Backtracking Homo Sapiens into the Future

As we try to control global warming and environmental deterioration, information from the past is producing fresh insights. First described in 1935, according to Bruce Bower in Science News, in turn quoting Wei Wang, based on a molar purchased from a traditional Chinese drugstore Gigantopithecus Blacki has been an outlier in the theory of evolutionary great ape development. DNA analysis which has been of great use in living tissue and tissue, including bone, is no longer useful when the tissue is too old. A newer technique called proteomics is used which reconstructs the building blocks of existing material such as that in teeth. Complicated MRI and radiological analyses can establish the structure of contributory biological materials ( ancient proteins ) giving good guesses as to their contributory DNA. This new knowledge puts Gigantopithecus clearly in the lineage of the present day orangutans.

Proteins preserve much better in teeth and bones than does DNA, but hot and humid environments are not conducive to the preservation of ancient proteins for comparison with existing proteins in the various species. The field is called Paleoanthropology, and is quite different from the branch of physical anthropology that I was exposed to at Columbia College 70 years ago. It is not only that the remains of Gigantopithecus come from a cave in Southern China ( Chuvien ), while I was fascinated with a creature named Sinanthropus ( pekinensis ) from a cave in northern middle China ( Chokoutien ) it is that unanswerable questions are being answered and I have lived to hear the answers as well as the new and deeper questions. I have been to Chokoutien and saw the cave.

It was my second visit to China in the 80's as a leader of a Temple University medical tour. On my first visit, you could not leave the tour and agents of the government were everywhere. On the second visit, Chinese officials were delighted by my interest in Chokoutien  and I was allowed to rent a car and briefly leave the tour. The skeleton of Sinanthropus was stolen after one war or the other and was not present in the cave which was elevated and climbing was discouraged. At the time, there was a Grand Canal which was dug east to west, since Chinese rivers run north to south. The Grand Canal no longer exists. Dams and dynamite and human relocation along with rail and plane accommodation much accomplished through the adoption of state capitalism has been transformative.

Our visit to Paleoanthropology takes us next to Berlin where AP reports on the remains of an ancient ape found in a Bavarian clay pit also upsets earlier assumptions. Madeline Boehme of the University of Tuebingen Germany, coordinating with researchers from Bulgaria, Germany, Canada and the USA, examined over 15,000 bones recovered from an area known as the Hammerschmiede 44 miles west of Munich. The paleoanthropologists reconstructed much of the bony architecture of 4 individuals who lived 11.62 million years ago. The most complete skeleton was of an adult male 3 ft 4 inches tall weighing about 68 lbs. and probably resembling today's bonobo, a species of chimpanzee. The creature termed Danuvius used it's arms to brachiate but could walk upright on ground or branches. Thus bipedalism and upright posture were early hominid attributes and the knuckle dragging progenitors of today's great apes may well be off the direct line leading through the varieties of Homo erectus to Homo sapiens.

Botswana now seems to be the point of origin of the first African migration with the progenitors of Homo erectus, following the growth of grasses and the migration of game animals following the grassy Miocene growth north and out of Africa. The pattern of ecological change enabling or preventing animal, including human, migration is still holding today (Arctic exploration for oil, etc.).