QUARRY by NOEL T. BOAZ

Author:NOEL T. BOAZ
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1993-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

METHODOLOGY AND SAHABI

The real importance of Sahabi has lain not in what few fossils of primates have come from the site so far but in what the investigation says about the way hypotheses are framed and how research is undertaken in modern paleoanthropology. The old research methodology might be called the Indiana Jones School of Paleoanthropology. This approach focuses entirely on the hominid fossils and puts the geology, paleoecological studies, flora, and fauna on the back burner. When Indiana Jones successfully negotiates the booby-trapped cave and secures the crystal skull in Raiders of the Lost Ark his expression of fulfillment indicates that he has attained his objective. All the information that is relevant to the object is inherent in the object. Context, in this case the temple in the cave, does not matter.

Most paleoanthropologists today belong to what may be termed the Contextual School, in which the context is viewed as centrally important to formulating and testing hypotheses of hominid evolution and behavior. This approach has led to graduate students completing theses and dissertations on such diverse groups as horses (as Ray Bernor did at UCLA) or hippopotamuses (as Paris Pavlakis did at NYU) in anthropology departments, paradoxically concerned with humankind. The evolutionary history of these groups of animals can reveal much about the environment, age, and ecology of the habitats they shared with hominids. The scientifically detailed context that Sahabi provided for the North African Pliocene of 5 million years ago (not 7 million as we first thought) was our first real glimpse into an area of a continent and a time period that we know were important to the earliest emergence of our lineage.

Beginning in the 1970s when the Messinian Event was discovered by Deep Sea Drilling Project excursions in the Mediterranean, there has been speculation about how such a major change in the circum-Mediterranean world might have affected hominid evolution. A cartoon circulated by geologist John Van Couvering showed a knuckle-walking ape venturing out onto the hot Mediterranean salt flat, hopping up on two legs and shaking his fingers to cool them off. “The origin of bipedalism,” the cartoon read.

More serious suggestions were made as well. For example, C. K. Brain of the Transvaal Museum suggested in 1980 that the Messinian Event and the drying up of the Mediterranean would have set into motion a number of climatic changes in Africa that resulted in the spread of savannas. This environmental change was, according to many scholars, one of the most important in initiating the evolution of the bipedally walking hominids from forest-living African apes. And the timing of the change accorded well with the postulated dates of the splitting of hominids and African apes derived from the new molecular studies. Sahabi was immediately adjacent to the Mediterranean basin and dated to the end of the Messinian Event. It thus is positioned perfectly to test whether this environmental change occurred and what evolutionary effects it may have had.

Another evolutionist, Elisabeth Vrba, has suggested that faunas should change radically when the environment changes radically.

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