Join us this time as we meet up with Keneiloe Molopyane, curator of the Maropeng Museum of Human Origins in South Africa!
She is a member of the original Rising Star caving team, and has been working closely with Lee Berger ever since, more recently she has been working on a site called the 105 site in the cradle, and is helping preparations and excavations there as she prepares to take over the site from Professor Berger.
Join us for a chat!
Let us know what you think in the comments below and if you want to be a guest on the show let us know by emailing us at worldofpaleoanthropology@gmail.com!
The Sediments of Time, a book written by Meave Leakey (Yes those Leakey’s) with her daughter Samira is a look into the history of modern Paleoanthropology from her perspective as some of the greatest archaeological finds of all time were made.
From the discovery, excavation and preparation of the Turkana Boy, as well as many other erectus fossils found all over the larger Turkana region, Koobi Fora, and other localities.
Fossils from all across Africa are chronicled in this book, all from the perspective of a young WOMEN in the STEM field. Its a perspective that is both rare and welcoming as most stories and recollections from the time are from their male counterparts, which is great but its a nice change.
The books goes over the personal life of the Leakey’s at the time, from Meave getting hired on by Louis and eventually marrying Richard, nursing him through the loss of his legs, and even giving him a kidney. A story of true love follows these two as they adventure around the wilds of Africa following Richards pursuits. But Meave was never far behind, in fact in some cases she was in front, leading her own expeditions when Richard couldn’t, or when he had to take up position with the ranger service.
This books is not a technical biological review of the evolution of humans, while human evolution is a prevailing theme, and is all that is talked about, it is what is between the lines that make this book stand out against the crowd when it comes to books on paleoanthropology.
The Leakey Family is famous for all that they have contributed, and continue to contribute to the community of paleontologists, archaeologists, and scientists who study and try to answer the same initial questions that Louis Leakey set out to answer oh so long ago.
This is a great read if you want to hear about the story of these amazing finds, and learn the history of where we are today.
Welcome to our next interview! And with the prolific and wonderful Professor John Hawks!
I do hope you enjoy our chat, and remember if you or someone you know is interested in appearing on the show have them contact us at worldofpaleoanthropology@gmail.com and we can set something up!
So we are finally here! Launch day in the United States! October 27th is the day that Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art finally comes available in hardcover and paperback to readers across the U.S.
While available on kindle and audible for some time, the book was not officially available until now.
In preparation for the books launch, we interviewed the author, Rebecca Wragg Sykes, which we had a great time doing. You should check out that talk here:
But now that the book is out, lets talk about it! How is it? Should you get it, and whole role does it play in the future of anthropology?
First off lets start off with the basics, if you are looking for a book on Neanderthals, especially one that has by far the most up to date information based on the most recent findings and technology, then this is the book for you. Not only is all of the information top notch, and as up to date as you will find out there (besides any discoveries that come out after the publication of this article).
Each chapter starts with a look back into the past, with a glimpse through the eyes of our Neanderthal cousins, while some people complain about these anecdotes, I find that they add to the overall story and provide a more fulfilling and imaginary driving experience when imagining a world that no longer exists. After all, no matter how much archaeology is involved, there is still going to be guess work, might as well make it interesting and logical.
The book guides you through the basic lives of a Neanderthal, as the title suggests, from birth to death and everything in between we get a close glimpse at what it was like to live in a world no longer recognized. From how stone tools were made and used to the way in which a Neanderthal women would give birth, each aspect is touched upon, and in unique and intelligent ways.
At the time of writing this, it is a fact, that there are no more updated or more informed books on Neanderthals out there Rebecca Wragg Sykes has quickly made herself a name in the field of Paleoanthropology and Archaeology doing various works in STEM and science education. And for good measure, her charisma, love her work, and talent at bringing detailed and hard to understand concepts into view creates an entirely new perspective on creatures long dead.
From start to finish the book takes you on a long journey through time and explains each aspect of it, in a kind, understandable way that makes it enjoyable to read and learn even the harder, more dry topics.
For me, Im a biological anthropology kind of guy, the chapters on stone tool knapping were not my favorite, but they were still very informative.
So what is there to learn and take away from this book? First of all, let me say, if it is not clear, if you want to learn about Neanderthals this is a must read, simply put. This is the best modern book on Neanderthals.
But what is the main take away? To me, I think its an idea that many anthropologists have been trying to push for some time with little success, but maybe this book will change that. To change the idea that Neanderthals were not brutish ancestors who only lived in caves and ate each other. But that they were so much more, so much closer to our own species than we ever thought, both in thought, culture and anatomy. That these creatures were in fact us, and that our differences are far smaller than they ever seemed before.
