Lowly Origin: Where, When, and Why Our Ancestors First Stood Up / Edition 1

by Jonathan Kingdon

Overview

Our ability to walk on two legs is not only a characteristic human trait but one of the things that made us human in the first place. Once our ancestors could walk on two legs, they began to do many of the things that apes cannot do: cross wide open spaces, manipulate complex tools, communicate with new signal systems, and light fires. Titled after the last two words of Darwin's Descent of Man and written by a leading scholar of human evolution, Lowly Origin is the first book to explain the sources and consequences of bipedalism to a broad audience. Along the way, it accounts for recent fossil discoveries that show us a still incomplete but much bushier family tree than most of us learned about in school.


Jonathan Kingdon uses the very latest findings from ecology, biogeography, and paleontology to build a new and up-to-date account of how four-legged apes became two-legged hominins. He describes what it took to get up onto two legs as well as the protracted consequences of that step—some of which led straight to modern humans and others to very different bipeds. This allows him to make sense of recently unearthed evidence suggesting that no fewer than twenty species of humans and hominins have lived and become extinct. Following the evolution of two-legged creatures from our earliest lowly forebears to the present, Kingdon concludes with future options for the last surviving biped.


A major new narrative of human evolution, Lowly Origin is the best available account of what it meant—and what it means—to walk on two feet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691120287
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	10/04/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jonathan Kingdon is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Biological Anthropology and Department of Zoology of Oxford University. He is the author of and artist for numerous books, including Self-Made Man and Island Africa (Princeton). The Millennium issue of American Scientist named Kingdon's Atlas of Evolution in Africa one of the "100 books that shaped a century of science."

Read an Excerpt

Lowly Origin

Where, When, and Why Our Ancestors First Stood Up

---

By Jonathan Kingdon

Princeton

Copyright © 2003
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0691050864

---

Chapter One

PREFACE TO A SELF-PORTRAIT FROM THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

Why Lowly Origin? Peculiarity of bipedalism and role of geography and ecology in explaining it. Evolution by increments. Hypotheses and definitions. The beginnings of bipedalism dated to about 6 million years ago (mya), originating in East African coastal forests. "Evolution by river basin." Separate fore-/hindlimb origins. Bipedalism as the criterion for all hominins. Bipedalism and brain develop separately.

Charles Darwin, in the final words of his "Descent of Man" (1871), put it this way: "[I]t seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities-with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system-with all these exalted powers-Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin" (1).

Darwin was referring to many more than one or two stages of human evolutionary history. In the preceding pages, he had invoked wormlike, fishlike, and reptilian ancestries, and it was as much to these as to four-footed primates that he contrasted a soaring intellect, exalted powers, and noble, upright qualities.

For that most eminent of Victorians-no less than for any member of another culture, past or present, historic or prehistoric-uprightness (or, more prosaically, bipedalism) was a primary and definitive difference between humans and other animals. How that stance evolved is still a great mystery, and although fragmentary fossils of very early bipeds are, at last, being uncovered, there are still many more questions than answers when it comes to giving life to these broken bones and teeth. Some new ideas about bipedalism, its precursor conditions, as well as some of its consequences are central themes in this book. Although there are many scientific papers and single chapters of books that discuss bipedalism, this is probably the first to be devoted to it as a single dominant theme-the central condition on which human evolution is predicated.

In borrowing Darwin's two concluding words as my title, I invite reflection on a moment or "stage" in human evolution that was both metaphorically and literally "lowly." I attempt to reconstruct, in the light of much new evidence and inference, the appearance, ecology, and geography of those ancestral apes that were not yet bipedal yet must already have been predominantly terrestrial. Ancestors whose nonerect gait put them on the other side of that great conceptual divide between the category "Apes" and what we call "Hominids." I also reflect, but in a much more summary fashion, on the very earliest and even more "lowly" attributes of primitive aquatic vertebrates, because I find some relevance there for hand-brain connections.

