Skull discovery could fill origins gap

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - A hominid skull discovered in Ethiopia could fill the gap in the search for the origins of the human race, a scientist said on Friday.

The cranium, found near the city of Gawis, 500 km (300 miles) southeast of the capital Addis Ababa, is estimated to be 200,000 to 500,000 years old.

The skull appeared "to be intermediate between the earlier Homo erectus and the later Homo sapiens," Sileshi Semaw, an Ethiopian research scientist at the Stone Age Institute at Indiana University, told a news conference in Addis Ababa.

It was discovered two months ago in a small gully at the Gawis river drainage basin in Ethiopia's Afar region, southeast of the capital.

Sileshi said significant archaeological collections of stone tools and numerous fossil animals were also found at Gawis.

"(It) opens a window into an intriguing and important period in the development of modern humans," Sileshi said.

Over the last 50 years, Ethiopia has been a hot bed for archaeological discoveries.

Hadar, located near Gawis, is where in 1974 U.S. scientist Donald Johnson found the 3.2 million year old remains of "Lucy," described by scientists as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in the world.

Lucy is Ethiopia's world-acclaimed archaeological find. The discovery of the almost complete hominid skeleton was a landmark in the search for the origins of humanity.

On the shores of what was formerly a lake in 1967, two Homo sapien skulls dating back 195,000 years were unearthed. The discovery pushed back the known date of mankind, suggesting that modern man and his older precursor existed side by side.

Sileshi said while different from a modern human, the braincase, upper face and jaw of the cranium have unmistakeable anatomical evidence that belong to human ancestry.

"The Gawis cranium provides us with the opportunity to look at the face of one of our ancestors," he added.

this seems as good a thread as any in which to post the following lengthy excerpt.

Alice - see how this applies to your purposes. I think the character you plan might be asking for a world of hurt if he sports a wolf tat of any sort in that time period.

for the others:

(Transcriber's note: I'll say now that I dislike this author's prose - it is long-winded, disorganized, rambling, excessive in spite and light on hard data and citations - and loathe his style of punctuation. Nevertheless, he makes some cogent points, and I have endeavored to reproduce his writing in exact detail here.)

(Transcriber's second note: There are those who earnestly maintain that modern naturalism and the natural sciences owe their origin to Christianity. As naturalism and the rudiments of scientific inquiry are demonstrably known to predate the rise of Christianity, and are similarly known to have gone into a rather comatose state in the era of monastic recapitualtion and manuscripting, and remained dormant and decerebrate until the advent of the Gutenberg press, these claims are clearly in error. I post this excerpt in large part to illustrate just how eroneous those claims are. Nevertheless, i don't expect those who make such claims to give any heed to this post... save for a perverse few: Among those who make these absurd claims, there are those who will be so discourteous as to ignore the effort involved in this manual transcription and shall be disinclined to consider the author's points; who will, rather, be interested only in attacking, in quote-mining some juicy anti-science material. Knowing this, I shall spare these poor creatures the effort: The lines you want are the final two paragraphs, which I shall quote here in their entirety:
That was written in 1921. It is, of course, an isolated incident, but it properly belies the sometimes arrogant claims of science to objectivity. It was just such biologists as this whom stockmen sought out in the twentieth century to support with "scientific testimony" ideas about wolves that they might as well have gotten from Edward Topsell.
That some scientists obliged them is one of the sadder facts of man's association with wild animals, and of the politics of science.
Furthermore, I shall do the witless warping for them, recasting those lines as a typical brainless barb:
"In 1978, noted mytho-historian and naturalist Barry Lopez indicted science - particularly biology! - as arrogant, politicized, and totally unobjective!"
Those who enjoy being so shallow and frivolous may now take their new toy and go home. For the rest, those interested in honest discourse, please read on...)

Chapter Eleven: THE REACH OF SCIENCE

There is an old story about a wolf in Gubbio, Italy, involving Saint Francis. The wolf had been threatening the villagers and Saint Francis was trying to get the animal to desist. He and the wolf met one day outside the city walls and made the following agreement, witnessed by a notary: the residents of Gubbio would feed the wolf and let him wander at will through the town and the wolf, for his part, would never harm man nor beast there.

Beneath the popular, anecdotal appeqal of this story is a common allegory: the bestial, uncontrolled nature of the wolf is transformed by sanctity, and by extension those associated with the wolf - thieves, heretics, and outlaws - are redeemed by Saint Francis's all-embracing compassion and courtesy.

