Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived

by Chip Walter

  2. For a summary of Dunbar’s theories, see pages 122–23 of Thumbs, Toes, and Tears: And Other Traits That Make Us Human.

  3. For more on this case, see Valerie E. Stone et al., “Selective Impairment of Reasoning About Social Exchange in a Patient with Bilateral Limbic System Damage,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 99.17 (2002): 11531–36.

  4. It is probably not a coincidence that the neuroimaging studies of people who suffer from different forms of autism find that activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, superior temporal sulcus (STS), and the amygdala is low or nonexistent compared with others who don’t have autism. As the experience of R.M. illustrated, these areas of the brain are crucial to social interactions most of us take for granted. Autistics are missing many of the functioning brain structures that allow them to “read” minds. Autistics struggle with grasping the intentions of others, or even comprehending that others have states of mind different from theirs. Depending on how severe the autism is, empathy, sympathy, deception, even joking, are out of the question because they all require seeing life, however briefly, from a point of view other than one’s own. This means that the scenario building that comes so naturally to most of us is hard for them. Though scientists don’t yet understand why, these newer and more ancient parts of the brain seemingly have been shut down or struggle to communicate with one another.

  5: THE EVERYWHERE APE

  1. Curtis W. Marean, “When the Sea Saved Humanity,” Scientific American 303.2 (2010): 54–61.

  2. Explore National Geographic’s fascinating Genographic Project for details of our past migrations at https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/atlas.html. There is not universal agreement on these conclusions, but the information nevertheless provides fascinating insights into how we evolved and came to spread across an entire planet. Another excellent site to visit is http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey.

  3. The most recent matrilineal common ancestor shared by all living human beings, also known as Mitochondrial Eve, lived roughly 120–150 millennia ago around East Africa. This is about the same time as Homo sapiens idaltu. A study of African genetic diversity headed by Dr. Sarah Tishkoff found that Africa’s San people express the greatest genetic diversity among the 113 distinct populations sampled in the research, making them one of fourteen “ancestral population clusters.”

  4. Dramatic climate fluctuations began 356,000 years ago according to researchers at the Smithsonian Institution and continued until about 50,000 years ago due to the elongated orbit of Earth around the sun. During this time, Africa often grew dry and the planet cold. For more see http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-evolution-timeline-interactive.

  5. Read M. Lozano et al., “Right–Handedness of Homo heidelbergensis from Sima De Los Huesos (Atapureca, Spain) 500,000 Years Ago,” Evolution and Human Behavior 30.5 (2009): 369–76, and http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17184-ancient-teeth-hint-that-righthandedness-is-nothing-new.html for more details on handedness and brain lateralization at this point in human evolution.

  6. See: http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals for more insights into Neanderthal range.

  7. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3948165.stm.

  8. For more details on this fascinating theory read “Genetic Analysis of Lice Supports Direct Contact Between Modern and Archaic Humans” at http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0020340.

  6: COUSIN CREATURES

  1. Neanderthal skulls were first discovered in Engis, Belgium (1829), by Philippe–Charles Schmerling and in Forbes’ Quarry, Gibraltar (1848), both prior to the specimen discovered in the Neander Valley in Erkrath near Düsseldorf in August 1856. At the time, no one was quite sure what they were. Later they were identified as Neanderthals. If they had initially been identified and investigated further, the species might have been named Gibraltarians or Engiseans rather than Neanderthals.

  2. Lighter, straighter hair is often a by–product of lighter, fairer skin.

  3. Scientists have speculated that one of the reasons it is so difficult to find fossils of Homo sapiens from the same period is that they hadn’t yet begun to bury their dead even if Neanderthals had.

  4. It’s difficult to know how many Native Americans lived in the continental United States before the arrival of white men, but it couldn’t have exceeded many more than tens of thousands. In 1823 President James Monroe reported the “Chayenes” to be “a tribe of three thousand two hundred and fifty souls, dwelling and hunting on a river of the same name, a western tributary of the Missouri, a little above the Great Bend.” Ten years later, Catlin, the famous painter of Native Americans, reported, “The Shiennes are a small tribe of about three thousand in number, living neighbors to the Sioux on the west of them, between the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains.” In 1822 the population of the two divisions of the Sioux was estimated at nearly thirteen thousand.

  5. You can listen to the sound of the Neanderthal’s e at http://www.fau.edu/explore/media/FAU-neanderthal.wav. It’s fascinating.

  7: BEAUTIES IN THE BEAST

  1. Recounted in Darwin’s Descent of Man, chap. 19.

  2. See Thumbs, Toes, and Tears: And Other Traits That Make Us Human for a more detailed exploration of why women evolved large breasts and other insights into the attractions between men and women.

  3. J. H. Langlois, L. Kalakanis, A. J. Rubenstein, A. Larson, M. Hallam, and M. Smoot, “Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta–analytic and Theoretical Review.” Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000): 390–423. Also see http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/langloislab/facialattract.html.

  4. Descent of Man, chap. 19.

  5. Ibid.

  6. At all of these sites researchers found piles of seashells. Together with the much–older evidence from the cave at Pinnacle Point, the shells suggest that seafood may have served as a nutritional trigger at a crucial point in human history, providing the fatty acids that modern humans needed to make an already large and intricate brain faster and smarter. Stanford University paleoanthropologist Richard Klein has long argued that a genetic mutation at roughly this point in human history sparked a sudden increase in brainpower, perhaps linked to the onset of speech.

  7. E. Bates, with L. Benigni, I. Bretherton, L. Camaioni, and V. Volterra, The Emergence of Symbols: Cognition and Communication in Infancy. New York: Academic Press, 1979. Note the term Bates used in the passage, heterochrony, which is defined as a developmental change in the timing of events leading to changes in a living thing’s size and shape, is often used interchangeably with neoteny.

  8. For more on the exponential rate of change in evolution of all kinds from the universe to human culture, explore Ray Kurzweil’s concept of the Law of Accelerating Returns, defined in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.

  9. These mutations may also have kicked in the ultimate symbolic ability and the most extreme proof that the human brain had evolved to a point where its owners had become self–aware—modern, human language and speech.

  8: THE VOICE INSIDE YOUR HEAD

  1. See Belinda R. Lennox, S. Bert, G. Park, Peter B. Jones, and Peter G. Morris, “Spatial and Temporal Mapping of Neural Activity Associated with Auditory Hallucinations,” Lancet 353 (February 2, 1999), http://www.bmu.psychiatry.cam.ac.uk/PUBLICATION_STORE/lennox99spa.pdf.

  2. This story was related in comments online following an article in Scientific American entitled “It’s No Delusion: Evolution May Favor Schizophrenia Genes” at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=evolution-may-favor-schizophrenia-genes.

  3. Eighty percent of diagnosed autistics are men based on research in C. J. Newschaffer, L. A. Croen, J. Daniels, et al., “The Epidemiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders,” Annual Review of Public Health 28 (2007): 235–58. doi:10.1146/annurev.publhealth.28.021406.144007.PMID_17367287.

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