Neanderthals were not “cavemen”, they were sophisticated hominids who lived dedicated and developed lives that were not so different than our own. Hopefully this message gets across to a new, and old generation, for we have so much to learn about those that came before us, and even during our own existence. We have no closer relatives, its time we start to recognize them for who and what they are and their importance in our daily lives, our health, and our future.
We have so much left to learn about Neanderthals, and while KINDRED is a great start and covers just so much information, it is just the tip of the iceberg, the taste to get you interested and involved in the on going research involving paleontology and Neanderthals.
You can order your copy of the book right here on your favorite format:
We highly recommend it, and suggest you watch our interview to go along with the book for added content!
We would like to go ahead and thank Rebecca again for her participation in our interview, and thank you for the wonderful years and hard work that she has put forth to bring us this great work on Neanderthals.
I have some exciting news! Along the launch of our latest interview today, we are also announcing that we have created our very own Youtube account!
You will be able to find all of our video interviews there, as well as on Facebook, but the quality will be much better on YouTube! But we shall maintain both for user ease.
View our channel and please like and subscribe here!
Author of the new book KINDRED, we take time to talk to Rebecca about Neanderthals and their lives, from how they could throw spears to Jean Auels Earth’s Children Saga.
Join us here, and let us know what you think about Neanderthals below!
Whats your favorite aspect about them?
Look forward to our full review of the book when it comes out at the end of the month, in the meantime be sure to get your pre order on Amazon right here!
Some Assembly Required by Neil Shubin is a great look into the genetics of what makes us human. One of the newer books out there, the information contained therein is up to date and relevant to todays topics and discoveries.
Focusing more on the mechanics of evolution and biology in general than specifically Human Evolution, this book will please a variety of scientists and enthusiasts alike.
Discussing from what we are from our basic building blocks, to Homo sapiens, we explore an amazing journey through they eyes of a geneticist and scientist who’s goal is to find the center of it al through a detailed analysis of genetic, fossil, and theoretical remains.
Neil Shubin does a great job of leading us down a path of exploration as we start at the beginning, the very beginning, 4 billion years ago at the start of life on earth up to where we are today. Not only is this done in great detail with in a way that is easy to understand but done so that it can be built upon by other scientists and enthusiasts.
This may not be the best book for those just starting down the path of paleoanthropology as some of the topics are harder to understand than others, but they are explained well and in detail so that no one is left behind.
All in all its a good book, nothing super special to say about it to be honest, but if youre looking for another book to pick up, anything relating to this subject, its a good addition to your library.
Hello and well met Prof. Tattersall! How are you?:
Still ambulatory, fortunately.
Today we are lucky in the fact that we get the rare opportunity to interview someone who has made such a mark on the greater world of Paleoanthropology. Professor Ian Tattersall!
To get started, I would love to give you a little space to tell us a little about yourself:
Thank you for asking. I am an emeritus curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I have spent the last fifty years or so thinking about human evolution in the light of my early experience with the lemurs of Madagascar. The lemurs are a very diverse group of primates; and this started me thinking in terms of natural diversity, which I soon realized also describes the pattern we find in the human fossil record. I had been brought up to think of human evolution as a matter of gradual perfecting change, one species giving rise to the next in a slow transformation. But looking more closely I saw that the story of human evolution has actually been one of vigorous experimentation with the hominid (hominin if you prefer) potential. Many species were produced over the tenure of the hominids, and most of them became extinct.
Great! Thanks so much for sharing that! Now, to get to the questions!
What is your favorite Hominid and why?
Wow, that’s a tough one. I guess if pressed I’d have to say Homo heidelbergensis, if for no better reason than it is the main hominid species I’m still having to do battle about. Today, pretty much everyone recognizes that Homo neanderthalensis is its own entity, one that needs to be understood in its own terms, even though it was a close enough relative of Homo sapiens to have done some minor interbreeding with it. But Homo heidelbergensis is still very confused, and even though it is very distinctive my colleagues can’t even agree which fossils belong to it. That’s an issue that won’t be resolved until the Atapuerca fossils, wrongly ascribed to Homo heidelbergensis, are given their own name and identity.
2. Twenty years ago, did you see us where we are today?
3. Where do you see us in another 20 years?
I will answer these two questions together, because basically I hadn’t, and haven’t, a clue. When I got into the field half a century ago, our understanding of human was radically different from our understanding today. Back then we had a much thinner human fossil record, geochemical dating was still a novelty, the CT scanner was in the future, nobody in paleoanthropology was using electron microscopes, isotopic studies hadn’t been thought of, and paleoanthropology itself was in thrall to the Evolutionary Synthesis. Now the world is a radically different place; and it would be total hubris to imagine that it will have not changed out of recognition again in fifty or even twenty years’ time. To our successors, what we think today will appear just as quaint as what our teachers thought in 1970 does to us today.