Medieval men believed that they saw in wolves a reflection of their own bestial nature; man's longing to make peace with the beast in himself is what makes this tale of the Wolf of Gubbio one of the more poignant stories of the Middle Ages. To have compassion for the wolf, whom man saw as enslaved by the same base drives as himself, was to yearn for self-forgiveness.

Men came to such philosophical points chiefly through dialogue with the doctrines of the Roman Church, which preached both compassion and hatred for sinners, for the bestial, for the wolf in man. And yet when laymen came to ask, in effect, "what is this animal, alone, and how does he get on in the universe?" the Church responded less than compassionately. When laymen said, "Let's consider the wolf as a biological entity, quite apart from the Devil and pagan worship and evil and the symbolism of man's bestial nature, " the Church, the seat of appeal for such inquiries in the Middle Ages, replied, "No, it would be inappropriate even to consider such a thing."

It was, in fact, an idea that only a handful of people in the long climb from Aristotle to Francis Bacon could have been expected to formulate.

If, at the moment when Saint Francis was accepting the wolf's promise outside the walls of Gubbio you had entered the shop of the local apothecary, you would have found many of that wolf's relatives laid up in jars and boxes. There would be wolf dung to treat colic and cataract, powdered wolf's liver to ease birth pains, and the right front paws of wolves to treat swelling in the throat. You'd find wolf teeth for teething, and, if the proprietor were open-minded and had had a visitor from the East, there might even be dried wolf's flesh stored away, after a Bedouin belief that it was good for aches in the shins.

Had you stepped into the street and gone to inquire of local learned men the contents of their library, they would likely eagerly have shown you, along with copies of the Psalter and the Apocalypse, a Physiologus, for these were the most popular illuminated books of the time. The Physiologus was a moralizing, didactic work in which the elements of natural history - animals, vegetables, and minerals - were allegorically presented as reflections of the moral order in God's universe. A naturalist's curiosity about animals hardly existed. Animals were worth thinking on only as food and clothing, as a source of economic gain, as beasts of burden, or as symbols. There was little concern for separating fact from folklore. Since the animal was an object, like a stone, there seemed no point in it.

The imaginative, even fabulous, entry on each animal in the Physiologus was preceeded by a quote from Scripture and followed by a moral lesson. Accompanying illustrations, which had little to do with the natural world, were fanciful interpretations of the entry, which itself was contrived to fit the Scripture and produce a moral lesson as needed.

You might have asked yourself, standing in some library in Gubbio with a Physiologus in your hand, why human inquiry was stalled in such a curious place as this, a thousand years after Aristotle. The entry on wolves, staring up at you in Latin, would bear as accurately on the natural history of the wolf as his paw would compare with penicillin as treatment for goiter in a a modern hospital.

I hesitate to single out the Church as the lone culprit to bear responsibility for such ignorance. Clearly, this was not so. But it is inescapable that the Church, because it largely controlled both the publication of books and the institutions of learning, profoundly affected the progress of natural history by subjecting it to theological constraint, by making it conform to preconceived ideas. What the Church supported, survived. What it regarded as in error - and a secular interest in animals smacked of paganism - did not.

Books like the Physiologus, in which zoology had been reduced to a search for edifying symbols, where wolves were important because they were the Devil's hounds, was almost the best a learned man could offer you in the way of natural history in the twelfth century.

***

To return to the apothecary's shop, her would be not only powdered wolf's liver but the gonads, entrails, excrement, and saliva of hundreds f other animals. The medical authority of record would be Galen, a second-century Greek physician. The science - as opposed to magic - of healing the human body began with Hippocrates and entered a limbo with Galen, through no fault of Galen's. He was taking monkeys and pigs apart and extrapolating from their anatomy to make statements about human anatomy. (Neither the Church nor the state at the time looked favorably on human dissection.) Galen was a Christian and the enormous encyclopedia of medical knowledge he wrote endorses a God-ordained balance between illness and its treatment by a physician, a mirror image of the treatment of the sinful soul by a priest. Because of its Christian bias, the book found favor with the Church and superseded the knowledge of other men for nearly a thousand years.

Galen and his errors (he endorsed many folk treatments involving use of animal parts0 were perpetuated, incredibly, until the sixteenth century, when Andreas Vesalius, William Harvey, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek reintroduced the use of reason, observation, and experiment as a means to furthering medical knowledge. The fate of natural history in the Middle Ages was closely tied to what physicians thought of animals. Animals were a source of medicaments and useful as anatomical analogues, but how they lived was of little interest.

