There is an amazing story in The Wisdom of Bones (which I pulled out last week because I wanted to tell Solon about the implications of a very human, but speechless, skeleton, and have gotten sidetracked by the election)
One of the African skeletons, a homo erectus, showed evidence of a terribly deforming and painful condition called hypervitaminosis, which is caused by ingesting too much vitamin A (primarily from eating the livers of other animals). It causes terrible blood clots to form as muscle pulls away from bone that ossify and it eventually cause death.
The skeleton was a female and every bone was severely deformed and covered with ossified clots. Dr Walker concluded that the only way this woman could have survived for so long in such a terrible condition was if someone took care of her, fed her and protected her, for an extended period of time. In other words, this skeleton is evidence of sociality that moved beyond nonhuman primate bonding about 1.7 million years ago.
Yet the conclusions reached by Dr. Walker about the Nariokotome Boy (1.5 million) are that he lacked the ability to speak, he was illinguate-- a condition so rare today that Dr. WAlker had to coin a word for it-- despite being very tall and thin, and very much human in his outer appearance. (at that time, hominids had already been bipedal for two million years or so) What was very different, and very much more "apelike" than human was the size of his vertebral canal in the thoracic region, a region that is assoiciated with speech. Dr. Walker concluded that the Nariokotomi Boy had not yet evolved to the point that he had the physical ability, the control necessary, to actually speak.
It's just fascinating. And the whole book is like a mystery story revolving around evolution. And that's what I meant about the implications of the findings. |