The many undeniably apelike features of human gross anatomy were sufficient for Darwin's argument, but modern genetics has greatly extended the depth and reach of his insights. From this very contemporary perspective, his words "still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp" reads like a prophecy. You and I now know that almost every step of our evolutionary history is written into every cell of our bodies. My genome includes sequences that date back more than 700 million years, when my ancestor consisted of no more than one cell. Locked into the genetic mosaic that adds up to a living being are huge numbers of indelible or "undeleted" genetic particles that demonstrate a patrimony that goes back not just to apes but to the start of life on Earth. In common with every other organism, each one of us is the sum of genetic additions and subtractions on an unbroken thread of life that ties us, step by step, back to that fecund moment of origin, the first and lowliest of all our "beginnings" (figure 1.1).

It can justly be argued that because evolution is the sum of so many tiny genetic increments, any focus on just one event has to be distorting and arbitrary, even for so apparently momentous an event as rising up on two legs. To offset such conceptual isolation and to put bipedalism in a broader perspective, I have devised more than one framework to present my ideas. Only multiple frameworks can hint at the scale and difficulty of the enterprise. Our gait may be as plainly factual as our unquestionable existence as primates, mammals, animals; yet the puzzle of why an ape should get up on two legs is inseparable from the larger mystery of our emergence from nature as a culture-bearing species. For all the new fossils, newly mapped genome, and new awareness of the biological roots of human health, reproduction, and material culture, it is our profound and continuing ignorance of nature itself that remains the primary obstacle to self-knowledge. It is not difficult to report new discoveries from the frontiers of science; but it is less easy, as a scientist, to acknowledge that lacking the intellectual tools necessary to understand nature, we lack the means to understand ourselves. In the meantime, my multistranded narrative may hint at some of the many dimensions of human evolution while also expressing a personal confidence that the gap between nature and culture will one day be bridged by one of our greatest cultural achievements: science.

My first, largely symbolic presentation derives from an attempt, in the late 1980s to put together what I envisaged as a "Family Album," a sort of pasted-up scrapbook of my far-flung family, the diaspora of modern humans (2). After publishing it under the title "Self-made Man," I was challenged by a friend, who knew that I was also a painter, to attempt a "self-portrait" painted in both words and images. Not an autoimage of the artist as a young man compared with his middle-aged and elderly self, but rather a self-portrait informed by modern genetics and ecology as well as some less modern palaeontology. A portrait in which the younger self is the minimal vertebrate, an appetite-driven, wriggling backbone attracted hither, repelled thither; the youth an alert mammal-like reptile; the person in his prime a vivacious ape; and the elderly, worldly-wise wizard a contemporary, wholly modern human.

To try and retrace any part of that ancestry can be portrayed as a very personal quest, and there can be few that would deny the self-centeredness of our interest. It is in that spirit that I have adopted the metaphor of self-portrait as a medium to tell the story. But it is a self-portrait that reveals itself by increments. Each is drawn at a different stage of life, and each is set within a different landscape. Lifted out of this succession for special attention is the pivotal event on which human evolution hangs. This is not the arrival of consciousness, the ability to talk, or the evolution of a big brain. (All of these properties seem to have had very protracted histories.) Rather, it is the much more sudden event of walking on two legs, not four. What follows is not only new as an explanation, using new data, but also invokes new ways of approaching the problem of bipedal origins.

By including rudimentary vertebrates, reptiles, and monkeys in my autoportrait, I am expressing my self-awareness of belonging to nature, not being inexplicably different. In acknowledging the many qualities that seem more or less unique to me and my kind, I do not forget to remind myself that they must, in every case, be derived from earlier conditions that are typical for primates or other animals. Most of the characteristics that we envisage as uniquely human are actually species-specific amalgams, truly unique recombinations or composites of much more modest, preexistent increments. Some of the many unknowns in our evolutionary history will eventually become more understandable through some such incremental approach.

In such a fragmented biography, the acquisition of bipedal stance can so easily be presented as some sort of portentous coming of age: the moment in which all that followed would change irrevocably. The term hominin (or hominid) that we use to separate all bipeds from their ape cousins certainly reinforces that expectation. Yet, as many newly discovered fossils demonstrate, our monopoly of bipedalism must be seen in the context of numerous extinct bipeds. Since I first began to assemble the material for "Self-made Man," the number of new fossil hominin species has doubled, and what was envisaged as a pagoda tree of human evolution has become a bush that looks more and more like a thicket with numerous pruned branches and a succession of dead ends. While the biogeographic model presented in the following pages contributes new ideas to explain such bewildering diversity, only more fossils from more localities can tell us the true story.

