Over the past few days I read Bones, Stones and Molecules, which is a slim primer on the current state of paleoanthropology. The order is appropriate, old school fossil morphology tends to get a lot of play, with a secondary role for analysis of tool making and cultures and finally a tertiary spot for molecular phylogenetics. It makes sense since the authors start their survey back in the Miocene, long before stones (tools) are an issue and antedating any practical expectations of genetic extraction.
I’m not someone who knows that much about zygomatic arches and dental morphology, so the text was something of an alphabet soup of data that I had a hard time processing. Nevertheless, I think at under 300 pages (big text) it is relatively easy to digest. Additionally, they make extensive use of cladistics by crunching all the morphological characters into data analysis and statistical programs, so it isn’t an artistic and impressionistic rendering of fossils. Molecular phylogenetics looms in the background as an independent method of corraboration of the trees that morphology spits out, and in general the two methods do tend to align, though I am sure that the authors massaged the data a bit here and there.
Though the book jacket states that the authors survey both Out-of-Africa and Multiregionalism, the latter is definitely frowned upon and one chapter on Australia seems to fixate on falsifying Multiregionalism by examination of Australian Aboriginal morphology and genetics. But, it seems that the authors make a stronger negative case against Wolpoffian Multiregionalism than they do for Out-of-Africa. The fossils are scattered in a fashion that it makes specific patterns difficult to tease apart, and there are many question marks that the authors choose to highlight. The book was published in 2004 before the Hobbit discoveries went public, but the authors allude to it pretty clearly in reference to Flores, and one of them offers that they have recovered a Neandertal skeleton from southern China (unpublished and going to press, literature searches didn’t turn anything up). Such anomalies (Neandertals are traditionally a West Eurasian people), as well as the Flores finds, suggest to me that though classical Multiregionalism is unsupported, a glib assumption that recent Out-of-Africa and absolute replacement matches the data well is a bit of a stretch (at least universally). It is clearer what is false than what is true.
Posted by razib at 07:03 PM