Biological Anthropology and Its Love of Fantasy

No, this blog post isn't going to be a blazing condemnation of biological anthro, exposing it as some sort of head in the clouds discipline. I love bio anthro, I love everything about it. For those of you who don't know, biological (or physical anthropology) is the sub-discipline of anthropology that focuses on the human skeleton. It encompasses the search for human remains, both modern and ancient to help elucidate things about our past. It works to piece together the fascinating history of human evolution, studies living apes and monkeys to learn more about ourselves, examines archaeological assemblages of human skeletal material to learn all sorts of interesting things about diet and nutrition and what people did while they were alive, it even helps identify and reconstruct the death of modern murder victims.

It's amazing what you can learn from a few bones.

But the more I learn about bio anthro and the more time I spend with the wonderful, geeky people who study it, the more I--a true nerd in my own right--see connections with our modern sci-fi fantasy world.

Let's begin with two big deals from the fields of anthropology and fantasy.

J.R.R. Tolkien and Louis Leakey.

I'm sure you all know about Tolkien, but what of Leakey? Louis Leakey was your typical British intellectual. He galloped off to Africa and didn't look back, spending a great deal of his life searching for the hominid skeleton that would make him famous. Incidentally, it was his wife, Mary, who did a lot of the work and eventually found their specimen-- the lovely robust australopithecine Australopithecus boisei, who Mary referred to as "Dear Boy"-- one day while Louis was sick in their tent. The find would throw them into the spotlight, National Geographic would follow them about for most of their lives and their children would go on to continue the Leakey family anthro legacy.

And here he is, Louis Leakey, with another great scientist who we all love and know, Jane Goodall. Leakey, in fact, was the one who gave Jane her first assignment to study chimps, a work that would continue her entire life and make her a household name.

















To the right of course, is Tolkien, the hobbit master himself, and as you are sure to admit, Leakey's doppleganger.

So here we have two bigwigs of the fields, now let's jump to the subjects of their work and see how similar they really are.

I'm going to start with one of my new favorite hominoids, Oreopithecus bambolii, a Miocene ape that doing the bipedal thing long before we humans or any one of our genus hopped onto the scene. Found in near Tuscany, this specimen is helping raise questions about how we think about bipedalism and what, if anything, it had to do with making us "human." Plus, scientists have given it an adorable nickname thanks to its food-y genus (that really means ape from the hills) "Cookie Monster".

The reconstruction of little Oreo looks a lot like another ugly-cute biped from the fantasy world:



















Jumping to a different realm in fantasy geekdom we have close ancestor of ours, Homo erectus.
The picture here is a reconstruction of a very well know nearly complete skeleton (nearly complete skeletons are almost never found) of a teenage H. erectus boy (awkard word combiniation intended) know as Turkana boy. I think he kind of looks like Voldemort might have if he went the peacenik route, quietly contemplating Mudblood/Pureblood relations rather than trying to scare the shit out of everybody.



























And of course we have the most obvious example, Homo floresiensis, the much publicized "hobbit people". These tiny hominids lived on an island in the South Pacific, hunted tiny elephants, and (one assumes) smoked good pipe weed with Gandalf the Grey.

(Interestingly, these are the first two images to pop up when you search "hobbit" under google images)





















I have, however, saved my favorite comparison for last. This reconstruction is of a prehistoric man found in Washington state a little over ten years ago, known as Kennewick Man. Being about 9,000 years old, his remains have been claimed by Native American groups as a ancestor. Much commotion was made however when it was discovered his face bore striking resemblance to a certain captain of the USS Enterprise.