The supposed bell of destiny must be muted by the awareness that not all the apes that became bipedal found themselves on a human trajectory. Getting up on two legs may have rung in a human future for our direct ancestors, but at least some bipeds, including some of the ones best known as fossils, remained "cranial apes." That much is borne out by the fossil record. So, assuming that the distinction is a real one, what was it about our specific lineage that emancipated the earliest members of our branch from being just one more type of bipedal ape?

For clues to that puzzle, I turn to my second, less symbolic framework of ideas, locating my players in a succession of geographic and ecological contexts (without doing violence to fossil facts or the logic of known paleoecology and paleogeography). I seek answers in known anatomical changes that anticipate typically human attributes by diminishing the differences between juveniles and adults, males and females. I suggest corresponding changes in behavior that might have enhanced versatile all-group responses to various unpredictable challenges. Such social and mental versatility would have undermined the more genetically fixed responses of a species in possession of an ecological niche that existed within relatively predictable limits. Step by step, the predetermined behavior of a species with a single niche must have given way to the new competences of a species that could acquire multiple niches through an ever-expanding armory of technology, techniques, and eventually systems of communication to back them up.

For the most part, I have used the often random and accidental provenances of fossils as mere guides to the larger ecological and geographic contexts for human evolution, seeking clues in those details of African biogeography and ecology that we can still retrieve and reconstruct today. I have also sought to put the likely anatomical and behavioral responses of early hominins to a succession of environmental challenges into a sequential and spatial order that is consistent with the fossil record. A full time chart and checklist of fossil hominins has been kept for the last chapter, together with a summary of my conclusions, leaving the rest of the chapters to stress my biogeographic perspectives. Thus the first tie-up between time, place, ecology, and behavior is located on the east African coast, the second and third involve movement into the interior (each involving subtly different but highly significant divergences). The hominin trail leads on into Highvelt and other interior uplands and thence, very much later, to the Atlas Mountains (or Arabia). Each such translocation involved further refinements of bipedalism, from merely functional standing and walking to much later skills in fast running and jumping (3). In addition, there must have been a succession of mental and behavioral adjustments as the habitats and climates of particular populations changed over time. These are some of the disparate strands of analysis within which I have presented my ideas.

Finally, as a specialist in the evolution of mammals, the perspective that I have sustained longest (and reinforced most decisively in this book) is that of the emergence of humans as the evolution of yet another mammal-a very peculiar and special one, true, but in essence just one more African mammal. I have, as long as I can remember, always seen myself in that light and seek here to share that self-image. If the reflection you see is distorted by the mirror I have constructed or by my own deficiencies of vision and knowledge, that is my responsibility. But I take heart from the certainty that I share, with you and with others before us, the impulse to try and make sense of the deeply puzzling animal that stares back at us from the mirror.

I like to think that Charles Darwin, who must have been amused by contemporary cartoons of himself as an ape or the final morph of an egg-larva-pupa transformation (figure 1.2), would have enjoyed the conceit of a hagfish (a primitive, eel-like fish) rendered as a self-portrait. After all, he concluded that the "early ancestors of man, thus seen in the dim recesses of time, must have been as simply, or even still more simply organised than the lancelet or the amphioxus." As if in anticipation of the Human Genome Project, he also invited the idea of reconstructing the past from the realities of the present: "look to man as he exists; and we shall, I think, be able partially to restore the structure of our early progenitors, during successive periods" (1).

Self-portraits require mirrors, but reflections can stare back at surprising moments and from unexpected experiences. For example, among the diversions of my backwoods childhood in Africa were hypnotic audiences over the cadavers of various wild animals while they were being butchered or skinned. Commonest were antelopes, ostriches, or wild pigs being prepared for the pot. Then there was a leopard being carefully skinned for its coat; and a zebra. Least commonplace were species such as an aardvark, a striped hyena, or a monkey, victims of some accident and dismembered or dissected out of pure curiosity.

