Interview with Ian Tattersall

Ian Tattersall photo D. Finnin/AMNH

Ian Tattersall is Curator in the Museum’s Division of Anthropology and author of many books on human evolution including The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness, and, most recently, The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human.

He spoke with us about the exhibition The First Europeans: Treasures from the Hills of Atapuerca for which he is co-curator.

What makes this exhibition so important?

This is the first time outside Spain that this extraordinary material that documents the very earliest attempt by human beings to occupy Europe has been on display. And it’s also the first time that the later fossils from the extraordinary locality called the Pit of the Bones will ever be seen in this hemisphere. So it’s a very exciting opportunity for our New York audience to see this material.

There are two sites at Atapuerca. One is literally a hole in the ground that’s filled with human bones that are thought to be about 400,000 years old. This is the Sima de los Huesos site, or the Pit of the Bones. There is another site, only half a mile away called the Gran Dolina. At the Dolina, a cave occupation site was sliced through by a railroad cutting at the end of the 19th century. An enormous sequence of archaeological deposits was exposed in the vertical side of the cutting. And low down in that sequence were found human bones that are about 800,000 years old, twice as old as the other hominids at the Sima. It’s just pure coincidence that these two extraordinary sites are so close to each other.

How does this material fit in with the human fossil record? People tend to think about human evolution as a progression, and I know that your research disputes that.

Gary Sawyer, senior technician, works on the Neanderthal skeleton reconstruction. photo D. Finnin/AMNH

That’s correct. We tend to think of human evolution as having been a kind of a single-minded slog from primitiveness to perfection. And it really was not like that at all. It was instead a matter of evolutionary trial and error, of experimentation, of new species going out into the environment and competing with other life forms, and succeeding or failing and going extinct. And this material that we’ll have on display for the first time is some of the best evidence that we have for this pattern in human evolution. I think that probably that the earliest material we’re going to have on display—800,000 years old, the earliest human material known from western Europe—was the product of a failed attempt by an early human species to colonize Europe. And the later material from the Sima is closely related to the Neanderthals who, again, were a species that lost out, as it were, in competition with Homo sapiens when Homo sapiens finally entered Europe. So here are two separate attempts to be a European, as it were. There are many ways than our own to be a hominid, and these are two of those ways.

If we think of Africa as the cradle of humanity, how did humans end up in Europe?

The entire human fossil record that we have, up to about two million years ago, is confined to Africa. There were never any hominids outside Africa up to that point. Right after the two-million-year mark, hominids began to spread out of Africa, and we have presumptive evidence that they were already in the Far East possibly as early as about 1.8 million years ago. So there was a very rapid spread out of Africa and toward the East at that time, but occupation of Europe seems to have come much much later, possibly because Europe was fairly hostile environment during much of the Ice Ages. It may just not have been friendly terrain for the hominids. But about a million years ago humans, coming from Africa, finally managed to penetrate Europe. Evidence from Atapuerca is the earliest fossil evidence of that invasion that we have, along with one specimen from Italy.

You mentioned the Pit of the Bones site. Why is it so unusual and intriguing?

It’s an extraordinary concentration of human fossils. Human fossils are not that common. We have a pretty good fossil record for a mammal, but human fossils are still very hard to find and this particular site is the most astonishing concentration of human fossils than has been found anywhere in the world. The excavators here are the only people who can decide how many hominid fossils they want to find in a field season, go out, find them, and then stop working and go home again. It’s an astonishing thing. And it’s still producing at that same rate.

Hellish conditions, by the way. Absolutely hellish, horrible, cramped, at the bottom of this shaft in the ground. You have to walk 700 yards into a cave through dark passages in the pitch dark and over a rough floor. And then you have to descend 50 feet vertically down a shaft in the dark ‘til you come to a slope that leads down even further into the cavity where these bones collected.

Not for the claustrophobic?

Not for the claustrophobic at all, no. Indeed, the dreadful conditions are the reason why nobody knows what those bones were doing in there. The other bones in the pit are mostly cave bear. And if they’re not cave bear and they’re not hominids, they’re carnivores of one sort or another. It’s plausible that since cave bears naturally went into caves to hibernate, some of them fell into this hole in the ground, and died. And it’s possible that some of the smaller carnivores might have been attracted there by the stench of decaying cave bear corpses and have suffered the same fate. But what hominids would have been doing in the cave in the first place is anybody’s guess. And nobody knows how long it took this concentration of broken bones to accumulate. But the best guess of the investigators of the site is that the bodies were thrown in there by other humans.

