http://edge.org/conversation/rethinking-out-of-africa

[CHRISTOPHER STRINGER:] At the moment, I’m looking again at the whole question of a recent African origin for modern humans—the leading idea over the last 20 years. This argues that we had a recent African origin, that we came out of Africa, and that we replaced all of the other human forms that were outside of Africa. But we’re having to re-evaluate that now because genetic data suggest that the modern humans who came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago probably interbred with Neanderthals, first of all, and then some of them later on interbred with another group of people called the Denisovans, over in south eastern Asia.

If this is so, then we are not purely of recent African origin. We’re mostly of recent African origin, but there was contact with these other so-called species. We’re having to re-evaluate the Out-of-Africa theory, and we’re having to re-evaluate the species concepts we apply, because in one view of thinking, species should be self-contained units. They don’t interbreed with other species. However, for me, the whole idea of Neanderthals as a different species is really a recognition of their separate evolutionary history—the fact that we can show that they evolved through time in a particular direction, distinct from modern humans, and they separated maybe 400,000 years ago from our lineage. And morphologically we can distinguish a relatively complete Neanderthal fossil from any recent human.

You could argue that they’re an extreme variant of Homo sapiens, but a very different ‘race’ from anyone alive today, or, as I prefer to argue, they’re a separate species, with a separate evolutionary history. But I’ve never actually said that that meant they were completely reproductively isolated from us. We know that many closely related species in primates, for example, can interbreed. Various species of monkey can interbreed and have fertile offspring, and so can our closest living relatives, Bonobos and common chimpanzees.

In my view the Neanderthals were closely related and probably potentially able to interbreed with modern humans, but until recently I considered that while there could have been interbreeding forty or fifty thousand years ago, it was on such a small scale that all trace of it vanished in the intervening years. But it now seems from Neanderthal genome studies that that was not so. We do have a bit of Neanderthal in us, you and I—it’s a small amount, but certainly not negligible..

Does that mean Neanderthals are a different species or does it mean we should include them in Homo sapiens? Well, they are still only a small part of our makeup now, reflecting something like a 2.5% input of their DNA. Physically, however, they went extinct about 30,000 years ago. They had distinct behavior and they evolved under different conditions from us, so I still think it’s useful to keep them as a separate species, even if we remember that that doesn’t necessarily preclude interbreeding.

Then there are these enigmatic people called the Denisovans, who we only know about because of DNA work that’s gone on in the site of Denisova Cave in Siberia. The site has been known for a long time. There were some very fragmentary human fossils from there, a finger bone; a couple of teeth, a foot bone, and each of them have yielded significant DNA. The surprise was that while the foot bone DNA turned…

You could argue that they’re an extreme variant of Homo sapiens, but a very different ‘race’ from anyone alive today, or, as I prefer to argue, they’re a separate species, with a separate evolutionary history. But I’ve never actually said that that meant they were completely reproductively isolated from us. We know that many closely related species in primates, for example, can interbreed. Various species of monkey can interbreed and have fertile offspring, and so can our closest living relatives, Bonobos and common chimpanzees.

In my view the Neanderthals were closely related and probably potentially able to interbreed with modern humans, but until recently I considered that while there could have been interbreeding forty or fifty thousand years ago, it was on such a small scale that all trace of it vanished in the intervening years. But it now seems from Neanderthal genome studies that that was not so. We do have a bit of Neanderthal in us, you and I—it’s a small amount, but certainly not negligible..

Does that mean Neanderthals are a different species or does it mean we should include them in Homo sapiens? Well, they are still only a small part of our makeup now, reflecting something like a 2.5% input of their DNA. Physically, however, they went extinct about 30,000 years ago. They had distinct behavior and they evolved under different conditions from us, so I still think it’s useful to keep them as a separate species, even if we remember that that doesn’t necessarily preclude interbreeding.

Then there are these enigmatic people called the Denisovans, who we only know about because of DNA work that’s gone on in the site of Denisova Cave in Siberia. The site has been known for a long time. There were some very fragmentary human fossils from there, a finger bone; a couple of teeth, a foot bone, and each of them have yielded significant DNA. The surprise was that while the foot bone DNA turned out to be Neanderthal, at the eastern limit of their known range, the other fossils had DNA that was quite distinct: it wasn’t clearly Neanderthal, it wasn’t modern human. It was something different.

Svante Pääbo and his colleagues have dubbed these people the Denisovans. So we have this site in Siberia with Denisovans, and it looks like it was occupied in quite a short period of time by the Denisovans, by Neanderthals, and finally by modern humans. It’s a remarkable site with three different kinds of humans living there in close proximity in time and space. However, the exact dating of these different occupations is still unclear.

Thus the Denisovans are only known from this one site, genetically. The fossils are too incomplete to tell us what these people were really like, except they’ve got big teeth. However, there are lots of ancient fossils from China, and one from India. We’ve known about the people in China for a long time, ones who didn’t look Neanderthal, and didn’t look modern human either. Fossils like from the ones from Dali, Jinniushan, Maba might well be Denisovans, but unfortunately we don’t have DNA from them at the moment, and we have to hope that the DNA work will move on, and eventually we can unite the Denisovan DNA with more complete fossils, and say physically what these people looked like.

A further big surprise was that not only were there distinct humans in Siberia maybe 50,000 years ago, but when whole genome scans were done against modern humans, it turned out that there was one group of living humans that seemed to be related to the Denisovans, that had Denisovan DNA in them, and these people are down in Australasia. They’re in New Guinea, Australia, and some neighbouring islands, so that’s also very unexpected.

The Denisovans are only known from their DNA in Siberia. Down in New Guinea and Australia, there is Denisovan DNA in living people. The best way to explain this at the moment is that modern humans were dispersing through southern Asia towards Australia and New Guinea, and Denisovans must also have been living in that region. So they weren’t just in Siberia, they were actually right across eastern Asia and down into Southeast Asia, where there was another interbreeding with people whose descendants ended up in New Guinea and Australia. So those people have got a double archaic dose, if you like: they’ve got a bit of Neanderthal DNA that their ancestors picked up maybe in western Asia from encounters with some Neanderthals, and then coming through southeast Asia, they picked up some Denisovan DNA, and that gets added to the mix.

We end up with a pretty complicated story of the interweaving of these lineages, which were separate for hundreds of thousands of years, but then when they overlapped, they exchanged genes. We don’t know the circumstances of the interbreeding—we don’t know if these were groups that came together peacefully, or maybe some modern humans were lacking mates and decided to capture some from a neighboring group. It can’t have been that common a behavior, or there would be a lot more DNA from these archaic people. And it can’t even have been a common behavior with the Neanderthals, because of course, if modern humans came out of Africa and spread gradually across Europe, we would expect if there was continuing interbreeding with Neanderthals, then Europeans would actually have a lot more Neanderthal DNA than someone in China or someone in New Guinea.

The extraordinary thing is the level of DNA is about the same in a modern European, a modern Chinese and a modern New Guinean. One possibility is that an interbreeding event happened early on in southwest Asia. As modern humans first emerged from Africa, they met some Neanderthals—maybe only 25 Neanderthals and 1,000 modern humans. That would be enough. And then that DNA gets carried with those modern humans as they spread out from that area and diversify.

Another possibility, which Mathias Currat and Laurent Excoffier have recently argued, is that the low level of interbreeding between Neanderthals and moderns was actually due to the unsuccessful nature of most of the interbreeding events. That actually the level of interbreeding in separate events was a measure of the low viability of those interbreeding events— which is why there isn’t more Neanderthal DNA in people outside of Africa.

I’m thinking a lot about species concepts as applied to humans, about the “Out of Africa” model, and also looking back into Africa itself. I think the idea that modern humans originated in Africa is still a sound concept. Behaviorally and physically, we began our story there, but I’ve come around to thinking that it wasn’t a simple origin. Twenty years ago, I would have argued that our species evolved in one place, maybe in East Africa or South Africa. There was a period of time in just one place where a small population of humans became modern, physically and behaviourally. Isolated and perhaps stressed by climate change, this drove a rapid and punctuational origin for our species. Now I don’t think it was that simple, either within or outside of Africa.

We can see the focus, the center of evolution, for modern humans in Africa apparently moving around from one place to another, driven by climate changes. 110,000 years ago the Sahara was not desert, it was well-watered, with extensive lakes and rivers. And we see evidence of human occupation in the form of stone tools right across the region. At other times those populations completely vanished, and we pick up the evidence of evolving modern humans in East Africa, or down in the south instead. And we have to remember that there are large parts of Africa where we have stone tools, but no fossil record to show us who was making those tools. We’ve got no ancient human fossils from central Africa or West Africa, none at all. So we have to bear in mind that our picture is still limited in terms of the sites that have been excavated and the information we’ve got from them.

So for me, the exact processes involved in our African origin are still unclear. We don’t know exactly when it happened, we don’t know exactly where it happened. We have modern human fossils from Ethiopia at 160,000 years at Herto and 195,000 years from Omo Kibish. These do look physically like a more robust version of people today, but I think we’re also learning that alongside those modern-looking people were surviving forms of more archaic humans, at sites like Omo Kibish, Ngaloba, Singa and Eyasi.

And there were further surprises from a specimen that I and collaborators published on a few months ago. It’s the oldest fossil from Nigeria, from a site called Iwo Eleru. It’s about 13,000 years old, and yet if you look at it, you would say from its shape that it’s more than 100,000 years old. This reminds us that we have a very biased picture of African evolution, with many unknown areas, and there could be relics of human evolution hanging on not only outside of Africa in the form of the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, and over in Flores, this strange creature nicknamed the ‘Hobbit’. In Africa itself, archaic humans could have lingered in parts of the continent as well. From some recent genetic analyses, there is evidence of an input of archaic DNA into some modern African populations as recently as 35,000 years ago. So even in Africa, the process was more complicated than we thought.

In terms of modern humans, this means that in a sense some modern humans have got more archaic genes than others. That does seem to be so. So it leads us on to ask again: what is a modern human? Some of the most fascinating ongoing research topics in the next year or two will be homing in on the DNA that some of us have acquired from Neanderthals, that some people have acquired from the Denisovans, and that some African people have acquired, perhaps even from Homo heidelbergensis.

Scientists will look at that DNA and ask, is it functional? Is it actually doing something in the bodies of those people? Is it affecting brains, anatomy, physiology, and so on? That’s going to be a huge focus of research for the next few years because on the one hand, looking at these genes will help to really tell us what makes a Neanderthal a Neanderthal, what makes a modern human a modern human, what makes a Denisovan a Denisovan. But it might possibly also show that, as multiregionalists have argued in the past, robust fossils in regions like Australia could be a reflection of archaic gene flow.

We can say that the shared (specific) features of Homo sapiens (e.g. globular braincase, small brows, chin) evolved first, in Africa, while most of our regional (‘racial’) traits were added on to that modern template through the action of natural selection, sexual selection, founder effect and drift, as modern humans spread out to the regions where they are found today. But could archaic genes be responsible for some of them, at least?

