Ian Tattersall

In the beginning, Ian Tattersall presents us with a common situation: a human staring into the eyes of a chimpanzee. He reveals more details, since the chimpanzee is in a zoo cage and the human is a Victorian. What happened afterwards were an inter-species collision and a descent into the Uncanny Valley. The Victorian, once comfortable in his status as a member of the ruling class of a global imperial superpower, now had his belief system shattered in this one brief moment. How different are show more we than chimpanzees? Masters of the Planet: the search for our human ancestors, by Ian Tattersall, seeks to answer that question. Along the way, he confirms the existence of hominid descendents who roamed the planet millions of years ago.

Written in a jaunty, descriptive manner, Tattersall traces the story of human evolution back to its roots. But make no mistake, this isn’t a simple rehash of paleoanthropology, this book includes information on the latest discoveries. Additionally, Tattersall gives the reader a kind of historiography of paleoanthropology. Unlike other branches of archaeology, paleoanthropology possesses a peculiar history. Our most recent ancestors, the Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal, were discovered first, sometime in the 19th century. “Lucy” and our earliest hominid ancestors were discovered as recently as the 1970s. On a few years ago, earlier specimens were discovered, along with the Homo florensis, the “Hobbit” species, complicating what was once perceived as a linear and progressive evolution from one hominid species to another. At the beginning of the book, Tattersall provides a chart showing all known hominid ancestors. It doesn’t look like one of those progressive charts with the chimp leading to the caveman leading to modern man. Tattersall’s chart is, in a word, arborescent. Hominid evolution had many branches, a few dead-ends, and a scattering of outliers. The field of paleoanthropology is now locked in heated debates over how one species is related to another species, or if one is a sub-species of another. And once a debate is settled, scientists doing field work discover another cache of specimens. The book does a good job summarizing the present state of the field of paleoanthropology and the specific cases where interpretation is still very much “at play.” (For those interested in further reading, Tattersall provides a generous bibliography of primary and secondary sources and sources pertinent to each chapter’s subject matter.)

The writing, while aimed at a popular audience, can get a little technical and clinical at times. Rest assured, the terms and subjects discussed are given ample contextualization, making it easier to understand. The book reads like a National Geographic or Learning Channel special, at least before both channels became devoured by reality shows about animal hoarders, storage wars, and whatever else TV executives can dream up between stealing ideas from European programs and scoring coke money.

Tattersall makes a series of bold assertions in Masters of the Planet. In his quest to discover what makes us human, he posits several theories: bipedality, brain size, and language. It is with language that he sees the cause of what makes us human and how we came to dominate the planet. The capacity for language is based on the concept of understanding symbolic representation. This quantum leap in cognitive functioning put Homo sapiens far above other competing hominid species. The cognitive leap also occurred relatively early, at least in terms of evolutionary time, roughly 60,000 years ago. By harnessing language, we could name things and make paintings and count and numerous other tasks we take for granted.

Masters of the Planet is a fascinating book exploring the always controversial field of paleoanthropolgy. Tattersall succeeds, not only in re-affirming and explaining previous work in the field, but also changing this reviewer’s perception of human evolution. Evolution is a given, but the archaeological record, the latest discoveries in both fieldwork and genetics, and compelling gift for storytelling make Tattersall’s work as a must-read for those wanting to know more about how we got here.

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Masters of the Planet provides an excellent overview of the current state of our knowledge of the evolution of humans and other hominids. Back in the 1960s, hominid evolution could still be viewed as unilinear and progressive, leading towards Homo sapiens along a single axis of evolutionary change. As outlined in this book, an impressive array of fossil finds and sophisticated technical analyses have yielded a very different picture, one in which diverse lineages of hominids existed show more simultaneously and interacted. The profusion of paleontological discoveries has buried the traditional creationist myth of "missing links." Indeed, the sheer number of fossils and structurally intermediate forms has sometimes made it difficult to determine which of the many candidates is closely- related to which.

Ian Tattersall, author of Masters of the Planet, is curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He brings to the issues a lifetime of expertise in hominid evolution, as well as abundant experience in writing books and articles for fellow scientists and general audiences. The book is organized historically, and traces the diverse and complicated history of hominids over the past 7-8 million years. Beginning with the ancient origins of the hominid lineage, it outlines the rise of bipedal apes, the variety of australopiths (including "Lucy"), life on the savannah, emergence from Africa (an event that occurred multiple times), the spread of early Homo throughout the Old World continents, the enigmatic Neandertals (distant cousins to ourselves, not ancestors – except to the degree in which we interbred), and ultimately, the arrival of modern H. sapiens. The book does not focus entirely on skeletal features. Rather, such aspects as development of social behavior, running ability, loss of body hair, diet, use of fire, and cooking all get their due. Tattersall's account leads towards recognition of the distinctiveness of our species, as manifested by language as well as symbolic behavior, features that he considers to be responsible for our species' success.

In tracing hominid diversity and evolutionary history, Tattersall draws on contemporary technological analyses to reveal details that would have been unimaginable a decade or so ago. Thus, readers may be surprised to find what isotope analyses have revealed about diets of early hominids, and what genetic analyses have shown about skin and hair color in Neandertals. Tattersall does not shy from recognizing unresolved issues and persistent controversies. He fairly presents alternative viewpoints, and freely acknowledges areas where a scarcity of evidence has rendered divergent interpretations viable.

