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16 ★ FTWeekend 27 July/28 July 2019

Homo naledi Homo heidelbergensis

Homo sapiens

The new human story

We thought we knew all about human evolution — but unexpected discoveries, such as finding out
that our genomes are sprinkled with Neanderthal DNA, have forced a drastic rethink. By Chris Stringer

Masters of Science
Welcome to the third series of FT
Weekend’s Masters of Science. The
experiment we began in 2017 has
developed into an annual showcase
for scientists who can communicate
complex research with enthusiasm
and clarity to lay readers.
Chris Stringer of London’s
Natural History Museum (pictured
below) kicks off the series with the
remarkable change over the past 15
years in palaeontologists’ views of
human evolution.
Over the coming weeks, we will
feature six Masters covering some
of the most exciting fields,
including creating a “synthetic
intelligence” with nanotechnology;
the quest for new plastics; growing
mini-brains in a lab dish; regrowing
failed organs in the human body,
and exobiology, the search for life
elsewhere in the universe.
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oday humans are the domi-
nant species on our planet
— so much so that some sci-
entists talk of a new geologi-
cal era, the Anthropocene,
defined by the traces left by human
activity. Yet, for most of its history,
Homo sapiens left only the faintest of
footprints.
Researchers such as myself, who try
to answer the question of how our seem-
ingly all-conquering species evolved,
have to make relatively little evidence
do a lot of work. That means new discov-
eries can make a big difference — and in
the past decade and a half there have
been a lot of them.
At the turn of the century, we thought
we had a clear picture of the past
500,000 years of human evolution.
In essence, it was a simple family saga
with a clear arc and only a few players. It
began with Homo heidelbergensis
(named from a jawbone found in Ger-
many in 1907), a widespread ancestral
species with heavy brows and a very
muscular body, known from Africa and
western Eurasia between about
600,000 and 400,000 years ago.
Heidelbergensis gradually evolved into
two descendants: the Neanderthals
(Homo neanderthalensis), thick-set and
big-nosed, in western Eurasia, and
Homo sapiens — us, with our globular
braincases and small brows — in Africa.
Genetic data from living people sug-
gested that our species subsequently
dispersed from Africa about 60,000
years ago and, by 30,000 years ago, had
completely replaced the inferior Nean-
derthals across Eurasia, with little or no
interbreeding.
Other Homo species, with earlier ori-
humans moved in about 45,000 years
ago.
Only Homo sapiens, with the use of
ocean-going vessels, was able to spread
further eastwards across the island
chains leading towards Australia, which
we reached at about the same time as
Liang Bua, a Indonesia.
cave on the No researcher now could subscribe to
Indonesian this straightforward narrative. A tor-
island of Flores, rent of fossil finds and technological
where a breakthroughs has swept away many of
diminutive these ideas.
skeleton was It’s a flood that shows no sign of letting
discovered in up: this month brought news that analy-
2004 and sis of a fossil found in Greece had pushed
assigned to a back the arrival of Homo sapiens in
new human Europe by at least 150,000 years.
species, Homo The first major challenge to the con-
floresiensis — Getty ventional wisdom came in 2004 with
news of the discovery of a diminutive
skeleton in Liang Bua, a cave on the
Indonesian island of Flores.
It had primitive features such as a
brain cavity the size of an ape’s and a
strong and chinless lower jaw, and
seemed to retain traits from tree-dwell-
ing ancestors, even though it was ini-
tially dated to only about 17,000 years
ago. So peculiar was it that its finders
assigned it to a new human species,
Homo floresiensis.
Arguments soon raged about whether
this find — which quickly acquired the
nickname of “hobbit” — could have
descended from Homo erectus, shrunk in
size by “island dwarfing”, an evolution-
ary process known in other mammals.
Or was it actually an abnormal modern
human with a condition such as Down’s
syndrome or congenital iodine defi-
ciency?
Particularly challenging was the
apparently associated evidence of stone
tools, hunting behaviour and fire-mak-
ing, and the possibility that Homo
floresiensis had reached Flores by boat (a
technology supposedly only within the
capacity of Homo sapiens) — all unlikely
accomplishments for a creature with a
brain the size of a chimp’s.
Since then, further excavations in
Liang Bua have uncovered other dwarf
human remains in deeper levels, and
have shown that the original skeleton
was actually at least 60,000 years old.
Meanwhile similar, more fragmentary
remains have been found at another site
on Flores — Mata Menge — dating from
about 700,000 years ago, suggesting
In 2010, analysis of a
finger-bone fragment
from a cave in Siberia
revealed an entirely new
kind of human, neither
Homo sapiens nor Homo
neanderthalensis
that the “hobbit’s” lineage ran deep on
the island. Earlier this year, comparably
diminutive and distinctive human fos-
sils were excavated from Callao Cave on
the island of Luzon in the Philippines,
dating from about 70,000 years ago and
given the name Homo luzonensis.
Did this species also reach the Philip-
pines by boat, or could the ancestors of
both Homo floresiensis and Homo luzon-

gins, overlapped with these. One was ensis have been swept by tsunamis to
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found in China, as evidenced by a fossil their respective islands on rafts of vege-

