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Ian Tattersall
Ian Tattersall, the curator of biological
anthropology in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum
of Natural History, in New York City, differs from many of his
colleagues by suggesting that as many as 20, not only six or seven,
different species of hominids are represented in the present-day
fossil record. “This notion of human evolution as being a linear
trudge from primitivism to perfection is totally wrong,” he told Amy
Otchet for the UNESCO Courier (December 1, 2000). “I came to
paleoanthropology from the study of lemurs [monkey-like primates] in
Madagascar where you have a huge diversity of animals. You cannot
help asking, ‘How did these creatures become so diverse?' Yet this
question is not asked in paleoanthropology because there is only one
species of humans today. Somehow we believe it is normal and natural
for us to be alone in the world. Yet in fact, if you look at the
fossil record, you find that this is totally unusual--this may be
the first time that we have ever had just one species of humans in
the world.” With his colleague Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Tattersall
recently published the most complete compendium documenting and
analyzing the major specimens of the hominid fossil record. In
addition to his contributions to academia, Tattersall has published
several nonfiction books for general readers. Gilbert Taylor,
writing for Booklist (February 1, 1998), described Tattersall
as “perhaps the best popular expositor of paleoanthropology.”
Ian Michael Tattersall was born in Paignton,
Devon, England, on May 10, 1945 and raised in East Africa. He
returned to England to pursue his bachelor’s and master’s degrees,
studying archaeology and anthropology at the University of
Cambridge. In 1967 he immigrated to the U.S. and enrolled at Yale
University, in New Haven, Connecticut. After he earned a Ph.D. in
geology and geophysics, in 1971, he moved to New York City to teach
at the New School for Social Research and the Lehman College of the
City University of New York (CUNY). That same year he was also hired
as an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH),
a position he held until 1976, when he became an associate curator.
In 1981 he was promoted to head of the biological anthropology
section. He currently serves on the faculty of CUNY's Graduate
Center.
During the 1970s Tattersall published several
scholarly works on lemurs—a group of primates that were once
widespread but are now found, in the wild, only on the island of
Madagascar, off the eastern coast of Africa. Although they are all
from the same superfamily (Lemuroidea), the estimated 30 to
35 extant species of lemurs vary widely in body size and habitat.
“The lemurs of Madagascar have always been a fascination of mine . .
. ,” Tattersall said in an interview posted on the AMNH Web site.
“Why they’re really important, in a scientific sense, is that
they’re a whole parallel world; they’re a separate independent
radiation of primates that show exactly how primates can exploit
their basic primate potential to do many many different things. And
they give us a new perspective on ourselves, on our own evolutionary
group, by making this comparison.” Tattersall's book Primates of
Madagascar (1982) was described by a reviewer for Library
Journal (May 15, 1982) as “likely to be the definitive work on its
subject.”
That same year Tattersall, collaborating with the
noted American paleontologist Niles Eldredge, published The Myths
of Human Evolution, in which they attempted to introduce the
general public to contemporary evolutionary theory. While the
scientific community is nearly unanimous in its acceptance of
Charles Darwin's assertion that all species have diverged from
common ancestors through the process of natural selection, many now
question whether evolution occurred at the gradual pace that Darwin
first suggested. In 1972 Eldredge and the famed naturalist Stephen
Jay Gould proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which
posits that the characteristics of organisms remain the same before
undergoing short periods of rapid change. Describing The Myths of
Human Evolution as a “lightweight polemic in favour of a
‘punctuationist’ view of human evolution,” J. R. Durant, writing for
the London Times Literary Supplement (February 18, 1983),
complained that “the ‘myths' referred to in the title are many and
varied, since the authors consign to this category virtually any
idea on the subject of evolution with which they happen to
disagree.” The book, Durant concluded, “contributes more or less
nothing of any consequence to the current debate about the pattern
and process of evolution, be it organic, human, social, or whatever.
. . . [The authors] have produced yet another popular work that will
merely add to the confusion of those interested lay people who turn
to it for guidance through the maze of contemporary arguments about
evolution.” Offering a different view was the critic for Choice
(February 1983), who, while agreeing that “the authors spend an
inordinate effort” offering evidence to support their favored
approach to evolution, nonetheless described the book as “a fine
introduction to the current facts and theories of human evolution.”