Darwin was puzzled, of course, by the evolution of those features. If we read The Descent of Man, his favoured view for the evolution of many of the regional features was that they were sexually selected or, we might say, culturally selected. I think he was probably right, in some cases at least. We can see that skin colour generally has a relationship with ultraviolet light, with getting a balance between having enough UV getting into your skin to produce Vitamin D, but not too much of it that it will damage the skin or destroy folic acid. So there’s a balancing act in the amount of skin pigmentation, and there’s no doubt natural selection is at work on this. But even here, sexual selection in terms of mating preferences for lighter or darker skin could be playing a part. And when we look at other features such as, say, oriental eyes or the kind of hair we’ve got, Darwin may be have been right, and sexual selection is at work there. As populations spread out in small numbers, cultural preferences for attractiveness might have driven some of those differences. Not much DNA is involved, and some striking-looking differences between populations could have evolved quite rapidly.

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There have been some remarkable advances in the time that I’ve been researching human evolution, which is 40-odd years now. When I began my PhD in 1970 and went on my doctoral research trip in 1971, the technology was very primitive. Basically, I went around Europe with a suitcase full of measuring instruments: calipers, tapes, protractors. I applied these to the fossil skulls of Neanderthals and modern humans that I was studying, spending four months doing that. It took half a day to study a single skull and collect that data, all put down by hand onto a paper sheet that couldn’t be backed up. There were not even any photocopy machines around so I could have lost all of my data quite easily. There were no pocket calculators, there were no photocopy machines—it was entirely non-digital recording.

When I got back to Bristol, I had to laboriously transcribe all of those measurements by hand onto punch cards, which were then fed into the massive mainframe computer for the whole of Bristol University. It was probably about four times the size of this room, but with less processing power than the digital watch that I’m wearing now. A day later I would come back and get the results of that particular analysis. Or if it didn’t work because of some minor error in one of cards, I’d have to put them all in again, which happened often.

Things were laboriously slow. It took me four months on that trip to gather the data. It took me another 18 months to analyze those data, to get the results for my PhD. But my conclusions were clear enough. I had cranial samples of modern humans from different regions, and they grouped with each other in cranial shape, rather than with their local predecessors. And the Neanderthals rarely fell into an intermediate position between ancient fossils and recent humans—they seemed to be heading off in their own evolutionary direction through time, rather than gradually approaching a modern cranial shape.

Now, of course, with the advent of scanning and digital technology, a good graduate student sitting at a computer console here or in Europe or the USA could conjure up an equivalent amount of data that I gathered, in fact probably more data than I gathered, on a series of skulls in a week or two, And they could do a more thorough computational analysis of that data than I managed, in a couple of weeks more. So what effectively took me nearly four years could be accomplished by a good student now in a few weeks!

Advances like CT technology give you access to far more, and far richer, data. I was limited to the craniometric points on skulls where I could put my measuring instruments. But with CT, you can capture the whole shape of a specimen, of course. You can look at the internal cranial morphology, the sinuses, the inner ear bones of Neanderthals, which we now know are differently shaped from our own. We only learned that through CT technology, so all of that has made a huge difference to what we can get out of our fossils.

In one way I’m jealous of the new generation that can come in and do all of this in such a short period of time. On the other hand, by going around Europe for four months, I actually held the Neanderthal skull from Germany in my hands, and the Cro-Magnon skulls from France, and it was wonderful to have a hands-on approach to these important relics. So with only virtual access to the fossils, I think the people doing the digital stuff on their consoles are missing that special and even emotional contact with the actual fossils.

When I began my work in 1970, it’s fair to say that people who believed in evolutionary continuity between Neanderthals and modern humans dominated the field. There was Loring Brace at Michigan, who certainly influenced me in my early studies. Loring firmly believed that human evolution passed through a Neanderthal stage all over the world. Everywhere we looked in the middle Pleistocene, there were ‘Neanderthaloid’ people, and these were the ancestors of modern humans in each region. Thus if we had a complete fossil record, we would see a gradual transition in each region through Neanderthal-like forms to modern humans. Around 1970, that was probably the dominant view.

Milford Wolpoff was one of Loring Brace’s students and he came out of that tradition, but with collaborators he developed his own variant by going back to the views of Franz Weidenreich, the German anatomist. Weidenreich had developed a theory which is now known as Multiregional Evolution. In 1984 Milford, Alan Thorne and Wu Xinzhi published a paper that argued for multiregional evolution from fossil, archaeological and genetic data. Homo erectus, when it spread out around the Old World, started to evolve towards modern humans in each region. But these lines didn’t diverge—they were glued together by gene flow. The populations were breeding with each other across the whole range of humans at the time, and so there was no single place where modern humans evolved. Basically modern humans evolved everywhere where ancient humans lived. Thus every fossil could potentially be placed in a lineage leading through to modern humans. And in one of the clearest distinctions from a Recent African Origin model, the establishment of regional features would often have preceded, rather than succeeded, the appearance of shared modern ones.

However there were also people who weren’t part of the framework of regional continuity. For example there was William Howells from Harvard, who I spent a lot of time with in the 1970s. Bill was someone who didn’t think the Neanderthals were our ancestors, and he exerted an increasing influence on my thinking. We didn’t know where modern humans had evolved, but we both felt that it wasn’t from the Neanderthals. But if not the Neanderthals, where were those ancestors? Were they in the Far East? Were they in Africa? In the 1970s, we couldn’t say. However I followed Bill in arguing that there was probably a single center for modern human origins, given the similarities among humans all over the world, physically and genetically.

During the 1980s, data started to build up that the African record was significant. In terms of both morphology and archaeology, Africa wasn’t the rather backward place it was often thought to be. First, modern humans and advanced tools were shown to be there as early as anywhere else in the world. Then as the data grew, it seemed that modern humans were indeed there earlier than they were anywhere else. This was the beginning, in the 1980s, of what we call “Out of Africa”.

On the archeological side, Desmond Clark, was also very strong in that view. He had links with Tim White, and Desmond and Tim were people who went out in the field to find the fossils we needed to test our models. I haven’t been so lucky on the excavations I’ve been on in places like Gibraltar, tending to find lots of archeology and fauna, but not the human fossils. But people like Desmond, Tim, Ofer Bar Yosef and Bernard Vandermeersch have invested many years in field work and were rewarded in finding those fossils. Clark Howell was another big influence on me, having written influential papers on Neanderthals during the 1950s and 1960s, and he was a pioneer of field work in many regions. He was someone who was meticulous in the anatomical details that he looked at in fossils and he taught me a lot about how to look at the morphology of fossils. And closer to home I learnt a lot from my Museum colleague Peter Andrews, who helped to sharpen my thoughts about an African origin for modern humans, co-authoring our influential 1988 paper in Science.

The preceding year of 1987 was a real watershed, with the publication of the ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ paper in Nature by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson. A few of us had been advocating a recent African origin for modern humans before then, but it wasn’t until ’87 that this topic suddenly made the front pages of journals and newspapers. Suddenly modern human origins became very sexy, and more money became available for research and for field work on recent human evolution.

Before that, the sexy areas for human evolution were in the much older African record. People working in the Rift Valley and in South Africa were the focus of attention and funding. But after 1987, people started to pick up on the evolution of modern humans as a significant topic, and we started to get more conferences, more fieldwork, and more public interest in our own evolution. Of course I was delighted to ride on that wave of increasing public interest in modern human origins.

Until 2004, we thought that only modern humans had got across the Wallace line. The Wallace line was named after the zoologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who recognised significant changes in the fauna and flora in Southeast Asia as we move from places like Java across into the islands leading to New Guinea and Australia. The view was that ancient humans like Homo erectus got as far as Java, but they didn’t get any further—the assumption was that only modern humans with boats were able to get onto the islands leading to New Guinea and Australia.

Then the find known as Homo floresiensis was made in Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores, and was quickly nicknamed “The Hobbit,” because the Lord of the Rings films were popular at that time. The excavators who described this material argued that they had found a new species of human, small-bodied at about a meter tall, with primitive features in the skeleton, and a brain the size of that of a chimpanzee. And this creature was living on the island of Flores, way over the Wallace Line, five-hundred kilometers beyond Java. Not only that, it was still around 17,000 years ago, long after the Neanderthals had died out. It was an extraordinary claim from a partial skeleton and some more fragmentary material dug up from just this one site on Flores.

I was at the Nature press conference where these findings were announced, and commentated on the discovery, which did impress me. I took this seriously as a distinct human-like species, which had somehow got to Flores and had evolved separately in isolation for a long period of time. The leading view in 2004 was that this creature represented a dwarf form of Homo erectus. Homo erectus had somehow headed eastwards, arrived on Flores, and under the conditions of this relatively small island, the species had dwarfed down in size (a process called insular dwarfism, which happens to medium-to-large-sized mammals on islands with reduced resources, when evolution favors a reduced body size). The argument was that this was a dwarfed Homo erectus, explaining the smaller body and brain size.

However, some researchers refused to accept that. They felt that this was such a bizarre find, under bizarre circumstances, and they actually favored the view that they were some kind of pathological modern human, perhaps suffering from cretinism, microcephaly or something called Laron Syndrome. These conditions can produce small brains and small bodies in modern humans, so some people have argued that these findings are not a distinct species at all.

That view is a minority view, but it continues up to this day. However I’m not convinced by these counter-arguments. We’ve got now over 100 fossils from Liang Bua, not just that one skeleton—there are a number of other individuals. There’s a second jaw bone, which to me looks every bit as primitive and archaic as the first jaw bone that’s with the skeleton. And there are two sets of primitive-looking wrist bones. These finds were made in levels from about 17,000 right down to about 90,000 years in the cave, and there’s archeology right through those levels, archaeology which in some respects resembles much older stone tools found elsewhere on the island.

So for me, it remains a convincing distinct form of human, and one that may be even more primitive than was originally considered because recent research on the material, more detailed research, has found a number of features that seem to be more primitive than even the ones we find in Homo erectus. The suggestion is now that this might represent an even earlier stage of human evolution, one that’s closer to Homo habilis or even to Australopithecus, creatures that lived two million years ago or more in Africa. Although we’ve got no evidence of it happening yet, the argument is that one of those more primitive forms got out of Africa more than two million years ago, somehow found its way over to southeast Asia, and survived in isolation on the island of Flores until 17,000 years ago, when it went extinct. That would be an even more extraordinary story than a Homo erectus getting there and dwarfing, that you’ve actually got a relic of an earlier stage of human evolution that got all the way over there.

Lots of questions arise from this very challenging find in explaining where it came from and what happened to it. Did it die out because of the impact of modern humans, which is an argument that’s been used for the extinction of Neanderthals? Well, according to the excavators on Flores, there’s no evidence of modern humans there 17,000 years ago. Supposedly the modern humans came later. But there is evidence of a massive volcanic eruption about 17,000 years ago, which produced very thick ash in the Liang Bua cave and elsewhere on the island. It may well be that this eruption was so enormous that it devastated the vegetation on the island and led to the extinction of the hobbit, which would be a very sad end after maybe two million years of evolution in a remote region, at the edge of the inhabited world at that time.

Where did it come from? Well, that’s also still a mystery. On the one hand, was it from Homo erectus? Mike Morwood has recently argued that it’s more likely that the ancestors of the Hobbits came from the north, because the currents of water in that region actually run from Sulawesi southwards, down to places like Timor, and then westwards. That’s the opposite direction from a transit from Java to Flores. So Morwood argues that the Hobbit’s ancestors will be found further north. Remarkably, he and his colleagues have found stone tools on Flores that are a million years old, which might have been made by the ancestors of the Hobbit. Reportedy he’s even found tools which are a million years old on the island of Sulawesi, and that island is also over the Wallace Line. So there may actually be many more populations related to the hobbit waiting to be found on the islands of the region.

