On Early Human Skin PigmentationAuthor(s): Michael G. Michlovic, Martin Hall and Tim MaggsSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Sep., 1977), pp. 549-550Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2741423 .

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On Early Human Skin Pigmentation

by MICHAEL G. MICHLOVIC Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Moorhead State Univer- sity, Moorhead, Minn. 56560, U.S.A. 21 I 77

Reed (CA 17:719) mentions the possibility that the lighter- skinned Bushmen of South Africa might have so developed over the last several hundred thousand years. Evidence for a more widespread Bush/Hottentot population in equatorial Africa is taken as a suggestion that these earlier Boskops must have been darker-skinned. I should note first that the Bush/Hottentots are probably nowhere near that ancient. The earliest Boskop material outside of South Africa seems to be a skull from Singa, in Sudan. A 17,000 B.P. C14 date has been tentatively offered (Sprague and Wynn 1974:18). We should recognize, however, that perhaps the present homeland of the Bushmen is their original homeland and the earlier, more widespread distribu- tion of Boskop represents an expansion out of South Africa. Secondly, although the assumption that skin color and skeletal anatomy are unrelated is not difficult to accept, some more convincing evidence would certainly be welcome. The obvious problem here is that the sun's rays do not seem any more benign in the Kalahari Desert than in the tropical forests of the Congo or West Africa, so there is hardly an impetus or selective pres- sure toward lighter skin. (Quite the contrary, I would imagine, taking into consideration the lack of shade!)

More seriously, however, the problem that suggests itself is that the tilt of the earth's axis keeps the sun directly opposite some point between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. We must assume, therefore, that between latitudes 23?27'N and 23027'S the sun's ultraviolet radiation will be at a maximum at some time during the year. Assuming that if a trait in an organism (such as skin color in humans) is to have a selective advantage it must be operative in providing that advantage on more than a seasonal basis, we are left with the problem of why there should be lighter-skinned populations in the Kalahari and other parts of South Africa north of the Tropic of Capricorn. The fact that must be dealt with is that not all populations between the two tropics have black skin, though during some season of the year ultraviolet radiation from the sun is falling at some point in this area with the same inten- sity as on the equator during equinox.

I think it should also be kept in mind that the subsurface layers of the human skin produce both melanin and keratin. Keratin will provide a defense against the harmful effects of a high incidence of ultraviolet rays, although not as effectively as melanin (Loomis 1973), and we should be hesitant to accept too readily any claims that only dark (black) skin must be related to extended occupations of tropical areas. In other words, the Bushmen's light-colored skin (in comparison to African Blacks) may itself be an adaptation to tropical condi- tions of high levels of ultraviolet radiation. It is not necessary to suppose that their skin color has become lighter because they were "pushed" into South Africa, away from the equator.

Nevertheless, the idea that the early hominids were dark- skinned is worth more consideration than has been afforded it in evolutionary studies, especially insofar as such a hypothesis

might illuminate particular episodes in hominid phylogeny. Loomis (1973:261) touches very briefly in a footnote on one of these problems, namely, that perhaps Neanderthal populations disappeared in Western Europe because of severe endemic rickets which afflcted a population with (presumably) dark skin that was unable to accumulate enough Vitamin D from an exogenous source (i.e., ultraviolet sunlight). Ivanhoe (1970) provides more detail on the Neanderthal-rickets question. Although these explanations appear plausible, they fail to take into account that prime tenet of evolutionary theory- that perhaps Neanderthals did not "die out," but evolved into "modern" humans by developing lighter skin and losing certain of those aspects of the skeleton that suggest rickets in many Classic Neanderthal specimens (see Ivanhoe 1970 for a discus- sion of these traits). While it seems to me safe to assume that Neanderthal skeletal anatomy resulted from any number of evolutionary trends and adaptations and was not universally a function of rickets, the possibility exists that rickets might have contributed to the Classic Neanderthal phenomenon. I would think that Reed's contention that the first people were dark- skinned might profitably be kept in mind.

by MARTIN HALL and TIM MAGGS

Natal Museum, Loop St., Pietermaritzburg 3201, South Africa. 17 II 77

We should like to point out the inaccuracy of Reed's statement (CA 17:719) that the Iron Age peoples settled in South Africa "at approximately the same time as Dutch colonization of the Cape in the 17th century." It has long been known that popu- lations of Negro physical type, speaking Bantu languages, were settled along the coasts of the Transkei, Natal, and Mozambique prior to the colonization of the Cape, since the earliest maritime adventurers recorded encounters with such people (Wilson and Thompson 1969). Furthermore, extrapolation from oral tradi- tions collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries indi- cates that the African societies of South Africa were well established by the time of the arrival of European settlers (Ellenberger 1912, Bryant 1929, Soga 1930). In recent years, a number of archaeological investigations have permitted the development of a chronological framework for the process of Iron Age diffusion, and although research is far from complete there is clearly no longer any room for the antiquated version of African history revived by Reed.