As one who has read many books on hominid evolution, I found Tattersall's work to be interesting and informative. My copy is now replete with penciled comments and bent- down page corners to mark fascinating issues and controversial matters. While the book's dealings with uniqueness of our own species' overlaps that of Brian Fagan's recent Cro-Magnon, I found Tattersall's account preferable in some respects. The latter recognizes the emergence of artistic expression (starting at least 70,000 years ago) as a worldwide phenomenon rather than one local to Europe and Asia, in accord with its status as a species characteristic.

Notwithstanding my high regard for this book, it is not free of error. The hyoid apparatus is not a "bony portion of the Adam's apple" (as stated on page 36). Rather, the hyoid consists of thin cartilages that support the tongue and its musculature, while the so-called Adam's apple is the larynx. (How the two could be confused by a paleo-anatomist is most puzzling). "Exaptation" is wrongly presented as a non- adaptationist mechanism (pages 44, 68, and 210), in which features arise by chance and only later evolve to take on a function. Evolutionary biologists will recognize this characterization as mistaken. In exaptation, features that are evolutionary adapted to serve one function are transformed through natural selection to serve some new function (as outlined in Gould and Vrba's original 1982 paper in Paleobiology and throughout the modern literature). As another example, the author suggests that "members of the genus Homo have been consistently predisposed in the same way towards brain size increase"(page 132) since brain enlargement occurred in three separate lineages. However, one need not infer any special mechanism or attribute unique to our genus. A trend towards brain enlargement has occurred independently in many mammalian lineages, as well as in numerous linages of birds and cartilaginous fishes, and even among molluscs and arthropods. In this respect, hominids appear (with aquatic mammals) as an extreme example of a widespread evolutionary trend.

Some interpretations in the book are quite speculative, leading to weak inferences. For example, discovery of one toothless male skull (the Dmanisi specimen) is taken as evidence for long- term compassionate behavior among Homo erectus era hominids, on the grounds that the individual would not have been able to chew his own food. (Page 124: "…it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that the Dmanisi hominids had the cognitive reserves to express their fellow- feeling in the form of material support"). In view of the profusion of other interpretations, the inference is unnecessarily speculative. One might also question the book's central claim that emergence of artistic expression in our species paralleled the development of a unique form of psychology, as manifested in our capacity for symbolic thought. Fossils reveal little about psychology, and how early symbolic thought arose arguably is entirely a matter of speculation – cave art and jewelry notwithstanding.

Such issues do not detract from a work that, on the whole, is one of the best modern accounts available; indeed, some of the above manifests the fascinating and thought – provoking nature of this book. Overall, I would strongly recommend Masters of the Planet as an interesting and informative account of the diversity and evolutionary history of the bipedal apes and we their peculiar descendants. show less

In his new book The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, human paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall argues that a long tradition of "human exceptionalism" in paleoanthropology has distorted the picture of human evolution. Drawing partly on his own career--from young scientist in awe of his elders to crotchety elder statesman--Tattersall offers an idiosyncratic look at the competitive world of paleoanthropology, beginning with Charles Darwin 150 years ago, and continuing through the Leakey show more dynasty in Africa, and concluding with the latest astonishing findings in the Caucasus.The book's title refers to the 1856 discovery of a clearly very old skull cap in Germany's Neander Valley. The possessor had a brain as large as a modern human, but a heavy low braincase with a prominent brow ridge. Scientists tried hard to explain away the inconvenient possibility that this was not actually our direct relative. One extreme interpretation suggested that the preserved leg bones were curved by both rickets, and by a life on horseback. The pain of the unfortunate individual's affliction had caused him to chronically furrow his brow in agony, leading to the excessive development of bone above the eye sockets. The subsequent history of human evolutionary studies is full of similarly fanciful interpretations. With tact and humor, Tattersall concludes that we are not the perfected products of natural processes, but instead the result of substantial doses of random happenstance. show less

Having read and enjoyed Ian Tattersall's earlier work The Fossil Trail for a college class several years ago, I was delighted to see his latest, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The two works cover much the same ground; Tattersall offers an overview of recent research into the evolutionary history of hominid species, highlighting the latest finds and discoveries of fossilized hominid remains, tools, &c.

A couple things that struck me about show more this book: first, how much of the hominid record is still uncertain at best. Tattersall quite frequently has to add qualifiers to his statements since they're based on the very small bits of data that have been discovered and studied so far. Along the same lines, he pillows many assertions with the note that not all scholars agree with this interpretation or that. It was refreshing, actually, to see how much of all this isn't settled science, and how the discovery of a single fossil might put a whole new light on things (as the discovery of Homo floresiensis a few years ago did).

I'm glad I read this book fairly close on the heels of E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth. While Tattersall doesn't get into the evolution of social behavior, his other conclusions generally seem to jive with Wilson's fairly closely, but Tattersall is able to explore at greater depth some of the specific early hominid fossil sites, and to offer additional anatomic and taxonomic details about the species he discusses. I'd actually like to see a conversation between Tattersall and Wilson about whether they see things differently ... wouldn't that be something?

Packed with detail, but quite readable, and supplemented with a long list of sources should you find yourself interested in a particular topic. show less