We’ve got a whole unknown history there for the hobbit, just as we’ve got an unknown history for the Denisovans in East Asia.

Changing topics, I think one of the most remarkable recent finds is the material from the site of Malapa in South Africa. This is material that’s been found in the last few years, and we’ve seen a series of papers published in Science in the last few months. This is a species of Australopithecus called Australopithecus sediba, and it’s clearly related to the previously known and possibly ancestral species Australopithecus africanus. The Taung specimen and the ‘Mrs Ples’ fossil are two famous examples of Australopithecus africanus, a species that lived in South Africa more than two million years ago.

It’s true to say that for most experts, the South African australopithecines have been side-lined from the mainstream of human evolution. The mainstream view has been that East Africa was where the first humans evolved, with Homo habilis coming out of a species like Lucy’s, Australopithecus afarensis. From there, in turn, the species Homo erectus supposedly evolved about 1.8 million years ago.

What’s new is that sediba is close to two million years old and has many more human features than Australopithecus africanus. So we’ve got these strange fossil skeletons of sediba down in South Africa, on the one hand looking like Australopithecus africanus, but with more human features in the teeth, pelvis, legs and hands. This suggests for people like Lee Berger (the discoverer of sediba), that the transition to Homo occurred in South Africa, not east Africa. You could then turn things around and sideline all of those east African fossil.

I tend to the view that it will be more complex than that. We know there were australopithecines living in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi, down into South Africa about 2.5 million years ago. Then if in a number of areas we get parallel evolution in adapting to environmental change, these different species start to use tools to an increasing extent, they start to eat meat to an increasing extent, they start to travel longer distances on two legs to get their food, this could have driven parallel human-like changes in the body, the hands, the brain, even. That is maybe what we’re seeing in both East Africa and South Africa. And an even more radical possibility is that hybridization events which we can now map from ancient and modern DNA were also occurring in Africa two million years ago and might have produced some of the mosaic morphologies that we observe there. So which area will eventually turn out to be the place of origin of the genus Homo is still an open question, but sediba reminds us that South Africa could be part of that story, and that perhaps Australopithecus africanus didn’t die out. Maybe it carried on evolving, and even started to evolve some human-like features. So this material is important in evolutionary terms, but also important because of the completeness of the several skeletons discovered so far.

Published so far are two fairly complete skeletons of what are probably a boy, perhaps nine or ten when he died, and an adult female. Still unpublished are at least three more individuals, all from this one site. It looks like these individuals fell one after another into a death trap. They may have fallen into anoxic water, where there was very slow decay of the tissue, and they were mummified before they were fossilized, with even the possibility, according to Lee Berger, of soft tissue preservation. Between the bones and the sediments around them there could be layers of fossilized skin that might have preservation of skin, pores, hair and even pigments. Even more extraordinary if that’s true. But just for their completeness, these are really important specimens.

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The impact of genetic work on our field is enormous, and growing. When you think back to 1997, a tiny bit of mitochondrial DNA was recovered from the original Neanderthal skeleton found in Germany. I was at the press conference with Svante Pääbo, and it was undoubtedly a pioneering achievement, and a breakthrough. But no one could have believed that ten years later, we’d be talking about most of a genome of a Neanderthal being reconstructed. So the technical and computational advances have been huge.

The ability to recover the DNA, massive computing power, huge databases of comparative DNA samples have allowed us to map most of the genome of a Neanderthal, in fact several Neanderthals, and also recover the DNA of these enigmatic people called the Denisovans. I think wherever there are suitably cold conditions, and just as importantly, where it was predominantly cold in the past there should be good DNA preservation. So in northern Asia and Europe and in sites at high altitude outside of those areas, there should be more DNA to come from the fossils, and we will see increasing amounts from modern human fossils as well, which has been slow to come through because of the problems of contamination. We may find there are other people than the Denisovans and the Neanderthals to be recognized from their DNA in these regions— there may well be more surprises to come. For example there is evidence both from fossils and recent DNA that even Africa had an overlap of modern and archaic humans, with the possibility in a continent so large that there were other descendants of heidelbergensis living there alongside Homo sapiens. These populations could have exchanged DNA too, evidence of which might be found in the genomes of living Africans. We will also get the first good look at functional DNA in the genomes of ancient individuals. For the first time, we can make a comparison, not just between the chimp genome and the modern human genome, but we can now add in the Neanderthal genome and the Denisovan genome. We can start to see what unites those three human genomes compared with the chimpanzees. What evolved along the modern human line to make us what we are? And then individually, what made the Neanderthals what they were? What made the Denisovans what they were? This will have an impact, of course, on our own nature, what makes a modern human a modern human. Already a number of bits of DNA have been identified that are distinct among humans, where the Neanderthals are like chimpanzees. Some of these are concerned with the brain, some are concerned with the skin and physiology, some are concerned with how the skeleton grows, and some are concerned with things like the motility of sperm. These things really are going to help us tell what makes a Neanderthal, what makes a Denisovan, and what makes a modern human. Equally we will see studies of the function of Neanderthal-derived and Denisovan-derived DNA in the modern populations that show this from previous interbreeding. So we will find out whether we picked up short or longer-term advantages from those interbreeding events in terms of local adaptation, resistance to new pathogens etc.

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Here’s a somewhat simple representation of my current thinking now about human evolution over the last two million years:

We’ve got the lineage of the hobbit, ‘Homo floresiensis’ (in quotation marks because its human status in not yet clear), perhaps diverging more than two million years ago, evolving in isolation in southeast Asia, and apparently going extinct about 17,000 years ago.

We’ve got Homo erectus, most likely originating in Africa, giving rise to lineages which continue in the Far East in China and Java, but which eventually go extinct. In Europe, it perhaps gave rise to the species Homo antecessor, “Pioneer Man,” known from the site of Atapuerca in Spain. Again, going extinct.

In the western part of the Old World, we get the development of a new species, Homo heidelbergensis, present in Europe, Asia and Africa. We knew heidelbergensis had gone two ways, to modern humans and the Neanderthals. But we now know because of the Denisovans that actually heidelbergensis went three ways—in fact the Denisovans seem to represent an off-shoot of the Neanderthal lineage.

North of the Mediterranean, heidelbergensis gave rise to the Neanderthals, over in the Far East, it gave rise to the Denisovans. In Africa heidelbergensis evolved into modern humans, who eventually spread from Africa about 60,000 years ago, but as I mentioned, there’s evidence that heidelbergensis populations carried on in Africa for a period of time. But we now know that the Neanderthals and the Denisovans did not go genetically extinct. They went physically extinct, but their genes were input into modern humans, perhaps in western Asia in the case of the Neanderthals. And then a smaller group of modern humans picked up DNA from the Denisovans in south east Asia.

We end up with quite a complex story, with even some of this ancient DNA coming back into modern humans within Africa. So our evolutionary story is mostly, but not absolutely, a Recent African Origin.

Lindsey Gilbert

The Internet may well have its downsides, but it also has the potential to make us collectively smarter, according to open-science advocate Michael Nielsen. In Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, Nielsen argues that networked digital tools, such as discussion boards and online marketplaces, can make it easier for scientists to pool their data, share methodologies, and find far-flung collaborators. Even non-scientists are participating in large-scale citizen science projects. In Nielsen’s view, however, public policy has yet to catch up to technology. The digital environment will amplify our collective intelligence, but only if there are incentives for people to share. Editorial assistant Lindsey Gilbert asks Nielsen about what science looks like now, the changing role of academia, and whether collective intelligence might also transform politics.

Lindsey Gilbert: In Reinventing Discovery, you talk about two distinct eras: the era of pre-networked science and the era of networked science. What separates the two eras? Is it only the Internet, or are there other things?

Michael Nielsen: There are many other things. The Internet is a piece of technology that started to be deployed back in the ’70s and obviously has been gradually improved ever since. (I’m talking about TCP/IP, the protocol.) The point about networked science is that what is required for it to come to fruition is actually a whole set of cultural changes within science. And that has got nothing to do with the technology directly. It’s about what our expectations are, about how scientists behave, about what they are rewarded for, and about what they see as doing their jobs. And that’s something that is only gradually changing. Year to year, it looks like it is only changing very slightly. But I think that over just a few decades, in fact, it will be completely transformed.

LG: You propose that when people use online tools to collaborate, they can become collectively smarter. What is collective intelligence, and how is it different from plain old intelligence?

MN: It’s a very old concept, of course. Everybody knows that sometimes, at least, when you’re in a group with a bunch of other people, it can become easy to solve problems that you might have thought were extremely challenging or maybe beyond your capabilities at all. What’s new, and what’s interesting, is the possibility that actually we can go much further than before. We can use online, networked tools to enable groups to work together—sometimes better, and sometimes on a scale that was formerly unimaginable.

LG: I’m interested in what science looks like now. When Archimedes was struck by his famous principle, he supposedly leaped out of his bathtub and shouted “Eureka!” Are today’s scientists all alone in their laboratories shouting “Eureka”?

MN: It happens. I suspect that even the Archimedes story is apocryphal, although it would be lovely if it were true. I think it was Isaac Asimov who said that what a scientific discovery really looks like—a big breakthrough—isn’t somebody shouting, “Eureka, I found it,” but rather one scientist talking to another scientist whom they have maybe just met and saying, “That’s funny,” because something isn’t quite making sense. It is often out of those little things that in fact the big discoveries can grow. When something doesn’t quite match your expectations of how you think the world actually is, people will often build on that, and they will realize that what seems like a minor discrepancy can actually turn into a really, really big thing.

LG: In the open-source world that you describe, people with micro-expertises would make micro-contributions to sprawling, networked projects. At the moment, many of us are reconsidering the value of a liberal education. Does it still make sense to have the Renaissance man, as it were, as our ideal, or should we be moving towards micro-specialization?

MN: You’ve framed that as a choice, a dichotomy; you choose one or the other. But actually I think it’s much more complicated than that. First of all, when you have got billions of people and ever more of them are working to create new types of knowledge—we have several million scientists working—at some level it’s inevitable that there is going to be specialization. There’s no way I could follow what five million scientists are doing. Obviously that’s just impossible. But with that said, there is the question, “Where should I as a scientist apply my talents, and what sorts of things should I learn?” What you want to have is all these different kinds of knowledge—a very broad understanding of how science and human knowledge more generally fit together. What’s interesting? What are the boundaries of what is known? And then you start to gradually develop in certain narrow areas a higher-resolution understanding. You actually want both a good broad general understanding—just so you understand what the right questions are to be asking—as well as the detailed domain expertise that is necessary to forge ahead. So the answer is both.

LG: In the future, scientists may be relying on open-source projects and data sharing. As you well know, not everyone wants to share. Why do scientists lock up their data?

MN: To some extent, it’s just a question of, “What are the incentives for people to take their best ideas and take their data and share it out on the network?” If you go back to the seventeenth century, a lot of the early scientists were very reluctant to share anything at all. You have this idea of the alchemist, who would write down his private secret notes, and sometimes he would go to his grave with them. Fortunately, we have moved away from that, but it’s still true today that it is not necessarily in people’s best interest to share their ideas too broadly around too early—partially just because it can take a lot of time, and partially because people want to get the credit for those ideas, and they don’t necessarily see it as being in their best interest to share them broadly.

