Dmanisi Homo erectus: I’ll have what she’s having

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Herman Pontzer and buddies just published a brief analysis of fine-scale tooth wear in the Dmanisi Homo erectus specimens.

Teeth are useful as hell in life. Humans’ teeth are critical not only for eating, sporting a sexy smile, and biting people, but also for speech and song (“f,” “th” and “v” sounds). Some parents even harvest their childrens’ exfoliated baby teeth. The things we do with teeth.

Teeth are also really useful for studying long-dead people and animals – teeth may preserve pretty well for millions of years, they can be used to estimate an individual’s age-at-death, and their shape and composition can be used to learn about diet. In a vile act of revenge, the food that sustains us also scrawls its Nom Hancock into the surfaces of our teeth. So, scientists can study the microscopic marks (= “microwear”) on tooth surfaces to see what kinds of foods were eaten shortly before death. Peter Ungar, an author of the current paper, has done a lot of work here, and his website is worth checking out if you’re interested in learning more. Microwear can’t really tell you exactly what an animal was eating, but can tell you whether the animal mostly ate grasses, leaves, hard objects like nuts, and so forth.

So Pontzer and colleagues examined the microwear on some of the lower molars of the youngest individuals from the nearly 1.8 million year old Homo erectus group from Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia . To the left is a picture of the jaws, from the paper (from another paper. how meta). The microwear patterns of these badass early humans fit cozily within the variation exhibited by other Homo erectus specimens.

Microwear in Homo erectus is pretty variable, but still rather distinct from other fossil groups like robust Australopithecus, and a little less distinct from their putative ancestor H. habilis. This suggests that something special about Homo erectus was the species’ great dietary breadth – Homo erectus‘ key to geographic and evolutionary success might not have been the adoption of a specific dietary resource, but rather the ability to utilize a wide range of food resources. Atkins diet be damned. What’s neat is that the Dmanisi hominids, though kind of primitive (Australopithecus-like) in terms of brain size and some aspects of skull shape, nevertheless demonstrated key behaviors of H. erectus, namely geographic expansion (Dmanisi is the oldest reliably-dated hominid site outside Africa), and dietary flexibility. This really suggests the success of our ancestors was due to some behavioral innovation, aside from advances in stone tool technology.

Now, these Dmanisi H. erectus folks’ teeth wore like other H. erectus, and it would be reasonable to infer that this is because they ate similar foods. This makes it all the more mysterious that the other Dmanisi jaws, from older adults, have teeth completely worn to smithereens. Most notably, D3444 and D3900 (left, from here) comprise the skull of an individual who was missing all their teeth, except maybe a lower canine – the earliest example of edentulism in the human fossil record (Lordkipanidze et al. 2005). A very large mandible, D2600,  with teeth so worn that the pearly-white first-molar crowns were gone and the internal pulp cavity (and nerve) were exposed. (Interestingly, D2600 is so large that some researchers initially argued it represented a different species from the other jaws – yet Adam Van Arsdale presented evidence that this extreme tooth wear may actually be responsible for making jaws relatively taller in early humans).

So what’s curious is why the older Dmanisi hominids should show such an extreme amount of tooth wear compared to other H. erectus, but microwear on the young suggests their diet was the same (that is, just as diverse in texture) as others in the species. Was Dmanisi-level tooth wear (and tooth loss) comparable to other H. erectus, and we just happen not to have found them at other sites? (KNM-ER 730 from Kenya is the next-most worn early Homo that next comes to mind) Is there another aspect of diet we don’t know about, that caused the Dmanisi teeth to wear especially quickly? Or were these early Homo from Dmanisi actually living longer than other H. erectus? I suspect the second is more likely, but that’s a hypothesis that remains to be tested.

