Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man

by Susan B. Martinez, Ph. D.

  DIVERGED OR MERGED?

  Since Darwin’s day, many missing links were found—creatures that seem to link Au to H. erectus, H. erectus to Neanderthal, and so on. So what was the problem? Something in the morphology of these intermediate types, the links, always precluded a smooth sequence from one to the other. Always something that doesn’t fit. It is, some have commented, as if these mosaics were all made of spare parts. Each fossil seems to combine the laundry list of morphological traits in a different way, ruining the flow from one to the other. Lee Berger’s Au. sedipa, for example, is “a jumble of parts.” A spot note in Smithsonian titled “Body Parts” refers to our “idiosyncratic histories” and the idea that H. erectus is made out of “different parts. . . . It is amazing what evolution has made out of bits and pieces.”26 But is it evolution that jumbles spare parts, or simply crossbreeding?

  “The nookie factor,” the whimsical term coined by my friend, archaeologist Chris Hardaker, gives us a much better idea of these spare parts: a picture of melting pot Earth, mix-and-match humanity with the urge to merge since day one, which is the only honest solution to the so-called transitional and mosaic types that abound in the fossil record. The hybrid model of man’s lineage does not look for an ancestor but for (at least) two ancestors. In the words of Franz Weidenreich: Most populations have several ancestors.

  Paleontologists have, to date, assembled many fossil men, both primitive and more advanced, but can reach no agreement on sequence, how these fossils relate to each other, most critically how or if one is ancestral to the other. But let’s streamline the whole shooting match: Think of the endless quibbling, even ungentlemanly rancor, over hominid classification—deciding which taxon specimens belong to—when mixing, plain and flat, is the magic bullet, Occam’s razor. Parsimony par excellence.

  Think of how things will slip into place if early (second race, Ihin) is recognized as the source of all small, gracile, and big-brained specimens. The late nineteenth-century German biologist, geneticist, and zoologist August Weismann laid out a fundamental principle, the law of parsimony (though he didn’t follow it himself), demanding that extraneous forces not be invoked. Weismann thought Darwinism leaned too much on unknown factors, hypothetical forces. Account for phenomena that can be readily explained by known causes, Weismann argued. Well now we know . . . about hybridization.

  Parsimony also means the fewer assumptions made, the better the theory. It is a kind of thrifty, minimalist thing: the more a single axiom or fact can account for a wide range of phenomena, the truer it rings. This way, too, we remove the paradox of polygenesis: the problem being—How could races all over the world have coincidentally evolved in the same way? This difficulty evaporates once we recognize the Asu-Ihin-Druk blends in all parts of the world. It has been asked, for example: If a single mutation of a gene could change the length of limbs, why is this “random” mutation the same in far different places? Obviously, there is something amiss in our searchlight. Nothing ever “changed” the length of limbs; gene flow (race mixture) alone brought about such differences.

  Milford Wolpoff in Race and Human Evolution incisively points out that the same DNA variations “are found over and over again, in the most widely separated populations.” How is that possible? How could they all evolve the same way? The answer is profoundly simple: They didn’t. The same basic types intermixed; they did not evolve.

  Follow these hybrids dispassionately and we also dissolve the decades-old debate of why bipedalism appears to have preceded big brain. Lucy, for example, was bipedal but pea-brained; Taung Child also was bipedal with the “brain of an ape.” And why was Taung’s foramen magnum and dentition more advanced than his jaw and face? Mixing is the answer. All the mixed traits in these australopiths (see table 1.1) devolve quite simply on their mixed parentage.

  Differences between H. rudolfensis and H. habilis (the two were contemporaries in Africa) have been ascribed to “rapid evolution.” Nonsense. It is simply a matter of two races blending, consorting—and in a matter of generations producing a new type. Why call the time between H. habilis and H. erectus “rapid hominid evolution,” when it is plain that mixing gets even quicker results—with no evolution in sight? Besides, it was too big a change in size/stature for H. habilis (a bit over three feet) to evolve into creatures like tall and lanky Turkana Boy. Did H. erectus evolve at all? Not really. They appeared suddenly. Neither did they “lead” to higher forms:

  Figure 5.9. A shot at hybridization. A grapefruit chastising an orange for cheating on her husband, having two children—a tangerine and an apple. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.

