Darwin's hunch

ISBN 978-1-4314-2425-2

Darwin's hunch was that humans evolved in Africa. As Christa Kuljian shows, for most of the twentieth century, this was not the prevailing view among palaeoanthropologists, who felt sure humans had emerged in Europe or Asia. Indeed, the ready acceptance of the Piltdown forgery reflected both this view and the importance attached to brain size. In contrast, the Taung child, an australopithecine discovered in 1924 by Raymond Dart, was disregarded because of its location and small brain size. 

The Taung child (Australopithecus africanus) discovered in 1924
Ditsong National Museum of Natural History CC BY-SA 4.0

Indeed this highly entertaining account of the South African contribution to anthropology by Dart, Robert Broom, Phillip Tobias and others exposes how misconceptions both within South Africa and without shaped interpretation of the fossil record.

Many of the same scientists were involved in biometric studies of living people. These were troublesome because of implicit racial bias. Support for such studies was forthcoming from Jan Smuts and other politicians with a racial agenda. Particularly disturbing was the treatment afforded to the "bushmen" or San people. Anthropologists such as Tobias and Hertha De Villiers were much interested in such female characteristics as steatopygia (increased fat in the region of the buttocks) and elongated labia minora. 

This book was published over a year ago and I was alerted to it by a lengthy review (and opinion piece) by Rebecca Rogers Ackermann (here). It certainly provides food for thought.

The book also covers more recent conflicts between South African palaeoanthropologists such as Ron Clarke and Lee Berger. This has again come to the fore with publication by Clarke of the first description of the australopithecine known as Little Foot (e.g. here) and the hasty reaction from Berger (here). 

The book does not go into detail about phylogenomics and studies of ancient and modern DNA. These provide robust support for the Recent African Origin hypothesis of human origins argued since 1988 by Chris Stringer (here). And thus for Darwin's hunch. Genomics is set to cast new light on the history of the San as recently reported in Nature (here).