ResearchBlogging.org
Read more:
Ferring, R., Oms, O., Agusti, J., Berna, F., Nioradze, M., Shelia, T., Tappen, M., Vekua, A., Zhvania, D., & Lordkipanidze, D. (2011). From the Cover: Earliest human occupations at Dmanisi (Georgian Caucasus) dated to 1.85-1.78 Ma Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (26), 10432-10436 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1106638108
Lordkipanidze, D., Vekua, A., Ferring, R., Rightmire, G., Agusti, J., Kiladze, G., Mouskhelishvili, A., Nioradze, M., de León, M., Tappen, M., & Zollikofer, C. (2005). Anthropology:  The earliest toothless hominin skull Nature, 434 (7034), 717-718 DOI: 10.1038/434717b
Pontzer H, Scott JR, Lordkipanidze D, Ungar PS. In press. Dental microwear texture analysis and diet in the Dmanisi hominins, Journal of Human Evolution (2011). DOI:10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.08.006

Data, development and diets

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As mentioned briefly but repeatedly on this blog, my dissertation is about growth of the lower jaw in Australopithecus robustus (right), comparing it with jaw growth in recent humans. This is important because we don’t really know exactly how skeletal-dental (especially skeletal) maturation of our fossil relatives compares with us today. From a developmental perspective, it is also important to know how and when adult form arises during growth, and how these processes vary within and between species.


It’s not easy to examine ontogeny in fossil samples. In a post a few weeks ago I included a drawing of some of the A. robustus juvenile jaws. At the time, I was pointing out variation in dental maturity (which is a nice thing when studying growth), but the picture also reveals a bigger bugbear – variable preservation of features (which is a terrible thing if you’re trying to study growth).

For example, the youngest individual in the fossil sample (right, viewed from above, front is at the top of the picture) includes only the second baby molar tooth, a bit of the bone surrounding the sides and back of the tooth, and a small portion of the ascending ramus. The oldest subadult in the sample (SKW 5), on the other hand, is almost entirely complete. In between these ages, jaws variously preserve different parts. Under these circumstances (i.e. lots of missing data), growth cannot be studied by traditional (namely, multivariate) methods (how I will deal with this is a topic for another day).


So while studying the fossils in South Africa, in order to maximize the number of comparisons I could possibly make, I measured just about every single linear dimension conceivable on these jaws. I thus have a spreadsheet with 300 columns of measurements I could take on each specimen. Most of the cells are empty : (


What’s a boy to do?! In order to compare A. robustus with humans, I need to take the same measurements on a growth series of human jaws, too. But life is short, and if I want to finish this project before I succumb to some sinister signature of senescence, I really can’t take hundreds of measurements on a human sample which is much larger than the fossils. Plus, a lot of the individual measurements are a bit redundant: some of the distances overlap, many of the variables can be taken on the right and the left sides, etc.


If I am to finish collecting data in a reasonable time frame, I need to cull my variables from 300 to however many (a) maximizes the comparisons I can make within the less-complete A. robustus sample, and (b) are not too repetitive. Boo. Plus I have to get these spreadsheets ready to be read and analyzed in the program R, which for whatever reason is always a pain in the ass.

Again, the statistics of the overall comparisons is a topic for another day, and I haven’t had the opportunity yet to write the analytical program(s). But I have looked at some individual traits in A. robustus compared with a subsample of humans. For example, at the left is a plot of changes in height of the jaw at the baby second molar or adult second premolar (which replaces the baby molar). Obviously my human sample is way to small at the moment to make any really meaningful statements about how growth compares between the two species. Note also that these are absolute measures and not size-corrected, and that these are stages of dental eruption rather than chronological ages. But from this preliminary view, the two species are very similar up to around when the first adult molar comes in (“stage 4” here). Thereafter, the A. robustus individuals dramatically increase in size rather fast, whereas humans only slowly increase in size.


Again, this is a very preliminary result, and only for a single measurement. But it is interesting in light of a recent study by Megan Holmes and Christopher Ruff (2011). These researchers compared jaw growth recent humans who differed in the consistency of their diets. They found that kids in the two populations were not too different, but the samples became more different with age to become fairly different as adults. Now, A. robustus seems to have eaten a diet with lots of hard objects (see recent review by Peter Ungar and Matt Spohneimer), but humans’ diet (and technology) really obviates the need for chewing as powerful as seen in A. robustus. So this dietary divergence may well be reflected in the growth difference suggested above, but it may not be the sole factor. PLUS I NEED TO INCREASE MY HUMAN SAMPLE.