In 1993 Tattersall presided over the opening of
the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution at the AMNH, which had taken
nearly a decade to plan and construct. Writing for the New York
Times (April 23, 1993), Malcolm W. Browne praised the exhibit,
which had replaced the museum's old Hall of Human Biology, for its
combination of “spectacular dioramas with models, animated displays
and lucid explanations”; he predicted that it would “become one of
the most popular museum exhibitions New York City has seen.” The
first exhibit in the new hall was a diorama showing a family of
skeletons gathered in a typical American living room. While the rest
of the family watched television, the father relaxed in his easy
chair, reading a copy of The Human Odyssey: Four Million Years of
Human Evolution, written by Tattersall to coincide with the
exhibition's unveiling. The book became one of the all-time
best-sellers in the museum shop, with nearly 1,000 copies sold
within the first month. The Human Odyssey “is sure to be the
general-readership book on human evolution for the 1990s,” E. Delson
wrote for Choice (September 1993). “Drawing heavily on
exquisite graphics prepared for the exhibit (two glorious Jay
Matternes murals, site photographs, and dioramas, as well as
numerous photos of the included fossil casts), Tattersall has
produced a lucid and literate guide to the whole range of human
biological history.”
In The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think
We Know About Human Evolution (1995), Tattersall traced the
development of differing theories of evolutionary biology. According
to Linda Gamlin, reviewing the book for New Scientist (April
8, 1995), Tattersall “simultaneously handles half-a-dozen different
themes,” tracing the development of the field from the 19th century
onward. “It is a complex mix,” Gamlin wrote, “which also zigzags
geographically from the rock art of Lascaux in France to the caves
of South Africa, from the river valleys of Indonesia to Olduvai
Gorge in Tanzania. . . . The task of organising such complex
material into a narrative account would have defeated most writers,
but Tattersall has mastered it with remarkable skill. The result is
a smoothly flowing and wonderfully readable book that grips the
attention without oversimplifying the arguments.” In contrast,
Christopher Dornan wrote for the Toronto, Canada, Globe and Mail
(April 20, 1995) that Tattersall’s treatment of evolution “makes its
subject boring beyond belief. There's nothing wrong with the factual
content. It may be plodding, but it's all here, the full closet of
famous skeletons—from Java Man to the Taung Child, from Turkana Boy
through Lucy to the ‘First Family.’ The problem is that the author .
. . cannot tell a story to save his life.”
Tattersall examined the evolutionary milestones
that define our species in Becoming Human: Evolution and Human
Uniqueness (1998). Beginning roughly five million years ago,
with the emergence of australopithecine--small-brained hominids that
were no more adept at tool use than other great apes--Tattersall
attempted to parse the evolutionary pressures that transformed our
ancestors into thinkers capable of producing such sophisticated
paintings as those found in Lascaux. “Tattersall believes humanity
was achieved in a quantum leap,” Robert J. Richards wrote for the
New York Times Book Review (April 26, 1998). “After
consideration of anatomical and artifactual evidence, he is
reluctant even to admit that the Neanderthals had language and the
kind of symbolic understanding that would mark them close cognitive
cousins to their contemporaries, the cave-painting Homo sapiens.
This quantum evolutionary theory seems more a conclusion derived
from deep cultural belief than from strong evidence or convincing
hypothesis.”
Though Richards acknowledged that Tattersall had
provided an “an interesting, if unorthodox, theoretical support for
his belief,” the complaint that the book's content is skewed by the
author's endorsement of punctuated equilibrium prompted a reply by
Niles Eldredge in the May 17, 1998 issue of the New York Times
Book Review: “Though Richards pronounces the ‘anchoring
evidence’ to be ‘relatively light,’ the truth is that the fossil
record of hominid evolution over the past four million years is
remarkably dense—the outcome of especially intense collecting over
the past 40 years. Tattersall has seen more hominid fossils than
anyone else. That he has concluded that the patterns of hominid
evolution are really no different from patterns in the evolutionary
history of all other life-forms for at least the past 535 million
years should by now come as no surprise. Patterns of species
stability interrupted by relatively quick intervals of change (the
whole triggered by ecosystem-wide extinction and subsequent
speciation events) are well established as the norm rather than the
exception in the history of life.” Despite the scholarly controversy
over Tattersall's stance, the book proved accessible to lay
audiences, prompting David Perlman to write for the San Francisco
Chronicle (May 10, 1998), “There is no more literate
anthropologist writing on human evolution today than Ian Tattersall.