Natural history can be said to have begun formally with Aristotle. He wrote with some accuracy about wolves, in his Historia animalium, giving the period of gestation as from fifty-nine to sixty-three days, noting that females came into heat but once a year, that the pups were born blind, and that the wolves of Arabia were smaller than European wolves. He showed open skepticism about folklore as a basis for scientific fact, being very much in favor of personal observation. This is not to say he never passed on fancy for fact. Later in the same volume he writes, "The fleeces and wool of sheep that have been killed by wolves, as also the clothes made from them, are exceptionally infested with lice."

The scientific tradition of Aristotle was carried on by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, in his Historia naturalis, and later by Solinus in his Collectanea rerum memorabilium, or Polyhistor, which repeats much of Pliny and Aristotle. And there, except for the redundant work of the encyclopedists - Aelian in the second century, Isidore in the seventh, Neckham in the twelfth, Bartholomew in the thirteenth - scientific interest in the lives of animals ends. Four hundred years after Aristotle, Plutarch was writing: "Wolves give birth to their young when acorn-bearing trees shed their blossoms because, when she-wolves eat these blossoms, their wombs are opened. When the blossoms are not available, the embryo dies in their body and cannot be expelled; for that reason those regions where there are no oaks or mast-trees cannot be troubled by wolves."

What replaced science was the folklore of the Physiologus, which, by the twelfth century, had expanded into the better-known "bestiary."

The first Physiologus - the word is Greek for "the naturalist" - may have appeared in Syria in the fourth century B.C., but it does not turn up in the Western world for another five hundred years. A collection of popular stories about animals, plants, and gem stones, it is likely the product of many authors representing the amalgamation of the oral literature of the ancient world. Unlike Aristotle's contemporary Historia animalium, it made no pretense to scientific objectivity. Its authors were more intrigued by folklore, myth, and mysticism. The Physiologus was a book of wide popular appeal, probably as well known as Aesop, with which it soon came to share common features. Because of its popularity, it became an appropriate vehicle for didactic instruction. By the second and third centuries the stories in the Physiologus were being restructured to reflect Christian morals and world view. What was once entertaining psuedoscience had now become moral allegory.

This should not be construed so much as a conscious plot on the part of the Church as a reflection of the intellectual climate of the times. Florence McCulloch, in a history of medieval Latin and French bestiaries, writes: "A characteristic of scholarship at this period was its preference for allegorical exegesis of the Scriptures and in like manner nature was interpreted mystically. Creatures of nature were to be explored for what they revealed of the hidden power and wisdom of God." Accordingly, the Physiologus that began to appear at this time soon incorporated Scripture and moral lessons into its format.

It is important to understand that most men of learning did not take the contents of the Physiologus for science. As McCulloch points out, "Illustrations used by the Church Fathers to render subtle theological concepts more intelligible and vivid to the unlettered people [cannot] be presumed to prove that medieval man actually believed such examples as were perpetuated in the Physiologus and later in the bestiary."

The Physiologus did not come into its own until the seventh century, when it was expanded to include the work of Isidore of Seville, a Spanish bishop and encyclopedist. Isidore's Etymologiae was an attempt to set down all the knowledge of man in twenty books, the twelfth of which, De animalibus, was the source for material for a new Physiologus. Isidore's work is derivative. He borrowed heavily from Pliny and Solinus, and in some places drew ludicrous conclusions or passed on, unquestioning, the ignorance of those he drew from. But this is, nevertheless, one of the most important works of the early Middle Ages. (Of the wolf he tells us, erroneously, that the word lupus is derived from two words, leo, "lion," and pes, "foot," and means "lion-footed.")

By the ninth century the excesively nonsecular character of the Physiologus begins to show a secular influence, with the inclusion of chapters without Scripture or morals; but it is still the anonymous authors' intent to show that the natural world is but a reflection of the moral order of God's universe. By the twelfth century the Physiologus includes fanciful chapters on the dragon, the basilisk, the manticore, and the centaur, and is richly illustrated and widely enjoyed.

With natural curiosity about animals in a state of suspension and the natural world itself valuable only for the practical use to which it could be put, it is not Canis lupus we find in these bestiaries but the unabashed imagination of the times. The wolf does not appear in the earliest Physiologi; he does not show up consistently, in fact, until some time in the seventh century. After that we find a record in the section on wolves of most of the superstition that had come down from the time of the Greeks.

A thirteenth-century bestiary from the library of the monastery of Saint Victor in Paris, for example, tells (in the twentieth chapter of its second book, De luporum natura) of the association between wolves and light. The bestiarist also says it is appropriate that the Latin words for whore (lupa) and female wolf (lupa) should be the same, because both "plunder a man's goods." In the same history the author cites Solinus as an authority for asserting that there is a tuft of hair on the wolf's tail with the power of an aphrodisiac, which the wolf bites off if capture is imminent.