And this is where we find evidence of cannibalism?

The bones that show evidence of cannibalism are the ones from the 800,000-year-old site, the Gran Dolina. They’re fragmentary, just like the animals bones that are also found at this occupation site, and they are broken up in exactly the same way. They also bear cut marks left by stone tools that are just like the cut marks that are found on the animal bones. Evidently the humans there treated human bones exactly the same way that they treated the animal bones. And if they were eating the animals then probably they were eating the humans as well. But you could never know for sure, without catching them in the act.

I’ve heard you say that we often mistakenly make assumptions about cannibalism and assume symbolic thinking in early humans.

There are all kinds of behavior that have symbolic overtones for us. And it’s tempting to read our own interpretations into this kind of evidence. But I don’t think it’s very wise or helpful to try to imagine these early precursors to Homo sapiens as sort of bush-league versions of ourselves. They probably saw the world in a totally different way and they didn’t leave any symbolic archaeological record behind them of the kind that tells us that the Cro-Magnons were just like us.

Which object is, in your opinion, the most beautiful?

The most spectacular object will be the complete skull, Skull 5, from the Sima de los Huesos. It was broken up into many pieces but most of the skull is there, and it’s been reassembled. And the preservation of the skull is extraordinary, it’s as if the individual died yesterday. It’s just phenomenal. You don’t get that kind of preservation routinely.

There is a certain number of hominid individuals identified from these sites. Can you explain how you identify one individual from another, or assign identity?

Individuals haven’t really been identified as such. What we have is an estimate of the minimum number of individuals it would take to yield the bones we have. The actual number of individuals could, of course, have been higher than the minimum, potentially right up to the total number of bits that we have. But the individual count is based on the smallest number of individuals that could possibly produce the number of fragments that we have, given where in the skeleton they came from.

What other material will be presented in the exhibition?

We’re going to have the first tool ever found in the Sima on display. It hasn’t been described yet; it’s a totally new discovery. The Gran Dolina part of the site, that’s the occupation site, has a number of levels where humans actually lived and carried out their daily life in the past so you have animal bones and you have human bones and you have stone tools. But a pit where people clearly never lived, a pit in which bodies may have been disposed of deliberately, is not a place where you’d necessarily expect to find tools. But miraculously there is one tool, and quite a good-looking tool, made out of a rosy quartz, that has been found in there and that’s going to be on display.

And then we’re going to present the context for the Atapuerca material, which is basically from two sites, 800,000 years old and 400,000 years old. So we’ll have an introductory section that discusses where the Atapuerca hominids came from. We will discuss how humans came out of Africa, plus we’ll have the very earliest occupation evidence in Europe, which happens to come from the Republic of Georgia, in the Caucasus. And then at the end of the exhibition we’ll look at what happened after the time of the Sima. We’ll talk about the Neanderthals, a closely related species that took over the European landscape after the Sima people were defunct. And we’ll see how the Neanderthals were ultimately displaced by incoming Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. So we’ll complete the story on both ends so we can give the visitors some kind of a perspective on where this amazing evidence from Atapuerca fits into the bigger picture of human evolution.

What do these hominids teach us about ourselves or about what it means to be human?

What it mainly teaches us is what a special phenomenon Homo sapiens is. Homo sapiens is not simply an extrapolation of what came before. There’s something qualitatively different about Homo sapiens compared to any previous hominid species. I think it’s important to understand that we weren’t gradually burnished by evolution to do what we do superbly well. We are more like an accidental product that happens to have all these new cognitive capacities. These qualities did not come into existence for anything, they haven’t been fine-tuned for anything, they’re just abilities we happen to have. And we’re still exploring the ways in which they can be used.

You use both terms humans and hominids. Is there a distinction to how these words are used?

It’s awfully difficult. There is no universally agreed upon definition for what human means. The word was invented before people knew anything about the apes, let alone before anybody had any concept that we had close extinct relatives. So human is a very elusive term. And we do all tend to use it a little loosely; I certainly tend to use it rather loosely. I don’t think that matters, just as long as we realize that what is human is contextual, is something that we sort of intuitively recognize rather than rigorously define. In the strictest sense none of the Atapuerca people were human; but there is something that we can recognize as humanity in all of them.