4. Which of your hypotheses was the hardest to defend, and do you think you did it successfully?
I have tried all my career to break away from the hugely minimalist and linear notion of human evolution that Ernst Mayr imposed on paleoanthropology in 1950. It is a very beguiling one, and it makes a great story; but clearly things in the real world were a lot messier than that. Evolutionary change is potentially influenced by many different factors, and there is a lot more to evolution than just natural selection. Paleoanthropologists today recognize many more extinct hominid species than they did a few decades ago; but this havs been imposed by the pressure of discovery, rather than by the rethinking of the fossil record that I would like to see done. So no, I don’t think I have got very far. But I comfort myself by reflecting that, in science, we are all ultimately wrong.
5. What’s it like to travel the world to all of these exotic places and explore human origins?
It has been a blast. I spent a good bit of my childhood in Africa and so got a taste for travel early on; and I have been privileged to indulge that taste in search of fossils both in the field and in museum drawers. In the process I have met many wonderful people (and a few not so wonderful); and I have been able to appreciate first-hand that the world is a very big place, and that what it looks like depends entirely on where you are viewing it from.
6. What first got you interested in this subject?
I stumbled into it in college.
7. What’s the hardest part of your job?
I think the hardest thing of all in paleoanthropology is its most basic, and most necessary, operation: sorting the hominid fossil record into species. The problem arises because there is no one-to-one correspondence between speciation and morphological shift. That makes hypotheses in this area very hard to test, given the nature of the evidence we are dealing with. But although some scoff that worrying about species is just “arguing about names,” there is no doubt in my mind that if you don’t know who the actors are, you’ll never understand the play.
8. What is one major misconception you would like to clear up?
Probably the notion that phylogenies are a matter of discovery. The idea often seems to be that fossils are like links in a chain, and that if you crawl over enough outcrops and find enough fossils, you will find where the chain runs. But in fact, phylogenies are typically very complex, with numerous speciations and extinctions. Which means that unraveling them is essentially a matter of analysis, not of discovery. Which doesn’t mean that more fossils are not better, of course.
9. Who are some of your major inspirations?
Wow. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, starting well before Darwin. But without David Pilbeam, Elwyn Simons, and Niles Eldredge, my career would never have developed as it did.
10. What are your thoughts on Homo naledi; especially possible interment of the dead?
Well, naledi is one of the great recent discoveries, though I am not sure it is appropriately placed in Homo. The algorithm that “If it isn’t Australopithecus it’s Homo, and vice versa” is a bit of a straitjacket for paleoanthropology at this point. For me, naledi is an additional indication of just how diverse the hominids are. As to the rumored interment, I am still waiting to see all the evidence, although hominids are so weird anything is possible.
11. What’s next for you?
Over the last few years I have become increasingly interested in how Homo sapiens came to be the extraordinary creature it is, and I think I will extend my studies in that direction. I am also working on the history of early zoological exploration in Madagascar (old guys always get interested in history).
12. Why is it important to understand where we came from?
It is crucial to know accurately how we Homo sapiens came about, because very often we have the notion that we have been perfected by nature: that we have been honed by evolution to be the creature we are. Whereas in fact the record suggests otherwise. It suggests that (like everything else) we are an adventitious product of nature, unperfected in any respect. Knowing this helps us to understand not only why we are so creative, but also why we are so fallible. And why we are responsible for what we do, and can’t just blame it on our genes or some imagined past.
13. If you could be present for any discovery, what would it be?
Tough to say. I don’t know what discoveries will be made, and frankly I don’t want to guess. But looking back, I know where I would like to have been, as witness to the first Neanderthal/Homo sapiens encounter. There would have been no better moment to gauge the exactly what it is that makes modern humans different
14. How has the study of human origins changed the way you view the world?
Another tough one, since it has been so long since I viewed the world through any other lens. Perhaps, though, it has most importantly placed our species in perspective for me. We are one of many millions of species on this planet, each of which is unique and can do something no other species can. We are unusual in many ways, notably in our symbolic cognitive style; but we are not special, and we do not have a special right to the world and its resources.
15. What advice would you give someone going into the field?
Be sure you are really motivated. Getting into a good grad school is nowadays a lot easier than getting a good job at the end of it all. But never lose your interest!
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