Alison Brooks lets Alan see how perfectly a million-year-old axe fits in his hand. Photo by Larry Engel

We’re in Cambridge, Massachusetts, visiting Harvard and MIT – just across the Charles River from where I’ve lived for almost my whole career as a producer of science programs for public television. So it’s familiar ground. I remember a film shoot on the top of one of the MIT towers (the Green Building, I think) for one of my first NOVA productions, when the scientist held up a ball for a shot that included the golden dome of the State House in Boston as a visual analogy of how far earth is from the sun. That must have been in 1976 or so. The Boston skyline is now very different, with the dome almost lost in a sea of tall modern buildings. That shoot is also memorable because there was a brief glimpse of the top of my head in the rushes, taken while I was with the scientist and the cameraman was lining up his shot from above and behind us. It was the first time I became aware of another emerging shining dome.

One of the people we filmed here is actually a visitor, taking a sabbatical at Harvard’s Peabody Museum from George Washington University, where she is Professor of Archeology and International Affairs. Alison Brooks and a colleague (Sally McBrearty of UConn) set the field of human origins all atwitter almost ten years ago when they published a massive paper in the Journal of Human Evolution challenging the then-prevailing view that the modern human mind suddenly gelled when our ancestors arrived in Europe some 35,000 years ago and began painting the walls of caves in southern France. In other words, that it was in the flickering oil lamps of the artists of Lascaux that the Human Spark ignited.

Sally and Alison had both worked extensively in Africa in the previous decades, and pulling together their own archeological evidence and that of others argued in their JHE paper that instead of a sudden cognitive revolution in Europe, the modern human mind emerged bit by bit much earlier in Africa – that the Human Spark in fact didn’t ignite in one glorious (and European) burst but instead sputtered into existence in the minds of our African ancestors over perhaps a hundred thousand years or even longer.

So entrenched was the idea of a sudden European origin of modern human behavior that the McBrearty-Brooks paper was met with much skepticism when it was published in 2000. But it has since not only convinced most of their colleagues, but was also one of the inspirations for this project. So it was a great opportunity for us to have Alan and Alison get together at the Peabody, in what Alan was enchanted to discover is the museum’s “Stone Age Laboratory.” Alison had spent several hours prowling through the museum’s huge collection of archeological artifacts and had laid out for us a wonderful collection of items made by humans from over 1.7 million years ago in Africa to some 20,000 years ago in Europe.

Alan was very taken by how nicely the million-plus year old stone axes nestled in his hand, but was most struck by the fact that having invented stone hand axes some 1.7 million years ago, we humans stuck with them for most of our existence. Alison showed Alan several much more elaborate tools in stone and bone found in Europe and dating to between 20,000 and 35,000 years ago as the sort of evidence that it was there and then that the Human Spark ignited. “People looked at these and they said, well, there’s a human revolution here. There’s an incredible development, an incredible flowering of human creativity and human inventiveness. It’s a revolution. Something must explain it.”

Alison told Alan that it was a trip as a graduate student to the Kalahari with her then-new husband, John Yellen, that began to plant the seeds of doubt about the conventional wisdom. In the course of his work with the Bushmen, Yellen had discovered an archeological site where there were hundreds of tiny stone points. Alison showed Alan an example: “If you found these in North America, you would say this is an Indian arrowhead, but these were not in North America and, as we were able to show, they were about 75 to 80 thousand years old.”

The Human Spark camera captures Alison and Alan’s exchange as they examine the ancient points. Photo by Maggie Villiger

Alison argues that these points must in fact have been arrowheads.

Alison: “You could put it on a little tiny spear and go after a little tiny antelope, but would you really want to go up against a giant buffalo with something that size?’

Alan: “Not before it was extinct!”

Alison: “Don’t think so. Let’s say those people didn’t have too many descendants, which is what matters after all in evolution.”

Conventional wisdom had the bow and arrow invented perhaps 20,000 years ago – guess where.

So this was the beginning of Alison Brooks’ career-long quest to demonstrate that there was in fact no single cognitive “explosion” that led to the modern human mind; that instead it was built piece by piece in Africa. And this is the theme of what will be the first program in our Human Spark series. Later we will be going with Alison to an archeological site in Kenya she has been excavating for several years now, and which she believes encompasses the critical time – and perhaps the critical place – where the Human Spark first began glimmering into life.

It will be a long way from my academic backyard. But Alison promises some exciting finds…

Photo: www.vanessawoods.net

Researcher Brian Hare is a strong advocate for eliminating the chimpanzee pet trade, as we learned when we filmed with him at the North Carolina Zoo. After the recent news that a pet chimp violently attacked a woman in Connecticut, we asked Brian to further describe his stance for The Human Spark audience. Read on to learn why he is so strongly against anyone keeping a chimp for a pet.

The Science Behind Why Chimpanzees Are Not Pets

By Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods
Duke University, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology

Last month, a 200-pound male chimpanzee named Travis mauled a woman outside the home where he has been living with his “owner” Sandra Herold. Charla Nash was nearly killed by Travis and now has life-changing wounds to her face while Travis was stabbed by his owner with a butcher knife and shot dead by the police.

Was this incident preventable or just a freak accident? Should chimpanzees and other primates be kept as pets? What is the effect of the primate pet trade not only on the welfare of these “pets” but on their species survival in the wild?  To answer these questions I consider what science has to say and draw on both my own work on domestication and over 50 years of research by primatologists on wild chimpanzees.

