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Rate of Human Evolution

and the Coexistence of

Different Hominid Species

"In short, all evidence suggests that the traditional view
of hominid evolution is wrong" (TFC:58).

Posted: August 1, 2005

Last Updated: September 14, 2005

"Reasons to Believe"'s Discussion of the History Channel documentary, Ape to Man.

The Overall Tempo and Mode of Evolution:

  • "The overall tempo and mode of evolution best fits in with long periods of morphological stasis followed by rapid speciation.  Under this model, the many gaps in the fossil record are not merely annoying hiatuses, they are actually data: they are informing us about the tempo of evolution, that in many cases these gaps are the  result of rapid speciation (rapid in geological time, that is, about 100,000 years!).  Given this rapid turnover, then, the transitional forms were unlikely to be fossilized; or if they were fossilized, they are unlikely ever to be discovered, given their small population size and occupation of a restricted geographical region.  While there certainly are many, many gaps in the hominid fossil record, it is perhaps the Miocene hominid record from 23 to 6 million years ago that has been most clearly shown to be characterized by a tempo and mode of evolution, that best fits a punctuationist model.  This will certainly prove to be the case for the hominids and hominins of the Old World , for they are marked by a sudden explosion of contemporary species, many of which appear to have left no direct descendents.  This is further emphasized because the fossil record will always underestimate the number of species, and we will never have fossils representing all of the species that have even existed" (BSM:2-3).  

The Single-Species-Hypothesis Overturned:

  • " When White (now at the University of California , Berkeley ) and I began our graduate studies at the University of Michigan , its physical anthropology program was known for supporting a 'single-species hypothesis.'  According to this school of thought, there was only one species of early hominid living at any given time; therefore, two species of australopithecines had never coexisted.  Thus, the variation seen in australopithecines was attributed to sex, rather than species, differences.  Robust australopithecines were supposedly females.  We graduate students at Michigan were brought up on this hypothesis.  And we believed it.      
  • " The human paleontological record is making it increasingly clear that, rather than a simplistic model of just one or two hominin species being present at any one time, numerous species, some sympatric, emerged in Africa during the Plio/Pleistocene, most often followed by the extinction of one or more of them.  This should be no surprise if we view hominins as just like any other large mammal.  For at this time, we witness in the fossil record a diversity of experiments within other mammal groups, with rapid speciation events and extinctions -hominins were just joining in on the act (Unba, 1985, 1999; Foley, 1987; Potts, 1996).  The same pattern of rapid and ongoing speciation is also observed in the earlier Miocene hominids of Africa and Eurasia, for they also had climatic and habit hurdles to jump, which resulted in considerable hominid species diversity (Cameron, in press a; see also Harrison 2002; Begun, 2002; Kelley, 2002; S. Ward & Duren, 2002)" (BSM:179).

Homo Erectus and Australopithecines Robustus were Contemporaries:

  • "As more bones turn up, the story becomes less clear.  For much of the time, two or more kinds lived together in an uneasy coexistence rather like that of men and chimps today.  In East Africa , for instance, two species of large-brained Homo lived alongside smaller-brained Australopithecines of several types , with perhaps half a dozen forms present at once.  Some engimatic fossils, such as the 'Black Skull' found at Lake Turkana, combine primitive and advanced features and suggest that patterns of change were complex indeed" (DG:323).
  • "Moreover, the gradualist position maintained that no more than one hominid species ever existed at one time , so that the development of the lineage was one of successive chronospecies.  This has now been shown to be false by the very good evidence of different species of hominid living not only at the same time but also at the same places .  It now seems that there may have been four species of hominid all alive at the same time , about 2 million years ago, but even this is not the strongest evidence against gradualism in our ancestry" (TFC:58).
  • " Coexisting with the earliest species of Homo was a different line of large and robust australopithecines that existed between 2.5 and 1.2 million years ago .  One of these was Paranthropus robustus , which probably approached the size of a gorilla.  The 'robust' australopithecines were heavy jawed with skull crests and large back molars, used for chewing course roots and tubers.  They are a side branch in hominid evolution and not part of our own lineage" (IPZ:604).
  • "Swartkrans has provided the largest sample (more than 126 minimum number of individuals) of a different type of fossil hominid known as Australopithecus robustus. This is a very different type of hominid than that found at Sterkfontein, but also only found in South Africa which went extinct around 1 million years ago. Also, Swartkrans has provided the first evidence for the co-existence or species living at the same time of two different types of hominids, Homo erectus and Australopithecus robustus. This was the first indication to the scientific community that hominid evolution did not proceed in a linear fashion from one species to the next to the eventual end at us, Homo sapiens. Instead, it demonstrated that human evolution proceeded in a more bushy arrangement with a number of different species adapting to different environments at different times. In other words, there were a number of different experiments in human evolution, some which succeeded and some that failed and subsequently became extinct."