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skull found in Dali, Shaanxi Province, in tation? Pending new fossil evidence,
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1978; another lived in Indonesia, where such questions will remain unanswered.
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fossils suggested that Homo erectus, an Compared with fossil sites in Africa and
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ancestor to Homo heidelbergensis, was

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the only inhabitant until modern Continued on page 17

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 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
27 July/28 July 2019 ★ FTWeekend 17

Spectrum
Trump, Johnson and performance”. The same applies

I
magine that you are an average advert can make you crave something
US Republican in early 2015. You you’d never considered before. Trump to Trump. Their vocation is as
always vote Republican, and the communicates so powerfully that he entertainers.
and politics’ new rest of the time you just get on with
life. In 2016, you vote Republican.
has even created an enemy tribe too:
he has done a better job of mobilising
Both men could have turned their
tribes into big-tent movements that

radical tribes Sure, Donald Trump’s rants about

Mexican “rapists” and his planned ban
on Muslims are discomfiting, but
perhaps it’s just campaign talk. Your
vote turns out to be your initiation rite
into a new, radical tribe.
By 2019, you are backing a president
who calls white supremacists “very fine
people”, who orders that migrant
toddlers be held in cages separated
from their parents, and tells American
Congresswomen of colour to go back to
where they came from. Somehow
you have stayed along for the ride.
Or imagine being an average Briton
in 2015. You don’t particularly like
the EU, but you seldom think about it.
(In polls before the 2016 referendum
was called, typically less than one
Briton in 10 named the EU as an
important political issue.) When asked
your opinion, on balance you vote
Leave. By 2019, you are backing Boris
Johnson to suspend Parliament and
ram through a no-deal Brexit.
In both countries, a new dominant
tribe has formed, and has then been
radicalised. This wasn’t inevitable.
Each tribe’s leaders haven’t simply
intuited what their followers wanted.
Rather, the leaders are taking the
followers on a journey that most
followers had never imagined.
Trump hasn’t merely revealed an
Simon Kuper existing tribe; he is creating one, day
by day. He has converted the existing
Illustration: Harry Haysom members from loneliness. In our
so by tapping into racist traditions that
are as old as the US.
“Send them back”, for instance, is
a trope designed to tell immigrants or
native-born non-whites that they aren’t group who live alone with their TV sets,
real Americans. The nativist strand in
American politics long predates
Trump. But Trump didn’t have to
prioritise that strand.
There are other paths in US history,
other ways this could have gone. Most
Republicans previously voted for pro-
immigrant presidents such as George
W Bush and Ronald Reagan; before
Trump, many didn’t have strong views
on immigration. They might have
cared more about taxes, abortion or
private healthcare, or perhaps they
rarely thought about politics at all.
American liberals than any liberal
leader in history.
Tribal formation in Britain has been
even more revolutionary: a new Leave
tribe has displaced the old Conservative
tribe. (About four in 10 Conservatives
voted Remain in the referendum.) The
Leave tribe doesn’t have a clear leader:
Johnson and Nigel Farage have been
competing for control since 2016. But
Leave and Remain have eclipsed all
previous tribal identities: more Britons
now identify as Leavers or Remainers
than with any party or religion.
All these new tribes help save their
atomised societies, ever more adults
are single, don’t identify with their jobs
and don’t belong to a clear economic
class, religious grouping or trade union.
Especially for people of Trump’s age
the new tribes provide a community.
The tribes don’t prioritise making
policy: Brexiters haven’t executed any
policies, and Trump not many —
though his Supreme Court appointees
will shape the US for decades, notably
by blocking environmental regulations.
For most tribal members, these new
tribes function above all as cultural
movements, comparable to punk in the
1970s or today’s “incel” subculture of
angry young men.
The movements aren’t always
entirely serious. Irish writer Fintan
In the US and the
UK, each tribe’s
leaders are taking
their followers
on a journey that
most had never
imagined
drew in opponents. Johnson would
probably have liked that. Instead, the
tribes are in a constant process of
radicalisation, as they build an identity
that sets them apart from the enemy.
Every time Trump breaks an
American taboo on race, and takes his
followers with him, it’s as if his tribe
has sworn a communal blood oath:
liberals demonise them, and so
Trumpsters are bound together in
thrilling, transgressive comradeship.
No wonder Trump’s support among
Republicans rose after he told the
Congresswomen to leave the country.
Now Leavers have adopted a new
radical belief: the only real Brexit is
no-deal. If no-deal inflicts pain and
chaos on their own country, and
enrages Remainers, that will only
solidify the Leave tribe.
Meanwhile, the tribes keep purifying
themselves. Any member who balks at
any stage of the journey — Theresa
May, Paul Ryan, perhaps Johnson
himself if he doesn’t leave the EU on
October 31 — is branded a “traitor”,
chucked overboard and stripped of
their identity and community. No
wonder most tribal members stay on
the ship no matter how far from their
original homes the journey takes them.
simon.kuper@ft.com; @KuperSimon
More columns at ft.com/kuper

