An interview with Ian Tattersall

Co-curator of The First Europeans: Treasures from the Hills of Atapuerca

Ian Tattersall is Curator in the Division of Anthropology and author of many books on human evolution including, most recently, The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human.

Q: What is the significance of this exhibition ?

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.

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 Gran Dolina [where] an enormous sequence of archaeological deposits was exposed. 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.

Q: How does this material fit in with the human fossil record?

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 new species going out into the environment and competing with other life forms, and succeeding or failing and going extinct.

This material that we'll have on display is some of the best evidence that we have for this pattern in human evolution. I think that the earliest material we're going to have on display [from Gran Dolina] was the product of a failed attempt by an early human species to colonize Europe. And the later material is closely related to the Neanderthals who were a species that lost out when Homo sapiens finally entered Europe. So here are two separate attempts to be a European, as it were.

Q: You mentioned the Sima de los Huesos, or Pit of the Bones. Why is this site so unusual and intriguing?

Human fossils are not that common and this particular site is the most astonishing concentration of human fossils that has been found anywhere in the world.

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.

Q: 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. 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 and we're still exploring the ways in which they can be used.

Q: You use both the terms "humans" and "hominids." What's the distinction?

There is no universally agreed 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 it 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.

THE FIRST EUROPEANS: Treasures from the Hills of Atapuerca

Through April 13, 2003

The First Europeans will reveal the mysteries of ancient humans in western Europe through exquisitely preserved hominid and animal fossils--some up to one million years old--found in the hills of Atapuerca in the Spanish region of Castilla y Leon. This remarkable exhibition provides Americans their first-ever glimpse of these "first Europeans," and explores what their existence teaches us about what it means to be human today.

Co-organized by the American Museum of Natural History and Junta de Castilla y Leon

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