Bodies, race, and the history of anthropology

Another overdue post from our visit to Spain this past spring...

The Museo Nacional de Antropología in Madrid has a fascinating history. The first museum in Spain to be dedicated to the study of anthropology, it was founded in 1875 as the Museum of Anatomy by Pedro González de Velasco under the patronage of King Alfonso XII. Velasco's anatomical specimens and the ethnographic artifacts collected by the Spanish government from across its then-vast empire formed the museum's original collection. Off to the left of the main entrance lies a small, nondescript room that today displays some of these items as a record of, and a tribute to, the museum's past. For me, the most interesting, and, in many ways, poignant pieces in the room was the skeleton of Augustín Luego Capilla.

Skeleton of Augustín Luego Capilla

What makes the skeleton so remarkable, and the reason why Velasco acquired it for the museum, is its size: when Capilla died at the tragically young age of 26, he stood 2.35 meters (~8 feet, 3 inches) tall. Known as the "Gigante Extremeño," or "Giant of Extramadura," Capilla earned a living as part of a circus act and, when traveling through or near Madrid in 1875, sought medical attention from Velasco. By that time he was very ill, and on December 31st he died. His mother, Josefa, apparently in gratitude for Velasco's medical care, donated her son's body to the museum for anatomical study.

Capilla's extreme stature is likely explained by pituitary gigantism, a condition caused by the excessive secretion of growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor 1. The disproportionately large mandible, abnormal bone growth around the knee joints, and enlarged hands are all symptoms of acromegaly, which is commonly associated with pituitary pathologies. Capilla is one of only a handful of acromegalic skeletons on display in western museums. Velasco also created a full body cast of Capilla's corpse before it was skeletonized (this is also on display in the museum).

Pelvic girdle of Augustín Luego Capilla showing pathological proximal
femora (note anterio-posteriorally compressed femoral heads) and acetabula.

While the skeletal material is very interesting from a paleopathological perspective, some point out, correctly I believe, how tragic Capilla's life and afterlife was and is. Being displayed today as a museum oddity, Capilla's body, one can argue, has no more dignity now than Capilla himself had as a spectacle for gawking circus-goers when he was alive. While Capilla's body was donated, this was not the case for other acromegalic skeletons, many of which were essentially stolen to be included in medical collections.

The room also houses some objects that encapsulate the rather sordid history of biological anthropology, especially its obsession with racial typology.

Die Proportionslehre der Menschlichen Gestalt,
Carl Gustav Carus, 1854. 

References:

Giménez-Roldán, S (2019). The Giant of Extramadura: acromegalic gigantism in the 19th century. Neurosciences and History 6: 38-52.

Osteology in the Carolinas

I attended the first meeting of the Osteology in the Carolinas Interest Group (OCIG) this past Saturday (2/8). The event was organized by Gwen Robbins Schug (Appalachian State) and Dale Hutchinson (UNC-Chapel Hill) and was held at UNC-Chapel Hill. The purpose of the group is to be "a gathering focused on the analysis and interpretation of human skeletal remains from contexts pertinent to bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology, and paleoanthropology." In his introductory remarks (after showing off a hilarious t-shirt ode to syphilis), Dale noted that most researchers with these interests often fall between traditional disciplinary boundaries, so the group was meant to fill that gap.

Thirteen papers were given, and I would say that there were between 20-30 attendees. I was only able to stay for part of the morning session, but those papers that I did see were very interesting. Some snippets from my notes of the meeting:

• Chin-hsin Liu (Appalachian State) presented on the bioarchaeology of Bronze and Iron Age burials from Thailand. It was nice to hear from an area and time period about which I know almost nothing. Chin-hsin did say that many of the skeletons could not be analyzed in detail since they are left exposed by the state for tourism. Isotopic data indicate that populations tended to eat more-or-less the same diets even as they experienced a number of techno-sociological changes from the Bronze to Iron Ages.
• Sara Juengst, a PhD student from UNC-Chapel Hill, spoke about her research in the Titicaca Basin of Bolivia. She discussed how strontium isotope data can be used to identify the geographic area where individuals grew up and lived. Using this data, she found that a couple of the analyzed burials contain "non-local" individuals that were, perhaps, she suggested, pilgrims from other regions.
• Chuck Hilton, our colleague at UNCG, gave a really interesting talk on his research with human remains from Alaska. Essentially, he is interested in tracking skeletal changes associated with the shift from caribou- to whaling-based subsistence economies among Alaskan foraging populations a couple thousand years ago at a site called Point Hope. Chuck noted that data on the skeletal health of forager populations tends to be limited, as they are highly mobile and do not typically produce large cemeteries. Luckily, there are around 400 skeletons from this site, and Chuck found, intriguingly, that the folks practicing whaling were much less healthy than the earlier, caribou-hunting, people. Tuberculosis was especially prevalent in the former population (Chuck suggested that this could be linked either to increased marine mammal consumption or contact with infected NE Asian populations). The question becomes, of course, if whaling had such negative repercussions for health, why practice it? I was wondering if this isn't an example of costly signaling−whaling is, after all, a dangerous and, as Chuck put it, "boom or bust" proposition, so perhaps the individuals that engaged in it gained added prestige (and, thus, mating opportunities). I'll have to get his take on this.
• Megan Perry (East Carolina) talked about her team's work at the very famous site of Petra (you may recognize the picture below from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade−this is the city's treasury building). Orthodox thinking tells us that as a large, cosmopolitan urban center, Petra would have been ridden with diseases. However, preliminary analyses of the human remains suggests a surprisingly healthy population, and Perry and her team plan on testing this hypothesis further. 

