Darwin visited South Africa in 1836. The HMS Beagle was on its homeward journey and although the crew were keen to get home, Captain Fitzroy needed to exercise one of his interests and visit the newly opened South African Observatory. Darwin went ashore to “geologise”. The geology of the region interested him greatly. But ever the naturalist, he discovered a bug in the Cape, and it is named after him – Kaapiad darwini.

In all he spent 18 days in the Cape. By all accounts he was sick and miserable, the cold and rainy Cape winter not helping matters. He recorded in his diary that it was a rather desolate country. (In a later book describing his travels, he stated that “there was no country like South Africa” with regard to the large animals that could be found in the interior.)

The world renowned British astronomer Jon Herschel was living at the Cape at this time, studying the Southern sky. Herschel was fascinated by the Cape’s unusual indigenous flora and started speculating on how species evolved. Darwin and Captain Fitzroy were invited by Herschel to dinner and although the details of the conversation are unknown, the 26 year-old Darwin was said to be very impressed by Herschel’s ideas.

The city of Cape Town have erected a series of commemorative plaques to mark the route Darwin took during his stay. Here are images of one of the plaques, taken in Sea Point, Cape Town.

Click to view larger image.

Related articles:

• Darwin’s South Africa legacy
• Wits celebrates Darwin’s birthday

The specimen, one of three found on the site, is impressively large at seven metres long, the length of a African elephant bull. Click though for the full-size images.

Aardonyx skeleton

Aardonyx skull

Aardonyx premaxilla

Aardonyx claw

Dr Adam Yates announces Aardonyx celestae

The new species, a vegetarian dinosaur named Aardonyx celestae, from the early Jurassic period (approximately 195 million years old and seven metres long), was described by Dr Adam Yates, the primary investigator and a palaeontologist from the Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research,  University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The genus name (Aardonyx) means “Earth Claw”, (Aard – Afrikaans for Earth) and (Onyx – Greek for claw) an appropriate name, given that the large, earth-encrusted foot claws were some of the first bones to be discovered in the town of Senekal, near Bethlehem in the Northern Free State, in South Africa. The species name (celestae) is given to acknowledge the work of Celeste Yates who prepared much of the fossil.

“This species is important as the Aardonyx was an animal close to the common ancestor of the gigantic sauropod dinosaurs,” explains Yates. “Sauropods, known popularly as “brontosaurs”, were the largest backboned animals to walk on land with their long necks, tree-trunk legs and whip-like tails. Some were even longer and exceeded 100 feet (about 30 metres) in length.  Aardonyx gives us a glimpse into what the first steps towards becoming a sauropod involved.”
The discovery was made by a Wits postgraduate palaeontology student, Mr Marc Blackbeard, who began excavating two sites in the Northern Free State, five years ago, under the leadership of Yates. “We knew that there was likely to be some fossils in these ‘bone beds’ discovered by James Kitching about 20 years ago, but we did not expect to find anything of this magnitude,” says Yates. 

Yates elaborates on the anatomy of Aardonyx celestae: “The dinosaur had a wide-gaping mouth, bracing joints in the back vertebrae that made the backbone rigid enough to support great weight and a forearm and hand capable of grasping and supporting weight. Growth rings in the rib and shoulder blade sections show that Aardonyx was not full grown – it was probably less than 10 years old when it died near a river or stream.”

He adds: “Aardonyx probably walked on its hind legs but could drop onto all fours as well. It had flattened feet with large claws that supported body weight on the inside of the foot and a robust thigh bone (femur) for supporting weight.”
Dr Chinsamy-Turan a Wits graduate and a Vertebrate Paleohistologist at UCT concurs: “My analysis of the bone microstructure in the ribs and shoulder blades of Aardonyx suggests that while it had experienced at least seven spurts or cycles of growth, it was not a fully grown animal.”

Dr Adam Yates lies down next to newly exposed dino-femur

According to Dr Matthew Bonnan, a Vertebrate Paleobiologist, Department of Biological Sciences and an author of the paper, they already knew that the earliest sauropods and near-sauropods would be bipeds.  “What Aardonyx shows us, however, is that walking quadrupedally and bearing weight on the inside of the foot is a trend that started very early in these dinosaurs, much earlier than previously hypothesised. The bones of the forearm are shaped like those of sauropods – this means that the forearm and hand could bear weight and that Aardonyx could drop onto all-fours as well as walk bipedally.”