The wolf of the Physiologi and the bestiaries could strike a man dumb with his gaze, though if the man saw the wolf first he could put the wolf to flight. (The Malleaus Maleficarum, written by two franciscans as philosophical underpinning for the excesses of the Inquisition, says that the sorceror can bewitch "by a mere look or glance from the eyes." This and the above, I suspect, explains the origin of the French idiom elle a vu le loup, "She's seen the wolf," meaning she's lost her virginity.) A common illustration in these books was that of a man standing on his shirt clacking two rocks together, a method offered for curing dumbness. The wolf of the bestiary was reputed to have only one cervical vertebra; thus he was unable to turn his head and look behind him. Some said the backbone was so stiff that a wolf taken by the tail could be held under water, stiff as a board, until drowned. Aristotle and Pliny are cited as authorities here and, to be sure, both say the wolf has only one, not seven, cervical vertebrae.

The wolf is also thought to eat earth in times of great famine. Drawing on information in the bestiaries, Albertus Magnus wrote in the thirteenth century:
"It is said the wolves eat the mud called glis, not for the sake of getting nourishment but to make themselves heavier. Having eaten it the wolf preys upon very strong animals - the ox or stag or horse - by leaping at them, straight on, and clinging to them. If he were light he would readily be shaken off, but when he is weighed down by glis, he weighs so much that he can neither be shaken off nor gotten rid of. Presently when his prey is worn out and collapses, he tears at their throats and windpipes and so kills them. Then he vomits out the glis and feasts on the flesh of the animal he has slain."

Other beliefs endorsed by the bestiarists were that the wolf was repelled by squill, or sea-onion; that a horse that stepped on a wolf print would be crippled; that a pregnant mare who kicked a wolf would miscarry; that wolf-bitten mutton is sweeter; and that wolves are repulsed by music. The bulb of the squill (Urginea maratima and other species) was hung around the neck of sheep in a flock to ward off wolves and carried as a protection by travellers. (Red squill is still used today in Europe as a rat poison.) That the wolf should be considered the bane of the horse, a principal domesticated beast of burden with more nobility than the ass, the ox, or the cow, is evidence of the moral structuring of the bestiaries. The Devil seeks the saintliest to bring down. For the same reason a sheep picked out of the flock and killed by wolves took on special significance. That the meat would taste sweeter might be an opinion derived from Plutarch, who wrote that the breath of the wolf was so hot it softened and cooked the meat it devoured. Others felt, quite strongly, that wolf-bitten meat was poisonous. Jacob Grimm writes in Teutonic Mythology of the belief that any woman who ate wolf-bitten lamb or goat would give birth to a child who showed the wolf bite in his flesh.

Aelian, the third-century Roman, tells in the story of Pythochares, a flute player who drove off a pack of wolves with his music. This is an early reference to the widespread and persistent belief that wolves hate music. An analogous belief is that a drum with a wolf skin head will drown out any number of sheepskin heads, or that a string of wolf gut will dominate strings of sheep gut. In music today a discordant note on the violin is still called a wolf, as are the harsh, howling sounds of some chords on the organ.

It is apparently not the music of clacking stones, in the case of the man struck dumb, that frightens off the wolf and returns speech, however. Wolves, writes one sixteenth-century writer, hate stones and avoid them wherever they go because the bruises they cause breed worms. Richard Lupton, a medieval English writer, puts it quaintly: "When he is constrained to go by stony places, the wolf treads very demurely. For being hurt with a very little stroke of a stone, it breeds worms, whereof at lenght he is consumed and brought to his death."

T.H.White, in a modern translation of a twelfth-century bestiary, gives us the moralizing on this point: "For what can we mean by the Wolf but the Devil... and what by the stones but the Apostles or the saints or the Lord Himself? All the prophets have been called stones of adamant. And He Himself, Our Lord Jesus Christ, has been called in the Law 'a stumbling block and a rock of scandal.' "

Who could argue that it was in the nature of wolves to hate stones?

***

There is a third group of books, after the natural histories of Aristotle and Pliny and the bestiaries and Physiologi, that sought to reveal the wolf and those are the encyclopedias of such men as Alexander Neckham, Albertus Magnus, and Bartholomew of England. They wrote in the tradition of Isidore but much later - Neckham in the twelfth century, and Magnus and Bartholomew along with Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth. In the work of the encyclopedists one finds more political and social allegory than moral allegory, and a good deal of folklore. Bartholomew tells us that wolves eat marjoram to whet their appetites and sharpen their teeth before leaving for the evening hunt, and that they are fond of fish. In fact, he tells us, if wolves find a fisherman's nets on the beach and see no fish around they will tear the nets in anger, a story Aristotle perhaps first told about wolves near Lake Maeotis in Greece. Albertus Magnus writes that any man who binds a wolf's right eye to his right sleeve will be protected against men and dogs alike.