Randall L. Susman, Darryl de Ruiter and C. K. Brain

Department of Anatomical Sciences, School of Medicine, University at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York, 11794-8081, U.S.A.
Palaeoanthropology Unit for Research and Exploration, Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontology, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa ,
Transvaal Museum, P.O. Box 413, Pretoria, 0001, South Africa ,

Received 19 April 2001;  revised 2 July 2001;  accepted 3 July 2001. ; Available online 1 March 2002 .

Abstract:

"Fifteen newly recognized hominid postcranials from Swartkrans are described here and compared with a sample of previously described early hominids, African apes and modern humans. Ten of the new specimens are from Member 1. Two are from Member 2 and three are from Member 3. Nine of the fossils are referred to Paranthropus, three to Homo, and three specimens cannot be assigned at present.

The collection of hominid postcranials from Members 1–3 at Swartkrans now numbers more than 70 specimens. With the description of two new, small femoral heads, SKW 19 and SK 3121, there are now four proximal femora from Swartkrans. When SK 82 and SK 97 are compared with SKW 19 and SK 3121, the two sets offer important insights into body size and sexual dimorphism in Paranthropus robustus.

A new distal femur, SK 1896 and other bones attributed to Homo cf. erectus, indicate that male Homo were larger than Paranthropus at Swartkrans."

The Renowned Evolutionist Ernst Mayr wrote:

  • “There are rather few genera of primates (e.g., Ceroithecus) in either the Old or New World in which two different species coexist in the same area. But this is the case in the australopithecines. In the same region in southern Africa where the gracile species A. africanus lived, A. robustus, a member of a robust lineage, also lived. And in eastern Africa the robust A. boisei is found from about 3.5 to 3.0 mya, together with the gracile A. afarensis, and with Homo from 2.4 to 1.9 mya” (WEI:242-243).

Homo Habilis and Australopithecines Robustus were Contemporaries:

  • “For the first time, just after 2.5 million years ago, we find not one, but two species of proto-humanity living at the same time. The first of these two is an offshoot—at first glance, superficially back in the direction of apes. Some species had become secondarily thick-boned. Especially the Leakey’s Zinjanthropus (since renamed Australopithecus) boisei, but other closely related species as well in eastern and southern Africa show massive jaws and teeth, with ape-like crests on the males’ skulls to support the huge muscles needed to grind the tubers and nuts these creatures were probably eating" (F:71).
  • "This complex of robust australopithecine species lasted about one million years, living alongside the second species: Homo habilis, the ‘handy man’” (F: 71).

Homo Ergaster and Homo Habilus were Contemporaries:

  • "With the removal of the 'rudolfensis group' from the genus Homo, there is now only one species left that is a likely representative of the next stage of human evolution.  This species is Homo ergaster (Groves & Mazak, 1975), which probably evolved from H. habilis, although the earliest H. ergaster remains at Koobi Fora overlaps in time with the latest H. habilis (see B.A. Wood, 1991)" (BSM:97).

Homo Sapiens and Homo Erectus May Have Been Contemporaries:

Abstract:

"There's good evidence to place Homo erectus and modern humans together in time, but not necessarily spatially together," he (Frank Huffman, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin , US ) told BBC News."