We don’t yet have a group da Vinci. We can’t take a thousand people and get something like the Mona Lisa.

LG: Maybe you could talk about what’s going on right now in what you call “open science.” What’s the most interesting development you have seen so far?

MN: A project that I really like a lot is one called the Polymath Project, which has involved a large number of people, mostly mathematicians, from all over the world. They have started using blogs and wikis to collaborate together on difficult, unsolved mathematical problems. It’s a place where they can pool all their different types of expertise, hopefully get a conversation going, and maybe make some progress on problems that any individual amongst them might find very, very challenging. They have had some big successes. They have also had some other projects that haven’t gone so well, which is about par for the course in research. If you’re not having a lot of failures, it means you’re trying problems that are too easy. But it is exciting to see them doing this and pioneering a new way of doing research.

LG: If all goes as you hope it will, collective intelligence will change the way we answer scientific questions. But what about problems outside the hard sciences—problems of public policy and social justice, for example? Could collective intelligence also transform politics?

MN: Maybe. Obviously there’s been a lot of publicity around the Arab Spring and the use of social media. A real debate has gone on about how significant social media has been in those kinds of things. I’m a bit skeptical—in fact I’m very skeptical—about that. One thing you see in a lot of the open-science projects is that people with different insights can agree with one another, which really helps them along. Somebody will say, “Here’s a great idea that will help solve this scientific problem,” and other people will immediately come in and say, “Oh yes. You’re right, that’s a terrific idea,” and they add it into the canon of knowledge. They build up, gradually, a deeper and deeper understanding of the problem that they are trying to solve. What’s happening there is that people are able to agree on when progress is being made.

Now, that all sounds like motherhood and apple pie. But then you think about, let’s say, discussing a political problem. Maybe it’s a question like, “Should the drinking age be lowered?” There are a whole of lot of facts that are relevant to that. But there are also a whole lot of values that are relevant to that, and it’s hard to get people to agree on when you’re making progress in a discussion. It really limits the extent to which you can benefit from a collective approach to solving that kind of a problem. If one person has religious objections to people drinking at all, it’s just going to be difficult for that person’s insights to be integrated with somebody else who thinks that the drinking age should be lowered to seventeen. Instead, the discussion will tend to fragment around that difference in values. So I think it’s very hard, except for the kinds of problems where there is this shared common understanding of what it means to make progress.

LG: What about humanities and the arts? Would there be any way to use online tools there to amplify our collective intelligence, or is the idea of collaborative art an oxymoron?

MN: Well, there are lots of experiments. There have been things like attempts to do collective drawing applications, where hopefully you get lots of artists to come in together and maybe create something beautiful. Unfortunately, mostly they haven’t worked very well. I’m optimistic that maybe what’s going on is that we just haven’t found quite the right pattern yet. You do see some very beautiful things done occasionally. On YouTube, there are some beautiful collective choirs, where hundreds of people from all over the world will contribute a YouTube clip of themselves singing some song. The collective can have its kind of beauty in that way. It seems to me that we are still lacking some key ideas or key tools necessary to do that really well. We don’t yet have a group da Vinci. We can’t take a thousand people and get something like the Mona Lisa.

LG: In Reinventing Discovery you talk about “citizen science.” I’m wondering what that is. All of us have free time. Should we be spending it on citizen science? Can amateurs and hobbyists really contribute to scientific discovery?

MN: For hundreds of years now, amateurs have participated in science in various ways. One area where they’ve done a lot is in ornithology. Amateur birdwatchers have been really important for a long time. The exciting thing that’s happening now are these new citizen science projects, which connect amateurs with, say, the astronomy community (or many different scientific communities) to help out in solving some of the problems that astronomers have. There’s a nice project called Galaxy Zoo, which involves a quarter of a million people who are helping to analyze galaxy images. They’ve made all sorts of discoveries. They’ve written 22 scientific papers, and they’ve discovered an entirely new class of galaxy, among other things. You ask whether or not we should take some of our spare time and do it. I don’t know. I don’t think there is a moral dimension to it. It’s not a question of whether people should or not. It’s just a question of whether or not they’d enjoy doing it and maybe get some value or meaning out of it for themselves.

LG: You say that Galaxy Zoo has produced a certain number of papers. Who is writing those papers? The citizen scientists?

MN: So far in the case of Galaxy Zoo, most of the work on the papers has been done by professional astronomers who are running the Galaxy Zoo website, sometimes with considerable input from the amateurs. Galaxy Zoo participants have certainly been listed as coauthors on some of the papers. It depends on the paper. I mentioned this new type of galaxy discovery that they made, for example. In that case, the amateurs did a lot of really quite important analysis in advance. They systematically hunted down a number of these galaxies, and that was impressive.

LG: Let’s talk about academia. I’m wondering about the role of universities in contributing to open science. Are universities standing in the way?

MN: By and large, they’re not standing in the way except through inertia. As a scientist, you build your career by publishing papers, basically. If you’re spending a lot of time doing that, it’s hard to make time to, say, share your ideas online or to share computer code online or any of the other things you might potentially be doing, even though those things have tremendous scientific value. So, in some sense, the entrenched system of reward that universities use is standing in the way of open science, but it’s not because of anything malicious on anybody’s part. It’s just that we have this established system, and it’s very difficult to get everybody to change at the same time.

LG: Some people think that the Internet is not a new tool that we can use, but rather a new paradigm that is circumscribing and containing our lives. What do you think?

MN: People are right to worry about questions like, “Is the Internet causing us to become too distracted? Is it causing us to be dumbed down?” All these kinds of questions—it’s certainly good to be asking them and to be looking for evidence. On the other hand, it’s also true that whenever you have any kind of a new tool, it’s possible to misuse it. It can be hard to learn how to use the Internet effectively. How do you develop attentional literacy, the ability to be working on the right stuff at the right time and not necessarily frittering your time away, looking at Facebook and whatever else it is you do? I think that as time goes by, people will get better at minimizing any negative aspects, and they will start to use the more powerful aspects of this tool more effectively. That’s part of the benefit, I guess, of asking the skeptical questions—it will hopefully enable us to get more out of the tool.

boston review

Generations of Protestant Christians have heard God speaking through the language of the King James Bible. Four hundred years after it was first published, in 1611, it still has an unrivalled reputation as a shaper of English prose, its phrases a lasting contribution to how we use the language. It’s given us such expressions as “out of the mouth of babes,” “suffer fools gladly,” “seek, and ye shall find,” and “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Yet the 50 or so learned men who labored in teams to create the King James Bible did not set out to create a literary masterpiece. They wanted to establish as direct a connection as they could to the original languages of the Old and New Testaments. And it’s not a miracle that this monumental exercise in translation-by-committee turned out as well as it did. By the time they set to work, in 1604, the King James translators had a hundred years of pioneering work on which to draw. They leaned heavily on texts and translations put together by theologians and linguists such as Erasmus and William Tyndale.

In recent decades, scholarship on the making of the King James Bible has made it plain just how much cumulative human labor and debate went into its creation. “The King James Bible didn’t drop from the sky in 1611,” says Helen Moore, a fellow and tutor in English at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. Moore led the curatorial committee that put together “Manifold Greatness,” an anniversary exhibit at Oxford’s Bodleian Library devoted to the making of the King James Bible. The most famous Bible in English, she says, was “made by many different people in many different places using many different people’s words and many reference texts.”

The King James Bible got its immediate start at a gathering called by Britain’s King James I in January 1604. The Hampton Court Conference brought together high-ranking clergymen and courtiers to discuss the calls for religious reform made in the Millenary Petition, which the Puritans had submitted to the new monarch the previous year. Present at the conference was John Rainolds, a Puritan and the president of Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. Rainolds complained, among other things, that English translations of the Bible from the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI were “corrupt and not answerable to the truth.” (For instance, he pointed out, a line from Psalm 105 should read “They were not disobedient” rather than “They were not obedient.”) James agreed. The following year, six companies, or teams of translators—two based at Oxford, two at Cambridge, and two at Westminster—undertook to create a new, more acceptable version.

The names of the translators won’t be familiar to most contemporary readers. But they were the academic and religious stars of their day, chosen for their knowledge of Scripture and of Greek and Hebrew and other languages. Many were fellows at Oxford and Cambridge; many were working clergymen.

“They were essentially the most learned people in England at the time,” says Hannibal Hamlin, an associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Hamlin co-curated the American version of the “Manifold Greatness” exhibit, which runs through January 15, 2012, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

The translators were given a set of rules to follow as they worked. The rules organized them into six companies, each responsible for a particular section or sections of the Old and New Testaments. The companies were to circulate their drafts among the others. After all the teams completed their work, a smaller group drawn from all three met to prepare an agreed-upon final version.

Rainolds, the prime mover of the idea, served on the First Oxford Company, which was charged with translating the Old Testament prophets. Officially headed by John Harding, the president of Magdalen College, that company met in Rainolds’s lodgings. Thomas Ravis, the dean of Christ Church, led the Second Oxford Company, responsible for preparing the four Gospels of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, and the book of Revelation. The First Cambridge Company, under Edward Lively, worked on the Old Testament from 1 Chronicles to Ecclesiastes; the Second Cambridge Company, led by John Duport, took on the Apocrypha. The First Westminster Company, directed by Lancelot Andrewes, handled the Old Testament from Genesis to 2 Kings, while colleagues on the Second Westminster Company, led by William Barlow, the dean of Chester, were assigned the New Testament epistles.

“We know quite a bit about how things worked,” Hamlin says. “The actual process was probably exceptionally dull. They’re basically slogging through, year after year, word by word, thinking about the most minute detail and trying to get it as perfect as possible.”

Moore imagines the process as “very discursive, very communal, and very multiple,” meaning that the translators worked through multiple drafts and from multiple sources. “One of the things that made the translation possible at all was the publication, in 1519, of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament,” Moore says. “Once there was a standard text, translation could really take off.” Erasmus’s text had many idiosyncrasies and flaws but it gave other scholars something substantial to work with.

Every member of the translation companies was given a loose-leaf copy of the Bishops’ Bible, an English translation first published in 1568, to use as a base text. David Norton, a professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, is author of The King James Bible: A Short History From Tyndale to Today (Cambridge U. Press, 2011), probably the most detailed account of how the translators did their job. In it, he makes the case for the Bishops’ Bible as “of very particular importance as a draft of the King James Bible.”

The translators were also intimately familiar with a translation called the Great Bible of 1539 and with the Geneva Bible (1560), compiled by Protestant exiles in Europe. Small and printed in roman type, the Geneva Bible was much more of a pocket edition than the Great Bible. Moore describes the Geneva Bible as “the reading Bible of the Elizabethan public,” the Bible that Shakespeare used.

Running through those Bibles is the work of William Tyndale, an English theologian born about 1494, who was the first to work from the original languages. Before England finally broke with the Roman Catholic Church, it was heresy to translate the Bible into English. Tyndale dared to do it, often working more or less on the run during self-exile in Europe. In 1536, he was captured and executed, in part because of that work. Miles Coverdale, his assistant, published some of Tyndale’s translations posthumously. Within four years of his death, sanctioned English translations began to appear. Later English Bibles, including the King James, preserve large portions of Tyndale’s language. It’s only in recent decades, thanks to the work of scholars such as the biographer David Daniell, that Tyndale’s contribution has been more fully appreciated.