In the Transvaal, three Early Iron Age sites have been dated to the 3d and 4th centuries A.D.: Silver Leaves (Klapwijk 1973), Klein Afrika (Prinsloo 1974), and Eiland (Maggs 1977). At the village settlement of Broederstroom, occupied in the 5th century A.D., Mason (1973) has recovered skeletal material which can be attributed to an individual of Negro physical type. To the south, in present-day Natal, the earliest Iron Age sites are somewhat later than in the Transvaal, but nevertheless predate Dutch settlement by a millennium. Ndumu, for in- stance, has a date in the 7th century A.D. (Dutton 1970), while Ntshekane was occupied in the 8th and 9th centuries (Maggs and Michael 1976). Research sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation has shown that farming communities had settled on the high plateau of the Orange Free State by the 15th century A.D. (Maggs 1976). Thus it would appear that the

Vol. 18 * No. 3 * September 1977

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first Iron Age farmers, ancestors to the Bantu-speaking com- munities of South Africa today, moved across the Limpopo sometime before the 4th century A.D., were settled in Natal by the 7th century, and were exploiting the more difficult environments of the southern highveld by the 15th century.

The myth that Iron Age occupation coincided with Dutch settlement has an origin related to specific historical circum- stance. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the expansion of the frontier of White settlement northwards coincided with a process of internal upheaval in the African societies in its path. These developments, intimately connected with the formation of the Zulu kingdom and known in their later stages as the Mfecane, resulted in the virtual depopulation of Natal south of the Tugela River and large areas of the highveld. Consequently, when the Voortrekkers arrived in this area in the early 1830s, they found rich cattle country virtually un- settled, and the refugees who returned on the defeat of the Zulu king Dingane in 1839 were seen as immigrant groups from the north rather than the peoples who had been displaced by the Zulu some 20 years earlier.

While we are not qualified to comment in detail on other aspects of Reed's paper, there are a number of other inac- curacies that need to be pointed out. In the first place, con- temporary San peoples are not "restricted to the Kalahari Desert of Namibia" and are not solely represented by the !Kung; other groups are widely dispersed over Botswana. Furthermore, it would seem perverse to argue, in the absence of any data, that there has been a major physical change among such people, as modern research has shown the San to have close cultural adaptation to their environment (Marshall 1976, Lee and DeVore 1976), while archaeological information indicates that such a hunting and collecting economy has per- sited in southern Africa for many millennia (Sampson 1974). Secondly, there is little basis for designating the "Bush-Boskop physical type" as a subspecies, Homo sapiens capensis, as Reed suggests. A prior condition for such a categorization is that the population concerned be clearly distinct from other, equivalent, groups. In the many areas of southern Africa where contact between San and Bantu-speaking communities does occur, or has occurred in the past, there is a considerable degree of mis- cegnation (De Villiers 1968). In Natal and Lesotho, for instance, the San of the Drakensberg escarpment have been incorporated within the African population, with the result

that there is a wide spectrum of physical variation. In any case, it would surely be inappropriate to designate as capensis a people who were widely dispersed over central southern Africa. Finally, we are at a loss to understand why there is a "quandary" because early man cannot be unequivocally seen as dark- skinned. Surely it is much more reasonable to assume that in the past, as in the present, there was a wide spectrum of human physical form which developed in response to differing en- vironments?

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MAGGS, T., and M. MICHAEL. 1976. Ntshekane: An Early Iron Age site in the Tugela Basin, Natal. Annals of the Natal Museum 22:705-40.

MARSHALL, L. 1976. The !Kung of Nyae Nyae. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

MASON, R. 1973. First Early Iron Age settlement in South Africa, Broederstroom 24/73, Brits district, Transvaal. South African Journal of Science 69:324-25.

PRINSLOO, H. P. 1974. Early Iron Age site at Klein Afrika. South African Journal of Science 70:271-73.

SAMPSON, C. G. 1974. The Stone Age archaeology of southern Africa. New York: Academic Press.

SOGA, J. 1930. The south-eastern Bantu. Johannesburg: Witwaters- rand University Press.

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More on Hominid Evolution, Speech, and Language

by PHILIP LIEBERMAN

Department of Linguistics, Brown University, Providence, R.l 02912, U.S.A. 25 I 77

Cowan (CA 17:776-77) proposes that the presence of "for- mally complete" linguistic ability is the "essential and decisive" factor in recognizing Homo sapiens. Speech is one component of the linguistic ability of modern H. sapiens. Cowan therefore states that "articulate" speech must have been present if a fossil hominid is to be classified at the sapiens level. The implicit premises thus are that language is an all-or-nothing phenom- enon and that speech is either "articulate" or "inarticulate." Cowan seems to argue that the classic Neanderthal hominids, whose speech may have had some phonetic deficiencies with respect to that of modern H. sapiens, should not be classified as sapiens.

Cowan refers to the data of a series of experiments (Lieber- man 1968, 1975, 1976; Lieberman and Crelin 1971; Lieberman

et al. 1972) which suggest that present-day nonhuman pri- mates, australopithecines, classic Neanderthal hominids of the class typified by the La Chapelle-aux-Saints fossil (Howells 1974), and human newborn infants have supralaryngeal airways that differ functionally from those of normal human speakers. The normal adult-like human supralaryngeal vocal tract consists of a pharyngeal airway which leads from the larynx to the oral and nasal airways. The human pharyngeal and oral airways are approximately equal in length and form a "two-tube" acoustic filter that can generate the full range of human speech sounds. The anatomy of the human supralaryn- geal airways is, at present, unique in this respect (Negus 1949). The results of computer modelling of the reconstructed supra- laryngeal airways of the classic Neanderthal La Chapelle-aux- Saints fossil indicated that hominids of this class could not have produced sounds like the vowels [i], [u], and [a] (the vowels of the English words meat, shoe, and mama). Their speech also probably would have tended to have a nasal quality. Cowan appears to equate these deficiencies of Neanderthal speech with the term "inarticulate."

What, however, might these characteristics indicate with regard to general linguistic ability? The presence of one or more

550 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

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