After Darwin at AMNH: Ian Tattersall

Thursday, February 04

Curator Ian Tattersall on Darwin’s Thoughts About the Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History continue to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species with a collection of vignettes describing expeditions and ideas with links to Darwin’s seminal work.

Below is an excerpt of a longer piece that Ian Tattersall wrote for Evolution: Education and Outreach in 2009.

Charles Darwin was curiously unforthcoming on the subject of human evolution as viewed through the fossil record, to the point of being virtually silent. He was, of course, most famously reticent on the matter in On the Origin of Species, … [and] this is true even of his 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in which Darwin finally forced himself to confront the implications of his theory for the origin of humankind [but in which he barely managed even a passing reference to the Neanderthal fossil that by then was the subject of extensive scientific speculation.]

There were…many reasons why Darwin should have been disposed in The Descent of Man to shrink from any substantive discussion of whether extinct human relatives might actually be represented in fossil form. The fossil and antiquarian records were awash with fakes; any discussion of human ancestry was rife with social and political pitfalls; and anyway, by his own close colleague’s testimony, the record contained nothing that could have any relevance to ancient and now-extinct human precursors. Add to that Darwin’s innate suspicion of the distorting effects of incompleteness in the fossil record, and he may have felt that a large degree of discretion on the matter was mandatory.

The Feldhofer skullcap--the Neanderthal type specimen-- was discovered in a limestone cave in 1857 and is one of a handful of fossils that Darwin could have been aware of while writing The Origin of Species. The image includes an associated zygomaticomaxillary fragment that was discovered in the miners’ dump almost a century and a half later, in 1997. Credit: AMNH

None of this means, of course, that The Descent of Man has not exerted an immense influence on the sciences of human origins over the last century and a half. Just as it is easy for English speakers to forget how much they owe to William Shakespeare for the language they use daily, we tend to lose sight of the fact that much received wisdom in paleoanthropology has come down to us direct from Darwin. Darwin it was who proposed a mechanism for the structural continuity of human beings with the rest of the living world and who gave a detailed argument for human descent from an “ape-like progenitor.” It was Darwin who documented beyond doubt, in The Descent of Man, that all living humans belong to a unitary species with a single origin—which we now know, on the basis of evidence of which Darwin could never have dreamed, to have been around 200,000 years ago. He also had the inspired hunch that our species originated in the continent of Africa—and again, this guess has been amply substantiated by later science. Darwin’s perceptions on the behaviors of other primates and how they relate to the way humans behave were remarkably astute, particularly given the highly anecdotal nature of what was then known.

Virtually every section in the first part of the Descent of Man foreshadows an area of anthropology or biology that has independently flowered since; and in this way, Darwin wrote much of the agenda that was to be followed by paleoanthropology and primatology over the next century and a half.

I just wish I knew what he really thought about the Neanderthal fossil!

Evolution: Education and Outreach is a new journal edited by Museum History Curator Niles Eldredge along with high school teacher Gregory Eldredge of the Port Jervis City School District in New York. The journal promotes accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for students, teachers, and scientists. Check out the journal’s Facebook page and blog.

When the HMS Beagle sailed from England just after Christmas of 1831, Darwin was on board as the ship’s naturalist and geologist. Over the next five years, he made scientific observations and collections in Cape Verde, tropical Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the pampas of Argentina, Andean Chile, marsupial-dominated Australia, Mauritius, the tip of Africa, and, of course, the Galápagos Islands that so influenced his thinking about evolution.

Darwin’s observations on this voyage must have been central in his thoughts as he walked the sand path around a thicket in Kent, where he spent the next decades crafting On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the foundation of evolutionary biology.

The After Darwin at AMNH series explores links between the scientific research work being done at AMNH today and Darwin’s influential work.