I especially remember the brutal rending away of a baboon's pungent pelt and the revelation of its stretched-out, pink, pathetic nakedness-like a jarring rip in the invisible curtain that had kept me separate from all other animals. Through the torn skin, its flesh was difficult to dissociate from my own. As a very small child I had once spent some months playing with an equally juvenile baboon, but for all its noisy, toothy determination to subordinate me to its ferocious, infantile will, I had somehow kept vestiges of my species-specific distance. Yet here was the racked body of a dead adult that mirrored me. As my own warm, living hands sampled the springy resilience of cool gray fingers I imagined myself suffering the helpless indignities of being played with because I, too, for an instant, was dead. This must remain one of my earliest experiences of seeing my self-portrait in another animal. Years later, the element of self-portraiture must have remained when I made anatomical studies and drawings, not only of a baboon but also of humans.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Lowly Origin by Jonathan Kingdon Copyright © 2003 by
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

	List of Figures	ix
	List of Tables	xv
	Acknowledgments	xvii
Chapter 1	Preface to a Self-portrait from the Center of the World	1
Chapter 2	On Being a Primate. From Gondwana to the Forests of Egypt	38
Chapter 3	On Being an Ape. Excursions to Asia and Back	75
Chapter 4	On Being a Ground Ape. Zanj	115
Chapter 5	On Becoming a Biped. "Evolution by Basin": Domes, Rifts, and Floodplains	151
Chapter 6	On Being a Manipulative Man-ape. Isolation in the South	194
Chapter 7	On the Uncertainties of Becoming Human. Main-line, Side-line, or Parallel Humans?	227
Chapter 8	On Going Far with Fire. Africans Go Abroad	260
Chapter 9	On Being a Self-made Human. The Modern Diaspora	291
Chapter 10	In Conclusion. Confessions of a Repentant Vandal	333
Appendix	Plants Known to Be Especially Favored by Humans and Other Primates	371
	Index	375

What People are Saying About This

Philip Pullman

Jonathan Kingdon's work is one of the things that make the present day such an exciting time for anyone with the slightest intellectual curiosity. His subject matter is our profound and thrilling human origins, and his stance toward it makes his work unique and priceless. Not only is Kingdon a scientist of commanding authority, he is an artist whose hand transmits his knowledge through drawings so swift and graceful that revelation and admiration arrive together. His wonderful new book takes a characteristically original look at one of the things that makes us human: our walking on two legs. There is no one alive who could do it better.
— Philip Pullman, author of "The Amber Spyglass"

Richard Dawkins

Jonathan Kingdon is a Living World Treasure. One of Africa's greatest zoological artists, he is also one of zoology's leading authorities on Africa's mammals. A world class zoologist, ecologist, and writer, he also thinks deeply about human prehistory and evolution. Bipedality is humanity's founding peculiarity. Lowly Origin is Kingdon's highly original take on how it came about, and he manages to broaden his canvas to accommodate all of human evolution. An artist with words and a poet with images, only Jonathan Kingdon could have written this book.
— Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford, Fellow of the Royal Society

Foley

Kingdon has made a unique contribution to the field of mammalian evolution and African ecology, both in his writing and in his art. His approach to human evolution, with its focus on the natural history of people and animals, is very special and important.
— Robert A. Foley, University of Cambridge

Groves

This well-written book offers new insights into the biogeographic and ecological influences on human evolution and helps us make sense of the fossil record.
— Colin P. Groves, Australian National University

From the Publisher

"Jonathan Kingdon's work is one of the things that make the present day such an exciting time for anyone with the slightest intellectual curiosity. His subject matter is our profound and thrilling human origins, and his stance toward it makes his work unique and priceless. Not only is Kingdon a scientist of commanding authority, he is an artist whose hand transmits his knowledge through drawings so swift and graceful that revelation and admiration arrive together. His wonderful new book takes a characteristically original look at one of the things that makes us human: our walking on two legs. There is no one alive who could do it better."—Philip Pullman, author of The Amber Spyglass