  Nowhere can it be demonstrated that men of the Homo erectus grade did evolve into modern populations.

  J. B. BIRDSELL, HUMAN EVOLUTION: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

  Zoologist T. Dobzhansky had no problem accepting hybridization among human populations throughout the Pleistocene. Crossbreeding readily explains the so-called rapid evolution of certain fossil men, the inexplicable quantum leaps in the record (evolution’s big bangs or explosions). From the Au lineage a new “species” rapidly became much larger, brain size increased dramatically. No, this is not evolution. This is something else.

  In the plant kingdom it was found that primroses made similar jumps, not by Darwinian mutations, but simply by hybridization, producing traits the parents did not have. Breeders have obtained plants and animals so surprisingly different, they would be immediately classed as a different species entirely if found in the wild. Hooton, discussing the appearance of very tall and raw-boned men, wrote “I have no doubt . . . [they] owe their increased size and ruggedness . . . to heterosis or hybrid vigor. . . . [I]n a world of men who have been migratory and promiscuous for scores of thousands of years, the origin of new types through hybridization . . . and recombinations . . . is a much more likely phenomenon than pure line ancient forms. . . . Hybrid vigor . . . means an increase in size and strength. . . . [M]ost of the tallest human groups are of mixed racial origin.”27

  ROOM OF MIRRORS

  By general definition, a species is a breeding group that does not or rather cannot productively mate with any other group. Even if they do mate and there are offspring, the latter are infertile. Sometimes, though, it is difficult to know where one species leaves off and another begins. When it comes to wolves and coyotes, for instance, it is hard to say quite where one “species” stops and another starts, because wolves and coyotes can successfully breed. They should not, therefore, be called different species.

  You could say zoology, like paleoanthropology, has become species happy. Even among the thirteen supposedly distinct species of Darwin’s Galapagos finches (see figure 4.8), some do interbreed; just as there are two supposedly different species of Mexican howler monkeys that still mate with each other. Even lions and tigers have interbred (in a zoo): if the father is a lion, the cub is called a liger; if the sire is a tiger, it is a tigon.

  What about the human species? William Howells held that humanity has always been a single species (therefore interfertile), even though separated geographically. T. Dobzhansky was another who protested the unnecessary multiplication of species and genera for hominids; let them all be one species and one genus Homo. Though correct, this is today a minority opinion.

  For many years it was argued that Neanderthal was a different species from us; H. erectus also was considered, by some, not only a different species but also a separate genus from Homo. Richard Leakey, wisely, thought that H. erectus and H. sapiens were not only the same genus but also the same species, H. erectus but an early version of H. sapiens. His father, Louis, toward the end of his long career, even asked if crossings could not in fact account for the multifarious H. sapiens–H. erectus composites so puzzling to analysts. Nor did Coon or Weidenreich rule out the interfertility of these two types of men: AMH and Druk.

  As an example of the oxymoronic confusion bedeviling these matters are statements like: “Neanderthals and modern humans are s
eparate species, but do not rule out some interbreeding.”28 If they could interbreed, and did interbreed (with fertile offspring), we have no business calling them different species; they would be merely different races (subspecies). Also violating the definition are statements like: “Once we shared the planet with other human species, competing with them and interbreeding with them.”29 Come again? I thought different species don’t interbreed by definition!

  The very concept of species has been debated for decades, with no final agreement among biologists on what species are. Are they simply a gene pool, meaning closely related populations who reproduce with one another? In the event that they don’t interbreed (like different “species” of fruit flies that look exactly alike), it doesn’t mean that they can’t. Separate gene pools may not be such a good criterion; the Bushmen, for example, comprise a separate gene pool from Eskimo-Inuit and don’t exchange genes with them, but still both are of the same species. We should follow Ernst Mayr in this regard, defining species according to their interbreeding potential.