“The way I see it is that it’s reasonable to think of Tyndale as the first draft of the King James,” Norton says. He points specifically to Tyndale’s work on the New Testament and the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. “That’s foundational for all that comes later. It’s also particularly good work.”

For instance, Tyndale threw a distinctive liveliness into his translations. Norton cites an example from Genesis in which the serpent reassures Eve that there’s no danger in taking a bite of the forbidden fruit. “Tush! Ye shall not die,” the tempter tells them. Norton says, “It gives you a sense of the kind of talent for language he had, and his very strong sensitivity to what’s being said in the original languages.”

The King James translators came up with many of their own phrasings, of course, and sometimes improved upon Tyndale’s. As an example, Norton cites a passage from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:28-9. The King James version has “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Compare that to Tyndale’s rendering of those lines: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They labour not, neither spin. And yet for all that I say unto you that even Solomon in all his royalty was not arrayed like unto one of these.”

Norton says, “Quite a lot could be made of this famous saying, including the improvement of rhythm—’neither do they spin,’ etc.—and the removal of wordiness. Tyndale’s ‘for all that’ has no equivalent in the Greek.”

By the time the King James translators set about their work, humanism and Protestantism had encouraged several generations to acquire the language skills necessary to undertake fresh translations of Scripture. “One of the most significant things that was possible by 1611 was the understanding of Rabbinic commentaries,” Moore says. “They were able to read not just the first layer of Hebrew but the commentaries as well. But of course they leaned heavily on English translations as well.”

Based in centers of learning, the King James translators could consult some of the great libraries of the time. According to Moore, Merton College, where one of the Oxford companies met, holds in its archives a list of books checked out by the translators and carried off to their rooms.

The translators also had their own books. Steven Galbraith, now curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, co-curated the Folger version of “Manifold Greatness.” According to Galbraith, Rainolds and many of his colleagues would have owned polyglot Bibles, which carry side-by-side columns of Scripture in different languages. “It allows you to see how each passage was translated,” the curator explains. “These were all clergymen, really, and they would have had these tools at their disposal.”

Norton says it’s essential to appreciate how steeped the translators were in languages and literature. “What’s worth keeping in mind is just how much they lived with all the materials they were working with,” he says. “It’s an intensity of involvement that very few modern scholars would ever match.”

For instance, John Bois, of the First Oxford Company, knew his Hebrew alphabet by the time he was 5 years old, according to Norton, and he spent almost every day of the rest of his life working with ancient languages and texts.

We have Bois to thank for one of the three primary documents—Moore calls them “the big three”—that reveal something of how the translators worked. (The “Manifold Greatness” exhibit marks the first time all three have all been displayed together.) A member of the final editing committee, Bois kept notes of some of its proceedings. Some time in the 17th century, Moore says, an antiquarian made copies of those notes. The originals later disappeared, but the American scholar Ward Allen rediscovered a copy in the library of Oxford’s Corpus Christi College in the 1950s. Allen’s discovery helped jump-start scholarship on the translators’ process.

The second of the big three is a manuscript copy of a partial King James draft that survives. Known as the Lambeth Manuscript, it belongs to the Lambeth Palace Library, the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Lambeth Manuscript contains a translation of the New Testament epistles, with the text written out in a column on the left-hand side of the page. The column on the right has been left blank, presumably to leave room for people to comment if they wanted to as the draft circulated among the companies.

The manuscript represents an interim translation, Moore says; it does not match the final language in the 1611 edition. “When I sat in the Lambeth Palace Library and opened it, my heart actually turned over,” Moore says, because the manuscript represents a glimpse of the stages the translators worked through on their way to a final version.

But the mother lode of evidence—and one not yet fully mined—is a copy of the Bishops’ Bible that carries strike-throughs and changes recording the translators’ decisions. The notations in the margins were most likely made by the scribes they employed, Moore says. The annotated copy that survives belongs to the Bodleian; it is made up of leaves from different translators’ copies, which were bound together at some point.

“The Bishops’ Bible is enormously important because it both shows the translators at work and gives really valuable evidence about what the translators thought should be in the text,” says Norton, who along with Ward Allen has probably studied the book more closely than any other scholar. People have known about the annotated copy “for a very long time,” as far back as the first half of the 19th century, he says. For years scholars saw little of interest in it, though, until the late 1990s, when Norton took a close look at the annotations in the Old Testament and recognized their value. He hopes that someone will sit down some day and work through the annotated Bible to transcribe all the Bible’s annotations.

That will be difficult, according to Helen Moore. “David Norton and Ward Allen have done what work has been possible,” she says, “but the Bodleian will not unbind it.” That’s a problem because some of the annotations in the margins got swallowed up by the binding.

“So our knowledge is very, very partial,” Moore says. To transcribe all the annotations “would be a lifetime’s work anyway.”

As they worked with the many sources at their disposal, the King James companies were guided by a desire to recreate, in English, a sense of direct engagement with the languages of the Bible. For instance, the Tyndale model on which they relied “has to do with emulating the diction and the syntax of the Hebrew,” according to Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley and a noted Biblical translator. “The diction is very simple, almost homespun, and yet it has a terrific dignity.” The translators managed to preserve those qualities in much of their work.

They did it without some of the resources that modern scholars have. Four hundred years ago, the Dead Sea Scrolls hadn’t been discovered, and much remained to be learned about the linguistic family of Near Eastern languages.

But the King James translators had other advantages. “These were men of serious literary culture, which I think is no longer possible. If you go to Harvard or Johns Hopkins and do a Ph.D. in Biblical studies, the odds are strongly against you reading James Joyce,” Alter says. “Nowadays people who are specialists in the field don’t have the feel for literary language.”

Alter describes the King James Bible as a masterpiece, but a flawed one. “It is not as seamlessly eloquent as everybody remembers it is,” he says. “There are beautiful lines of poetry, and then lines which are clunky, lines which run on to a multiplicity of words and syllables, which is not only unlike the original but pretty much lacking in poetic rhythm. I don’t think they paid much attention to the sound.”

In a lecture, Alter elaborates on that assessment. The “grandeur of the 1611 version is not infrequently interrupted by stylistic lapses, awkwardness, and patches of gratuitous wordiness,” he says, especially in stretches of poetry. In Job 3:11, for instance, Job laments that he didn’t die at birth. “The English rendering of the first half of the line could scarcely be surpassed: ‘Why died I not from the womb?’” Alter says. “But in the second half of the line, the translation becomes unhinged: ‘Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?’” Describing the line as arhythmic, Alter notes that it substitutes 15 English words for the Hebrew version’s three.

Over all, though, Alter thinks that the King James Bible deserves the place it has held for so long. Unlike most technology, he says, literature “doesn’t necessarily become obsolete. Nobody writes English now like Shakespeare or Milton, and yet the poetry they wrote still rings in our ears and is part of our inner lives. Warts and all, the King James is very much like that. It has this eloquence, it has this high, dignified simplicity following the Hebrew, so it speaks with a literary power that all these modern committee translations do not possess.”

David Norton agrees that what we have come to admire as the King James version’s literary power grows out of the direct connection to the original languages made by the translators, following Tyndale’s lead. That’s “quite different from our modern sense of what was achieved by the King James,” he says.

In recent decades, the King James Bible has faced more competition from other translations and has lost some of its status as a result. Literary power aside, it enjoyed such a long reign in part because it was ubiquitous. Very few printers in England enjoyed the right to print Bibles, and that helped cement the King James’s reputation. For centuries, “it was the book that was most present in English-speaking people’s lives from birth to death,” Norton says. “That’s an incredible monopoly of consciousness. So it became enormously familiar to people.”

As Norton says, “We learned to love it. And as we got used to it, as we learned to love it, we saw qualities we liked in it, we saw rhythms in it that could be admired from a literary point of view. And so the reputation of the King James as a literary achievement grew and grew.”

The men responsible for the King James Bible would have been taken aback by that, Hannibal Hamlin says. “I think they’d be surprised to hear how much credit they get,” he says. “They would have been perfectly well aware that they were not doing something new.”

http://chronicle.com/article/All-They-That-Labored/130155/

When I was very small I lived on a defunct chicken farm. There was a house with a yard, and these together took up half an acre. To the north there was a long, thin chicken coop, empty of chickens, and behind it lay the back pasture, which occupied one acre. Perpendicular to this, to the west, there was the side pasture. Steers dwelled in the back pasture, ate hay, shat, sculpted odd forms on the salt lick (until we had them shot and butchered). As far as I know, these were actually existing steers. But the side pasture was inhabited, I imagined for a long time, by a fox. When I went there by day, I felt I was entering upon its territory; and when I lay in bed at night, I was certain it was out there, in its burrow, dwelling. It lived there like a human in a home, and was as real as any neighbor—except that I had myself brought it into existence, likely by projecting it out of a picture in a book.

The fox did not need to exist in order to function in my imagined community, one which must be judged no more or less real than that of, say, Indonesians, or of humanity. It was enough that there be foxes at all, or creatures that fit that description, in order for me to conjure community with the imaginary fox in the side pasture. And it was no mere puerile phantasm that caused me to imagine this community, either. It was rather my thinking upon my own humanity, a condition which until very recently remained, over the course of an entire human life, embedded within a larger community of beings.

These days, we are expected to grow out of that sort of thinking well before puberty. Our adult humanity consists in cutting off ties of community with animals, ceasing, as Lévi-Strauss put it, to think with them. When on occasion adults begin again to think about animals, if not with them, it is to assess whether animals deserve the status of rights-bearers. Animal rights, should there be such things, are now thought to flow from neurophysiological features and behavioral aptitudes: recognizing oneself in the mirror, running through mazes, stacking blocks to reach a banana.

But what is forgotten here is that the animals are being tested for re-admission to a community from which they were previously expelled, and not because they were judged to lack the minimum requirements for the granting of rights. They were expelled because they are hairy brutes, and we learned to be ashamed of thinking of them as our kin. This shame only increased when Darwin confirmed our kinship, thus telling us something Paleolithic hunters already knew full well. Morality doubled up its effort to preserve a distinction that seemed to be slipping away. Since the 19th century, science has colluded with morality, always allowing some trivial marker of human uniqueness or other to function as a token for entry into the privileged moral universe of human beings. “They don’t have syntax, so we can eat them,” is how Richard Sorabji brilliantly reduces this collusion to absurdity.

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Enlarge Image Enlarge Image Before and after Darwin, the specter of the animal in man has been compensated by a hierarchical scheme that separates our angelic nature from our merely circumstantial, and hopefully temporary, beastly one. And we find more or less the same separation in medieval Christian theology, Romantic nature poetry, or current cognitive science: All of it aims to distinguish the merely animal in us from the properly human. Thus Thoreau, widely lauded as a friend of the animals, cannot refrain from invoking animality as something to be overcome: “Men think that it is essential,” he writes, “that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride 30 miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.” What the author of Walden misses is that men might be living like baboons not because they are failing at something or other, but because they are, in fact, primates. Thoreau can’t help invoking the obscene and filthy beasts that have, since classical antiquity, formed a convenient contrast to everything we aspire to be.

The best evidence suggests that this hatred of animals—there’s no other word for it, really—is a feature of only certain kinds of society, though societies of this kind have dominated for so long that the hatred now appears universal. Until the decisive human victory over other predatorial megafauna several thousand years ago, and the subsequent domestication of certain large animals, the agricultural revolution, the consequent stratification of society into a class involved with food production and another, smaller class that traded in texts and values: Until these complex developments were well under way, human beings lived in a single community with animals, a community that included animals as actors and as persons.

In that world, animals and human beings made up a single socio-natural reality. They killed one another, yes, but this killing had nothing in common with the industrial slaughter of domestic animals we practice today: Then, unlike now, animals were killed not because they were excluded from the community, but because they were key members of it. Animals gave themselves for the sake of the continual regeneration of the social and natural order, and in return were revered and treated as kin.

As human beings abandoned community for domination, thinking with animals became a matter of symbolism. Bears showed up on coats of arms, for example, not because the warriors who fought behind these shields were fighting as bears, as magically transformed ursine warriors. They were fighting behind the bear shield simply because that’s what their clan chose, as today one might choose Tasmanian Devil mudflaps for one’s truck. It was an ornament, a mere symbol.

Or was it? The eminent medieval historian Michel Pastoureau’s recent book, The Bear: History of a Fallen King (Harvard University Press), is motivated by a conviction that the symbolic is never merely symbolic, that when mythological elements are transformed into literary motifs, or totems into coats of arms, this does not mean that the old way of looking at things is entirely forgotten. Accordingly, Pastoureau believes that animals continued to shape our view of social reality well into what I have been calling the era of domination.

Pastoureau’s choice of research focus was widely dismissed as childish when he took it up in the 1970s: It is children who pay attention to Mr. Fox and Mr. Bear, the French historical establishment declaimed. Adults should turn their attention to adult matters—which is to say human matters. The bear accordingly grew plush, diminutive, and migrated to the crib in the form of the teddy bear. This destination serves as the end point of Pastoureau’s study, and while this chapter of the bear’s social history is not nearly as interesting as its medieval incarnation (or its Paleolithic one), it does serve to illustrate how far the king of European beasts has fallen.

Falling, humiliation, abasement: This is the story Pastoureau wants to tell, of a creature that was, in pre-Christian Europe, an exalted double of the human warrior; that in the high Middle Ages was displaced by the lion as the king of beasts; and that by the modern period was best known as a broken, muzzled circus curiosity. By the 14th century, the bear would be “forced to obey not saints or heroes but a mere jongleur or a vulgar animal showman with a monkey on his shoulders or hares popping out of his clothing.” Yet throughout its fall into dishonor, Pastoureau believes, the bear remained one of us: Even when it is abased, we see not some poor creature; we see what could easily be our own fate as well.

That we see ourselves in the bear in a way we would not in, say, a spider, is a result of what is often called anthropomorphism. It’s important to distinguish between a relatively wide and a relatively narrow sense of this concept. Broadly speaking, traditional societies were inclined to anthropomorphize all animals, to the extent that they attributed intentions and interests to spiders, fish, deer, etc. But pre-modern Europeans, according to Pastoureau, anthropomorphized the bear in a narrower sense: It really was given the “form of man,” construed as a special kind of man, as a creature not just with ursine interests of its own, comparable to arachnid interests, ichthyoid interests, and so on, but with distinctly human interests.

These interests extended right down to the choice of mates, which for male bears were, ideally, human women. As the ultimate mark of kinship, such couplings were thought to be perfectly fertile. Half-bear offspring were held to be particularly virile and heroic, and for this reason bears often show up in royal lineages. The 12th-century Gesta Danorum casually notes that the Danish king is descended from a bear, an observation that is repeated as late as the 16th century in the work of Olaus Magnus. This is not mythology, but straightforward genealogy, and there is no indication that it was doubted by the authors who promulgated it.

While a human male cannot couple with a she-bear, there is another way a human might end up with an ursine mother: adoption. A she-bear not only takes care of an abandoned human infant by bringing it food, but also nurses it with her milk and, most importantly, licks it, literally, into shape. It is this licking that was believed to transform cubs from mere unformed masses of hair—what in the Aristotelian zoological tradition would have been called moles—into proper beings. Milk-giving and licking are nearly as powerful a means of transmitting kinship as sperm (in many cultures, two children who drink milk from the same wet nurse are considered siblings), and it is in this way that a human can have a bear as either a mother or a father.

Another way is through magical transformation, perhaps by drinking the blood of a bear, or by covering oneself in a bear’s hide. Many will know already of the Scandinavian Berserkers, literally, the “bear shirts,” who “went into battle imitating the gait and the groans of the bear.” Pastoureau notes that according to some sources, the Berserkers “ate human flesh; still others [report that] they were metamorphosed into bears in the course of a magical-religious ceremony in which cries, chants, dances, potions, and drugs brought them to a state of frenetic excitement, as though they were possessed.”

Until the 10th century, European men from the North Sea to the Pyrenees transformed themselves into bears to enhance their experience of sex and violence. The end of the bear’s hibernation in early February was marked by “songs, dances, games, and ursine masquerades.” Many tales also tell of bears—not just lads dressed as bears—falling in love with women, kidnapping them, raping them, and forcing them to live as wives.

The virility and violence so strongly associated with the bear made it suspicious to the church. By the high Middle Ages the ecclesiastical authorities had succeeded in deposing it, reducing it to a pathetic circus performer. At the same time, the church succeeded in enthroning the lion in the bear’s former position in heraldry and more broadly in the medieval symbolic imagination. The lion was a safe choice as king of the beasts in large part because it was entirely extinct in Europe. It was no longer phenomenally salient in the daily lives of European folk, indeed hadn’t been for millennia, and so there could be no threat of dangerous effects from consuming its parts, from wearing its hide, or from having sex with it or as it. No young man could think to transform himself into a lion in order to ravage a village girl. “The foreign lion,” Pastoureau writes, “preferred by the medieval Church, gradually drove [the bear] off, demonstrating that … cultural history always wins out over natural history. Or, more precisely, … natural history is simply one branch of cultural history.”

By the late Middle Ages the lion, while non-native and physically absent, had become “a part of daily life” for average Europeans, which “raises a question for the historian about the aptness of the now familiar opposition between ‘native’ and ‘exotic’ animals. For feudal societies, the lion was not really an exotic animal, even though it had not been native to Europe for several millennia. The lion could be seen every day and everywhere, represented on a great many monuments, objects, precious fabrics, and works of art.” Established for millennia as king of the beasts in literate Asian and Middle Eastern traditions, the lion was easy to import as a symbol, particularly in the era of the Crusades, as Jerusalem came again to be conceptualized as the center of the world. What better title to show up there with than “Lion-Hearted”?

For the most part, the church was successful in dethroning the bear, but one senses that the shift in symbolism had at least something to do with ecological history as well as the history of ideas. Today, the bear is more or less extinct in France (and England, and the Low Countries), other than in parts of the Alps and the Pyrenees. The worship of the bear seems to have diminished in rough correspondence to its geographical disappearance over the centuries. (The lion could be maintained as king without being geographically present, but only by a top-down campaign.)

Today Romania has by far the highest concentration of bears in Europe (thanks in part to Nicolae Ceausescu’s promotion of bear fertility—a policy derived entirely from his personal interest in accumulating hunting trophies), and is also the place you are most likely to see vestiges of the jocum cum urso (now evolved into the Latinate jocul ursului, or “game of the bear”) that was already on the decline in France by the ninth century.

To “play the bear” is to allow one’s animal nature to come to the surface. On the standard interpretation of Christian anthropology, this is a nature that, while ineradicable, must be kept in submission. Yet Pastoureau argues that even within the Christian tradition there was a double movement: Our own animality was to be detested, yet animals, as testimony of God’s majestic creation, were nonetheless to be revered. St. Paul and the earliest church leaders tended to see animals as worthy of love, but it was above all Augustine who established the general sentiment of zoophobia that would predominate in the centuries to come. For Augustine, both difference from humans as well as similarity to humans seemed sufficient ground to deem animals diabolical. Bears, for example, were particularly troubling because they, so it was thought, copulated face to face, just like humans. For Augustine, “who was continually asserting that man and beast could in no way be confused with one another, that human and animal nature were completely different, this was a scandal, a crime, a transgression of the order intended by the Creator, something truly diabolical: ‘ursus est diabolus.’”

Cicero quotes a line from the poet Ennius: Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis: ‘How like us is the ugly beast, the ape.’ In fact, this is just one instance of a general rule concerning human perception of what are sometimes called higher animals, and when Ennius was writing, the worst had not yet begun for the other primates. As Pastoureau comments, the major monotheist religions “do not like animals that nature and culture have declared to be ‘cousins’ or ‘relatives’ of man. The pig”—about which Pastoureau has written a separate study, Le cochon: histoire d’un cousin mal aimé—”was a victim of this in biblical Antiquity. The bear suffered in turn in the heart of the Christian Middle Ages. And the great apes suffered the same fate a few centuries later. It has never been a good idea to resemble human beings too closely.”

On July 26, 2011, The Independent reported that “A mystery animal which has been attacking sheep in the Vosges since April has been identified by a remote-control camera as a wolf.” In the 18th century such a mystery could not be so easily dispelled, and when a series of attacks took place in the Gévaudan region of France in the 1760s, mostly on peasant girls, rumors began to fly. The simplest explanations were generally passed over in favor of ones involving supernatural forces, implausibly large creatures, or anatomically impossible hybrids. By the time the killing came to an end in the winter of 1765, a full-fledged legend had been born, one that would give rise to generations of amateur sleuths, and even, in 1889, to a Roman Catholic demonological treatise on the supposed monster.

Jay M. Smith’s recent book, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Harvard University Press), like Pastoureau’s work on the bear, concerns a fierce European animal, but in any more profound sense the two books have little in common. Smith’s subject is the human reaction to a mysterious specter. Pastoureau’s by contrast is very much a known commodity, and even when it is not precisely known, even when the facts about it are all a bit off, it is nonetheless conceived as a familiar, as a neighbor.

The wolf has had a very different history in Europe than the bear, as Pastoureau himself notes. “Fear of the wolf,” he writes, “a major factor in peasant sensibility, is linked to crisis periods (climatic, agricultural, social), not to times of economic prosperity or demographic expansion. It was not accidental that the story of the beast of the Gévaudan took place in the France of the 18th not the 13th century. In the French countryside in the feudal period, people feared the Devil, dragons, the Wild Hunt, and night hunting, but not really the wolf.” Smith’s book is indeed that of an 18th-century specialist seeking to reveal through microhistory the hopes and fears of the Gévaudan peasants.

In doing a microhistory of the events behind a folk legend, Smith has taken on an extremely difficult task. He is interested in an occurrence that has long been mired in amateur cryptozoological lore, but wishes to treat it in terms of the “cultural and psychological depths” of the 18th-century French villagers. Smith aims to “shift attention away from the beast itself.” Occasionally, this new approach leads Smith to write as though he were trying to impress a tenure committee or a grant-making organization: “I examine all the available sources in close detail in order to break through the ossified discourses that have long surrounded the beast’s tale,” and so on.

