by Lydia Pyne
Gurche’s second reconstruction is a colored latex sculpture where a few strands of gray hair wisp around Flo’s face and her soulful eyes seem to track the museumgoers throughout the exhibit. Both pieces emphasize Flo’s evolutionary vulnerability. Some of Gurche’s early sketches show Flo holding her head in her hands with her eyes shut, or with her hands thrown up over her head as if to stave off the inevitability of her extinction. For most reconstructions and dioramas, viewers are encouraged to believe that they are “seeing” a moment frozen in time. But like the dioramas of South Africa’s Ditsong Museum, the slice-of-time sentiment is a convenient and necessary fiction to fold viewers into the scene and have them believe the narrative they see unfolding before them.
Gurche was curious what the effect of such a role reversal would look like, particularly with a hominin like the hobbit. “There are ways of playing with realism, of taking it a little bit further,” Gurche muses. “What expression would be fitting for Flo if she were able to see us? What would she have thought of our kind?” In creating the expression and tone for Flo’s headshot, Gurche drew on one of National Geographic’s most iconic covers—the photo of a green-eyed Afghani girl. In the photo, her expression is haunting, resigned, frightened, even distrustful. It’s a lifetime of hardship focused through her eyes. “This is exactly the kind of expression I was thinking of for Flo,” Gurche recalls. “I thought her expression should be an uneasy one at the very least, maybe stopping just short of profoundly disturbed.”19 The story that Flo conveys through these reconstructions is an empathetic narrative of harsh evolutionary inevitability.
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The issues and arguments surrounding the fossil have been played and replayed, to the point that debates about the specimen’s interpretation as well as its handling have simply become de rigueur. These controversies only fan the fossil’s fame. (“Scientists at War over the Flores Hobbit Man Fossils,” screamed an August 16, 2014, headline from the Guardian, fairly typical of floresiensis-based articles.) There is always a sense of provoking and wanting to stir up disagreements about the fossil. Dean Falk recalled the day that Nature lifted its media embargo on the Homo floresiensis papers and authors were no longer barred from talking about the fossil discovery. Falk received a call from National Geographic’s David Hamlin. “While we continued to talk, I called up a news site on my computer and watched in amazement as Hobbit stories popped up one after another.”20 News about the discovery became weighted with an immediacy that other celebrity fossils had not been fraught with, thanks to the easy availability of information due to easy digital access. (No other fossil had been able to digitally go viral before Homo floresiensis.) Articles begat other articles, journalists roved the Internet looking for quotes, and blogs went wild. It was a far cry from the publication of the Taung Child or even the press release that accompanied Lucy’s discovery.
Although originally a bit skeptical of the Flores discovery and its implications, Peter Brown later mused, “Now I’m more open to the idea that very small-bodied and small-brained bipeds moved out of Africa at a much earlier date, maybe 3 million years ago, or earlier. I’m more open to the idea that there were lots of failures in the evolution of bipeds. Some were successful, some weren’t. It’s a very branchy tree, and it just so happens we’ve survived.”21 Bert Roberts summed things up this way: “To me, the ultimate value of the hobbit is not what it is, in and of itself, because it’s just a dead end. It probably didn’t lead to anything that’s alive today. But it opened up the door for people to think more broadly about everything. I think the hobbit changed the way people thought.”22
“Homo floresiensis challenges us because she is so unexpected, because she does not fit with many preconceptions about how humans evolved and behaved, and what they should look like. Taken in context … she is, however, exactly what we might expect,” Morwood argued in 2007, offering his take on why the fossil is such an unexpectedly expected conundrum. “Some find this possibility not to their liking and have challenged it, which in turn has led to a sometimes bizarre series of twists and turns in Hobbit’s postexcavation history.”23
Although controversy has so far defined the life of Flo the hobbit-like hominin, it is perhaps unsurprising, given how relatively recent the discovery is. If one were to look at only the first ten years of the Taung Child’s life postexcavation, one would find a fossil defined by controversy. It wasn’t until several decades later—and, especially, not until the debunking of Piltdown—that the Taung Child became less controversial and more mainstream. Many fossils in paleoanthropology’s history have become well known rather rapidly—usually thanks to something provocative or heavily debated within the field—and then the fossils flame out, celebrity-wise, within a couple of decades.
