Here's what, I answer:
- Homo floriensis, that Indonesian "hobbit" population? Probably within the range of human skeletal evolutionary plasticity. Just a shrunken sapiens. So what if it's not in our direct lineage? That's insufficient for expulsion from the subspecies (H. sapiens sapiens).
- Homo heidelbergensis/rhodesiensis/sapiens-idaltu, the former "archaic Homo sapienses"? Probably just a subset of Homo sapiens morphological covariation that is no more.
Not that any of these things weren't possible before. It's just that now we have actual evidence for really rapid skeletal evolution, an' ain't nobody gonna argy that them Mediæval cathedral-smiths was even a different subspecies.
Look, in paleontological terms, we've got a damn fine-grained collection of evolutionary change in Homo over the past megalenium [my own neologism for "million years," thank you very much]. We've got, perhaps, too much information. We don't have clearly definable paleospecies, we've got a continuum. And while that does vindicate Darwinian gradualism in some contexts, it's not so great for our sense-making of the particular historical details, because we don't have quite enough data for that.
And while there may be a directional component to evolutionary change, there's a vast difference between directionality and progressivity. The earliest known human immigrants to the Americas didn't look like any extant population. There are collections of morphological covariation out there in the past that just aren't to be found today. That doesn't make those populations less human. Our statistical morphological models of the range of human (co)variation are based on a strongly biased sample: there are more people alive today than in the whole of pre-A.D. 1900 human history. But coïncidence is no explanation for historical accident. We contemporary humans just like to think we're the measure of our species. That doesn't make us so.
Look, in paleontological terms, we've got a damn fine-grained collection of evolutionary change in Homo over the past megalenium [my own neologism for "million years," thank you very much]. We've got, perhaps, too much information. We don't have clearly definable paleospecies, we've got a continuum. And while that does vindicate Darwinian gradualism in some contexts, it's not so great for our sense-making of the particular historical details, because we don't have quite enough data for that.
And while there may be a directional component to evolutionary change, there's a vast difference between directionality and progressivity. The earliest known human immigrants to the Americas didn't look like any extant population. There are collections of morphological covariation out there in the past that just aren't to be found today. That doesn't make those populations less human. Our statistical morphological models of the range of human (co)variation are based on a strongly biased sample: there are more people alive today than in the whole of pre-A.D. 1900 human history. But coïncidence is no explanation for historical accident. We contemporary humans just like to think we're the measure of our species. That doesn't make us so.
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 16:55
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