    Absract:

"The species Homo erectus is thought to have diverged from Homo ergaster populations roughly 1.6 million years ago, and then spread into Asia . It was believed that Homo erectus disappeared as other populations of archaic Homo evolved roughly 400,000 years ago. Evidently, this is not the case. Recent studies into the complicated stratigraphy of the Java Homo erectus sites have revealed some surprising information. Researchers have dated the deposits thought to contain the fossils of H. erectus near the Solo River in Java to only 50,000 years ago. This would mean that at least one population of Homo erectus in Java was a contemporary of modern humans (Homo Sapiens) ."

Abstract:

“The temporal and spatial overlap between H. erectus and H. sapiens in Southeast Asia, as implied by our study, is reminiscent of the over lap of Neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis) and anatomically modern humans (H. sapiens) in Europe.”

Abstract:

 “What is clear is that some Homo erectus groups co-existed with Homo sapiens, even post-Toba. Homo erectusjavaensis ("Java Man") lived on Java as recently as 25,000 to 30,000 years ago (ref. Swisher III C.C. et al. 2000) and Homo floresiensis on the Indonesian island of Flores survived even longer until around 18,000 years ago (ref. Lahr M.M. et al., 2004; Brown P. et al., 2004; Morwood M.R., et al., 2004). For more information, see sub-chapter 5-4 below.”

Abstract:

"There's no way modern humans could be direct descendants of Homo erectus," said Kenneth Mowbray, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City .

"The dating is tricky, but the Java material suggests that H. sapiens and H. erectus overlapped in time. H. erectus can't stay the same and be an ancestor at the same time," he said. "It's possible that there's a side branch in H. erectus, but there's no fossil evidence that can lead us in that direction."

Abstract:

"Recent studies claim that some Javan skulls are between 51,000 and 27,000 years old, far more recent than previously thought. If confirmed , it means that Homo erectus and sapiens co-existed in this region for some time. (Swisher et al. 1996)."

Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals Were Contemporaries:

  1. Evidence for a Genetic Discontinuity between Neanderthals and 24,000-year-old Anatomically Modern Humans

"David Caramelli, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Cristiano Vernesi, Martina Lari, Antonella Casoli, Francesco Mallegni, Brunetto Chiarelli, Isabelle Dupanloup, Jaume Bertranpetit, Guido Barbujani and Giorgio Bertorelle

Dipartimento di Biologia Animale e Genetica, Università di Firenze, Via del Proconsolo 12, 50122 Florence, Italy; Departament de Biologia Animal, Universitat de Barcelona, Avenida Diagonal 645, 08028 Barcelona, Spain; Dipartimento di Biologia, Università di Ferrara, via Borsari 46, 44100 Ferrara, Italy; Dipartimento di Chimica Generale e Inorganica, Chimica Analitica, Chimica Fisica, Università di Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze 17/A, 43100 Parma, Italy; Dipartimento di Scienze Archeologiche, Università di Pisa, via Galvani 1, 56100 Pisa, Italy; and Facultat de Ciències de la Salut i de la Vida, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Doctor Aiguader 80, 08003 Barcelona, Spain

Edited by Henry C. Harpending, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, and approved March 27, 2003 (received for review January 20, 2003)

During the late Pleistocene, early anatomically modern humans coexisted in Europe with the anatomically archaic Neandertals for some thousand years. Under the recent variants of the multiregional model of human evolution, modern and archaic forms were different but related populations within a single evolving species, and both have contributed to the gene pool of current humans. Conversely, the Out-of-Africa model considers the transition between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans as the result of a demographic replacement, and hence it predicts a genetic discontinuity between them. Following the most stringent current standards for validation of ancient DNA sequences, we typed the mtDNA hypervariable region I of two anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens individuals of the Cro-Magnon type dated at about 23 and 25 thousand years ago. Here we show that the mtDNAs of these individuals fall well within the range of variation of today's humans, but differ sharply from the available sequences of the chronologically closer Neandertals. This discontinuity is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that both Neandertals and early anatomically modern humans contributed to the current European gene pool.

This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.

Abbreviations: a.m.h., anatomically modern human(s); HVRI, hypervariable region I; MDS, multidimensional scaling.

Data deposition: The sequences reported in this paper have been deposited in the GenBank database (accession nos. AY283027 and AY283028).

To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ggb@unife.it."

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