Dr. Henry Gee

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130 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Dr. Henry Gee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ancients · Rise of Humans · 6 Apr 2025 podcast

Here is a skull I prepared earlier. This was a sheep skull I found when I was nine. And if you look, that's the hole where the spinal cord would go in. And it's right at the back of the head. It's right at the back. So if you look at the base of the skull, there's the hole. It's called the foramen magnum, which is Latin for big hole. So let's call it a big hole where the spinal cord goes in.

In hominins, that is members of the human family, that hole is moved much further to the center. So the skull would balance on top. And that indicates the one thing that suggests that the owner of the skull was a hominin. And that means a member of the lineage that led to humans as distinct from our closest relatives, chimpanzees. And so Sahelanthropus

That was pretty much the only thing that showed that Sir Halanthoffus was a hominin. It looked very ape-like in every other way, but that crucial feature marked it out as closer to living. It's not an ancestor. It's not a missing link. What it means is that it is closer to modern humans than to modern apes. So it is the first sign of something being on our lineage.

A distant great uncle, let's call it,

Yes, I mean, it is central. One of the reasons we can tell is that no other mammal has a skull like that with the foramen magnum underneath. Bipedality, certainly of that style, is absolutely unique to modern humans. I mean, there were an awfully long time ago some apes that tried to be bipedal, but they were kind of bipedal in different ways. They were more definitely apes.

But they all died out a long time ago, and there's some rather suggestive footprints that are kind of five million years old. Some people think they belong to bipedal creatures. Some people don't think they're footprints at all. And there were apes that lived much longer ago, 14 million years or so. There's one called Aureopithecus that lived in what is now Tuscany.

might have been bipedal, but it died out. But this particular mark of bipedality, the hole, where the position of the hole in the skull is really what marks a hominin, something that is on the human line, as it were, in the human family.

Well, the hominin fossil record being very scant, an awful lot of nothing for another two or three million years. The record picks up again about five, between five and four million years in East Africa. There is a creature called Ororin tuganensis from Kenya. That's not known from the skull at all, but it's known from leg bones, which show a bipedal hominin.

And there is another creature from Ethiopia called Ardipithecus cadaba, which is about nearly five million years ago. And slightly more recently, Ardipithecus ramidus, which is about four and a half million years old. Ardipithecus ramidus has most of the skeleton. And that's quite interesting. I mean, it's a hominin in that it shows that the move to bipedality wasn't a simple linear thing.

Ardipithecus was clearly a hominin and clearly a biped, but not quite as bipedal as you or I. It was probably much better up a tree. It would have been a better climber than us. And it probably, like modern chimps and gorillas do, is they make nests in the lower branches of trees, even though they spend a lot of time on the ground.

There are some, even as late as three and a half million years ago, there are a range of different hominins, the bipedal chimp phase. Some were more bipedal than others. There is a series of footprints at a place called Laitoli in Tanzania, discovered by Mary Leakey, this was the great Louis Leakey's wife, back in the late 60s. Did they discover the famous fossil Lucy, Mary Leakey?

No, they didn't. That was discovered by other people in Ethiopia, but it's generally thought that Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, was the same species that created the footprint at Laetoli. And certainly from what we know about Lucy's anatomy, that looks... perfectly reasonable.

And what we can see from Lucy, because we have a lot of a skeleton of Lucy, what we see from Lucy and these footprints is that these creatures walked as bipedally as you or I, but there are other footprints at Laetoli. What happened in Laetoli was three and a half million years ago, there was a volcanic eruption, as there often are in the Rift Valley, and it rained some ash all over the landscape.

And then there was actual rain. So the ash became kind of a bit gloopy and muddy and everything walked all over it. It looked like the Victoria Station at rush hour. There was footprints of all sorts of creatures all over it. So there are antelopes and pigs and And then there's this famous line of Australopithecus afarensis footprints. But there were also some footprints of another creature.

Mary Leakey originally thought it might have been a bear because bears can walk upright. But this was really just a blind supposition because fossils of bears are extremely rare. But it's now thought that this was a different kind of hominid. There's a foot, a fossil foot that was found in Ethiopia that looked kind of hominin, but it had a much more divergent big toe.

So in other words, its big toe was more like a thumb. And the footprints made by this mystery hominin might have been made by that kind of hominin. So three and a half million years ago, there were bipedal hominins, but some were more bipedal than others. Lucy, Australopithecus aflorensis, walked just like you or I, but probably climbed trees as well.

There's some research to show, some forensic pathology to show that Lucy died when she fell out of a tree. So she's got fractures consistent with falling out of a tree. I mean, some people don't believe this, but it's a nice story. So the bipedal chimp phase had a mixture of different species, some of which were better at climbing than others.

Well, you know, the thing about paleontology is you must expect the unexpected. So who knows what would come? But I would imagine that when people start looking, if they find deposits of that of a similar age, they will find a greater variety of the bipedal chimp kind of thing until about two and a half million years ago when things kind of changed a bit.

It's very hard to say because there were quite a few species of Australopithecus. The first one described, Australopithecus africanus, was described exactly 100 years ago, and that came from South Africa. So that was Australopithecus africanus. And so the paleoanthropology world is celebrating that centenary this year.

But there were a number of different species, and whether they were all actually different species or not is a matter of very refined argument. But that genus Australopithecus seems to have been pretty successful throughout Africa. There is another one, indeed, from Chad, Australopithecus bar-el-gazali, which is almost indistinguishable, actually, from Afarensis.

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