Stay tuned for more analyses and results!


ResearchBlogging.orgReferences to make you smarter and stronger
Holmes, M., & Ruff, C. (2011). Dietary effects on development of the human mandibular corpus American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 145 (4), 615-628 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21554


Ungar, P., & Sponheimer, M. (2011) The Diets of Early Hominins. Science 334(6053), 190-193. DOI: 10.1126/science.1207701  

Genetic basis of disgusting

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The genome of the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber, below right) has been sequenced (Kim et al. 2011), shedding insight into how mammalian evolution made gross.

Here are some factoids about these murine monsters, from a nice editorial accompanying the research paper in Nature. These critters live in underground colonies – because who could suffer to see them on the surface? These bald rats are unique among mammals in that they are “eusocial” like bees or ants. Also like bees and ants, a colony has a single, breeding “queen” in the group, whose mere presence prevents other female mole rats from becoming sexually mature. When a queen dies, females fight for the vacant throne. When one wins and becomes the new queen, she subsequently undergoes a “growth spurt,” becoming up to 80% heavier and dramatically lengthening her lower spine (Dengler-Crish and Catania 2007; figure below) – a marvel of phenotypic plasticity. These rats dwell in crowded, dirty tunnels low in light and oxygen, kind of like the teenage mutant ninja turtles. Plus, they can live for up to 30 years, which is an amazingly long time for an animal so small you can hold in it your hand. They are also apparently resistant to cancer and to some kinds of pain and itching. So, so strange.

With only one female contributing half a generation’s genes, you can imagine the shamelessly-naked mole rats are a little more inbred than most of us. In spite of this potential drag to genetic variation (and thereby natural selection), the naked mole rat genome demonstrates a number of adaptations to the species’ peculiar lifestyle. For example, the genes TEP1 and TERF1, which have been implicated in determining the lengths of the ends of chromosomes (“telomeres“), show evidence of positive natural selection in the mole rat. Kim and colleagues (2011: 2) say their analyses “point to altered telomerase function … which may be related to its evolution of extended lifespan and cancer resistance.” Cancer resistance!? I think the paper’s final paragraph (p. 4) lays out nicely what’s most important about research into the genome of this most ghastly rodent:

To summarize, sequencing and analysis of the [naked mole rat] genome revealed numerous insights into the biology of this remarkable animal. In addition, this genome and the associated data sets offer the research communities working in ageing, cancer, eusociality and many other areas a rich resource that can be mined in numerous ways to uncover the molecular bases for the extraordinary traits of this most unusual mammal. In turn, this information provides unprecedented opportunities for addressing some of the most challenging questions in biology and medicine, such as mechanisms of ageing, the role of genetic makeup in regulating lifespan, adaptations to extreme environments, hypoxia tolerance, thermogenesis, resistance to cancer, circadian rhythms, sexual development and hormonal regulation.

It’s not news that Life on Earth can be pretty weird sometimes. Understanding how Life became and becomes weird can provide us with tools to make life better for people.


Things I cited
Anonymous (2011). More than teeth. Nature, 478 (7368), 156-156 DOI: 10.1038/478156a


Dengler-Crish, C., & Catania, K. (2007). Phenotypic plasticity in female naked mole-rats after removal from reproductive suppression Journal of Experimental Biology, 210 (24), 4351-4358 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.009399


Kim, E., Fang, X., Fushan, A., Huang, Z., Lobanov, A., Han, L., Marino, S., Sun, X., Turanov, A., Yang, P., Yim, S., Zhao, X., Kasaikina, M., Stoletzki, N., Peng, C., Polak, P., Xiong, Z., Kiezun, A., Zhu, Y., Chen, Y., Kryukov, G., Zhang, Q., Peshkin, L., Yang, L., Bronson, R., Buffenstein, R., Wang, B., Han, C., Li, Q., Chen, L., Zhao, W., Sunyaev, S., Park, T., Zhang, G., Wang, J., & Gladyshev, V. (2011). Genome sequencing reveals insights into physiology and longevity of the naked mole rat. Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature10533

Variation: a blessing and a curse

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Trying to start on finishing my dissertation, I’m thinking about the issue dental development and how it relates to skeletal growth. Specifically I’m trying to decide whether I want to analyze my human and Australopithecus robustus samples based on estimates of “dental age,” or if I want to be a bit more cavalier and divide the sample into rougher age categories.

To avoid copyright issues, here’s a crappy picture I drew a few years ago, of the youngest A. robustus jaws. The youngest, “SK 438” is erupting its last baby tooth (bottom right), while the others have their full set of baby teeth, and none of them has its first adult tooth yet. I don’t think I can estimate ages accurately enough to capture the true chronological difference between SK 438 and the rest. Would I be better off just dividing the group into “younger” (SK 438) and “older” (the rest) infants, or even lumping them all together as simply “infants”?

On the one hand, I could assign individuals a chronological age based on a modern referent of known age, at similar stages of dental development. This could allow me to get more fine-scale glimpses into patterns of growth in my samples, but that’s assuming I’ve accurately estimated their ages. Individuals vary in the ages and sizes at which their teeth erupt; a person’s first molar, for example, may erupt at anywhere from 4-8 years of age. How can I estimate an individual’s age in light of such variation? And what if I’m as poor a judge of ages as Dennis Duffy?! Conceivably I could program my analysis to account for error estimation (which in itself could be educational and interesting, but is it worth the trouble?), but this would also add a further source of uncertainty. And it’s like Dwight Schrute said (Michael Scott said), “K-I-S-S: keep it simple, stupid. Great advice, hurts my feelings every time.”

On the other hand, I could divide my sample into coarse age categories – say, putting specimens who’ve attained a given level of dental development in the same group, such as ‘infant, child, juvenile, adolescent, and young adult.’ This method loses the temporal resolution of the first method, but also avoids the possible errors of assigning strict ages I’m pretty sure I would not infer accurately. But, tooth development does not show a clean 1-to-1 relationship with other systems in the body, such as hormonal axes or the bony skeleton. It’s uncertain how accurately kids can be put in any of the above categories (based on general life history variables; Bogin 1999) based on dental development.

Choices, choices.

Variation is a problem for biologists. The theory of evolution was conceived as a way to explain the conundrum of why there is such remarkable variation in the forms of life that Earth is lucky to have harbored. The problem of within-species variation in the relative timing of skeletal and dental development isn’t just a bug-bear for paleoanthropologists. It’s important to medical doctors and pathologists investigating genetically-based developmental disorders, and to epidemiologists looking at aspects of population health, such as the prevalence of growth stunting. It’s also important for forensics specialists who need to use biological clues about the age and identity of crime victims and defendants. I mean, how else would we know whether Jon Voight bit both Kramer and this pencil?

The silver lining, I suppose, on this storm-cloud of biological of variation is that without variation there cannot be evolution. And stasis is boring. If nothing changed since the Cambrian, none of us would be here today. We’d probably be some gross stupid monstrous thing, like this Hallucigenia to the right. It’s the quirks and weird variants that arise randomly, that make evolution possible. If individuals all developed exactly the same, then all organisms through all time would be the exact same, and probably all would have gone extinct as they succumbed to some sinister fate, no new variants would have arisen that may have been able to survive the devastation.

ResearchBlogging.org
So variation is a blessing and a curse. Individual and population variation make it difficult to state norms such as what is “average” or “healthy,” and nothing to be concerned about. Variation is also the magic ingredient of adaptation, without which Life could not survive the randomness inherent in any environment.

Things I cited
Bogin, B. (1999). Evolutionary perspective on human growth Annual Review of Anthropology, 28 (1), 109-153 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.109

Also 30 Rock, The Office and Seinfeld. Well done, NBC.

Pictures worth thousands of words and dollars

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ResearchBlogging.orgLooking into subdural empyema, which is a meningeal infection you don’t want, I stumbled upon a study from the roaring 1970s – the glorious Nixon-Ford-Carter years – using computerized axial tomography (hence, CAT scan) to visualize lesions within the skull (Claveria et al. 1976). Nowadays people refer to various similar scanning techniques simply as “CT” (for computed tomography, though this is not exactly the same as magnetic resonance imaging, MRI).

It’s pretty amazing how medical imaging has advanced in the 35 years since this study. For example, to the right is a CAT scan from Claveria et al. (1976, Fig. 4). These are transverse images (“slices”) through the brain case, the top of the images corresponding to the front of the face. You can discern the low-density (darker) brain from the higher density (lighter) bone – the sphenoid lesser wings and dorsum sellae, and petrous pyramids of the temporal bones are especially prominent in the top left image. In the bottom two images you can see a large, round abscess in the middle cranial fossa. Whoa.

What makes this medical imaging technique so great is that it allows a view inside of things without having to dissect into them. Of course, the downside is that it relies on radiation, so ethically you can’t be so cavalier as to CT scan just any living thing. If I’d been alive in 1976, CAT scanning would’ve blown my mind. Still, the image quality isn’t super great here, there’s not good resolution between materials of different densities, hence the grainy images.

But since then, some really smart people have been hard at work to come up with new ways to get better resolution from computerized tomography scans, and the results are pretty amazing. To the left is a slice from a synchrotron CT scan of the MH1 Australopithecus sediba skull (Carlson et al. 2011, Supporting on line material, Fig. S10). You’re basically seeing the fossil face-to-face … if someone had cut of the first few centimeters of the fossil’s face. Just like the movie Face Off.

Quite a difference from the image above. Here, we can distinguish fossilized bone from the rocky matrix filling in the orbit, brain case and sinuses. Synchrotron even distinguishes molar tooth enamel from the underlying dentin (see the square). The post-mortem distortion to the (camera right) orbit is clear. It also looks as though the hard palate is thick and filled with trabecular bone, as is characteristic of robust Australopithecus (McCollum 1999). Interesting…

Even more remarkable, the actual histological structure of bone can be imaged with synchrotron imaging. Mature cortical bone is comprised of these small osteons (or Haversian systems), that house bone cells and transmit blood vessels to help keep bone alive and healthy. Osteons are very tiny, submillimetric. To the right is a 3D reconstruction of an osteon and blood vessels, from synchrotron images (Cooper et al. 2011). The scale bar in the bottom right is 250 micrometers. MICROmeters! Note the scan can distinguish the Haversian canal (red part in B-C) from vessels (white part in B). Insane!

Not only has image quality improved over the past few decades, but CT scanning is being applied outside the field of medicine for which it was developed; it’s becoming quite popular in anthropology. What I’d like to do, personally, with such imaging is see if it can be used to study bone morphogenesis – if it can be used to distinguish bone deposition vs. resorption, and to see how these growth fields are distributed across a bone during ontogeny. This could allow the study the proximate, cellular causes of skeletal form, how this form arises through growth and development. If it could be applied to fossils, then we could potentially even see how these growth fields are altered over the course of evolution: how form evolves.

References
Carlson KJ, Stout D, Jashashvili T, de Ruiter DJ, Tafforeau P, Carlson K, & Berger LR (2011). The endocast of MH1, Australopithecus sediba. Science (New York, N.Y.), 333 (6048), 1402-7 PMID: 21903804

Claveria, L., Boulay, G., & Moseley, I. (1976). Intracranial infections: Investigation by computerized axial tomography Neuroradiology, 12 (2), 59-71 DOI: 10.1007/BF00333121

Cooper, D., Erickson, B., Peele, A., Hannah, K., Thomas, C., & Clement, J. (2011). Visualization of 3D osteon morphology by synchrotron radiation micro-CT Journal of Anatomy, 219 (4), 481-489 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2011.01398.x

McCollum, M. (1999). The Robust Australopithecine Face: A Morphogenetic Perspective Science, 284 (5412), 301-305 DOI: 10.1126/science.284.5412.301

Teaching next summer

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When I was working at Dmanisi this summer, I used a lot of my free time to develop a course on human evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo. I submitted this to my department, and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be teaching this class at U of M in Spring 2012. So if you’re at UM and want to take a badass class exploring the evolution and development of the human body, keep an eye out for this new anthropology offering (NB I need to come up with a catchy title for the class still).

The tentative textbook for the class will be Lewis Held’s Quirks of Human Anatomy: An Evo-Devo Look at the Human Body, which I just got in the mail yesterday. It got very good reviews and should be an interesting read, and with just under 3000 references it has a pretty useful bibliography, too. I’m really looking forward to reading this, and even the first page of the preface points to something promising:

“In Chapter 13 of Origin, Darwin asserted that the evidence from embryology alone was strong enough to convince him of the principle of common descent. Human embryos make many structures we don’t need, and we destroy others after we’ve gone to the trouble of making them. No engineer in his right mind would ever allow such idiocy.”

I can’t wait to read about these idiocies.

Teaching is an important part of my work, but I’ll admit that sometimes I’d rather be doing other things than preparing lessons, assignments and such. I have to say, though, I’ve had a lot of fun preparing this class so far. I’ll keep you posted about what I think of the book and how the course-planning comes along.

[insert clever quip about australopithecus hips]

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A week and a half ago, Kibii and colleagues (2011) published reconstructions and re-analyses of two hips belonging to the 1.98 million-year old Australopithecus sediba. As with many fossil discoveries, these additions to the fossil record raise more questions than they answer. Unless the question was, “did A. sediba have a pelvis?” It did. Here’s a good summary from the paper itself:

Thus, Au. sediba is australopith-like in having a long superior pubic ramus and an anteriorly positioned and indistinctly developed iliac pillar…[and] Homo-like in having vertically oriented and sigmoid shaped iliac blades, more robust ilia, and a narrow tuberoacetabular sulcus…and the pubic body is upwardly rotated as in Homo. (p. 1410, emphases mine)

So far as I can tell, the main way the hips are ‘advanced’ toward a more human-like condition is that the iliac blades are more upright and sweep forward more than in earlier known hominid hips. Here’s the figure 2 from the paper (more sweet pics of the fossils are available here). NB that in both A. sediba hips much of the upper portions of the iliac blades are missing (reconstructed in white; this region is missing in lots of fossils), so it’s possible they were more flaring like the australopith in the center photo.

The authors’ bottom-line, take-home point is that the A. sediba pelvis has features traditionally associated with large-brained Homo – but belonged to a small-brained species (based solely on the ~430 cc MH1 endocast). They argue that this means that many of these unique pelvic features did not evolve in the context of birthing large-brained babies, as has often been thought. They state that these features are thus “most parsimoniously attributed to altered biomechanical demands on the pelvis in locomotion,” and suggest that this hypothetical locomotion was mostly bipedalism but with a good degree of climbing. Maybe, maybe not. This interpretation is consistent with the analysis of the A. sediba foot/ankle (Zipfel et al. 2011).

The weird mix of ancient (australopith-like) and newer (Homo-like) pelvic features in A. sediba really raises the question of how australopithecines moved around. More intriguing is that the A. sediba pelvis has different Homo-like features than the ~1 million year old Busidima pelvis (Simpson et al. 2008), which has been attributed to Homo erectus (largely in aspects of the iliac blades). This raises the question of whether A. sediba is really pertinent to the origins of the genus Homo, and whether the Busidima pelvis belongs to Homo erectus or a late-surviving robust australopithecus (e.g. boisei, Ruff 2010).

Also interesting is that the subpubic angle (in the pic above, the upside-down “V” created by the pubic bones just above the red labels) is pretty low in MH2. This is curious because modern human males and females differ in how large this angle is – females tend to have a large angle which contributes to an enlarged birth canal, whereas males have a low angle like MH2. But MH2 is considered female based on skeletal and dental size. This raises the additional questions of whether human-like sexual dimorphism had not evolved in hominids prior to 1.9 million years ago, and whether the sex of MH2 was accurately described.

Finally, though the authors did a great job comparing this pelvis with those from other hominids, I think a major, more comprehensive comparative review of hominid pelves is in order. How does the older A. afarensis hip from Woranso (Haile-Selassie et al. 2010) inform australopithecine pelvic evolution? What about the possibly-contemporary-maybe-later hip from the nearby site of Drimolen (Gommery et al. 2002)? Given the subadult status of the MH1 individual, it would be interesting to compare with the WT 15000 Homo erectus fossils, or A. africanus subadults from Makapansgat, to examine the evolution of pelvic growth.

ResearchBlogging.org

Lots of interesting questions arise from these fascinating new fossils. “The more you know,” right?

References
Gommery, D. (2002). Description d’un bassin fragmentaire de Paranthropus robustus du site Plio-Pléistocène de Drimolen (Afrique du Sud)A fragmentary pelvis of Paranthropus robustus of the Plio-Pleistocene site of Drimolen (Republic of South Africa) Geobios, 35 (2), 265-281 DOI: 10.1016/S0016-6995(02)00022-0

Haile-Selassie Y, Latimer BM, Alene M, Deino AL, Gibert L, Melillo SM, Saylor BZ, Scott GR, & Lovejoy CO (2010). An early Australopithecus afarensis postcranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107 (27), 12121-6 PMID: 20566837

Kibii, J., Churchill, S., Schmid, P., Carlson, K., Reed, N., de Ruiter, D., & Berger, L. (2011). A Partial Pelvis of Australopithecus sediba Science, 333 (6048), 1407-1411 DOI: 10.1126/science.1202521

Ruff, C. (2010). Body size and body shape in early hominins – implications of the Gona Pelvis Journal of Human Evolution, 58 (2), 166-178 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.10.003

Simpson, S., Quade, J., Levin, N., Butler, R., Dupont-Nivet, G., Everett, M., & Semaw, S. (2008). A Female Homo erectus Pelvis from Gona, Ethiopia Science, 322 (5904), 1089-1092 DOI: 10.1126/science.1163592

Zipfel, B., DeSilva, J., Kidd, R., Carlson, K., Churchill, S., & Berger, L. (2011). The Foot and Ankle of Australopithecus sediba Science, 333 (6048), 1417-1420 DOI: 10.1126/science.1202703

Tess Tossed Tyrone

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What’s the secret to becoming a good father?

I for one have no idea BUT! a study published today in PNAS early edition finds an association between studly vs. paternal behavior, and levels of everyone’s favorite hormone, testosterone (T).

Using longitudinal data, researchers (Gettler et al. in press) found that, in general, a young guy with higher levels of circulating T is more likely than a guy with low T to become a father w/in a few years. MOREOVER! this erstwhile-high-T-and-now-father then experiences a relatively sharper decrease in T than would be expected simply because of aging. PLUS! fathers who interacted with their kids on a daily basis had lower T than fathers who didn’t hang around their kids too often.

One thing neat about this study is that it uses longitudinal instead of cross-sectional data.  A cross-sectional version of this study would’ve sampled a bunch of dudes (hopefully somewhat randomly) only once. This can be problematic because it’s then hard to interpret the results in light of the many sources of variation between people. This study, on the other hand, sampled a tonne (n = 694) of guys at more than one occasion, so they can tell how individuals’ testosterone levels tend to change in paternal vs. free-spirited circumstances.

The last line of the paper is pretty intriguing: “[these results] add to the evidence that human males have an evolved neuroendocrine architecture shaped to facilitate their role as fathers and caregivers as a key component of reproductive success.” (Gettler et al. in press: p. 5/6) This is especially interesting in light of the Ardipithecus ramidus-related evidence for a great antiquity of humans’ paternal proclivity (Lovejoy 1981, Lovejoy et al. 2009). Just how and why testosterone responds to/mediates this fatherly ‘reproductive strategy’ is mysterious to me. And of course, linking this hormonal phenomenon with anything as old as Ardi is a challenge I’m certainly not up to. Still neat, though.

ResearchBlogging.org

Reference
Gettler LT et al. in press. Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences… doi: 10.1073/pnas.1105403108

Lovejoy, C. (1981). The Origin of Man Science, 211 (4480), 341-350 DOI: 10.1126/science.211.4480.341

Lovejoy CO (2009). Reexamining human origins in light of Ardipithecus ramidus. Science (New York, N.Y.), 326 (5949), 740-8 PMID: 19810200

Photo credit: google (image) “Bill Cosby Fatherhood”

New Australopithecus sediba analyses

/ zcofran / 2 Comments

A slew of papers analyzing the brain, hands, feet, and pelvis of Australopithecus sediba were just published in the journal Science. I have not had a chance to read them yet – nor will I for a few days as I’m in a wedding Saturday [not mine 😦 ] and the partying starts in a few hours. So I’m afraid I won’t be able to report on and interpret these on the blog for a while. Please stay tuned!

CT reconstruction, from Science (follow link above).
The exact same thing happened to me 2 years ago when the Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton was (finally) published. I remember waiting in the Detroit airport to board a flight to St. Louis to begin my platonic soul-mate’s bachelor party, and I get a flurry of emails on my phone announcing the skeleton in the 15 year old closet.
So media beware – whenever I’m in a wedding, badass new fossil studies will be published. 

And I thought I had it bad (or, "Toad terrors")

/ zcofran / 3 Comments

The world can be a terrible place. Sure, there are the finer things that make life worth living – puppies, spooning, hoppy beer, etc. – but there are also things that make you wonder, ‘Now why should anyone ever have to endure this?‘ I recall being a child, growing up on the mean streets of Kansas City, MO, it was a struggle just to get an education. There were bandits that set up a ‘toll’ to cross the bridge to get to the school, and if we didn’t have any pence to put in their pouches, well we’d have to fight our way into the classroom (see map below, of Lincoln College Prep middle school). Getting home in the afternoon was even worse. There was an Iron Maiden. And this thing.
I thought my midwest urban childhood was tough, until today when I read about “cane toads” (Rhinella marina) (below, right). Now, toads in general are odd animals. They’re vertebrates, with a sweet bony spine and skeleton, like us humans and wicked-pisser mammals. But they’re also not like us (“NLU,” as my sweet, politely diabolical grandma would say). Not like us at all. When a human is a baby, she or he looks more or less like an adult, albeit much smaller and cutely misproportioned. But a toad – well, amphibians just have a totally different life plan. Toad babies are these “tadpoles” (or “pollywogs” if you’re feeling especially cavalier and sassy) that don’t have a body with a head and four limbs that can be used for being awesome. Instead, pollywogs are these fat embryo-ish bodies trailing along a slithering tail. Limbs eventually form from tiny buds and the tail is lost. But superficially, the panning out of toad ontogeny looks like giant sperm deciding to become frog-like abomination unto something. So toads are already not quite right from the get go.
But this one species, the cane toad, has tadpoles that EAT THEIR EGG SIBLINGS and EMIT A CHEMICAL THAT STUNTS THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR BROTHERS and SISTERS. In the history of human society there have been a number of stories of family eating family, but there is nothing quite like this. It’s a mix between the child-eating Kronos (or Roman “Saturn”) or Thyestes (though his was accidental), and Cain and Abel from the Bible that’s such a smash with the Judeo-Christians, or Romulus and Remus from the mythic founding of Rome. [Hey I guess my Classics BA has come in handy after all!]
So next time you’re feeling down and out, upset with the hand the great Dealer has dealt you, just be glad you weren’t a cane toad. Because then you’d’ve either been eaten/murdered by your older sib, or you’d’ve eaten/murdered your siblings. Yikes.
Feelings aside, this toad presents a very interesting case study. It will be interesting to uncover the biochemistry and genetics behind how the older pollywogs stunt the development of their little brothers and sisters. I can see this really helping with an understanding of how growth and development are controlled and inhibited, and possibly even how they can be manipulated. It would also be interesting to see if in the evolution of these species, there arose any biochemical defenses expressed in eggs and young larvae against older sibs’ fratricidal fragrances, or if it was simply a 1-sided battle.
Life is a funny, funny thing.
Works Ci-toad [sorry for the terrible pun 😦 ]
PS