Homo Erectus In Java: Just As Human As Ever

From the November 27, 2012 eNews issue
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The days of November 14-18, the Kota Kasablanka shopping mall in South Jakarta enjoyed a display of ancient human skeletons, a gift to the community from the conservation office of the Sangiran Early Man Site. Java is famous for Java Man, discovered by Eugene Dubois who was on the hunt for the missing link between humans and apes.

The Sangiran Early Man Site is known for the many early human fossils found there, along with a variety of flint tools. The major difficulty with the display is not the fossils themselves. At least fifty human fossilized remains have been found at the site, and they offer information about the people who once lived in Java. There is a major issue, however, with the display artists' interpretations of what early man must have looked like. Homo erectus has many times been demonstrated to have been fully human, yet the display pictures depicted these men as walking apes.

Eight-year-old Arifni Azizah enjoyed the exhibit, exclaiming to her big sister,"They look like monkeys!"

Actual apes, like Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus boisei, and Ramapithecus were included in the list of human ancestors. The pictures showed them all standing upright, even though the most recent evidence indicates that A. afarensis, the species of "Lucy", spent most of her time in the trees, with shoulder sockets oriented more upward like an ape's and not to the side like a human's.

There is no evidence that Ramapithecus walked like a human at all. In fact, Ramapithecus is now widely considered a relative of the orangutan, and is not an ancestor of Australopithecines or humans or anybody else in the display.

The display artists' work reflected their presumption that ancient humans looked like apes, and ancient apes walked like humans; they didn't reflect the actual evidence. Yet, little Arifni Azizah doesn't know that. Her mind is filled with wonder that people long ago looked "like monkeys."

Science artists love to show early humankind as intelligent apes. They portray them as hairy in a specifically primate-looking fashion, eyes and ears high on the head. Yet, as paleoanthropologists uncover more information about ancient (or not-so-ancient) humans, the evidence consistently points toward a race of beings that were intelligent and capable, essentially different from anatomically modern humans in that they camped out in caves.

Paleoanthropologists commonly place H. erectus at between 1.9 million and 143 thousand years ago, when they believe early humans lived in groups found in spots from Indonesia and China all the way to the southern tip of Africa. Because the brain cases of H. erectus were on average smaller than the brains of people today (yet within the modern-day range of brain size), bearing thicker face and jaw bones, artists often portray H. erectus with ape-like features. Yet, the evidence has long demonstrated that these early men were just as human as the humans of today. We cannot go back in time and have a conversation with them, but we can examine the tools they left behind, and they were not the handiwork of a people who were intellectually defective.

Tool-Making
The humans found at the Sangiran Early Man Site were talented tool makers. They created stone, jasper, and even bone tools over the years at that location. H. erectus had plenty of talents, including the management of fire.

H. erectus craftsmen chiseled tools from stone in a distinctive teardrop or oval shape, chipping stone hand axes and other cutting tools from the earliest time of their known existence. The cutting tools were used to butcher the large animals they hunted. The H. erectus people are always described as hunters and gatherers, yet their tools also included picks, which means they also spent time digging in the ground. While the "cave man" has long assumed to have been intellectually weak, the sophistication of the artifacts indicates otherwise. (Let's see Warren Buffet go out and use his bare hands and local rocks to make a stone knife sharp enough to field dress a deer.)

Communication
While there has been question about whether H. erectus could communicate as we do today, this people did have a human hyoid bone. Also, the Broca's area of the H. erectus brain was like that of modern humans, according to studies of skull endocasts done by Thomas Wynn.

Scientists have been slow to agree that H. erectus communicated just as well as we do (perhaps better), but the paleoanthropological community has also been reluctant to agree that Neanderthals sat around chatting, and Neanderthals had larger brains than modern man.

Considering their sophisticated tool production, sufficient brains and a hyoid bone, there seems to be little reason to believe that H. erectus did not use spoken language, except for the same assumptions about early man that cause the artists to draw him looking like an upright chimpanzee.

Red Deer Cave People

Even modern man gets sketched as ape-like because he is determined to have "primitive" features. An article on the Red Deer Cave People in Southwest China published earlier this year in China Daily shows a fine ape-man pencil drawing at the top, even though the Red Deer Cave People were dated to less than 15,000 years ago, nearly 60,000 years after the time when scientists say men were using fire to blacksmith tools. According to the common paleoanthropology timeline, these are young humans who should look anatomically modern, yet they have "archaic-looking" parietal lobes, large molars, and thick skull bones – qualities that H. erectus also shared. The most important difference is their lack of a strong modern human chin. "They look very different from all modern humans, whether alive today or in Africa 150,000 years ago," Darren Curnoe of the University of New South Wales told the BBC.

The Red Deer Cave People were also tool makers that used shovels and stone hammers. Even pyramids and quartz stone-cutting tools have been found in their isolated Asian home.

"It is not rare to see fossils that carry both early and modern Homo sapien traits. In the same era, there were many human groups in China. Red Deer Cave people could just be ordinary Chinese," an anonymous paleoanthropologist in China told reporters.

The skulls of modern humans are relatively similar, but that does not mean that ancient people who had different skull characteristics were any less human than we are. It simply indicates that certain human family groups died out (perhaps during Noah's Flood?), while one group lived on.

References
• Java Man Visits Kota Kasablanka Shopping Mall - The Jakarta Post
• Sangiran Early Man Site - World Heritage Convention
• Stone Age Man Used Fire To Make Tools - 50,000 Years Earlier Than We Scientists Thought - The Telegraph
• Microstratigraphic Evidence Of In Situ Fire In The Acheulean Strata Of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa -
National Academy of Sciences
• Homo Erectus - Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
• Oldest Homo Erectus Tools Found, Early Humans Had Tools Way Earlier Than Previously Thought - The Huffington Post
• Early Human 'Lucy' Swung From The Trees - Live Science
• Language Capabilities of Homo erectus & Homo neanderthalensis - Laboratorio de Lingui stica Informatica
• Latest Fossils Shed Lights On Evolution And The Migration Of Man - China Daily
• Humans Tamed Fire by 1 Million Years Ago - Scientific American