Flo is a celebrity fossil for two main reasons. First, she is surrounded by controversy, and that controversy has spurred on scientific and popular recognition. The second reason for her celebrity has the possibility to keep her in the public’s eye and to make sure that she resonates on more than just a level of scientific controversy. Because her biology and history—her small stature and moment of discovery—aligned so perfectly with the early twenty-first-century Lord of the Rings spectacle, she has a cultural resonance that gives her more footing than other fossils. Homo floresiensis even worked its way into popular television—references to the discovery pop up in season five of Gilmore Girls; in Bones, Dr. Brennan and her graduate student Daisy Wick traveling to Flores to look for more “hobbit” specimens.
With a different evolutionary story—if she weren’t quite so small, if she had a larger brain, if she hadn’t died so relatively recently—and a different cultural context—if the world hadn’t quite taken leave of its senses over the Tolkien novels coming to film, if the scientific community hadn’t become so publicly embroiled in its own discord—Flo’s story would be completely different. Other fossils have been controversial and famous for it, but controversy alone doesn’t make or sustain a celebrity fossil discovery in the decades after its discovery. She doesn’t easily fit into either traditional phylogenetic narratives or cultural ones. In essence, she flipped evolutionary history on its—small—head, by inverting the paleocelebrity story. For fossils like the Taung Child and the Old Man, popular culture spent decades catching up with its then contemporaneous scientific discoveries. For Flo, popular culture had a neatly carved-out cliché—the hobbit—that she so neatly fit into. What this inversion means for Future Flo will be determined in subsequent decades. Flo might end up as a museum and national icon like Lucy, or she might end up buried in the cultural equivalent of a cave on a remote island of history, if Lord of the Rings can’t sustain her in the decades to come.
If, at the end of the day, controversy is all that defines her, the odds are that she won’t be famous in forty years—she’ll simply be a curious footnote in paleoanthropology’s history. Give the fossil another fifty years, and its cultural history will be richer, deeper, and simply different than it is now.
Portrait of Australopithecus sediba, or Karabo. (Photo by Brett Eloff. Courtesy of Lee Berger, University of the Witwatersrand; CC GFDL)
CHAPTER SEVEN
SEDIBA: TBD (TO BE DETERMINED)
Dad, I found a fossil!”
On August 15, 2008, nine-year-old Matthew Berger tagged along with his father, paleoanthropologist Dr. Lee Berger, on a field project in Malapa Nature Reserve in northern South Africa. The project was part of efforts to explore and map out known fossil sites and caves in the reserve, about forty kilometers north of Johannesburg. While puttering around the reserve with his dog, Tau, Matthew discovered what he knew to be some kind of fossil sticking out of a dark brown chunk of breccia rock. At first glance, the senior Berger thought that the fossil was simply a piece of a very, very old antelope—a common fossil in the area.
He picked up the block of rock containing the fossil and looked more closely, and realized that what he was looking at was a clavicle—a collarbone—of a hominin. He f
lipped the block over and saw a lower jaw encased in the same piece of breccia. “I couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Berger giddily recalled in a New York Times interview. “I took the rock, and I turned it [and] sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died. What are the odds?”1
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In April 2010, the fossils Matthew and his dad’s team discovered in excavations from Malapa were published in Science as a new fossil hominin species called Australopithecus sediba. Although the paleoanthropological community was basically in agreement that the fossils were truly spectacular specimens, the scientific name proved to be a somewhat controversial taxonomic assignment because the fossils showed primitive apelike traits as well as derived, or Homo-like, characteristics. (Many researchers argued that the anatomy of Sediba would be better ascribed to the genus Homo, not to Australopithecus.) The publication of the fossils was accompanied by numerous opinion pieces arguing about the best taxonomic status for the fossil—from Science to Nature to National Geographic to the New York Times.
