Commentary

Iodine and Neandertals

Bibliographic Data

ID7783597
AuthorsIan Tattersall (0000-0003-2855-6599)
Year2002
Volume92
Issue1
Pages94-96
Publication date2002-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeographical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-7428 • E-ISSN: 1931-0846
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1931-0846.2002.tb00137.x
OpenAlexW2001608624
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited9

Pity the poor Neandertals. For they, alone among all extinct hominids known--some twenty species by now--have regularly been singled out for explanation as the expression of pathology of some kind. Partly this is an artifact of history, for the first fossil was discovered in 1856, three years before Charles Darwin published his great work, On the Origin of Species. In those pre-evolutionary days only two possible reasons could be imagined for the human yet so different morphology of the large-brained but low-skulled hominid whose remains had been unearthed in a limestone cave in Germany's Neander Valley. One was that the skeleton had belonged to a member of a brutish and primitive race of that had relatively recently vanished from Europe (Huxley 1863). The other was that the Neandertaler was an unusual individual of Homo sapiens whose peculiarities had been due to disease or dietary deficiency. The most famous such notion was Rudolf Virchow's claim that the individual had suffered from rickets (caused, as we now know, by insufficiency of vitamin D) (1872). With the advent of evolutionary thought the possibility arose that the Neandertals, known before the end of the first decade of the twentieth century from relatively abundant and geographically diverse material, actually represented their own kind of hominid. Related to Homo sapiens but distinct from it, this species had first been named Homo neanderthalensis by William King in 1864; and in the years preceding World War II King's nomenclature became firmly established. Although it became fashionable in postwar times to return to Thomas Huxley's view of the Neandertals as no more than a bizarre form of Homo sapiens, over the last decade or so the pendulum has appropriately begun to swing back toward the notion that Neandertals do indeed merit specific recognition in their own right (Tattersall 1998). Nonetheless, the notion that Neandertals were somehow pathological has refused to go away. In 1970, for example, Francis Ivanhoe resuscitated the notion that Neandertals were vitamin D-deficient in an article entitled, Was Virchow Right about Neandertal? And now Jerome Dobson has claimed in the pages of this journal that the distinctive morphology of Neandertals may have been due to dietary iodine deficiencies, leading to cretinism (1998). It thus seems a rather cruel irony that in large part the Neandertals owe their unfairly brutish popular image to a failure to recognize pathology where it actually existed. For the stereotype of the slouching, bent-kneed was born largely of Marcellin Boule's portrait of the species (1911-1913). This portrait was based on an aged male from the French site of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, whose remains show extensive degenerative arthritic changes throughout the skeleton. Dobson's essential argument for the role of dietary iodine deficiency in the establishment of morphology is summed up in his claim that Neandertal skeletons resemble cretins far more closely than they resemble healthy modern humans (1998,9). As Dobson himself admits, this judgment is limited by the paucity in collections of reliably diagnosed cretin skeletons, and it is a pity in this regard that he did not choose to illustrate any of the seventeen such specimens that he located in the Museum of Natural History in Basel and the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. For despite the series of skeletal similarities he lists between Neandertals and cretins, it still seems highly probable to me that cretins simply look like odd modern humans, whereas Neandertals look like, well, Neandertals. The problem is one of descriptive precision--a difficulty that is not limited to the present case, for imprecise morphological description is rampant in paleoanthropology. A brow ridge, for example, is not simply a brow ridge. A prominent supraciliary region is a feature that can be found in at least some individuals of virtually all species of Homo, including Homo sapiens; what distinguishes the latter is not the presence or absence of brow ridges, or even their size, but their morphology

Archaeology · Biology · Evolutionary biology · Genealogy · Homo sapiens · Paleoanthropology · History · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub