by Lydia Pyne
This creates an inexorable link between these scientists and the fossils they discover—they rise and fall as the rota fortunae of a fossil’s acceptance turns throughout the decades. When the Taung Child and its species, Australopithecus africanus, were finally accepted as a legitimate human ancestor, Raymond Dart was welcomed back to the scientific establishment. The excitement of discovering a Homo ancestor at Zhoukoudian meant that Davidson Black and Johan Gunnar Andersson could enjoy institutional support to establish a serious lab in Beijing. Lucy made Donald Johanson’s career. The popular success of Sediba whetted scientific and public interests in Lee Berger’s Next Big Thing—excavations of Homo naledi, which are currently a raging success. To be a successful celebrity fossil, then, is to balance the ever wobbly triple point of media, commoditization, and representation.
Although celebrity scientists are often propped up by their fossil discoveries, celebrity fossils are the culmination of thousands of decisions made over and over and over. These decisions—about how to study and how to internalize the fossil—add up and show what the fossil’s audiences value. A good story of discovery is what really sets a celebrity fossil on its initial trajectory of fame, and, certainly, great discovery stories give public audiences a way of identifying with the fossil and its discoverer. But, fundamentally, fossils are discovered by chance, as Winston Ayers might remind Claire Nash, and are an unrepeatable type of scientific find. Just like their histories.
Maybe other fossils should also be given a chance at fame, as Winston Ayers suggested should be the case for the thousands of aspiring Hollywood starlets that are not Claire Nash. Here I’m reminded of the question that my colleague posed about how to write about famous fossils: “How could you write a book about famous fossils and not write about these other important fossils???” There are, of course, other important fossils in paleoanthropology’s history, but these fossils are simply not elevated to the same celebrity since they do not resonate in popular ways with audiences. For the famous fossils, they are cultural figures with personae and symbolism; the stories they tell are beyond merely a simplistic one of discovery, observation, and theory. The better we understand fossils’ metastories, the more clearly we can consider how we think about the interplay between science, history, and popular culture.
Anthropologist Elizabeth Hallam poignantly suggests that bones—indeed, fossils—are particularly adept at complex life histories. “Bones [occupy] diverse post-mortem lives: trophies, souvenirs, sources of knowledge, things to possess and trade, deceased relatives, scientific data, once living persons… . Bones have been sensed in emotional terms, known in empirical ways, collected and displayed, deemed necessary to bury, exhume and rebury. They might be preserved or obliterated, are sometimes openly memorialized and at others concealed and lost.”5 Our celebrity skeletons move easily between emotional and empirical elements as their afterlives unfold. For some, that’s seeing The Real Fossil in a museum exhibit and feeling the authenticity of the artifact; for others, it’s recognizing the fossil hominin at the beginning of Man of Steel when Jor-El retrieves the codex. (It’s based on Mrs. Ples.)
How we talk about these famous discoveries shows how we construct a fossil’s life story—its scientific value as well as cultural cachet. The seven fossils in this book are scientific objects, of course, but they also speak to how we think about science and scientific discovery in popular culture. In fact, there is no single path to celebrity. There is only the value—need?—of it at the path’s end. Perhaps fifty or a hundred years from now, some of the B-list fossils will be celebrities, but, for now, they’re not.
“One knows the tale,” Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. “It has been told a thousand ways.”6 The stories, the narratives, the ever growing archives of meaning and cultural ephemera that are associated with these famous scientific discoveries have been told and retold—hundreds, if not thousands, of ways—forming the fossils’ mythos and giving them lives beyond that of a static object. How we understand the fossils of human evolution—which is to say, how we understand the origins of ourselves—is an integral part of the fossils’ cultural history. We, in our own contexts and encounters with these hominin fossils, are contributing to their life stories—and, even more interestingly, we are actively engaged in the writing of those stories. The fossils’ stories are still unfolding.
I think back to that wintery June morning in Johannesburg years ago when Dr. Tobias introduced me and a dozen or so other undergrad fossil enthusiasts to the iconic Taung Child. Sure, he spoke about the fossil’s anatomy and biology, the uniqueness of Taung’s fossilized brain cast, and what that was able to tell us about human ancestors from three million years ago. He talked through the evolutionary importance of the Taung Child’s species, Australopithecus africanus. He even described open research questions—questions for which the fossil is still, almost one hundred years after its discovery, considered crucial evidence for scientists working on current human origins inquires.
But, more important, his lecture also demonstrated that the fossil is completely and utterly imbued with historical and cultural meaning—meaning that he, himself, was actually creating by giving that very lecture, just as he had given that lecture hundreds of times before. His stories about his own adviser, Raymond Dart, and Dart’s adventures with the “missing link” were—are!—just as much a part of the fossil’s life story as its 3-D scans, its caliper measurements, and the hundreds of its casts that circulate among museums. The fossil’s poetic fan fiction and its small wooden box, left in a London taxicab by Dart’s wife—to say nothing of Tobias’s ventriloquist act with the Taung Child—are significant parts of the fossil’s history, chapters in the fossil’s life. Seeing the fossil—first in its fossil vault and later as casts in museums—means that I have participated in the life history of the fossil, just like everyone else who has done the same thing.
“One can think of [the Taung Child] as beautiful, both in terms of its scientific importance,” University of the Witwatersrand curator Bernhard Zipfel suggests, “and its aesthetic characteristics so reminiscent of a work of art. It evokes emotion in those who see it. I experience gooseflesh every time I carefully pick it up.”7 The story of the Taung Child, like all of these fossils from Lucy to Flo to the Old Man, is far from over. Each new story—each and every new scientific study, museum exhibit, and pop culture reference—opens up the next chapter in the fossils’ lives.
Their futures are still being written.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A book like Seven Skeletons draws from myriad different fields and perspectives—I am much obliged for the feedback, conversations, suggestions, support, and enthusiasm that so many colleagues, experts, and friends have offered over the course of this project: Justin Adams, Stacey Ake, Lee Berger, Jan Ebbestad, Kevin Egan, Jan Freedman, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Ronald Harvey, John Hawks, Charles D. Heim, Charles J. D. Heim, Lindsay Hunter, David Jones, William Jungers, Jon Kalb, John Kappelman, Linda Kim, Scott Knowles, Robert Kruszynski, Tanya Kulik, Kevin Kuykendall, Siu Kwan Lam, Kristi Lewton, Christopher Manias, Elizabeth Marima, John Mead, Nancy Odegaard, Sven Ouzman, Tammy Peters, Julien Riel-Salvatore, Sara Schechner, Karolyn Schindler, Shuk On Sham, Amy Slaton, Francis Thackery, Dirk Van Tuerenhout, Kirsten Vannix, Milford Wolpoff, and Bernhard Zipfel.
Additionally, many institutions have been kind enough to help facilitate the book’s research through interviews, access to archives, copies of publications, and/or financial support, including: The Appendix, Bone Clones, Natural History Museum (London), Pennoni Honors College (Drexel University), Science Photo and Science Source Library, Smithsonian Institution Archives, University of Texas at Austin Libraries, University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Historical Studies, University of the Witwatersrand (Archives), and Uppsala’s Museum of Evolution.
I am indebted to my agent, Geri Thoma, and editor, Melanie Tortoroli, for their interest in this project and their help in taking Seven Skeletons from �
�idea” to “book.” Holly Zemsta was kind enough to share her thoughts and feedback on many early drafts. My parents have always been excited to “talk fossils,” and I’m glad that these seven haven’t worn out their welcome. I am also most grateful to Stan Seibert for his unwavering optimism and enthusiasm for this project.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION. Famous Fossils, Hidden Histories
1. Joni Brenner, Elizabeth Burroughs, and Karel Nel, Life of Bone: Art Meets Science (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), p. 84.
2. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage, 2012), p. 61.
3. Samuel Alberti, ed., The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 1.
4. Brenner, Burroughs, and Nel, Life of Bone, p. 12.
CHAPTER ONE. The Old Man of La Chapelle: The Patriarch of Paleo
1. Lynn Barber Cardiff, The Heyday of Natural History (New York: Doubleday, 1984); Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700, second ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
2. J. C. Fuhlrott, “Teilen des menschlichen Skelettes im Neanderthal bei Hochtal,” Verhandlungen des Naturhistorischen Vereins der preussischen Rheinlande und Westphalens 14 (1856), p. 50; H. Schaaffhausen, ibid., pp. 38–42 and 50–52.
3. Ian Tattersall, The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success, and Mysterious Extinction of Our Closest Human Relatives, revised ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 74–77.
4. Ibid.
5. Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen, “Teilen des menschlichen Skelettes.”
6. Thomas Henry Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 205.
7. Marianne Sommer, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Neanderthal as Image and ‘Distortion’ in Early 20th-Century French Science and Press,” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 2 (April 1, 2006), pp. 207–40.
8. Jean Bouyssonie, “La Sepulture Moustérienne de La Chapelle-aux-Saints,” Cosmos, July 9, 1909, p. 11.
9. Marianne Sommer, Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 176.
10. Lydia Pyne, “Neanderthals in 3D: L’Homme de La Chapelle,” Public Domain Review, February 11, 2015.
11. Marcellin Boule, L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints (Paris: Masson, 1911), p. 11.
12. Sommer, “Mirror, Mirror.”
13. Richard Milner and Rhoda Knight Kalt, Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2012).
14. Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne, The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene (New York: Viking, 2012).
15. J. H. Rosny, The Quest for Fire (New York: Ballantine, 1982), p. 6.
16. Lydia Pyne, “Quests for Fire: Neanderthals and Science Fiction,” Appendix 2, no. 3 (July 2014); Lydia Pyne, “Our Neanderthal Complex,” Nautilus 24 (May 14, 2015).
17. Boule, L’Homme Fossile, p. 10.
18. “Human Skull from Fontéchevade, France: Abstract,” Nature.
19. William L. Straus, Jr., and A. J. E. Cave, “Pathology and the Posture of Neanderthal Man,” Quarterly Review of Biology 32, no. 4 (December 1, 1957), pp. 348–63.
20. Pamela Jane Smith, “Professor Dorothy A. E. Garrod: ‘Small, Dark, and Alive!,’” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 7, no. 1 (May 20, 1997).
21. C. Loring Brace et al., “The Fate of the ‘Classic’ Neanderthals: A Consideration of Hominid Catastrophism,” Current Anthropology 5, no. 1 (February 1, 1964), pp. 3–43.
22. N. C. Tappen, “The Dentition of the ‘Old Man’ of La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Inferences Concerning Neandertal Behavior,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 67, no. 1 (May 1, 1985), p. 43.
23. Ibid.
24. William Rendu et al., “Evidence Supporting an Intentional Neandertal Burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 1 (January 7, 2014); emphasis added.
25. J. Gurche, Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
26. M. Boule, Fossil Men: A Textbook of Human Palaeontology (Oak Brook, IL: Dryden Press, 1957).
27. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2, lines 296–98, 363–65.
28. Almudena Estalrrich and Antonio Rosas, “Handedness in Neandertals from the El Sidrón (Asturias, Spain): Evidence from Instrumental Striations with Ontogenetic Inferences,” PLOS ONE 8, no. 5 (May 6, 2013), e62797; L. V. Golovanova et al., “Mezmaiskaya Cave: A Neanderthal Occupation in the Northern Caucasus,” Current Anthropology 40, no. 1 (February 1999), pp. 77–86; Julien Riel-Salvatore, “A Spatial Analysis of the Late Mousterian Levels of Riparo Bombrini (Balzi Rossi, Italy),” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 37, no. 1 (2013), pp. 70–92; Julien Riel-Salvatore, interview with author, September 24, 2014.
CHAPTER TWO. Piltdown: A Name Without a Fossil
1. Frank Spencer, The Piltdown Papers, 1908–1955: The Correspondence and Other Documents Relating to the Piltdown Forgery (New York: Natural History Museum Publications and Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 17.
2. Ibid.
3. On Sunday, December 22, 1912, a New York Times headline screamed, “Darwin Theory Is Proved True. English Scientists Say the Skull Found in Sussex Establishes Humans Descent from Apes. Bones Illustrate a Stage of Human Evolution Which Has Only Been Imagined Before.”