Regardless of its taxonomy, to date, the Malapa site was undeniably a significant fossil locale, having yielded over 220 bone fragments that, when put together, can boast a total of six skeletons: a juvenile male, an adult female, an adult male, and three infants that all lived around 1.9 million to 2 million years ago. When the fossil species was described in 2010, it was—and still is—tremendously exciting not only because Sediba lived during a time when both australopith species and early Homo roamed the greater African landscapes together, but also because the fossils were from multiple individuals with incredible archaeological provenience. These fossils represented an interesting time in our evolutionary history and constituted a sample of the species that was greater than just one individual—which, in turn, helps paleoanthropologists understand variation within fossil species.
Over the twentieth century, little did more to shape paleoanthropology’s emerging identity as its own scientific discipline than the fossil hominin discoveries from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Every new discovery inherently carried a certain prestige because the fossil discoveries offered the basis for creating hypotheses and explanations about what could be observed in the fossil record—new fossils could make or break definitions of species, and every new discovery had the potential to rewrite the family tree. New fossils were imbued with social prestige in their original contexts—either accepted as ancestrally significant, like Peking Man, or dismissed, like the Taung Child.
As more and more fossil discoveries have entered the scientific record over the course of the last century, fossil collections are simply not as sparse as they were in earlier decades. (There are, for example, over four hundred Neanderthal individuals represented in the fossil record so far, compared with the very few specimens of the nineteenth century.) So, where does this leave twenty-first-century fossil discoveries? What would a famous fossil look like today? Flo and Homo floresiensis gave us one type of modern celebrity—contentious little hobbit that she is. The discovery of Sediba raised other questions: What historical patterns could or would other fossil discoveries follow? What historical patterns would they follow? What cultural expectations—and what scientific questions—would twenty-first-century fossils now need be required to answer to?
“The dolomitic cave deposits of South Africa have yielded arguably the richest record of both hominin and mammalian evolution in Africa. Fossils were first recognized in these deposits in the early 20th century, but it was the discovery of the Taung child skull from the Buxton Limeworks in 1924 that led to the recognition of the importance of these cave sites,” Berger explained in a guide to the fossils and history of the Malapa region.2 Part of the reason that the Malapa specimens could catapult so quickly into the paleo limelight was due to the incredible paleoanthropological history associated with the Malapa—Sediba’s success is contingent, in no small part, upon the fossils’ South African legacy.
But Sediba’s renown is also a product of the fossil being in the right place at the right time and with a person to champion it, all the while pushing for a change in the paradigm of how paleoanthropology collects data and generates hypotheses. If the historical parallels are any indication, the life and afterlife of a fossil are made and remade by its contexts; its lasting celebrity is created over decades. While Sediba’s initial life history certainly sets it up to be The Next Big Thing, it’s not a foregone conclusion that a century from now it will still carry the same distinction it has today.
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The year 2010 was a great one for studies in human evolution: two major new hominin discoveries entered the scientific record. These new fossils were both members of the genus Australopithecus, around two million years old. Although both were significant in terms of broadening our understanding of hominin evolutionary history, the two fossils have had very different lives after their discoveries. As similar as the fossils appear at first glance, they actually couldn’t be more different. One was from South Africa, the other from Ethiopia; one was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the other in Science. One was an Australopithecus afarensis—like Lucy—and the other was the new species, Australopithecus sediba. One was a discovery of a partially complete single skeleton, and the other featured multiple individuals. One was discovered during a routine field season by a veteran member of an international research team, and the other by a nine-year-old boy and his dog. The one, Kadanuumuu, has languished in scientific journals as a rather unknown hominin specimen to the public, while the other, Sediba, has gone on to wide international acclaim. Both are unquestionably significant to the field of paleoanthropology, but the cultural lives of these fossils are as separate as their evolutionary trajectories.