Although the researchers draw the conclusion that there is an international consensus on evolution, as a South African in makes depressing reading.

The top (blue) bar indicates the percentage of adults who have heard of Charles Darwin and at least a little about his theory of evolution. South Africa comes in at the bottom of the class at a meagre 27%.

The bottom (red) bar indicates the percentage of adults who have both heard of Darwin and know a bit about his theory, and agreed with the opinion that “enough scientific evidence exists to support Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution”. So here South Africa just sneaked in ahead of Islamic Egypt – at just 12% (42% of the 27% above) . Great.

So what accounts for this lamentable situation? After all, South Africa has provided the world with some of its best known fossils and other evidence of evolution described by scientific superstars. Evolution should be as much a part of South African consciousness as, say is soccer. What makes South Africa a creationist paradise?

The obvious problem must be education. The fact that only 27% of adults have a at least a nodding acquaintance with Darwin and that he had something to do with the theory of evolution must be blamed fairly and squarely on poor education.

South Africa has had a long history of poor education. During the apartheid years black people were subject to what was called “Bantu Education” whose aim was to produce a class of labourers – hewers of wood and drawers of water. Religion was also heavily promoted amongst them and it was greedily accepted. There was no room for the teaching of foreign concepts like evolution there.

The privileged whites fell under a system called “Christian National Education”, which promoted a deeply conservative, Calvinist world view which simply had no place for evolution.  It was certainly not taught in schools besides some vague references to it in biology lessons. None of the current teachers were therefore schooled in evolutionary theory.

The current dispensation is not much better. Besides ill-equipped teachers, society at large remains a highly superstitious one with only about 15% of people reporting no religion. But on top of that is the race obsession of South Africans, particularly that of the government. But how would that effect views on evolution?

The following quotes culled from an article on introducing evolution into the curriculum illustrate both the religious and racial objections to evolution:

Josef de Beer, a lecturer in the faculty of education at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), said teachers of evolution might have religious concerns. “My experience in teaching evolution in a foundation-year programme at the University of Pretoria is that many students find evolution problematic because of their religious beliefs.”

At a recent conference at UJ, where teachers were trained in evolution, a teacher said: “I am disappointed about the fact that evolution attacks God’s creation. It also mixes Genesis with idol worshippers of Babylon, which were never there when God created planet Earth.”

Another said he thought the topic should be voluntary because he didn’t think it suitable for people who believe in God. “I am totally against evolution,” another teacher said.

Matters came to a head after snippets of a video, Tiny Humans: Finding Hobbits in Flores, was shown. The video traces the origin of tiny prehistoric humans somewhere on an Indonesian island. They are depicted as short and dark-skinned people. This offended some black teachers. They said that evolution was a racist theory. It “terribly undermines black people, everything bad gets a black colour. It means blacks were apes,” they said.

Sigh… What can you say? Well, I did say something when this article was published last year and you can read my (published) response below the fold:

Sir

I read Thabo Mohlala’s article (“Evolution to be taught in SA schools”) with amusement and then growing dismay. I’dlove to know what Mohlala understands by the term “evolution”, since his article gives no indication that he even knows it’s a scientific theory. His ignorance is however overshadowed by the lunatic comments of the “teachers” he quotes.

Mohlala presents the teaching of the theory of evolution as the introducing a set of (probably atheist) ideas as a means of critically thinking about religion. What about the science and the overwhelming scientific evidence in support of Evolution?  What about the fact that understanding the theory of Evolution is absolutely critical in the study of modern biology?

The article mentions that the theory of evolution has a “growing body of followers”, making it sound like a religious sect. It is one of the cornerstones of modern science, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, particularly in the life sciences. It is hard science, without any competing scientific theory.  In the 120 years since Darwin published his “On the Origin of Species”, not a single bit of evidence has been produced to refute it. No faith is required to believe it: evolution is a fact in the sense that gravity is a fact. By injecting a highly spurious and unsupported paragraph about some Christian parents in the US challenging its teaching at schools in 2005, he further casts evolution as a philosophical idea competing in the religious space. As far as teaching evolution in the US goes, evolution is taught as part of the school curricula – specifically because it is science, not religion. This has been upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1987, and more recently in the famous Dover, Pennsylvania intelligent design case.

But most alarming are the quotes Mahlala has gathered. Did this really come out of a teacher’s mouth: “I am  disappointed about the fact that evolution attacks God’s creation. It also mixes Genesis with idol worshippers of Babylon, which were never there when God created planet Earth.” Besides being the most jaw-slackening, uneducated religious twaddle I have ever read, the fact that it was uttered by a teacher who would conceivably teach evolution is sickening.

And the group of teachers who think that evolution is a racist theory also clearly do not have the slightest grasp of the theory of evolution. To say “[it] terribly undermines black people, everything bad gets a black colour. It means blacks were apes,” just shows that how important understanding evolution is when attempting to think about anything biological. The fact that the ancestors of all humans were probably black – for good biological and evolutionary reasons – should remove any offence. In fact evolutionary biology dispels racist myths.

“Teachers of evolution will need to be well trained.”  You think?

Tim Beck

By the way, if you want to partake in a British Council Internet survey asking the same sort of questions, head over here.

Nicknamed “Lluc,” the male bears a strikingly “modern” facial appearance with a flat face, rather than a protruding one. The finding sheds important new light on the evolutionary development of hominids, including orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans.

In a study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Salvador Moyà-Solà, director of the Institut Català de Paleontologia (ICP) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and colleagues present evidence for the new genus and species, dubbed Anoiapithecus brevirostris. The scientific name is derived from the region where the fossil was found (l’Anoia) and also from its “modern” facial morphology, characterized by a very short face.

Thankfully, no “missing link” talk. But its modern, flat-faced appearance does raise intriguing questions about its relationship to us. Could we have a European ancestor after all?

Anoiapithecus displays a very modern facial morphology, with a muzzle prognathism (i.e., protrusion of  the jaw) so reduced that, within the family Hominidae, scientists can only find comparable values within the genus Homo, whereas the remaining great apes are notoriously more prognathic (i.e., having jaws that project forward markedly). The extraordinary resemblance does not indicate that Anoiapithecus has any relationship with Homo, the researchers note. However, the similarity might be a case of evolutionary convergence, where two species evolving separately share common features.

So the debate revolves around the geographic origin of the hominid family. The consensus at the moment is that it is Africa, so is Anoiapithecus brevirostris a European offshoot from an African family? And, fascinatingly, did this European offshoot then return to Africa? This is the subject of an article in New Scientist magazine.

Moyà-Solà says that A. brevirostris and some similar-looking kenyapithecins lived in Europe shortly after the afrohominid and kenyapithecin lineages split, and so that the divergence itself may have happened there. If he is right, our hominid ancestors lived in Europe and only later migrated to Africa, where modern humans evolved.

This “into Africa” scenario is likely to be controversial. Critics argue that discoveries like Moyà-Solà’s are more likely to reflect the quality of the fossil records in Africa and Europe than offer clues to the actual origins of hominids.

Muddying the waters is that the European fossil record for the time is superior to the African one. The Spanish project is continuing and researchers anticipate that more fossils remains will be found in the future. These should provide more information to help solve the puzzle.

Isn’t science exciting!

About a decade ago Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham and others developed an hypothesis about the role of fire, and particularly of the cooking of food, in human evolution. It is an intriguing idea which helps to explain these apparent anomalies – and much more.

Wranham has now published a book: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. It’s a fascinating read and is thoroughly convincing. When I heard some commentator call it a “new theory of human evolution” my sceptical hackles rose, but Wranham claims, probably quite accurately, “What is extraordinary about this simple claim is that it is new”.

In essence, our path from ape to modern human ago began about two million years ago when our ancestor Homo Erectus emerged knowing how to control fire and heat food. Eating cooked food – at first tubers and other plants and later meat – made digestion easier, leading to selection for smaller guts. Cooked food takes less energy to digest and provides more energy for the amount consumed. This extra energy could then have been used to power larger, energy sucking brains.

The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than  before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by
natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.