Republican tribe — more than 90 per In other words, a leader with O’Toole has remarked on Johnson’s Simon will be speaking at the FT Weekend
Opening shot cent of whom voted for him — into a
Trump tribe. It’s true that he is doing
exceptional communication skills can campness, his “comic persona that
alter his followers’ minds, just as a good evades the distinction between reality
Festival on September 7, Kenwood House,
London — see ftweekendfestival.com

The new 2016, this was confirmed by the DNA,

which firmly placed them on the Nean-
derthal lineage, despite their great

human story antiquity.

Continued from page 16
Europe, the islands of south-east Asia
were largely virgin territory. But in 2013
another big discovery was made in a
region whose fossil human record had
supposedly been thoroughly explored —
the “Cradle of Humankind” in South
Africa.
Excavations in the Rising Star cave
system, about 30 miles north-west of
Johannesburg, uncovered more than
1,500 fossils from at least 18 individuals,
infants to adults, showing a unique
blend of primitive and more modern-
looking skeletal traits.
The skulls had braincases similarly
sized to those of apes and very project-
ing faces, although the teeth and jaws
were more delicately built. The skele-
tons had human-like hands and feet
but primitive-looking shoulders and
hips. The finds were assigned to a new
species, Homo naledi (naledi means
“star” in the local Sotho-Tswana lan-
guage), and the team studying the
material controversially proposed that
Homo naledi intentionally laid its
dead deep in the cave, a remarkably
“modern” behaviour.
In 2017, dating work suggested the
skeletons were deposited about 285,000
years ago, a very recent age for material
showing features seen in African fossils
at least a million years older.
The late survival of Homo floresiensis
and Homo luzonensis could reasonably
be put down to their island isolation,
without competing human species, but
how could such a primitive species have
survived for so long in southern Africa
when our ancestors were supposedly
already living there?
Again, we have more questions about
the evolution and way of life of Homo
naledi than answers.
Although finds such as Homo flo-
resiensis and Homo naledi have proved
challenging to scientists wedded to
relatively simple schemes of human
evolution, perhaps the greatest revolu-
tions in our thinking have come from
genetic data, especially that derived
from fossils.
Genetic material in the form of mito-
chondrial DNA (mtDNA) had been
recovered from Neanderthal fossils
from 1997 onwards, but mtDNA repre-
sents only a small part of a person’s
genetic make-up compared with the
whole genome. By 2010, however, meth-
ods of recovery and analysis had
advanced so far and fast that whole
Neanderthal genomes began to be
reconstructed.
To the surprise of many, including
me, comparisons with our DNA today
suggested that people originating out-
side Africa show evidence of ancient
interbreeding with Neanderthals; some
2 per cent of their genome has Neander-
thal DNA.
This interbreeding seemingly began
soon after small groups of modern
humans moved from Africa to western
Asia about 60,000 years ago, but it was
still going on around 40,000 years ago,
А
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Above: the where there are no traces of Neander-
Rising Star cave thal DNA); other segments seemingly
system in South gave advantages in areas such as immu-
Africa, close to nity to disease, nutrition and environ-
the site of the mental adaptation and were accord-
2013 discovery ingly retained and even accentuated.
of Homo naledi. As DNA research was applied beyond
the classic Neanderthal sites in Europe,
more revelations emerged. In 2010,
analysis of a finger-bone fragment
Below: a molar about 70,000 years old from Denisova
tooth belonging Cave in Siberia revealed an entirely new
to the species kind of human, neither Homo sapiens
Homo nor Homo neanderthalensis, though
luzonensis was closer genetically to the latter.
among the Subsequent research on large human
fossils excavated teeth also found in the cave suggest that
from the Callao people related to these “Denisovans”
Cave in the lived in China. Recently, a strongly built
Philippines and chinless jawbone from the Tibetan
earlier this year plateau was also connected to the Denis-
Getty; Alamy
ovans by its preserved proteins and its
sizeable teeth. What’s more, data pre-
served in the genomes of people today
suggests that populations related to the
Denisovans must also have lived in trop-
ical south-east Asia, and have contrib-
uted to the make-up of modern humans
through interbreeding. This is because
many native inhabitants of Papua New
Guinea and Australia have genomes
with about 5 per cent of Denisovan-like
DNA, as well as the 2 per cent or so of
Neanderthal-derived DNA found else-
where outside Africa.
Comparisons with smaller amounts of
Denisovan-derived DNA scattered
across east and south-east Asian popu-
lations today indicate that the Denis-
ovans must have begun differentiating
into distinct populations soon after they
split from the Neanderthal lineage
about 450,000 years ago, and these sub-
groups each passed on DNA to modern
descendants. Europe too has done its bit
to keep palaeontologists busy. Three
years ago, mysterious oval construc-