4. Dawson and Smith Woodward, as quoted in Spencer, Piltdown Papers, p. 15.
5. Ibid., p. 16.
6. Ibid., p. 17.
7. Arthur Smith Woodward, The Earliest Englishman (London: Watts, 1948), pp. 9–10.
8. Ibid.
9. Spencer, Piltdown Papers, p. 20.
10. “The Piltdown Bones and ‘Implements,’” Nature 174, no. 4419 (July 10, 1954), pp. 61–62.
11. William Boyd Dawkins, “The Geological Evidence of Britain as to the Antiquity of Man,” Geology Magazine 2: 464–66 (1915).
12. Henry Fairfield Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age, Their Environment, Life and Art (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1925), p. 130.
13. A Guide to the Fossil Remains of Man in the Department of Geology and Palaeontology in the British Museum (Natural History) (London: British Museum, 1918), p. 14.
14. Raf De Bont, “The Creation of Prehistoric Man: Aimé Rutot and the Eolith Controversy, 1900–1920,” Isis 94, no. 4 (December 2003), pp. 604–30.
15. Grafton Elliot Smith, The Evolution of Man: Essays (London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1927), as quoted in John Reader, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 68.
16. Reader, Missing Links, p. 71.
17. Joseph Sidney Weiner, Kenneth Page Oakley, and Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark, The Solution of the Piltdown Problem (London: British Museum, 1953), p. 53.
18. Charles Blinderman, The Piltdown Inquest (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), p. 66.
19. Weiner, Oakley, and Clark, The Solution of the Piltdown Problem, p. 53.
20. Karolyn Schindler, “Piltdown’s Victims: Arthur Smith Woodward,” Evolve 11 (2012), pp. 32–37.
21. F. J. M. Postlethwaite, “Letter to Editor,” The Times (London), November 25, 1953.
22. Piltdown Collection, Natural History Museum, London.
23. N. P. Morris, “The Piltdown Story,” June 1954, Piltdown Collection, Natural History Museum, London.
24. Blinderman, Piltdown Inquest, p. 79.
25. Rosemary Powers, “Memo to Dr. Oakley,” April 28, 1967, Piltdown Misc., Piltdown Collection, Natural History Museum, London.
26. Kenneth L. Feder, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (Boston: McGraw-Hill Mayfield, 2001), p. 55.
27. Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (New York: Schocken, 1978), pp. 40–41.
28. Schindler, “Piltdown’
s Victims,” p. 37.
CHAPTER THREE. The Taung Child: The Rise of a Folk Hero
1. Raymond A. Dart with Dennis Craig, Adventures with the Missing Link (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), pp. 6–7.
2. As quoted in Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 50.
3. Dart and Craig, Adventures with the Missing Link, p. 4.
4. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
5. Raymond Dart, “Australopithecus Africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa,” Nature 115, no. 2884 (1925), pp. 195–99; Reader, Missing Links, p. 82.
6. Dart and Craig, Adventures with the Missing Link, p. 10.
7. Dart, “Australopithecus”; emphasis in original.
8. Ibid., pp. 198–99.
9. Dart and Craig, Adventures with the Missing Link, pp. 6–7.
10. Letter from F. O. Barlow, dated October 17, 1928, Raymond Dart Archive, University of the Witwatersrand.
11. Anne Clendinning, “On the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–25,” Branch Collective.
12. Letter (Published) from the Exhibition Commissioner, dated July 9, 1925, correspondence in the Raymond Dart Archive, University of the Witwatersrand.
13. Raymond Dart Archive, University of the Witwatersrand.
14. Letter (Published) from the Exhibition Commissioner, dated July 9, 1925, correspondence in the Raymond Dart Archive, University of the Witwatersrand.
15. Raymond Dart Archive, University of the Witwatersrand; Arthur Keith, “Letter to Editor,” Nature 116 (September 26, 1925), pp. 462–63.
16. Raymond Dart Archive, University of the Witwatersrand.
17. Letter from Joseph Liddle, dated May 3, 1930, correspondence in the Raymond Dart Archive, University of the Witwatersrand.
18. Dart and Craig, Adventures with the Missing Link, as contextualized by Reader, Missing Links.