That is not entirely fair to the discoursers. Some local French Web sites dedicated to the beast are amateurish indeed, but there is nothing at all ossified about them: They are lively and amusing. Now I too have little patience with cryptozoology, though I admit I am an adept of what might be called metacryptozoology: reflection upon the reasons why people need to imagine there are more creatures out there than there in fact are. I assume that the beast of the Gévaudan was just a very hungry wolf. But why it is that species are multiplied in the human imagination beyond strict necessity remains an interesting question, and a universal one that extends far beyond the Gévaudan in the 18th century.

In general, one senses that Smith, unlike Pastoureau, is not all that interested in winning for animals their own history. Smith is interested in the “popular beliefs, scientific thought, religious tensions, media markets, aristocratic culture,” and so on, of human beings, and animals real and imagined occasionally enter into this. Pastoureau, by contrast, has written a history of a symbiosis. I personally would like to see a treatment of the wolf comparable to Pastoureau’s of the bear: one that takes seriously the proposition that the beast of the Gévaudan and the people of the Gévaudan have a shared history, rather than the former simply being an imposition upon the latter, which afterward echoes within their distinctly human cultural and psychological depths.

When I was little, I went camping with a friend who liked to freak everyone out. He told a story of a man who had been hiking, and came upon a zone of friable rock. When trying to climb across it, he slipped right through, and landed in an underground cavern. He was pulled out after some hours or days, but what was in fact retrieved was no longer the camper who fell in, but only a mute, blubbering madman. He had seen something down there. I asked my friend what it was. My friend didn’t know. No one knows, he added ominously.

I assumed that the man must have witnessed some sort of blending of the human and animal worlds, a blending you are not supposed to see: not one that is simply “gross,” as we might have said back then, but rather one that cannot be espied without the basic order of the universe collapsing.

What could that have been? Bears and humans copulating? Bears and humans feasting together on less fortunate humans? No, I found I could think all of this, and come out more or less all right. It must have been something far worse, a secret ursine transformation, a “becoming animal,” so to speak, in which everything that Augustine and his successors sought to keep in check comes erupting uncontrollably to the surface, not out of any intentional invocation, such as the Berserkers performed, but out of a complete loss of human self-mastery. This is, I take it, a very deep human fear, certainly deep enough to freak out a 10-year-old.

The fear of the beast in the secret cavern—the bear that would animalize the soul of any human being who happened into its lair—exists side by side and in tension with my imagined community of the gentle fox in his burrow in the side pasture. The hairy beast in the cavern, the bear that does unspeakable things to the maiden it abducts, the wolf that dresses up as a grandmother in order to eat/rape Little Red Riding Hood: These are the ne plus ultra of enmity, the very opposite of community.

Traditionally, hunters offered up incantations and sacrifices, and took other such measures to keep the community as extensive and stable as possible, to extend it to the other top carnivores as well as to the gentle beings, without forgoing bloodshed in order to do this. It was a community not defined by species, and not based upon a social contract that precludes killing. Killing resulted in eating, and thus in absorbing the other’s powers: perhaps in the end a more profound form of community than living and letting live. This is the sort of community human beings once co-inhabited with bears and wolves, before these hairy cousins of ours were assimilated to the Devil.

Justin E.H. Smith, an associate professor of philosophy at Concordia University, in Montreal, is author of Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (Princeton University Press, 2011). He is at work on a book about human nature and human difference.

Similarly, a close look at the realities of economic history in the United States and elsewhere requires major adjustments to what is called ‘free market theory.’ These modifications lead to what should be called ‘really existing free market theory’, and this is the economic theory that is actually applied in practice.

For this, we can take a look at a rather perplexing example – a country that supposedly developed based on market principles and free enterprise – namely the United States. In the mid 18th century, the U.S was one of the richest societies (in terms of resources) in the world, yet it was pre-industrial.

Adam Smith, widely considered the father of modern economics, had surprisingly specific advice for the 13 colonies. Smith requested precisely what today’s economists recommend to many third world countries, advocating that the U.S maintain a commitment to its comparative advantages and sell what it’s best at producing. At the time, the U.S was most capable of catching fish and hunting fur, then exporting it to England, all while importing superior British manufactured goods.

Perhaps unpredictably in the eyes of Smith, the U.S gained its independence from Britain, and proceeded to completely ignore Smith’s free market advice. Under Alexander Hamilton, the liberated colonies immediately set up high protective barriers (such as tariffs) to try to bar superior British textiles, then later British steel. This allowed the new country to construct its own manufacturing base under specialized protective barriers and by other forms of incredible state intervention.

A staple in American manufacturing in the 19th century was cotton, which is often referred to as the fuel of American industrialization. The U.S produced cotton and became the world’s leading cotton exporter following its elimination of a massive indigenous population, which according to Howard Zinn, could have easily totalled “thousands upon thousands” of Indians.

The conquering of almost half of Mexico and annexation of Texas was also in order, which was land needed to monopolize cotton and “bring England to our knees,” to quote the Jacksonian Democrats. The U.S then ramped up production of this 19th century ‘fuel’ through its development of a slave society, which was followed by the criminalization of black life for the purpose of exploiting their labor.

Thus far, American society clearly industrialized in opposition, not supposed adherence, to market principles. It took radical violation of free enterprise undertaken to develop (change) its comparative advantages. Obviously, no small business or group of entrepreneurs could have conquered the northern half of Mexico; a publicly subsidized institution—the government—was the missing piece.

A brief look at the 20th century also reveals exactly this revelation, or the concept that the U.S did notdevelop and modernize because of a devout faithfulness to market principles.

Ronald Reagan is now considered a champion of free markets, and the 1980s a decade in U.S history in which entrepreneurial economics flourished. However, the Reagan administration’s efforts to protect American businesses from market discipline were unprecedented right up until their implementation. For example, the imposed 100% tariff on select Japanese electronics was done to “enforce the principles of free and fair trade,” according to President Reagan. His Treasury Secretary, James A. Baker, would later boast to the US Chamber of Commerce that the administration “granted more import relief to US industry that any of his predecessors in more than half a century.”

According to a comprehensive review of the Reagan era in Foreign Affairs by Clyde Sanger, a Senior Fellow for International Finance at the Council on Foreign Relations, “The postwar chief executive with the most passionate love of laissez-faire, presided over the greatest swing toward protectionism since the 1930s.” In a scholarly review by Patrick Low, a GATT secretariat economist, he estimates that the restrictive effects of Reagan’s policies measured at approximately three times those of other leading industrial countries.

Clyde Sanger notes some thematic irony, namely that advocation of market discipline is a tool used by those with power, who manage to avoid the ravages of the market as a result of astonishing state intervention. Those without power are then exposed to the free market discipline, and are therefore left with little, if any, protection from the subsidized structures of power. This theme is strikingly dominant in the economic history of the past three centuries.

The Reagan administration was following a common course of action that has been in practice in the U.S (and elsewhere) for its entire existence. However, modern neo-liberals have shed new light on the free market theory charade. Presidential candidate Michelle Bachman commonly extolls the victories of the free market and issues tough lectures about the immoral culture of welfare-dependence of American poor and working people. But an Environmental Working Group analysis points to evidence that her family farm received over $250,000 over eleven years.

A major piece of America’s dedication to ‘free market’ economics includes the massive transfers of taxpayer funds to private corporations, generally hidden under the masks of ‘defense’ or ‘security.’ However, pretending that these (purposefully) initiated transfers by the Pentagon to private industry hasn’t been economically effective isn’t, in fact, realistic. The U.S automotive, steel, high-tech, fiber-optic, airline and other industries would never have been able to survive international competition, innovate or develop through research without these fundamental violations of market principles, as MIT professor Noam Chomsky notes in Hegemony or Survival.

Whether this radical protectionism in a state-guided mercantilist system is a position worth advocating is perhaps a worthy subject for debate, but its usage is unquestionably in substantial defiance of any standard (classical) free market theory in principle. Since our analytical focus is centered on the world as it is, our attention should be focused on really existing free market theory, or the economic theory that is actually applied.

President Barack Obama, unlike his predecessor, hasn’t shied away from the belief and acceptance that protectionism is effective (and profoundly disguised). Of course, when his administration’s market interventions saved thousands of union jobs during the financial bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, American media commentators eagerly termed them ‘free market infringements’ and ‘giveaways’ to undeserving corporations and the unions. However, when President Reagan subsidized an enormous amount of GM’s capital costs in the 1980′s to save the company’s management from a massive restructuring bankruptcy, that was simply necessary in the country’s effort to save American industry.

In 2011, President Obama handily announced a ‘new’ federal project that exemplifies exactly what U.S free market policy has always been: “a joint effort by industry, universities and the federal government to help reposition the United States as a leader…” In desperate need of economic growth before his re-election bid that’s just one year and half away, the U.S President turned to the application of what existing free market economic theory has always been: an incredibly confounding cliché.

William E. Shaub is a violin performance major at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan and an active political journalist.

The discoveries are casting doubt on some long-standing theories about human evolution, including the notion that early human pelvises evolved in response to larger brain sizes. And there is also some new evidence suggesting that Au. sediba may have been a tool-maker.

These new findings, which include the most complete hand ever described in an early hominin, one of the more complete pelvises ever discovered and brand new pieces of the foot and ankle, are detailed in five separate studies. The Au. sediba research also boasts a high-resolution scan of an early hominin’s cranium along with work that refines the date of this early hominin site in Malapa, South Africa, to nearly 2.0 million years ago, close to the emergence of Homo.

The five studies appear in the 9 September issue of the journal Science, which is published by AAAS, the international nonprofit science society.

Lee Berger, the project leader from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, explains what these new findings mean for modern humans. “The many advanced features found in the brain and body, along with the earlier date, make it possibly the best candidate ancestor for our genus — the genus Homo — more so than previous discoveries, such as Homo habilis.”

The age of these Au. sediba fossils has been constrained to about 1.977 million years, which predates the earliest appearances of Homo-specific traits in the fossil record. Until now, fossils dated to 1.90 million years ago — and mostly attributed to Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis — have been considered ancestral to Homo erectus, the earliest undisputed human ancestor. But, the older age of these Au. sediba fossils raises the possibility of a separate, older lineage from which Homo erectus may have evolved.

“Science is pleased to be publishing these papers, which add important new information regarding this species, who lived during an important time in human evolution and was first described in the 9 April 2010 issue,” according to Brooks Hanson, deputy editor of physical sciences. “Well-preserved and complete early human fossils are so rare, and Au. sediba now provides a detailed look at some key parts of the anatomy, such as the hand and foot which are rarely well-preserved.”

The caves of Malapa, nearly 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg, have provided a rich assemblage of early hominin fossils over the years. They are part of the Cradle of Humankind, which has been recognized as a World Heritage Site and set aside for its physical and cultural significance. Last year, Berger and colleagues announced the discovery of the remains of a juvenile male (MH-1) and an adult female (MH-2) Au. sediba that were found together in one of these caves.

Since the fossils are too old to be dated themselves, researchers turned to the calcified sediments that have kept the fossils so well-preserved. The fossils hadn’t moved since they were cemented into place, and researchers were able to identify flowstones above and below them. So, Robyn Pickering from the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia, and colleagues used advanced uranium-lead dating techniques and something called palaeo-magnetic dating, which measures how many times Earth’s magnetic field has reversed, on the surrounding rocks.