Domesticated animals are biologically different

Most people keep domesticated animals, whether it’s a dog, cat or a cow.  We know the biological systems in their bodies that control stress responses are down-regulated relative to wild animals. This means that the average dog, cat, cow, etc. stays much more calm in a stressful situation than a wolf, lion or buffalo.  Because domesticated animals do not become as stressed, they rarely if ever attack humans compared to wild animals. It’s true that 23 Americans died last year from dog bites, but this statistic would be many times higher if the 68 million dog owners had instead lived in as close contact with wolves. By living together with us for thousands of years, domesticated animals have been bred to live together with humans relatively harmoniously.
Summary: Domestication is the process of breeding out aggression toward humans

Chimpanzees are not domesticated animals

Although chimpanzees share more DNA in common with humans than they do with gorillas, they are not domesticated animals. So while a tiny percentage of pet dogs will bite a human, all chimpanzees and all primates will readily bite a human.  Moreover, chimpanzees in captivity can weigh between 150 and 220 pounds, live for over 60 years, and grow to be many times stronger than any human.  In the wild, chimpanzees spend a lot of time defending their social status –- they often seriously injure each other in fights (biting off fingers, testicles, face tissue, etc.) and are known to occasionally hunt and kill rivals and their infants.  After 50 years of research on wild chimpanzees we now know that, like people, while they are extremely social, have close family bonds and prefer peace they can also be extremely violent –- sometimes leading to lethal aggression (i.e. murder).
Summary: Wild chimpanzees kill each other…it is in their nature.

Photo: www.vanessawoods.net

Why do people think chimpanzees make good pets?

Baby chimpanzees look a lot like human babies. They have fingers and toes, and they laugh and pout –- they are adorable.  People who sell chimpanzees as pets sell babies because no one would ever buy a 200 pound adult chimpanzee. Travis was bought as a baby from a group of trainers who used infant chimpanzees in TV commercials and in children’s birthday parties. Chimpanzee breeders are in the business of selling chimpanzees (at around $50,000 each), not educating their customers about the hazards of pet ownership. In addition, Hollywood hires infant chimpanzees to star in movies that show them as cute human imitations. It is estimated there are over 700 pet chimpanzees in U.S. homes of unknown origin (i.e. many may have been smuggled illegally from Africa). Many of these chimps live decades in horrible conditions and present a real risk to neighbors. ALL primates potentially carry diseases deadly to humans including Herpes B, Yellow Fever, Monkeypox, Ebola virus, Marburg virus, SIV, HIV and Tuberculosis.
Summary: Breeders and Hollywood portray infant chimpanzees as suitable pets

What laws exist to protect the public from the hazards of pet primates?

Currently there are no federal laws in the United States preventing the sale or purchase of a chimpanzee or other great apes born outside of Africa after 1976. There are state laws in the U.S. preventing the sale of primates such as chimpanzees, but loopholes exist in almost every state. Chances are, your neighbor can legally own a pet chimpanzee and that infant chimpanzees, which are highly endangered in their natural habitat in Africa, are still being smuggled into the U.S. to be sold as pets.
Summary: No federal law prevents the sale or purchase of chimpanzees in U.S.

What message do U.S. chimpanzee pet owners send to Africa?

Chimpanzees are highly endangered but still live in tropical forest in over a dozen African countries. It is illegal to own, purchase or sell a chimpanzee in all of these countries.  Unfortunately, an international trade rages in Africa –- including the sale of great apes like chimpanzees.  Hunters shoot mothers and sell their bodies as meat to rich city dwellers who can afford the luxury.  They pull babies off the backs of their dead mothers to sell in the markets as pets. However, these pet traders are doing nothing worse than what is done in the United States legally: baby chimpanzees are pulled off their mothers’ backs and sold as pets.  I have had Africans who have seen U.S. television shows with Hollywood chimpanzees dressed in clothing ask me why people in the U.S. can have chimpanzees as pets while someone in Africa cannot… they wonder why chimpanzees in the United States are not protected given the fact that they are so endangered.
Summary: U.S. pet chimpanzees seem hypocritical to Africans who know they need protection

You can help. Send a letter to your senators urging them to support the Captive Primate Safety Act that recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives.

More in the news:

• Editorial by Jane Goodall in the Los Angeles Times: “Loving Chimps to Death“
• AP article: “House Tightens Fed Controls Over Pet Primate Trade“
• MSNBC Video on a visit to a woman who owns two chimps: “Living with Chimps“

Organizations working to help orphan chimpanzees:

• Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
• Friends of Bonobos
• The Jane Goodall Institute
• Pan African Sanctuary Alliance

Anthropologists recently announced they’ve discovered the first example of footprints from the early human species Homo erectus. The trail of prints uncovered in Kenya were made by feet remarkably like ours, but 1.5 million years ago.

Unlike the 3.75-million-year-old footprints found in Tanzania and attributed to Australopithecus afarensis (the same species as Lucy), these trails are markedly different from the tracks of apes. All of the toes are parallel and relatively short and there’s an arch. This anatomy implies a bipedal species that had a similar gait to that of modern humans. Footprint trails like this one provide a rare glimpse of our ancient ancestors’ soft tissues – as opposed to the fossilized bones we usually rely on to answer questions about their bodies.

Check out the abstract of the research published in Science.

These articles provide more information about the latest discovery:

• New York Times: “Prints Show a Modern Foot in Prehumans“
• Wired Science Blog: “Walk Like Us: 1.5 Million-Year-Old Footprints Look Modern“
• CNN: “Ancient footprints: Earliest signs of modern feet“
• Reuters: “Footprints show human ancestor with modern stride“