Oh. My. God.
Wild Men? The First Fred Flintstones Were Left Holding the Baby yells the Daily Express.
Not much better, when you discount the popular culture reference, is the US News & World Report: Even Ancient Men Seemed to Like their Man Caves.
Urk. I cannot believe I just typed the words “man cave”. There, I did it again. Someone stop me…
USA Today manages to come up with an even more stereotypic angle: Human ancestors were Mama’s boys, their story is titled.
Lest we miss the point, Michigan’s ABC12 classified its version of the story (derived from the AP, with the title Wandering Women) under the heading “Bizarre News”, producing the unbelievably awful juxtaposition Bizarre News: Wandering Women.
The marginalization of the AP story is too bad, because the writer managed to get it basically right, while playing off stereotypes and popular culture in an amusing way:
Remember that old Dion song, “The Wanderer?” It was about a guy who would never settle down. But researchers say it was our female ancestors who did the wandering, while the males stayed put. A study in the journal Nature concludes that females from two pre-human species hit the trail. The researchers say it was probably to prevent inbreeding. The study analyzed mineral variation in fossilized teeth. Lead author Sandi Copeland, from the University of Colorado, says it would make sense for the males to stay put in order to develop a common defense.
The research, published in the June 2 edition of Nature, is described without gender stereotypes by the New Scientist.
Strontium isotopes were analyzed in teeth from two African australopithecene species, Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus.
The distinction between more local (within 50 km) and less local (beyond 50 km) strontium isotopes could not, of course, be directly correlated with sex: tooth size was used as a proxy. Larger teeth turned out to be local; smaller teeth non-local. Assuming sexual dimorphism among australopithecenes is correctly understood, larger teeth should belong to males.
Lead researcher Sandi Copeland, of the Max Planck Institute, argues that australopithecene populations may have depended on male bonds for defense of territory, requiring females to move “to find mates among unrelated males”. This would make these human ancestors most like chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest primate relatives, which in itself is not entirely surprising.
What is neat, though, is to have concrete data about individual migration histories. That makes this research worth more than the treatment accorded it by the press.
The proposed social structure is acknowledged to be speculative, and among the uniformly positive assessments of the research, there is a great deal more variation about whether Copeland’s proposed explanation for the observed pattern is yet warranted.
Somewhat lost in the popular press spin is the fact that the pattern is not perfect:
eight of nine large-toothed individuals — presumably males — grew up in the area where they died, whereas at least five of 10 small-toothed individuals — thought to be females — grew up elsewhere
Science News tells us.
I actually find this variability more interesting, as it suggest something more complicated is going on.
The Vancouver Sun suggests that there are divergent opinions about how to interpret the data among the researchers themselves:
U.S. anthropologists on the team are depicting the males as “stay-at-home-kind of-guys when compared to the gadabout gals.”
Their British colleagues at Oxford University said the findings “suggests early cavemen had ‘foreign brides.’”
In other words: the British researchers emphasize male agency; the US researchers consider the agency of both males and females. The majority– but not all!– males chose to stay locally– perhaps because they liked the locally available foods, the researchers suggest. Meanwhile, about half of the females at these sites grew up elsewhere, and so must have been motivated to travel longer distances.
Almost lost in the press coverage is the fact that the original research hypotheses were not concerned with sex differences at all. Instead, the researchers were expecting to find possible territorial differences between the two species, which overlapped in South Africa 1.8 million to 2.2 million years ago.
As Alan Boyle explains in MSNBC’s Cosmic Log,
Eight of the teeth came from the Sterkfontein Cave and were traced to a species known as Australopithecus africanus, dating back about 2.2 million years. The other 11 teeth came from the Swartkans Cave, and are attributed to Parathropus robustus, a species that lived about 1.8 million years ago. Australopithecus is thought to be a closer ancestor of modern humans than Paranthropus.
But the researchers found no systematic difference between the two species.
Rather, their data tells a story about tendencies toward greater and lesser mobility varying between larger and smaller individuals, a story that should be read, properly, as demonstrating that already at this early period, behavioral plasticity was high, not just between the sexes, but even within them.
We need to remember the one nonconformist male who came from somewhere else. We need to think about models that take into account that half of the females were from the local area.
None of that is helped by the kind of gender role stereotyping that the mainstream media indulged in.
Jason Antrosio
June 3, 2011
Hi Rosemary,
Thank you for a great post, interpreting the research and how it is depicted in both U.S. and international press. I wondered what you thought of Nicholas Wade’s coverage in the New York Times: “Teeth of Human Ancestors Hold Clues to Their Family Life.”
In some ways, I prefer the screaming headlines about ancient men holding babies to Wade’s approach, which seems to most emphasize male dominance and hierarchy. This Wade sentence seemed particularly disturbing: “The joint ancestor of chimps and humans lived about five million years ago and is often assumed to have had a chimplike social structure, with a male hierarchy, promiscuous mating by the females and all-out war between neighboring bands.” I’m not a primatologist, but I think Wade is amplifying some very dated and debated assumptions.
Thanks again!
Jason
Rosemary Joyce
June 3, 2011
Thanks for the query. I started a reply and realized I was writing another blog post, this one at What Makes Us Human.
The short answer: Wade is committed to a bizarrely reductionistic view of humanity, but not without contemporary research support. While I find Bernard Chapais’ work logically problematic (is is one long exercise in affirming the consequent) and dependent on asserting generalities where there actually is variation, he is an authority. And Wade hijacked his coverage of the new research to replay his previous article on Chapais.
Which is why I initially excluded him from this post (plus, I am NOT HAPPY about the new NY Times model– not wanting to send readers to a paywall).
The piece that most troubled me in Wade’s article was the following:
“The pattern of female dispersal is not unexpected, since it is practiced by chimpanzees, the closest living species to humans, and by some hunter-gatherers.”
“Some hunter-gatherers”?? what about the ones that don’t fit your a priori model???
Our anthropological problem, though, is that simpler explanations seem more powerful to those who have been sold on a bad model of science. We need a re-education plan that demonstrates that empirical adequacy (the ability to explain a greater amount of the data) is as much a virtue as simplicity.
For me, the new study is great for this. The simple model does not account for the one non-local male; or the five local females…