Review of: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madelaine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier
by Stan Prager (1-30-22)

In southern Greece in 1944, German forces constructing a wartime bunker reportedly unearthed a single mandible that paleontologist Bruno von Freyberg incorrectly identified as an extinct Old-World monkey. A decades-later reexamination by another paleoanthropologist determined that the tooth instead belonged to a 7.2-million-year-old extinct species of great ape which in 1972 was dubbed Graecopithecus freybergi and came to be more popularly known as “El Graeco.” Another tooth was discovered in Bulgaria in 2012. Then, in 2017, an international team led by German paleontologist Madelaine Böhme conducted an analysis that came to the astonishing conclusion that El Graeco in fact represents the oldest hominin—our oldest direct human ancestor! At the same, Böhme challenged the scientific consensus that all humans are “Out-of-Africa” with her competing “North Side Story” that suggests Mediterranean ape ancestry instead. Both of these notions remain widely disputed in the paleontological community.
In Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, Böhme—with coauthors Rüdiger Braun and Florian Breier—advances this North Side Story with a vengeance, scorning the naysayers and intimating the presence of some wider conspiracy in the paleontological community to suppress findings that dispute the status quo. Böhme brings other ammunition to the table, including the so-called “Trachilos footprints,” the 5.7-million-year-old potentially hominin footprints found on Crete, which—if fully substantiated—would make these more than 2.5 million years earlier than the footprints of Australopithecus afarensis found in Tanzania. Perhaps these were made by El Graeco?! And then there’s Böhme’s own discovery of the 11.6-million-year-old Danuvius guggenmosi, an extinct species of great ape she uncovered near the town of Pforzen in southern Germany, which according to the author revolutionizes the origins of bipedalism. Throughout, she positions herself as the lonely voice in the wilderness shouting truth to power.
I lack the scientific credentials to quarrel with Böhme’s assertions, but I have studied paleoanthropology as a layman long enough to both follow her arguments and to understand why accepted authorities would be reluctant to embrace her somewhat outrageous claims that are after all based on rather thin evidence. But for the uninitiated, some background to this discussion is in order:
While human evolution is in itself not controversial (for scientists, at least; Christian evangelicals are another story), the theoretical process of how we ended up as Homo sapiens sapiens, the only living members of genus Homo, based upon both molecular biology and fossil evidence, has long been open to spirited debate in the field, especially because new fossil finds occur with some frequency and the rules of somewhat secretive peer-reviewed scholarship that lead to publication in scientific journals often delays what should otherwise be breaking news.
Paleontologists have long been known to disagree vociferously with one other, sometimes spawning feuds that erupt in the public arena, such as the famous one in the 1970s between the esteemed, pedigreed Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson over Johanson’s discovery and identification of the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecine “Lucy,” which was eventually accepted by the scientific community over Leakey’s objections. At one time, it was said that all hominin fossils could be placed on one single, large table. Now there are far more than that: Homo, Australopithecine, and many that defy simple categorization. Also at one time human evolution was envisioned as a direct progression from primitive to sophistication, but today it is accepted that rather than a “tree” our own evolution can best be imagined as a bush, with many relatives—and many of those relatives not on a direct path to the humans that walk the earth today.
Another controversary has been between those who favored an “Out-of-Africa” origin for humanity, and those who advanced what used to be called the multi-regional hypothesis. Since all living Homo sapiens sapiens are very, very closely related to each other—even more closely related than chimpanzees that live in different parts of Africa today—multiregionalism smacked a bit of the illogical and has largely fallen out of favor. The scholarly consensus that Böhme takes head on is that humans can clearly trace their ancestry back to Africa. Another point that should be made is that there are loud voices of white supremacist “race science” proponents outside of the scientific community whom without any substantiation vehemently oppose the “Out-of-Africa” origin theory for racist political purposes, as underscored in Angela Saini’s brilliant recent book, Superior: The Return of Race Science. This is not to suggest that Böhme is racist nor that her motives should be suspect—there is zero evidence that is the case—but the reader must be aware of the greater “noise” that circulates around this topic.
My most pointed criticism of Ancient Bones is that it is highly disorganized, meandering between science and polemic and unexpected later chapters that read like a college textbook on human evolution. It is often hard to know what to make of it. And it’s difficult for me to accept that there is a larger conspiracy in the paleoanthropological community to preserve “Out-of-Africa” against better evidence that few beyond Böhme and her allies have turned up. The author also makes a great deal of identifying singular features in both El Graeco and Danuvius that she insists must establish that her hypotheses are the only correct ones, but as those who are familiar with the work of noted paleoanthropologists John Hawks and Lee Berger are well aware, mosaics—primitive and more advanced characteristics occurring in the same hominin—are far more common than once suspected and thus should give pause to those tempted to conclusions that actual evidence does not unambiguously support.
As noted earlier, I am not a paleontologist or even a scientist, and thus I am far from qualified to peer-review Böhme’s arguments or pronounce judgment on her work. But as a layman with some familiarity with the current scholarship, I remain unconvinced. She also left me uncomfortable with what appears to be a lack of respect for rival ideas and for those who fail to find concordance with her conclusions. More significantly, her book is poorly edited and too often lacks focus. Still, for those like myself who want to stay current with the latest twists-and-turns in the ever-developing story of human evolution, at least some portions of Ancient Bones might be worth a read.

[Note: I read an Advance Reader’s Copy (ARC) of this book obtained through an early reviewer’s group.]