  Weidenreich, noting the “irresistible trend to interbreed” among humans, recognized that all people were cross-fertile, that they can, do, and did, crossbreed, this ability proving we are all one species. Indeed, one might even “eliminate all the generic names”30 of fossil man,*73 as far as he was concerned. Although his insight goes back seventy-plus years, I believe it is the correct one, yet it is disparagingly labeled “already in disrepute”31 by some of today’s leading evolutionists.

  Officially, H. erectus and H. sapiens couldn’t interbreed because they are (taxonomically) classed as different species. But they did breed together, producing viable, fertile offspring, such as Homo floresiensis, the small-bodied fossils found in Palau, and Broken Hill Man (see chapter 11), where a combination of H. erectus and H. sapiens traits are all too apparent. The Palauans of Oceania were the same size as small Au, yet some of these Micronesian fossils are as recent as 1,400 years old, and certain craniofacial features are in keeping with H. sapiens. As for Zimbabwe’s Broken Hill Man, he possessed a large brain and gracile limbs, though his face and skull resembled Neanderthal and H. erectus. Some then called it Neanderthaloid, but with such mixed features, scholars argued back and forth whether to classify it as H. sapiens or Neanderthal. Europe’s H. heidelbergensis was another who represented a marvelous alloy of H. erectus, Neanderthal, and H. sapiens traits. In fact, H. erectus almost everywhere has been found with H. sapiens traits sprinkled in, such as in Europe where a mosaic of features abounds—not to mention H. erectus–mod blends in the Far East, at Choukoutien and Ngandong. And in Africa: mixed in one creature, Homo ergaster (Skull KNM-ER 3733) are massive (archaic) features along with thin bones and modern nasal structure. Students of the African hominids have noted “the puzzling variability in early Homo.”32 Of course there’s variation! It is not puzzling; that’s what happens when races mix. No, variability is not “hiding in the genes”; nor is it DNA “mutations” that generate variability. All we are seeing are the mix-and-match results of crossbreeding. We have taken infinitesimal measurements with calipers and run endless computer programs, and argued about classification till the cows come home. But there is and has always been only one species of man on Earth, different kinds for sure, but all assorted members of the family of man.

  In an e-mail, archaeologist Christopher Hardaker told me they edited out the following portion from his 2007 book The First American: “By definition, a people cannot successfully mate and have viable offspring with another species. . . . There might be nookie but no babies. . . . If babies, then same species. . . . How does ‘H. erectus sapiens’ sound? If everyone from H. erectus forward could ‘do it’ with everyone else, it would certainly give an added dimension to the name erectus. . . . You are warned on the first day of Phys Anth 101 that the world of human evolution is divided into splitters and lumpers . . . [but] it is a room of mirrors.”

  A NEW RACE WAS BORN

  If you want to get really confused, make a close study of who’s who in the human fossil family. Paleontologists keep changing their mind as to who belongs in the genus Homo. The earliest candidates, Africa’s australopithecines, were a bewildering hodgepodge of human and subhuman. East Africa’s Olduvai and Turkana finds were so “varied and baffling” that debate raged for decades over their proper classification.33 All that fussing and fighting, when they were, after all, nothing but hybrids—as were their parents and grandparents.

  At sites like Torralba, Spain, and Olorgesailie, Kenya, large numbers of primitive and sophisticated tools (flake and core-bifaces, respectively) occur together in open-air sites. And when H. erectus tools were found mixed in with more primitive ones at Olduvai Bed II, some analysts were forthright enough to say it looked like a case of “interbreeding. . . . The two gene pools are completely mixed. . . . This sort of interaction must have happened many times during the course of human evolution.”34

  How will Darwinian phylogenesis stand up to the lack of evidence for H. erectus evolving to H. sapiens? According to Ian Tattersall, a method called cladistic analysis does not allow it; according to Birdsell, brain size difference does not allow it. And if so, there is no evolution either, for with Neanderthal eliminated as our ancestor that leaves only H. erectus to fill the slot. Neither was Louis Leakey convinced that the pithecanthropines led to H. sapiens, his opinion based on morphology of the skull and H. erectus’s huge visor or torus, so tremendous it strains even the most credulous imagination to see in it the precursor of man. Meanwhile Marvin L. Lubenow has decried the wholesale ignoring of the Selenka-Trinil expedition, which found that mods and pithecanthropines lived at the very same time in Java, the latter playing no part in human evolution. “It is an amazing conspiracy of silence,” comments Lubenow. 35