tions made of carefully broken stalag-
mites deep in Bruniquel Cave in south-
ern France were dated to about 176,000
years ago, and ascribed to Neanderthals.
They added to a growing catalogue of
sophisticated Neanderthal behaviour
that included painting cave walls with
dots and geometric patterns, manufac-
turing resin glues to fix tools together
and carving wooden artefacts.
Now it appears that those Neander-
thals may not have had Europe entirely
to themselves, as had hitherto been
thought. This month a new study of a
partial skull found in Apidima Cave in
southern Greece in 1978 suggested that
it belonged to an early modern human
who lived in Greece at least 210,000
years ago. That is more than 150,000
The discoveries ofthe past
few years underline just
how much evolutionary
history remains unknown
years before the main exodus of Homo
sapiens that gave rise to modern peoples
outside Africa. The population involved
probably died out subsequently, but the
full implications of this revolutionary
finding (in which I was involved) are
still sinking in.
Further back in time, a jumble of skel-
etons found from the 1990s onwards
deep in the Sima de los Huesos (“Pit of
the Bones”) chamber within the Ata-
That challenged the model I have long
championed, that the 500,000-year-old
species Homo heidelbergensis was the last
common ancestor of Neanderthals and
Homo sapiens. Because the Sima fossils
already lie some way down the Nean-
derthal line, the ancestor probably lived
further back in time than Homo heidel-
bergensis.
Studies of facial evolution published
earlier this year also cast doubt on hei-
delbergensis as our ancient ancestor.
My view had been that Homo heidel-
bergensis’s big face could have evolved
into both the Neanderthal face, with its
huge nose and puffy cheekbones, and
the flatter face of sapiens, with its more
delicate cheekbones. However, a child’s
skull about 850,000 years old assigned
to the species Homo antecessor (“Pioneer
human”), found at another site in the
Atapuerca hills in 1997, looks more
modern facially than Homo heidelber-
gensis, the Sima people or mainstream
Neanderthals; so too do Chinese fossils
such as the Dali skull, dating from
around 300,000 years ago.
The upshot is that it seems possible
that the common ancestor of Neander-
thals, Denisovans and us possessed a
more modern-looking face, which we
kept, the Denisovans perhaps also kept
(if Chinese fossils such as the Dali skull
turn out to be Denisovans, once we have
their DNA), and the Neanderthals and
Homo heidelbergensis lost during their
evolution.
Who exactly that common ancestor
was remains to be determined, but it
probably had a face like that of Homo
antecessor, and it could have lived in
Europe, Asia or Africa.
So what can we expect in future —
what new surprises lie in store? The dis-
coveries of Homo floresiensis, Homo luzo-
nensis, Denisovans and Homo naledi in
the past 15 years remind us that the fos-
sil record of humans is still very patchy
— stone tools are scattered across much
of Africa as a witness to widespread
human occupation, yet fossil evidence
has been recovered from less than 10
per cent of that continent’s area.
The percentage coverage for Asia is
hardly any better: there is, for example,
currently only one significant human
fossil from the whole of the Indian sub-
continent. The discoveries of the past
few years underline just how much evo-
lutionary history remains unknown,
with other extinct lineages no doubt still
to be revealed.
Many of the new finds challenge how
we classify fossils in relation to Homo
sapiens today. I continue to call the
Neanderthals a different species from
us, based on their distinctive skeletons
and skulls; others feel that the recent
evidence of interbreeding and increas-
ing evidence of sophisticated behaviour
mean that we should merge them, and
the Denisovans, into our species.
All this makes for a radically different
perspective from the relative consensus
that prevailed only 15 years ago. The
ancestry of Homo sapiens is less clear-cut
now, while its takeover of the planet,
complicated by previously unknown
human species, looks less inexorable.
The past 500,000 years, whose history

as the last Neanderthals were disap- puerca hills of northern Spain yielded once seemed straightforward, have
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pearing across Europe. DNA that shed new light on Neander- become hotly disputed. For scientists
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Some Neanderthal DNA was not ben- thal evolution. studying our evolutionary history, these
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eficial to the modern humans who Some 430,000 years old, these are exciting times.
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inherited it and was rapidly selected remains had already been tentatively
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away (a process attested to by the large characterised as primitive Neander- Chris Stringer is a research leader at the
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Natural History Museum, London

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“deserts” in today’s human genomes, thals from their teeth and skulls; in
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