Lupton in his Notable Things catalogues the habits of hanging up a wolf's head to keep sorcerers at bay and of burying a wolf's tail at the entrance to a village to keep off other wolves. The grease rendered from a wolf's body, he says, will protect the hands from the worst cold, and wolf dung buried in the barnyard to keep off wolves will drive sheep and cattle crazy until it is removed.

And an English writer of the sixteenth century, Edward Topsell, in A Historie of Foure-footed Beastes, fascinates us with the following:
"The brains of a wolf do decrease and increase with the moon. The neck of the wolf is short which argueth a treacherous nature. If the heart of a wolf be kept dry, it rendereth a most pleasant or sweet-smelling savor. They will go into the water two-by-two, every one hanging upon another's tail, which they take in their mouths... Their manner is when they fall upon a goat or a hog, not to kill them, but to lead them by the ear and with all the speed they can drive them to their fellow wolves; and if the beast is stubborn, and will not run with them, then he beateth his hinder parts with his tail, holding his ear fast in his mouth. But if it be a swine that is so gotten, then they lead him to the waters, and there kill him, for if they eat him out of cold water, their teeth their teeth doth burn with intolerable heat... If any labouring or travelling man doth wear the skin of a wolf about his feet, his shoes shall never pain or trouble him. He which dot eat the skin of a wolf well-tempered and sodden will keep him from all evil dreams, and will cause him to take his rest quietly. The teeth of a wolf being rubbed upon the gums of young infants doth open them whereby the teeth may the easier come forth."

It was an urge to inform that motivated writers like Topsell, just as it was an urge to teach that saw the Christianization of the Physiologus. The wolf did not come off well in either effort. Even Renaissance venaries like Tuberville's Booke of Hunting (1577), which explain knowledgeably how to lure wolves to a blind and praise the devotion of young wolves to their parents, still have them eating snakes and killing each other "for spite."

Secular inquiry into the lives of animals, inquiry for the sake of learning rather than for the sake of edifying moral lessons or entertainment, did not begin until the sixteenth century. At that point we find Konrad Genser's Historia animalium, published in 1551, and the animal encyclopedias of Aldorvandi. But it is not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - when Carolus Linneaeus provides a system of organization, Charles Darwin writes of finches in the Galapagos, and John James Audubon draws birds in Florida - that the system of knowledge that had taken natural history for little more than symbology or a source of literary entertainment begins to break up. And for the wolf, astoundingly, the tradition continues almost unbroken until 1945, when The Wolves of North America by Stanley Young and Edward Goldman was published. A mixture of science and folklore, it passed as the only authoritative general work on wolves in America and Europe until the 1960's. Aside from Adolph Murie's The Wolves of Mount McKinley - the first unbiased ecological treatise on wolves, published in 1944 - and a couple of popular books*, there was nothing else around.

It is hard to conceive of another animal - I don't think there is one - that has suffered such prejudice as an object of our scientific curiosity.**

I recall one afternoon, sitting in a university library, reading in the Journal of Mammalogy about a biologist named Eugene Johnson who was in Alaska observing wolves. He was able to approach a wolf pup in his canoe without being seen. In his lap he had a small shotgun loaded with buckshot. Each time the pup, who was walking along the riverbank, looked up, Johnson put down the paddle and raised his gun. "There was not the slightest chance, " he wrote, "that two buckshot might find a vital spot at that distance, but I felt we ought not deny ourselves what satisfaction we might get out of frightening the beast to the utmost of our ability."

That was written in 1921. It is, of course, an isolated incident, but it properly belies the sometimes arrogant claims of science to objectivity. It was just such biologists as this whom stockmen sought out in the twentieth century to support with "scientific testimony" ideas about wolves that they might as well have gotten from Edward Topsell.

That some scientists obliged them is one of the sadder facts of man's association with wild animals, and of the politics of science.

***

Ch. 11, Of Wolves and Men, Barry Holstun Lopez, 1978, Charles Scribner's Sons NY, first edition, ISBN 0-684-15624-5

*******

transcriber's notes
*the "popular books" Lopez refers to may well have been Jack London novels, eg: Call of the Wild and White Fang.
**the author shows singular lack of imagination in this: Sharks have suffered as badly, if not worse; The hyena has had few objective reviews; Both the rat and cockroach continue to be treated as badly; etc...

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