"Jonathan Kingdon is a Living World Treasure. One of Africa's greatest zoological artists, he is also one of zoology's leading authorities on Africa's mammals. A world class zoologist, ecologist, and writer, he also thinks deeply about human prehistory and evolution. Bipedality is humanity's founding peculiarity. Lowly Origin is Kingdon's highly original take on how it came about, and he manages to broaden his canvas to accommodate all of human evolution. An artist with words and a poet with images, only Jonathan Kingdon could have written this book."—Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford, Fellow of the Royal Society

"This well-written book offers new insights into the biogeographic and ecological influences on human evolution and helps us make sense of the fossil record."—Colin P. Groves, Australian National University

"Kingdon has made a unique contribution to the field of mammalian evolution and African ecology, both in his writing and in his art. His approach to human evolution, with its focus on the natural history of people and animals, is very special and important."—Robert A. Foley, University of Cambridge

Editorial Reviews

"Naturalist-artist Kingdon is well known for his books on African mammals and his beautiful illustrations of them. . . . [This] book is well written and charmingly illustrated."

Choice

There are people who will authoritatively disagree . . . however, any subsequent account will have to parry Kingdon's version with equally explicit consideration of . . . equally vivid pictures of ways of life.

London Review of Books - Alison Jolly

Jonathan Kingdon is . . . singularly well equipped to cast an eye over the thorny problem of human origins. . . . Kingdon has read widely and wisely. . . . [He] does not claim to have found the answer to human origins. The real message of the book is the rich contextual evidence it provides. Wise students of human evolutionary history would be well advised to think carefully about that message.

Bioscience - Bernard Wood

Lowly Origin is an evocative book that highlights one of the key factors that makes us human—our bipedality. . . . Kingdon's writing is lucid and his illustrations are beautiful in showcasing just how this important component of human evolution took place. . . . A must read. A must have.

American Biology Teacher - Ann Haley MacKenzie

Jonathan Kingdon is a subtle amalgam of artist and scientist. He has a deep and up-to-date knowledge of human prehistory, and of the topology and geography of Africa, the continent where most of human prehistory happened. But he is also our leading zoological artist, and I think it must be his artist's eye that gives his writing style its vividness. . . . Kingdon is a wonderful example of a "Third Culture" writer: a scientist who communicated his original ideas to fellow scholars in books that can be read—and enjoyed—by any educated person.

Times Literary Supplement - Richard Dawkins

Every so often . . . a new concept comes into being. In Lowly Origin, Jonathan Kingdon puts forward just such a new concept. . . . Lowly Origin is full of insights and displays the profound knowledge of African geography and ecology that is the hallmark of all Kingdon's work.

Times Literary Supplement - Peter Andrews

Lowly Origin . . . provides much new food for thought for lay readers and specialists alike.

Journal of Anthropological Research - Osbjorn M. Pearson

Elegant and thoughtful. . . . Jonathan Kingdon commands a unique position at the interface of science and art . . . Whether or not [he] manages to convince you of his larger thesis, you will be provoked along the way by the many connections he makes. And just as important, Lowly Origin is a landmark for its thoroughness in integrating the story of human evolution (which he brings up to the present day) with that of the evolving landscapes and habitats of the African continent.

Natural History - Ian Tattersall

Lowly Origin is brimming with information, insight, experience and speculation about how we became human. . . . [A] comprehensive and evocative rendition of who we are and how we fit in to the natural world.

Los Angeles Times Book Review - Donald Johanson

[A] remarkable new book. . . . [I]n Kingdon we find a primate who is unafraid to give the establishment a good hard shake, and whose keen powers of observation and reasoning make him impossible to summarily dismiss. . . . Indeed so packed with novel ideas is Lowly Origin that it presents us with a picture of human evolution quite unlike anything that has come before it.

New York Review of Books - Tim Flannery

There are people who will authoritatively disagree . . . however, any subsequent account will have to parry Kingdon's version with equally explicit consideration of . . . equally vivid pictures of ways of life.
— Alison Jolly

London Review of Books

Jonathan Kingdon is . . . singularly well equipped to cast an eye over the thorny problem of human origins. . . . Kingdon has read widely and wisely. . . . [He] does not claim to have found the answer to human origins. The real message of the book is the rich contextual evidence it provides. Wise students of human evolutionary history would be well advised to think carefully about that message.
— Bernard Wood

Bioscience

Lowly Origin is an evocative book that highlights one of the key factors that makes us human—our bipedality. . . . Kingdon's writing is lucid and his illustrations are beautiful in showcasing just how this important component of human evolution took place. . . . A must read. A must have.
— Ann Haley MacKenzie

American Biology Teacher

Jonathan Kingdon is a subtle amalgam of artist and scientist. He has a deep and up-to-date knowledge of human prehistory, and of the topology and geography of Africa, the continent where most of human prehistory happened. But he is also our leading zoological artist, and I think it must be his artist's eye that gives his writing style its vividness. . . . Kingdon is a wonderful example of a "Third Culture" writer: a scientist who communicated his original ideas to fellow scholars in books that can be read—and enjoyed—by any educated person.
— Richard Dawkins

Times Literary Supplement

Lowly Origin . . . provides much new food for thought for lay readers and specialists alike.
— Osbjorn M. Pearson

Journal of Anthropological Research

Elegant and thoughtful. . . . Jonathan Kingdon commands a unique position at the interface of science and art . . . Whether or not [he] manages to convince you of his larger thesis, you will be provoked along the way by the many connections he makes. And just as important, Lowly Origin is a landmark for its thoroughness in integrating the story of human evolution (which he brings up to the present day) with that of the evolving landscapes and habitats of the African continent.
— Ian Tattersall

Natural History

Lowly Origin is brimming with information, insight, experience and speculation about how we became human. . . . [A] comprehensive and evocative rendition of who we are and how we fit in to the natural world.
— Donald Johanson

Los Angeles Times Book Review

[A] remarkable new book. . . . [I]n Kingdon we find a primate who is unafraid to give the establishment a good hard shake, and whose keen powers of observation and reasoning make him impossible to summarily dismiss. . . . Indeed so packed with novel ideas is Lowly Origin that it presents us with a picture of human evolution quite unlike anything that has come before it.
— Tim Flannery

New York Review of Books

Jonathan Kingdon is uniquely skilled to embrace the daunting task of learning how we became human because of his intimate lifelong affair with Africa. Brought up in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and sensing the pulse of Africa as a barefoot youth, he nourished his curiosity on a never-ending diet of close encounters in the crucible of human origins. The real message from Kingdon's book, Lowly Origin, is that hominid fossils are only a part of the story. Thus, Kingdon ponders the origins of our singular adaptation within a richly textured framework of African animal behavior, geography and ecology. — Donald Johanson

The Los Angeles Times

Depending on whom you ask, bipedalism emerged to free up the arms to carry babies and food, to allow for a more distant line of vision, to keep the body cool or for phallic display and intimidation. But Kingdon, who spent his childhood among the thickets of Tanzania, has little patience for the surmising that occurs at "intellectual hothouses" thousands of miles from the African continent.

Instead, he maintains, this momentous transformation can only be understood through intimate familiarity with the geography and climate within which it occurred. — Mark Parascandola

The Washington Post

"[A] remarkable new book. . . . [I]n Kingdon we find a primate who is unafraid to give the establishment a good hard shake, and whose keen powers of observation and reasoning make him impossible to summarily dismiss. . . . Indeed so packed with novel ideas is Lowly Origin that it presents us with a picture of human evolution quite unlike anything that has come before it."—-Tim Flannery, New York Review of Books

"Lowly Origin is brimming with information, insight, experience and speculation about how we became human. . . . [A] comprehensive and evocative rendition of who we are and how we fit in to the natural world."—-Donald Johanson, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Elegant and thoughtful. . . . Jonathan Kingdon commands a unique position at the interface of science and art . . . Whether or not [he] manages to convince you of his larger thesis, you will be provoked along the way by the many connections he makes. And just as important, Lowly Origin is a landmark for its thoroughness in integrating the story of human evolution (which he brings up to the present day) with that of the evolving landscapes and habitats of the African continent."—-Ian Tattersall, Natural History

"Lowly Origin . . . provides much new food for thought for lay readers and specialists alike."—-Osbjorn M. Pearson, Journal of Anthropological Research

From the Publisher