WT 15000

Back to the backbone of Homo erectus

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Of course the title is referring to all of the back bones. An alternate title may be “The backbone’s connected to the – what bone?” but that’s also kinda lame. I’ll do better next time.
Martin Hausler and colleagues (in press) report on newly identified vertebral fragments of the WT 15000 Homo erectus skeleton, perhaps the most complete of an early hominid (this one ~1.5 million years ago). This skeleton, and other early hominids (i.e. Australopithecus africanus), were described as having six lumbar (lower back) vertebrae; the modal number in humans is 5, and 3-4 in the great apes. The issue of vertebral formula (the number of cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral verts) in hominids is interesting because it is unclear what the ancestral condition is: was ancestral pattern to have more lumbars (like australopiths) from which humans and apes lost verts, or is ape pattern is ancestral, and lumbars were gained then lost over the course of human evolution?


The fragments found by Hausler and team establish that the WT 15000 individual – and presumably all H. erectus – possessed only 5 lumbar vertebrae. In the past, the only evidence of the 6th-to-last pre-sacral vertebra was the vertebral body. It was unclear whether this vertebra would have had articular facets for ribs (like a thoracic vertebra) or not (like a lumbar vertebra). The pedicle fragments identified by Hausler and colleagues (figure to the right) have a rib facet, and so indicate that the 6th-to-last vertebra of this skeleton was thoracic. Thus, WT 15000 – and again presumably all Homo erectus – had a modern-human-like vertebral formula.
The evo-devo of the spinal column is interesting because it seems to me that it may not be so outlandish to try to identify and test hypotheses about how spinal column development (segmentation) changed over the course of hominid and ape evolution. In trying to determine how development of vertebral segments evolved it is important to know how ancient the human pattern is, and so the identification of 5 lumbars in WT 15000 at 1.5 million years ago is an important finding. I need to think on this a bit, I’ll hafta get back to you . . .
ResearchBlogging.org
* figures are from Hausler et al. in press


Reference
Martin Haeusler, Regula Schiess, Thomas Boeni (2011). New vertebral and rib material point to modern bauplan of the Nariokotome Homo erectus skeleton Journal of Human Evolution : 10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.07.004

Growing a Homo erectus kid, sort of

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A paper, given at this year’s Physical Anthropology meetings, was just published online in the Journal of Human Evolution, with a re-evaluation of the height and possible growth pattern of a subadult skeleton of Homo erectus (KNM-WT 15000, aka “Nariokotome boy,” aka “Stripling youth”). When initially described, it was estimated that this young chap would gave grown to be around 6 feet tall. However, controversy around the skeleton’s age at death and probable growth pattern have made this quite a contentious topic. In the recent paper, Ronda Graves and colleagues used a South African human growth pattern and a pattern from “naturally-reared captive” chimpanzees to devise a series of intermediate growth patterns that might have characterized H. erectus. Using the pattern they felt most likely reflected the Nariokotome skeleton’s estimated life history parameters, the authors estimate the potential adult height of the youth to have been closer to about 5′ 4″.

All I’d like to say about this is that deciding how tall a subadult skeleton like this would have grown to be is inherently tricky. First, the individual’s height when he died has to be estimated, and this will always be an estimate, so there’s one level of error there. Next, in order to determine the duration of growth remaining had he lived, one must estimate the skeleton’s age at death. This has been debated for the Nariokotome skeleton, because the pattern of tooth eruption and tooth enamel formation seem to point toward an age of around 8-10 years; but the pattern of long-bone closure suggests an age closer to 13 or so years. If anything, this means we cannot assume a ‘human-like’ or ‘chimpanzee-like’ pattern of skeletal and dental development for H. erectus. But our final step in figuring out how tall this kid would’ve been is to use the previous 2 estimations to infer how much longer, and at what rate, he would have grown. Crap.
The authors tried to circumvent this issue by averaging/modifying the human and chimpanzee mathematical growth curves. The curves themselves come from averages of respective species samples, which then were combined (sort of like averaging) to create intermediate growth curves. They then also multiplied the intermediate curves by various constants, in attempt to model different life history patterns in the growth curves. Incidentally, one of these ‘altered life history’ models provided their preferred height estimate of 5′ 4″. I think this is a clever and interesting way to tackle the question of how to estimate height from fossils; but I think it’s important to bear in mind how far-removed from both their models they had to get to do this. How many assumptions and potential sources of error should be permissible? Are there any biological constraints that might actually render a human-chimp average growth pattern to be unrealistic? I dunno!
Anyway, an interesting paper, and with a pretty good literature review, too. As stated above, the model they preferred gave a much shorter height than traditionally accepted for this individual. The model (and so H. erectus) also lacks a modern human-like growth spurt, which this specimen would have ‘needed’ to attain a tall adult height like has been traditionally thought. Other researchers have used the cranial remains to argue that Nariokotome kid would have had a good amount of growth left to have a more characteristically H. erectus-like skull, though it is unclear if this necessarily means an adolescent growth spurt. So, this was a very interesting and thorough study, but I’m sure it’s not the last we’ll hear about growth and development in H. erectus.
The paper
Graves RR, Lupo AC, McCarthy RC, Wescott DJ, and Cunningham DL. Just how strapping was KNM-WT 15000? Journal of Human Evolution, in press.

doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.06.007