Dr Anne Dambricourt-Malassé is a palaeoanthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. She was the lead author for the paper on the Masol fossil findings. Siddhartha Mishra spoke to her about the significance of the excavations. Excerpts:
What do the Masol findings reveal?
If the homo genus made cut marks, this implies that their emergence occurred long before 2.6 million years in Africa. Then add the time necessary to achieve demographic balance needed for survival, and the time needed to reach the sub-Himalayan plains: I agree with scholars who are looking for 3-million-year-old fossils. I also agree with Yves Coppens and Brigitte Senut who recognise a Praeanthropus grade (the ancestral lineage) at 4 to 3.6 million years emerging in the southern hemisphere, independent of the Australopithecine lineage (still thought to be our main ancestral chain).
What species do you think made the marks?
We don’t know of any fossil of the genus homo dating from earlier than 2.7 to 2.6 million years and they were collected in South Africa. A mandible has been collected in Ethiopia dating to 2.8 million years, a typical face of Australopithecus. Its teeth indicate they ate meat, like the homo genus, and probably used stone tools for scavenging activity like at Masol. So now we know that Australopithecines ate meat and used stone tools 3.4 million years ago in Ethiopia and 3.3 million years ago in Kenya.
It debunks the ‘all humans walked out of Africa’ theory, then.
Yes, the fossils of great apes and hominin distribution in Masol break the view of a linear process of evolution.
Masol is very close to the area providing five fossil species of Asian great apes, Indopithecus giganteus and four species of Sivapithecus (8 million years). The tectonics have compressed the sediments which is the opposite of what has happened at the Rift Valley, so there is a lack of fossil layers.
And finally, Masol is at the same latitude as the cave of Longgupo in Central China, in which a fragment of hominin mandible, stone tools, fauna, the giant ape Gigantopithecus, have been collected in the same layer dated to 2.48 million years. If the African homo genus is the only one paradigm to explain Masol and Longgupo hominin activities, this means that the oldest species of homo genus would be scattered from South Africa to Central China at 2.5 million years with a large demography at the inter-continental scale.
Some have also raised doubts the cut marks on the bones being made by humans.
If they are specialists, they’ll provide me with reasons and proof: What are the arguments against the interpretation?
This is not opinion: we have done a demonstration with the description of each mark, its size, its profile and location and whether they were not intentional. The profile of the intentional marks is very well known by specialists, such as my colleague Anne Marie Moigne, member of the team, and these marks are exactly the same as on other fossils and the difference is only the age.
The spatial organisation is intelligent, the marks themselves are short, parallel with strong angulation—clearly done by the movement of a hand. And again, the superpositions of short marks which are on the surface do not correspond to carnivore teeth.
Some experts have also raised doubts over the dating of the tools your team has found.
The intentional marks are very strong and they were made by the sharp edge of quartzite. It is therefore logical to find stone tools with the fossils in the same condition. Also, these stone tools are otherwise unknown in the Shivaliks and coherent with the dated age of 2.6 million years. Such chopping tools have been collected in the silts with a fossil of a turtle and pictures give proof of this evidence. The stone implements have been found only in and on the fossiliferous layers, as shown by the dating process. We haven’t found artifacts in the sectors rich in cobbles (transported, rounded stones) and devoid of fossils.
You have gained a reputation when it comes to debunking the out-of-Africa theory.
I am a palaeoanthropologist. My work rests on the discovery of the embryonic origins of the permanent bipedality and its links with the complex nervous system. This process occurred in Africa and formed the Australopithecine and homo lines of ancestry.
I never imagined that we would find hominin activities in the Shivaliks and I was not looking for that. I have accepted the evidence because after seven years of fieldwork we have managed to verify it. If anything, it complicates my own research—this discovery changes the research of evolutionary mechanisms. The easy thing to do would be to abandon the fieldwork and publish ten papers with the demonstration of a true discovery and lie back.