[Note: I reviewed Superior: The Return of Race Science, by Angela Saini, here: https://regarp.com/2021/11/13/review-of-superior-the-return-of-race-science-by-a... ]

Review of: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madelaine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier https://regarp.com/2022/01/30/review-of-ancient-bones-unearthing-the-astonishing... ( )

I had not given much thought to what was knowable about pre-history before reading this book, which poses a fascinating and compelling theory extending humankind's history 3 million years further into the past from "Lucy".

Not only do the authors explain what changes made us the noblest ape, but they also describe the changing environment which forced those evolutionary adaptations - and the methods used to determine.

Fascinating stuff. Very grateful to have received an advance reader's copy via LibraryThing. ( )

In Ancient Bones Madelaine Bohme reviews analysis of current work in paleoanthropology, including her own work, to question the long-accepted theory of Africa as the original home of the human race. The bones of Ethiopian Lucy are 3.2 million years old. Bohme and her team in Germany found bones of a hominin millions of years older than the African finds. She evaluates other European and Asian discoveries of very early human ancestors for the first ⅔ of the book.
These hominins were able to walk upright and she discusses the changes necessary for feet, the placement of the head in relationship to the spine, the rib cage, the hands in all of these creatures. My only quibble with this part of the book (and it's a feature I particularly dislike in academics writing for a general audience)is her attempt at You Are There moments at the beginning of each section. Instead of engaging this reader, they feel like wasted paper.
On the other hand, the book came alive as she began to discuss the effects of climate change and the development of a Savannah belt on the evolution of humans. She traces the cause and effect of using fire to its making the development of smaller teeth possible, which makes greater intelligence and spoken language possible. She also gives a fascinating look at other human lines that developed and speculates as to why only Homo Sapiens (albeit with Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in our genome depending on where we live) was the only species to survive.

Thank you to Early Reviewers for my copy of this book! ( )

I got Ancient Bones through LT's Early Reviewer program and it is one of the best books I have received through the program. Ancient Bones is a well written and readable update of the current status of paleontology/archaeology of mankind. To expand, I use paleontology/archaeology as the distinction between the two is generally understood to be that archaeology deals with anatomically modern humans with archaeology and later, human culture while paleontology focuses on the fossils of non-human life. This book focuses distinctly on the transition point (or points) between modern humans and proto-ape ancestors.

Ancient Bones makes the argument that humanity descended more directly from a species in Europe and thus challenges the long prevailing "out of Africa" human migration theory. While interesting and well argued, this section of the book is more a snapshot of one side of an ongoing scientific debate about the origins of humanity. The more relevant and interesting portion of the book to me was the broader update that is provided about the scientific consensus surrounding human evolution and how it can be reconciled with the finding that some of our oldest ancestors were found in Europe.

If it has been awhile since you learned some of this history, the update is a bit of a surprise. Personally, I had the sense that our knowledge of human evolution was built on the discoveries of people like the Leakeys and their work in Olduvai Gorge that established that our first ancestors lived in eastern Africa and eventually migrated north into Europe and Asia. Neanderthals were alternatively part of the line or an offshoot that died out but otherwise modern humans arose in Africa and slowly spread throughout the globe.

Ancient Bones does a marvelous job of updating this understanding. In doing so it incorporates finds like the so called "hobbit" skeleton in Indonesia, Denisovan remains from Russia, and a lot of the information we have learned from detailed genetic analysis of earlier finds . This results in a far more complex story of evolution with different proto-humans appearing and disappearing with substantial evidence that the different species were still closely related enough to interbreed. The genetics also point to other branches of the human tree that we still haven't found.

As Ancient Bones freely acknowledges there remain a lot of unanswered questions and more we need to learn. With that acknowledgment, Ancient Bones serves as a very readable update on the current understanding of where we came from. Highly recommended. ( )

Though a fan of science in its many forms, I am much more familiar with the early days of Christian Biblical history than with scientific history of the human species. I have studied it, but the ground seems to be slowly shifting in this realm. Böhme details these shifts in this work as he summarizes the evidence over the last 20-30 years. She does so through a lucid, suspenseful, and engaging manner. She questions many older theories through generally acknowledged facts and does not appear to have an overriding agenda.

Genetic analysis is beginning to teach us much about early humans and human-like species. The story that is emerging is related here (and it’s not a finished story yet). Humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans likely all shared DNA (that is, interbred) until differences united in what came to be known as the species of Homo sapiens. Those species likely came out of a “savannah belt” that included not just Africa but also Eurasia. Thought by thought and concept by concept, Böhme unpacks how we have come to grasp this new story. She does so through finely examining the data from find after find and skillfully integrating it in with existing theory. (That is, she proceeds like a scientist should.)

The translation is clear and flows well. Aside from direct references to Germany, it’s hard to tell that this work was originally composed in the German language. It is quite accessible to general audiences that have an interest in science. It doesn’t bog down in needless detail but keeps perspective on the big picture. The illustrations – particularly the maps – teach a lot.

Paleontology is fascinating because like religion, it can tell us where we came from and thus where we can go. Ideally, it does so in a non-ideologically driven manner, and Böhme represents this field well in this regard. If you’re curious about knowing the latest science on where humans came from, this book provides a compelling investigation. As with all science, it may not contain the final word, but it summarizes our best guess at present. I’m glad Böhme’s research has led my curiosity in digging through the facts as she has done with her hands through some of the finds. ( )