A Short History Of Progress. Ronald Wright

gorilla is today… reduced to only about 10,000 adults.” Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie, African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity (New York: Henry Holt/John Macrae, 1997), p. 11. At the start of the Upper Palaeolithic, about 35,000 years ago, Stringer estimates that Homo sapiens had “a breeding population of at least 300,000.” Ibid., p. 163.

25. For the Out of Africa hypothesis, see Stringer and McKie, African Exodus. For opposing views, see recent works by M. Wolpoff, G. A. Clark, J. Relethford, and F. H. Smith. For a balanced overview, see Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

26. Animal species as different from one another as horses, zebras, and donkeys can interbreed, as can lions and tigers, even though the crosses are seldom fertile. The evolutionary gap in such cases is almost certainly wider than between many so-called species of early humans.

27. From H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, taken by William Golding as the epigraph of The Inheritors, 1955.

28. The case made by W. Arens in The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) that there are no well-documented cases of cannibalism (except survival cannibalism) does not stand up. While many accusations of the practice were, as he claims, unfounded propaganda from rival ethnic groups, there is also abundant hard evidence — butchered bone, special utensils, sound ethnographic and historical data — for both ritual and gourmet cannibalism, especially in the Pacific. There are also numerous documented cases of atrocity cannibalism from European wars in Reformation times and African wars between 1960 and the present.

29. Tattersall, Last Neanderthal, p. 77. A useful book, though Tattersall holds the view that Neanderthals were a separate species with no modern descendants.

30. Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman, The Neanderthals: Changing the Image of Mankind (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 6. These authors give a good summary of the conflicting evidence. For a more recent discussion of human origins and the Neanderthal problem, see General Anthropology 7, no. 2 (Spring 2001), a newsletter published by the American Anthropological Association.

31. Those who take this view use the classification Homo sapiens neanderthalensis for Neanderthals and that of Homo sapiens sapiens for Cro-Magnons and other modern humans.

32. Ornella Semino and other geneticists conclude that more than 80 per cent of the modern European gene pool has Upper Palaeolithic ancestry, while 20 per cent comes from Neolithic farmers who arrived much later from the Middle East. See Science, November 10, 2000.

33. An indicator of this is that early Neanderthal skulls are generally less robust than later ones. Tattersall, Last Neanderthal, p. 147.

34. Christopher Stringer, “The Evolution of Modern Humans: Where Are We Now?” General Anthropology 7, no. 2 (Spring 2001).

35. This cultural phase, called the Chatelperronian, is fully apparent by 36,000 years ago, at Saint-Césaire in western France. Tattersall, Last Neanderthal, p. 145. See also Francis B. Harold, “The Case Study of the Chatelperronian,” General Anthropology 7, no. 2 (Spring 2001). From analysing living floors and site structure, Donald Henry and his coauthors conclude that “putative linkages between [Neanderthal] biology and behaviour… can be dismissed” (Donald Henry et al., “Human Behavioral Organization in the Middle Paleolithic: Were Neanderthals Different?” American Anthropologist 106, no. 1 (March 2004): 29); they find no reason to think that Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon groups differed in cognitive ability.

36. Quoted in Leakey and Lewin, Origins Reconsidered, p. 280ff (caption to plate 4).

37. The studies were based on partial sequences from poorly preserved material. See John H. Relethford, “New Views on Neanderthal DNA,” General Anthropology 7, no. 2 (Spring 2001).

38. The Portuguese site is Lagar Velho and the bones are about 24,000 years old.

39. Trinkaus and Shipman (Neanderthals, p. 415) write that in central Europe, “there is abundant evidence of continuous evolution, genetic admixture and interbreeding between resident Neanderthals and the early modern humans who were filtering in slowly from the Levant.” See a curiously moving memoir by Loren Eiseley (Star Thrower, pp. 139–152) for his eloquent conviction that Neanderthals are still among us. Tattersall, who holds the view that Neanderthals were an entirely separate species, writes that the Neanderthal bun (the occipital torus) and its associated valley (the suprainiac depression) are features “unique to Neanderthals” (Tattersall, Last Neanderthal, p. 118). But I have one all the same.

40. In a similar way, many descendants of American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, Africans, and other displaced people are submerged in “white” populations largely unaware of their mixed ancestry.