  In Hindu scripture it is written: “the first race Asu [Ardi] tempted the white people”*74 In other words, the Ihins broke the commandment of endogamy (in-marriage) which enjoined: “Neither shall ye permit the Ihins to dwell with Asu, lest his seed go down in darkness.”†75 But the little people strayed out of the Garden of Paradise and “began to dwell with the Asuans, and there was born into the world a new race, the third race of man, called Druk [a.k.a. Cain a.k.a. Homo erectus], and they had not the light of the father in them, neither could they be inspired with heavenly things.”‡76 And the Druks were the first people to go to war, hence Cain’s “mark of blood” in the Old Testament.

  Those of the lesser light were called Cain (Druk), because their trust was more in corporeal than in spiritual things; and those with the higher light were called Faithists (led by Ihins) because they perceived that Wisdom shaped all things and ruled to the ultimate glory of the All One.§77

  Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, H. erectus is still widely considered our immediate ancestor, but he is nothing more than the result of Ihin-Asu “interaction.” If neither Au nor H. erectus is ancestral to us, then what? It’s the nookie factor, for the Ihins repeatedly blended with the autochthonous races. Wherever short stature, smooth features, gracile build, or unpredictably modern crania are observed in otherwise archaic forms, Ihin genes are at play.

  LUMPERS AND SPLITTERS

  Darwin mentioned theorists who envision anywhere from two to sixty different species of man. Well, the more they dig, the more mixes they find, erroneously calling them species—and gloating over the everexpanding variety of human and prehuman species. Yet critics do ask: “Is it possible that the scientists, who have given new species names to every early Homo find with significant differences, have made our family tree more complicated than it really is?”36

  Indeed, the “lumpers” (including Thomas Henry Huxley, T. Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Franz Weidenreich, and Ernst Mayr) all have argued against this unnecessary proliferation of species. Let all hominids be one species. It’s the splitters who gave us 700 species of Drosophila and 13 species of Galapagos finches, when they may just be varieties or races (subspecies); according to Mayr, the
re is extensive hybridization among six of those “species” of finches. “[You] might as well have called them all one species,” says another analyst.37 Fact is, Darwin himself thought the finches were merely varieties, until the ornithologist John Gould convinced him they were separate species!

  But that’s birds; what about man? The fundamental design of the human cranium is the same from the earliest pithecanthropines right up to the modern races. These features, they say, vary among recent races as much as between different fossil types; therefore, we might just as well split up recent man into several species—which would be a falsehood. (If a bone man were to compare the morphology of an African Khoikhoi and a Swede, without knowing the source of the specimens, he might well designate them as different species.)

  Multiple human species—no; multiple races—yes.

  The fossil people are trifling with us: a slightly different shaped jaw—and presto!—a new species is born. This was the scenario when Lucy’s discoverers assigned her to a different species than Au. africanus, who had slightly more specialized teeth. But they were not different species, only different proportions of Asu and Ihin genetic makeup. (C. Loring Brace thought the teeth of the two not very different.) Splitters continue to confuse the issue by seizing on minor differences, boldly naming a new species based on one or two fragments.

  Richard Milton, in Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, reminds us that a few years after Louis Leakey “insisted that his discovery [of Zinj] was entirely novel,” it was found to be just another robust Au. Also in East Africa, Ethiopia’s Ardipithecus kadabba, although known only from fragments, was made the “probable ancestor” of Ar. ramidus. Originally considered a subspecies (race only), the older Ardi was now elevated to Ar. kadabba, a new species, on the basis of bone scraps and a few teeth with a slightly different wear pattern than Ar. ramidus. Are different teeth really enough to crank out a brand-new species?