But why? What makes one fossil famous and not another? Why did one capture public and scientific attention and the other not?
The short answer is easy: context. Not only did the fossils come from different geological contexts—Kadanuumuu from East Africa’s Rift Valley and Sediba from northern South Africa’s limestone caves—but, more important for our purposes, the two sets of fossils inherited their own context for the history of their science, their own research traditions, and their own regional histories of how fossil discoveries are written into the story of human evolution. These differences came to speak volumes in how the fossils are studied and how they are immortalized.
The longer answer is, of course, more complicated. As with many famous fossils—Piltdown, Peking Man, Lucy—scientific significance is certainly one reason for fame and celebrity, but it is not the only reason. Paleoanthropology is a science punctuated by discovery and built by the fossils that it finds. Fossils capture scientific and public imaginations as new discoveries fill media headlines and Twitter feeds. These two fossil discoveries play out as brilliant cultural foils for each other—they are such recent discoveries that their initial conditions are easily compared and contrasted. From the same starting point—the same year of publication—they tell two different stories, giving audiences what-if scenarios for how twenty-first-century fossils enter scientific and social circles.
On his most basic level, Kadanuumuu—or “Big Man,” as he is affectionately called by the research team—is a partially complete skeleton assigned to the species Australopithecus afarensis and designated by field catalog number KSD-VP-1/1, dating to 3.5 million years ago. The first element of the partial fossil skeleton discovered was the proximal part of an ulna—the part of the forearm that makes the elbow joint—on February 10, 2005, by Ato Alemayehu Asfaw, an established member of the international team of paleoanthropologists. In addition to the ulna, the rest of the Kadanuumuu skeletal materials were published five years after its initial discovery in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a respected top-tier scientific publication. The article’s authors represented an international team, with members from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Kent State University, Case Western Reserve University,
Addis Ababa University, and Berkeley Geochronology Center.
In their publication, the authors noted that the fossil was “extraordinary” because the discovery expanded the knowledge base of Australopithecus afarensis. Most significant was the information it provided on how the species walked. In the decades since her discovery, there have been extensive debates about the exact nature of Lucy’s bipedality; sure, she could walk upright on two legs, but just how much of her time was she bipedal, and how efficiently did she walk? How much was she like us? With the skeletal elements recovered, Kadanuumuu was able to refine and answer questions that focused on how the afarensis species would have moved.
Kadanuumuu also sported a complete scapula—part of the shoulder—which meant that scientists could examine if and how Australopithecus afarensis moved in trees and how it could have moved its shoulders. In an interview with Nature, scientists offered their take on why this new information was significant. “This new skeleton shows a fully running and walking biped, with most of the adaptations we have,” said team member Dr. Owen Lovejoy, a paleoanthropologist at Kent State University. “What we see in the new skeleton’s pelvis is what we see in modern humans,” added the article’s lead author, Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Science writer Rex Dalton described the discovery this way: “A hominid species made famous by the ‘Lucy’ fossil from Ethiopia could walk down a runway just like a fashion model today, a newly reported partial skeleton shows.”3
Even in Kadanuumuu’s original publication, he lived in Lucy’s shadow. The team referred directly to Lucy in the second sentence of the article’s abstract, and the article’s photograph of Kadanuumuu is the classic allusion of Lucy’s iconic portrait—bones laid out in anatomical position against a black background. Where Kadanuumuu’s “official portrait” suggests Lucy, it also subtly highlights the differences between the skeletons. Lucy has some skull fragments and a jaw in addition to her long bones—so it’s easy to mentally fill in the parts that are missing, or at least grasp how she could have been a living entity. Headless Horseman–like, Kadanuumuu has no crania and only one leg. In other words, with certain skeletal elements, like a skull, it’s easier to anthropomorphize certain fossil specimens; the easier to anthropomorphize, the easier to create a character that people will identify with.4
