#australopithecines

Returning to hominid facial anatomy once again, I was able to adapt my A. sediba muscle model onto the OH5 skull (P. boisei) too! I'm happy enough with it that I went ahead and rendered some skins for them as well. Selected all the right vertices and generated UV maps and everything. Hopefully the colors look as legible on your screens as they do on mine, these are still very much in progress.

My restoration of this individual was partly based on an earlier attempt at rendering Paranthropus, from back in 2019. There were a lot of elements that got tweaked or entirely changed up in the update, but the mouth got to stay the same between renderings. Having even a little understanding of the face muscles makes a visible difference from one model to another, and I'm sure there's still some parts I could improve on as I keep working in this vein. If anyone has more technical knowledge about this sort of thing than I do, feel entirely free to get at me : )

On a crisp day in 1924, workers with Buxton Limeworks in Taung, South Africa, found some remains within exploded tufa-rock. The rock was full of secret spaces, so bones were no surprise.

This, however, was a head. The head was 2.3 million years old.

The head was put over the fireplace of the lime company’s director. If not for an intern at the University of Witwatersrand, it may have stayed there.

The head had belonged to a child about 3 or 4 years old at death. Due to their growth rate, they would have appeared 7.

2 million years ago, the tufa-rock of the limestone mines would have been mud, in a vast river floodplain. Megafauna would’ve shaped landscapes through their foraging. And between the trees, Australopithecus africanus did well to avoid them, in egalitarian family groups.

This child at Taung, like many their age at the time, would have traveled with their parents in one such group. One can imagine them sitting upon their parents’ back, chattering excitedly, watching the birds above go by.

Until one such bird came down to meet them.

Eagles today are known to catch primates, and eagles then were the same. A. africanus was not very large either - coming to about 3 feet. It would have been no surprise to watch a great bird carrying off someone.

But how it must have been to watch it happen to a child...

The head of the Taung Child is all that remains, but we can learn much through forensic analyses. Their tiny skull was peppered with ugly scratches, from talons able to pierce bone.

The child could even have watched the bird push its claws through right above their eye.

It would take decades before being more than an oddity, but today, it stands as one of the most important fossils in human evolution.

The Taung Child is a treasure-trove of data into our ancestors’ development - and a reminder of nature’s white-hot, dispassionate cruelty.

Madness is repetition.

Perhaps madness compelled a dusty tape recorder to belt “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” over and over, the evening of November 24th, 1974 - as 11 Westerners pored over the broken body they had found by the Awash River in Ethiopia.

The body was shattered into pieces, numbering in the hundreds. Less than half of the body recovered, and they delighted in every piece they found. Those from Ethiopia call the corpse “Dinkinesh” - “You are marvelous”. The Westerners took the tape-player’s cue that night.

“Lucy” wasn’t the first body found by the Awash, and wouldn’t be the last. Her mangled pieces toured the West for much of the late 2000s. She was laid behind glass in Addis Ababa, and has been there 6 years this May. Guests whisper, over and over: “You are marvelous”.

Dinkinesh is our Jane Doe - captivating to all, difficult to discern. She would’ve been 12 years when her body was broken - mature for her kind. As chance has it, she was a woman - or could carry child, as some women can. She stood at 3’7”, and saw out with familiar eyes.

Australopithecus afarensis saw over a world like Taung would a million years hence: dense forest, corralled by grass, serviced by megafauna. She may have spent more time in the trees, to avoid danger.

A twisted mind could call it funny then, how our Jane Doe fell to doom.

A body in so many pieces showed no signs of feasting, or even desperate scavenging. A single sharp tooth left a single mark upon her hip-bone, but folks have walked away from worse.

But perhaps Lucy didn’t walk towards death. Perhaps, 3 million years ago, she fell.

Force of impact would’ve started at her feet, moving up her body, shattering bones like dried clay. It is rare one could say “destroyed” of someone, but here it is.

It’s the damage that one sees in victims of accidents, suicides... or when one wants to fake the latter.

No suspects can be identified at this time. While this would’ve been the time when mates were selecting for compassion, anyone can tell you there is hatred in a small community. It would’ve been easy for some rival, jealous at her marvel, to give Lucy a gentle push...

The vertigo as Dinkinesh fell, down, down, down towards the cold ground... her stomach would turn and turn, over and over. It would have happened so quickly, but would the repetition have driven her mad? Could she still be feeling it, echoed through stone, into eternity?

A. afarensis has been known for over 45 years, and since has improved our understanding of our evolutionary context. She is a watershed in paleo-anthropological outreach, as well - so many have heard the name “Lucy”, over and over... “You are marvelous”, over and over...

To try to convey to you, in such a short, space, what it’s like, inside the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, is an impossibility… however, on Tuesday, November 15, 2011, between the hours of 3:00PM and 5:00PM, it went, something, like this… With only two hours to spend, I was limited to the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of Natural History’s Human…

Book Review: The Origin of Humankind, by Richard Leaky, 1994. 171 pp. Perseus Book Group. Tags: Leakey, archaeology, human origins, bipedalism, Australopithecines. Review by William Olkowski, PhD When I saw this book among the list produced by E.R. Hamilton Book Sellers I knew it would be good because I knew the name of Leakey as being a family of archaeologists who had made pioneering…

If you read books from even a decade ago they blithely assume (and often use the dubious assumptions of Paranthropines which are barely known beneath the neck and what is known doesn't confirmedly actually back up the assertions until they find confirmed bones of females to say for sure) that Australopithecines were like modern chimpanzees and gorillas and had males that vastly outweighed females. The most recent studies using the wide variety of newly discovered fossils has disproven the assumption.

Why does this matter? Well, because the first recognizably human creature, Homo erectus, was decidedly NOT like this. In other words, in spite of a teleological assumption that is one of many ideological elements that impairs abilities to look at the bones of dead animals for what they actually say versus attempts to do evo-psych horseshit, the more 'primitive' creatures were more like modern humans than their direct ancestors.

The implications here are also quite profound because it upends a set of assumptions on what Australopithecines were like, socially. Instead of emulating gorillas or chimpanzees their societies are essentially ones without any proven models among living apes except modern humans. And modern humans can go to other worlds and have managed to find ways out of the brutish cycle of the natural world, while these 3-foot apemen rather very much didn't.

It means that the world of the earliest proto-human species was one where females had far greater relative power and influence and where the societies are likely to be completely different to the terrestrial large primates of the present like baboons or the living great apes. In other words the most 'primitive' proto-humans were far more egalitarian, and the shifts do not follow some logic of 'primitive = emulating living ape, modern = emulating WASP social fixations from the 19th Century mashed up with the Cold War'.