Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction

Natural History, Feb, 1997 by Ian Tatersall

By Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari. Simon and Schuster, $25; 448 pp., illus.

Its title notwithstanding, this book isn't really about "race" as such. Rather, it is an attempt by two leading advocates of "multiregional continuity" to establish respectable historical antecedents for their theory, currently one of the two major competing models of later human evolution. Multiregional continuity holds that the roots of our species run very deep in time in various regions of the Old World. The competing notion is that Homo sapiens arose only within the last 200,000 years, migrating out of Africa to replace more primitive human relatives that had already populated Europe and Asia.

Paleoanthropologists Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari, of the University of Michigan, argue that Homo sapiens did not make a recent appearance on the evolutionary stage but instead showed up almost two million years ago in the guise of what they used to call Homo erectus: a big-faced, technologically primitive hominid of only modest brain size, whose principal resemblance to us was a body of reasonably modern proportions. Now, however, Wolpoff and Caspari prefer to regard this highly archaic form as a variant of Homo sapiens, taking the view that all of the many dramatic anatomical and behavioral developments in human evolution during the last two million years took place within a single species--our own. The rationale for this claim is that the invention of human culture allowed the suspension of various normal patterns of evolutionary change, most notably the budding off of new species from old ones. Quite simply, Wolpoff and Caspari believe that humans have been able to play the evolutionary game under a new set of rules.

The authors delve deeply into the histories of physical anthropology and evolutionary biology in search of an intellectual genealogy for their viewpoint. They exhume a great deal of fascinating material, especially about the monogenist/polygenist debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (concerning single or multiple origins for modern human "races") and turn-of-the-century German evolutionary and genetic thinking. Only in the 1930s and 1940s, however, do they find a true progenitor for their views: German anatomist Franz Weidenreich, the foremost student of Peking man Homo erectus fossils. Like Wolpoff and Caspari, Weidenreich regarded these early humans as a form of Homo sapiens and saw evidence for the persistence, over vast spans of time, of separate but interlinked human lineages in different parts of the world.

The heart of their argument, however, lies in their perception that various continuities in skeletal anatomy characterize the human fossil records in particular regions of the world. Wolpoff and Caspari do not dwell much on the details, but early in the book, for instance, they recount how, many years ago, Wolpoff was amazed by how closely his reconstruction of the million-year-old Sangiran 17 cranium from Java resembled those of the 10,000-year-old modern humans from Australia's Kow Swamp. The latter, he felt, could have been derived from the former purely by a reduction in robustness and an increase in brain size--seemingly inexorable trends operating elsewhere in the world at the same time.

The problem, however, is that even after reconstruction, the face of Sangiran 17 remains massively distorted. For example, the unfortunate individual could not have breathed through the nose with which it is currently endowed. Nonetheless, we are told that the ancient Javans are the precursors of the modern Australians, and we are provided with "proof" in the form of a drawing of these two skulls in which they are compared from the angle most advantageous to the authors' point of view.

Similarly, Wolpoff and Caspari see continuity in European fossils, with Neanderthals as an intermediate link in the chain that led to modern Europeans. They believe that because they had fairly bulky brow ridges over the tops of their eye sockets and (very occasionally) braincases that bulged at the back, some (actually few) of the earliest modern Europeans were descended from the Neanderthals. But such a gestalt assessment of anatomy is not adequate. In all modern people, the brow ridges, if any, are formed differently from those of Neanderthals, and any protruding at the rear of the skull bears none of the anatomical hallmarks of the Neanderthals.

To their credit, Wolpoff and Caspari are careful to disavow any implication, that the various extant human races have existed as discrete entities throughout the past two million years; rather, during this time "humans have been a single widespread polytypic species [that is, a species with distinctive regional variants], with multiple, constantly evolving, interlinked populations, continually dividing and merging" (italics theirs). They are thus emphatic that the continuities they see in some physical features do not mean the long-term persistence of discrete, recognizable human populations.