“This allowed us to narrow the deposition of the Au. sediba-bearing deposits to one of these short geomagnetic field events, the Pre-Olduvai event at about 1.977 million years ago,” wrote Pickering.

The old age of these fossils somewhat surprised the researchers, given some of the apparently Homo-like features that Au. sediba was already displaying at the time.

Kristian Carlson from the University of the Witwatersrand and colleagues took a look at the partial skull of MH-1 and made an endocast, or a detailed scan, of the space where the juvenile’s brain would have been.

“The actual brain residing within a cranium does not fossilize,” said Carlson. “Rather, by studying the impressions on the inside of a cranium, palaeontologists have an opportunity to estimate what the surface of a brain may have looked like. By quantifying how much volume is contained within a cranium, palaeontologists can estimate the size of a brain.”

According to researchers, the young australopith would have been around 10 to 13 years old, in human developmental terms, at the time of his death.

“The exceptionally well-preserved cranium of MH-1 was scanned at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, revealing internal anatomy with the highest achievable precision and contrast,” continued Carlson. “The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility is the most powerful installation worldwide for scanning fossils, setting the standard for what can be achieved during non-destructive studies of internal structures of fossils.”

The researchers found that the brain of the juvenile was human-like in shape, but still much smaller than the brains seen in Homo species. The orbitofrontal region of the brain, directly behind the eyes, shows some signs of neural reorganization, which perhaps indicates a rewiring toward a more human-like frontal lobe, according to the researchers. Carlson’s results cast doubt upon the long-standing theory of gradual brain enlargement during the transition from Australopithecus to Homo. Instead, their findings corroborate the alternative hypothesis which proposes that a reorganization of the neurons in the orbitofrontal region allowed Au. sediba to evolve while keeping its smaller cranium intact.

A separate study of the partial pelvis of MH-2 echoes that sentiment. Job Kibii from the University of the Witwatersrand and colleagues say that Homo pelvises could not have evolved in response to their expanding cranial capacity. In fact, Au. sediba’s pelvis was already developing modern, Homo-like features when their brains and skulls were still small.

“It’s clear there could be two things driving the evolution of the pelvis in our Homo lineage,” said Steven Churchill from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, a co-author of the paper. “One is bipedal locomotion. Between six and two million years ago, we begin to see a lot of it. The other thing is our big brains.”

“Our brains have to pass through the pelvis, so accommodations must be made,” continued Churchill. “What’s cool about sediba is their pelvises are already different from other australopiths, and yet they’re still small-brained… It’s hard to imagine that there’s no change in locomotion behind all this.”

And like most other aspects of Au. sediba, the hominin’s hands and feet display an interesting mix of both primitive and modern features.

The wrist and hand of MH-2 are only missing a few bones, making them the most complete hand fossils for an early hominin on record. Tracy Kivell from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues analyzed the female Au. sediba’s hand and found that there was a strong flexor apparatus, which hints at tree-climbing. But, the hand also had a long thumb and short fingers, which is a sign of precision gripping — a grip that just involves the thumb and fingers, but not the palm. It’s even possible that Au. sediba had already started dabbling with tool-making, the researchers say.

“The hand is one of the very special features of the human lineage, as it’s very different from the hand of the apes,” said Kivell. “Apes have long fingers for grasping branches or for use in locomotion, and thus relatively short thumbs that make it very difficult for them to grasp like a human.”

“Au. sediba has, in contrast, a more human-like hand that has shortened fingers and a very long thumb,” continued Kivell. “Although at the same time, it appears to have possessed very powerful muscles for grasping. Our team interpreted this as a hand, capable of tool manufacture and use, but still in use for climbing and certainly capable of human-like precision grip.”

The findings don’t mean that Au. sediba was the only hominin around two million years ago who was capable of making stone tools, though. (Homo habilis, or the “handy man,” was on the scene, but this hominin had a very different hand structure.) These latest findings do indicate, however, that different hominins with various hand morphologies may have been around at the same time, fashioning simple tools.

Finally, an analysis of the feet and ankles of MH-1 and MH-2 demonstrate that Au. sediba probably climbed trees sometimes and practiced a unique form of bipedal walking. Bernhard Zipfel from the University of the Witwatersrand and colleagues say that the MH-2 ankle is one of the most complete hominin ankles ever found — and at the same time, no ankle has ever been described with so many primitive and advanced features.

“…If the bones had not been found stuck together, the team may have described them as belonging to different species,” said Zipfel.

The ankle joint is largely like a human’s, with some evidence for a human-like arch and a well-defined Achilles tendon, according to the researchers. However, its heel and shin bone appear to be mostly ape-like.

This mix of modern and primitive characteristics evokes the image of a hominin who helped to usher in the various Homo species two million years ago. But, only time (and more research) will tell exactly how MH-1 and MH-2 were related to our own human lineage.

“The fossil record for early Homo is a mess,” said Churchill. “Many fossils are either questionably attributed to various species or their dating is very poor… Au. sediba has a number of derived characteristics, which it shares with the genus Homo. If you were to make a list of these shared traits — including those seen in habilis, rudolfensis and sediba — the list for sediba would be much longer than the other two, which suggests it’s a good ancestor of the first species that everyone recognizes in the Homo genus: H. erectus.”

More information about the journal Science’s special collection of papers is available online at: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/sediba/

The report by Pickering et al. was funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology, the South African National Research Foundation, the Institute for Human Evolution, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of the Witwatersrand’s Vice Chancellor’s Discretionary Fund, the National Geographic Society, the Palaeontological Scientific Trust, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Diplomatic Mission to South Africa, French Embassy of South Africa, the Oppenheimer and Ackerman families and Sir Richard Branson.

The report by Carlson et al. was funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology, the South African National Research Foundation (particularly the African Origins Platform Initiative), the Institute for Human Evolution (IHE), the Palaeontological Scientific Trust (PAST), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the AfricaArray Program, the United States Diplomatic Mission to South Africa, the Research Office of the University of the Witwatersrand and Sir Richard Branson.

The report by Kibii et al. was funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology, the South African National Research Foundation, the Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand, the University of the Witwatersrand’s Vice Chancellor’s Discretionary Fund, the National Geographic Society, the Palaeontological Scientific Trust, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Diplomatic Mission to South Africa, the French Embassy of South Africa, the A.H. Schultz Foundation, the Ray A. Rothrock ’77 Fellowship and IRTAG of Texas A&M University, the Oppenheimer and Ackerman families and Sir Richard Branson.

The report by Zipfel et al. was funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology, the South African National Research Foundation, the Institute for Human Evolution, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of the Witwatersrand’s Vice Chancellor’s Discretionary Fund, the National Geographic Society, the Palaeontological Scientific Trust, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Diplomatic Mission to South Africa, the French Embassy of South Africa, the Leakey Foundation, the Oppenheimer and Ackerman families and Sir Richard Branson.

The report by Kivell et al. was funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology, the South African National Research Foundation, the Institute for Human Evolution, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of the Witwatersrand’s Vice Chancellor’s Discretionary Fund, the National Geographic Society, the Palaeontological Scientific Trust, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Diplomatic Mission to South Africa, the French Embassy of South Africa, the Oppenheimer and Ackerman families and Sir Richard Branson

Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago, and ranged across Asia and Africa before hitting a possible evolutionary dead-end, about 70,000 years ago. Some researchers think Homo erectus evolved in East Africa, where many of the oldest fossils have been found, but the discovery in the 1990s of equally old Homo erectus fossils in the country of Georgia has led others to suggest an Asian origin. The study in Nature does not resolve the debate but adds new complexity. At 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus in Dmanisi, Georgia was still using simple chopping tools while in West Turkana, Kenya, according to the study, the population had developed hand axes, picks and other innovative tools that anthropologists call “Acheulian.”

“The Acheulian tools represent a great technological leap,” said study co-author Dennis Kent, a geologist with joint appointments at Rutgers University and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Why didn’t Homo erectus take these tools with them to Asia?”

In the summer of 2007, a team of French and American researchers traveled to Kenya’s Lake Turkana in Africa’s Great Rift Valley, where earth’s plates are tearing apart and some of the earliest humans first appear. Anthropologist Richard Leakey’s famous find–Turkana Boy, a Homo erectus teenager who lived about 1.5 million years ago — was excavated on Lake Turkana’s western shore and is still the most complete early human skeleton found so far.

Six miles from Turkana Boy, the researchers headed for Kokiselei, an archeological site where both Acheulian and simpler “Oldowan” tools had been found earlier. Their goal: to establish the age of the tools by dating the surrounding sediments. Past flooding in the area had left behind layers of silt and clay that hardened into mudstone, preserving the direction of Earth’s magnetic field at the time in the stone’s magnetite grains. The researchers chiseled away chunks of the mudstone at Kokiselei to later analyze the periodic polarity reversals and come up with ages. At Lamont-Doherty’s Paleomagnetics Lab, they compared the magnetic intervals with other stratigraphic records to date the archeological site to 1.76 million years.

“We suspected that Kokiselei was a rather old site, but I was taken aback when I realized that the geological data indicated it was the oldest Acheulian site in the world,” said the study’s lead author, Christopher Lepre, a geologist who also has joint appointments at Rutgers and Lamont-Doherty. The oldest Acheulian tools previously identified appear in Konso, Ethiopia, about 1.4 million years ago, and India, between 1.5 million and 1 million years ago.

The Acheulian tools at Kokiselei were found just above a sediment layer associated with a polarity interval called the “Olduvai Subchron.” It is named after Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, where pioneering work in the 1930s by Leakey’s parents, Louis and Mary, uncovered a goldmine of early human fossils. In a study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters last year, Lepre and Kent found that a well-preserved Homo erectus skull found on east side of Lake Turkana, at Koobi Fora Ridge, also sat above the Olduvai Subchron interval, making the skull and Acheulian tools in West Turkana about the same age.

Anthropologists have yet to find an Acheulian hand axe gripped in a Homo erectus fist but most credit Homo erectus with developing the technology. Acheulian tools were larger and heavier than the pebble-choppers used previously and also had chiseled edges that would have helped Homo erectus butcher elephants and other scavenged game left behind by larger predators or even have allowed the early humans to hunt such prey themselves. “You could whack away at a joint and dislodge the shoulder from the arm, leg or hip,” said Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at CUNY’s Lehman College who was not involved in the study. “The tools allowed you to cut open and dismember an animal to eat it.”

The skill involved in manufacturing such a tool suggests that Homo erectus was dexterous and able to think ahead. At Kokiselei, the presence of both tool-making methods — Oldowan and Acheulian– could mean that Homo erectus and its more primitive cousin Homo habilis lived at the same time, with Homo erectus carrying the Acheulian technology to the Mediterranean region about a million years ago, the study authors hypothesize. Delson wonders if Homo erectus may have migrated to Dmanisi, Georgia, but “lost” the Acheulian technology on the way.

The East African landscape that Homo erectus walked from about 2 million to 1.5 million years ago was becoming progressively drier, with savanna grasslands spreading in response to changes in the monsoon rains. “We need to understand also the ancient environment because this gives us an insight into how processes of evolution work — how shifts in early human biology and behavior are potentially caused by changes in the climate, vegetation or animal life that is particular to a habitat,” said Lepre. The team is currently excavating a more than 2 million year old site in Kenya to learn more about the early Oldowan period.