. . . His important new book, Becoming Human, is at once
absorbing in its details, provocative in its thoughtful speculations
and delightfully informal in its style.”
In his next book for a general readership, The
Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success, and Curious Extinction of Our
Closest Human Relatives (1999), Tattersall attempted to present
a coherent overview of the debate surrounding one of the most
perplexing and controversial questions in paleoanthropology: what
happened to the Neanderthals? While the book clearly outlines the
two competing answers to that question--multiregionalism, which
suggests that Neanderthals interbred with early humans, and the Out
of Africa hypothesis, which argues that they were replaced by
humans--most reviewers noted that Tattersall clearly favored the
latter. In a review for the American Anthropologist
(September 2002), Trenton W. Holliday wrote, “Writing books for a
popular audience cannot be easy--yet Tattersall has done an
admirable job of weaving a narrative of the Neanderthals that is
readily accessible to nonspecialists.”
Working with Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Tattersall
published Extinct Humans in 2000. In that book he broadened
the scope of his study to include many other extinct species of
hominids in an effort to trace human evolution in a way that
explained humans' development as not following a single line but,
rather, as resembling a tree with myriad branches—some dying out
rapidly and others flourishing. In a review for Booklist
(December 1, 2000), Gilbert Taylor wrote, “Tattersall has few peers
in popular paleoanthropological writing,” describing Extinct
Humans as a “superior overview.”
In 2002 Tattersall published The Monkey in the
Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human. In eight
essays Tattersall tackled such topics as the scientific process, the
origins of modern humans, and humans' relationship to Neanderthals.
The dual aims of the book, according to Alan Bilsborough, who
reviewed it for the Times Higher Education Supplement
(December 6, 2002), “are to summarise our understanding of human
evolutionary diversity and to review the means whereby we reach that
understanding.” The book, Bilsborough concluded, “is vigorously and
authoritatively written, and Tattersall has an enviable gift for
explaining complex ideas clearly and vividly. ”
From about 1998 to 2005, Tattersall and
Schwartz were involved in an ambitious project to analyze and
photograph as much of the hominid fossil record as possible. “I
realized that we had, in the course of doing research on
Neanderthals, accumulated a lot of descriptions of fossil hominids
that we'd made according to a very consistent protocol, and in such
a way that all these descriptions could be compared directly with
each other. And we realized that we had the basic element here of a
resource that really wasn't available to the paleoanthropological
profession,” Tattersall said, according to the interview posted on
the AMNH Web site. “Virtually all known human fossils have been
described in the literature but they've been described by different
people in different times and in different ways, and usually using a
sort of comparative schema which made it very, very difficult for
you to use one description in the record from one source with a
description that's gained from another source. So we decided to try
to see nearly all the fossils, or all of the hominid fossils that we
could get access to, and describe them all according to this single
protocol that we developed.” The most recent edition of the
four-volume set Human Fossil Record was published in 2005,
but given that paleoanthropologists are constantly making new
discoveries, Tattersall has said that he regards the series as a
work in progress.
In 2007 Tattersall and his colleagues unveiled the
Hall of Human Origins (which replaced the Hall of Human Biology and
Evolution) at the AMNH. The new displays, which incorporate the most
recent discoveries in molecular biology, include interactive
multimedia elements. In a review for CNET News (March 16, 2007,
on-line), Caroline McCarthy reported, “Where the old Hall of Human
Biology and Evolution had once been an austere set of skeleton casts
and dioramas depicting Neanderthals who looked like they'd stepped
out of Geico Auto Insurance's ‘So Easy, A Caveman Can Do It’ ad
campaign, the refurbished Hall of Human Origins is a multimedia
wonderland. The old dioramas are still intact, but the surrounding
explanations and diagrams have been replaced with more information,
better graphics, and often video or interactive touch-screen
displays.”
In addition to his books for adults, Tattersall
has written two children's books, Primates: Lemurs, Monkeys, and
You (1994) and Bones, Brains and DNA: The Human Genome and
Human Evolution (2007). He lives in New York City.
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