Of course fire would explain our relatively hairless skins which gave us the advantage of greater temperature control allowing us to endure long periods of physical exertion – such as hunting – without overheating. There is also the argument that fire allowed us to evolve into more social, calmer beings.

Humans in all cultures and all locations cook their food. Wranham cites studies that show that we cannot survive on uncooked food, and by extension, neither could our ancestors. As an example, one study shows that 50 percent of women on an all-raw food diet stop menstruating. Among the list of ills that befall those on raw diets are back and hip problem, and frequent urination.

But their is a darker side effect too: male authority over women. Marriage, or as Wranham calls it, “a primitive protection racket”, is really a means to protect lone (female) cooks from hungry (male) thieves.

Relying on cooked food creates opportunities for cooperation, but just as important, it exposes cooks to being exploited. Cooking takes time, so lone cooks cannot easily guard their wares from determined thieves such as hungry males without their own food.

A male-dominated culture with women trapped in a subservient role – from cooking? I am always a bit leery of evolution “just-so” stories, but Wranham presents his postulations in a nuanced and convincingly rational way. As Edward O. Wilson said, “In this thoroughly researched and marvelously well written book,
Richard Wrangham has convincingly supplied a missing piece in the
evolutionary origin of humanity.” I can’t argue with that.

It seems that the anomaly is that we have small mouths. Yes, us load, big-mouthed creatures. Says Wrangham: “They could equally well call us the small-mouthed ape.”

Ida is a lemur-like creature but differs from a lemur in many respects, in particular, the absence of a toilet claw and a toothcomb. Darwinius masillae is part of a larger group of primates, Adapoidea, not simply a lemur. The scientific paper is available and can be found here.

This is clearly an extremely interesting and important find. But the media reports – television, radio and press – are running sensational reports about this being the “missing link” and that it provides “proof” of our – human – evolution from the animal kingdom. The hype is that Ida is our direct ancestor, even that Ida show human characteristics. Here’s but one example:

Evidence in the talus bone links Ida to us. The bone has the same shape as in humans today. Only the human talus is obviously bigger.

This is obvious nonsense. Having the “same shape” is so non-specific as to be meaningless. And as for  “Missing link”: this is an archaic phrase now adopted by creationists to cast doubt on the fact of evolution. The tactic is to demand that scientists produce every single morphological change – the full evolutionary record – which is impossible. And of course when any fossil of a new transitional creature is found, another gap, or missing link, is added.

At first glance, this media onslaught with pretty much the same (wrong) message is puzzling. But dig a bit deeper and you will find a well-coordinated public relations effort to promote an upcoming documentary and a new book titled The Link. The press release from the University of Olso has a huge heading: “The Link”. They have a website named, you guessed it, The Link, where they describe what they’re doing:

The scientific publication of Ida has been carefully timed so that the film, book and website can be launched at the same time. The scientists see this as a new way of presenting science for the 21st century, where a major scientific find becomes available to everyone, wherever they are in the world at the same time. Ida connects to us all, and we can all share in understanding her.

This “link” they’re talking about is the one directly to humans. A member of the team, Dr Jens Franzen takes this to unbelievable lengths, describing Ida as “like the Eighth Wonder of the World”, because of the extraordinary completeness of the skeleton. He can’t contain himself:

It was information “palaeontologists can normally only dream of”, he said.

In addition, Ida bears “a close resemblance to ourselves” he said, with
nails instead of claws, a grasping hand and an opposable thumb – like
humans and some other primates. But he said some aspects of the teeth
indicate she is not a direct ancestor – more of an “aunt” than a
“grandmother”.

Others are more circumspect. Dr Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and author of The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey, said he was “awestruck” by the publicity machine surrounding the new fossil.

He argued that it could damage the popularisation of science if the creature was not all that it was hyped up to be.

Dr Beard has not yet seen scientific details of the find but said that it would be very nice to have a beautiful new fossil from the Eocene and that Ida would be “a welcome new addition” to the world of early primates.

But he added: “I would be absolutely dumbfounded if it turns out to be a potential ancestor to humans.”

Quite. I’m all for popularising science, but this is not the way to do it. It doesn’t always have to be about us. There is enough beauty and wonder to revel in this find. It doesn’t have to be turned into a proto-human media sensation.

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