Hominid Fossil Speaks Volumes

— -- Move over, Lucy.

“Madeleine” is a new fossil star from Indonesia likely to further fuel the debate over where modern humans evolved.

A team of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History and other institutions is still analyzing data from the partial hominid skull which shows features of both Homo sapiens, our forebears, and Homo erectus, an earlier species. Their most stunning conclusion so far is that Madeleine probably had a capacity for language close to that of modern humans.

“We don’t know what the immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens are, really,” says Eric Delson of Lehman College in New York, leader of the scientific team. This creature, he adds, “had the mental capacity to undertake complex reasoning.”

Does that make it a candidate? Delson hedges, but admits that when details are published, many paleoanthropologists will think it “might represent a population evolving in the direction of modern humans.”

The specimen was actually unearthed two years ago, but disappeared into the obscurity of the private fossil market. Henry Galiano, owner of the Manhattan natural history store Maxilla & Mandible, returned the skull fragment to Indonesian government officials Aug. 30 in New York.

After the farmer who originally discovered the specimen near Sambungmacan, Central Java, sold it to a local fossil dealer, a short description was published in a journal in Indonesia. Then it vanished, apparently smuggled out of the country. Galiano says he bought it several months ago with items from a collector’s estate.

Once he removed a thick layer of dirt, Galiano recognized the skull as hominid, but peculiar. “It just seemed odd,” he recalls. As he examined it, he says, he realized, “Oh my God, this is important.” Galiano contacted several paleoanthropologists to help identify the specimen, which he dubbed Madeleine in honor of a friend’s daughter.

Thinking Ahead

Among them was Delson, who says it was “immediately clear this was a well-preserved example of either a late Homo erectus or an early ‘archaic Homo sapiens,’ ” and unlike anything discovered in Asia to date.

Officially called PL-1 for now, the specimen has thick cranial bone and heavy brow ridges typical of H. erectus. But instead of that species’ flat forehead, Madeleine’s rises vertically, creating a dome shape more like H. sapiens. Its most unusual features are on the inside, where impressions remain from the brain itself.

“It has a large degree of asymmetry, which is something we do look for in modern humans,” says Doug Broadfield, a doctoral candidate inphysical anthropology at the City University of New York and Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.

The group believes that this, combined with other traits, indicates Madeleine “already had the capability for proto-modern human language,” says Sam Márquez, also of CUNY/Mt. Sinai.

Family Mystery

The old museum diorama image of our evolution as a single-file progression from ape to human, and from Africa to the rest of the world, has been replaced in recent years by the picture of a complex family tree. There are several contemporary branches, some kissing cousins and a few unexplained gaps.

We know our deepest roots are in Africa, where our remote ancestors distinguished themselves from other primates about 4 million years ago by standing up and walking around on two feet. They included the famous Australopithecus afarensis “Lucy.”

But it took another 1½ million years to make the next big leap to using tools and earning the genus name Homo.

This new breed’s ability to butcher meat gave them a nutritional advantage credited with spurring an increase in brain size. And, apparently, wanderlust.

The most enterprising of the group, H. erectus, packed up its tools and walked out of Africa. “Java Man,” discovered in 1891 in Trinil, Indonesia, is an H. erectus dating back about 1.6 million years. Paleoanthropologists in Southern China claim to have found 2-million-year-old specimens.

Hazy Origins

What happened next remains hotly debated. Most experts once thought that after fanning out across Europe and Asia, H. erectus settled down, eventually evolving into H. sapiens. That theory, though, is mostly out of favor today for a couple of reasons.

While H. erectus may have been as tall as modern humans, with a brain size at the lower-end of the normal range for H. sapiens, it’s still considered a fairly dim-witted cousin. Differences between “us” and “them” seem too great for all H. sapiens to have ended up so similar to each other if we evolved independently in isolated groups.

Then there’s timing.

The last “pure” H. erectus seems to have disappeared around 250,000 years ago and the first modern humans appear only 100,000 years ago. Thus, current theory holds that H. sapiens must have evolved in one place first, probably Africa, and then spread out in one or more new migrations. With the exception of Neanderthals in Europe, most H. erectus descendants were probably long gone and we had the world to ourselves.

Then who is Madeleine?

“This may be one of the last of the Mohicans,” jokes Teuku Jacob, an Indonesian paleoanthropologist collaborating with the scientists studying the skull. Based on where it was discovered, he thinks Madeleine is between 100,000 and 200,000 years old and probably a very late version of H. erectus.

Age MattersCarl Swisher at Berkeley Geochronology Center is analyzing the original soil encrusted on the brain case in hopes of establishing the specimen’s age. For now, Delson thinks it may be up to 1 million years old.

If so, he says it would certainly be “intriguing to see these apparently modern features in an ancient population.”

Even more interesting, he admits, if Madeleine is as young as Jacob thinks, “it might indicate that there were more than one species of humans in that part of the world living at the same time. Whether that meant they were interacting at all is a question to be answered much farther down the road.”

Christine Soares is a freelance writer living in New York.