  

  The treasury building at the ancient Nabataean city of Petra (courtesy of UNESCO).

• The last talk that I was able to hear was from Dan Temple (UNC-Wilimington). He was looking at human life history trade-offs with a collection of Jomon skeletal remains. Some background: bodies only have so much energy to delegate to various tasks like growth, maintenance, and reproduction, and life history theory is interested in understanding how the body uses these limited resources. Almost all individuals undergo some sort of stress early in development (low birth weight, disease, etc.), and human physiology is plastic enough to devote extra energy to combat these. The question is how does this impact the rest of an individual's life? Temple tested two models: (1) that these early stressors actually better prepare individuals for other setbacks later on; and (2) that the extra energy used early on in development actually makes those individuals more susceptible to later insults (a "borrow now, pay later" sort of idea). Using linear enamel hypoplasias, which are imperfections in the formation of tooth enamel that reflect episodes of stress, Temple found that those individuals affected by hypoplasia earlier on in their lives had more pathological conditions later on and lower life expectancy. This supports the "borrow now, pay later" hypothesis.

There were a number of other talks that I'm sorry I missed, including our department head, Bob Anemone, who talked about his predictive geospatial modeling, Steve Churchill (Duke), who discussed new hominin discoveries in South Africa, and Mark Teaford (High Point University), who talked about the latest in dental microwear. Looking forward to attending this get-together in the future.

Neandertals suffered from cancer, too

A new article in PLoS ONE by Janet Monge and her colleagues reports the discovery of fibrous dysplasia on a 120,000-year-old Neandertal individual from Krapina. Fibrous dysplasia is a benign cancerous disorder that manifests as abnormal bone growth.

Krapina 120.71 in caudal view (a). The large lesion is located above the tubercular facet and extends laterally. The trabeculae have been destroyed and the cortex appears expansive. The thin cortical bone forming the superior surface of the cavern was broken away postmortem. (b) Krapina 120.6 shows the normal pattern of bony trabeculae in the medullary space. The surface irregularities are postmortem. Caption from Monge et al. (2013: Figure 1).

What's really interesting here is that these sorts of disorders are very rare in the archaeological record. The earliest examples were, until now, only about 1,000-4,000 years old. While it's difficult to determine what caused the tumor, it does demonstrate that these sorts of abnormalities are not found solely with modern pollutants that are often thought to be responsible for the high rates of cancers among contemporary populations.

References:

Monge, J, Kricun, M, Radovčić, J, Radovčić, D, Mann, A, Frayer, DW. Fibrous dysplasia in a 120,000+ year old Neandertal from Krapina, Croatia. PLoS ONE 8, e64539.

How pathological is the Nariokotome Boy?

Regula Schiess and Martin Haeusler (2013) recently published a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that critically examines the issue of pathology for KNM-WT 15000 (the "Nariokotome Boy"). This analysis comes on the heels of other recent re-examinations of this important 1.5 million year old skeleton. For example, it was thought by many that the Nariokotome Boy, who died between the ages of 8-11 (based on tooth eruption and microanatomy) and 12-15 (based on bone development), would have attained an adult stature of perhaps 6'1" (185 cm). This suggested to many that a linear, heat-adapted physique was characteristic of Homo erectus. Graves and colleagues (2010) questioned this reconstruction, arguing that the individual would have largely finished growing, and that an adult stature of about 5'4" (163 cm) was closer to the mark (John Hawks, on his weblog, provides additional commentary here).

Several authors have suggested that Nariokotome suffered from growth pathologies that, if corroborated, would preclude the use of this particular skeleton as a reference for Homo erectus skeletal biology (things like maturation rate or stature). Schiess and Haeusler (2013) set out to test whether the skeleton possesses evidence for:

• Unusually small, platyspondylic (that is, flattened) vertebrae.
• Spina bifida, which refers to a series of conditions characterized by the failure of one or more neural arches to close and thus fully encircle the spinal cord.
• Condylus tertius, which is an additional condyle found on the anterior margin of the foramen magnum, right between the two occipital condyles.
• Particularly small spinal canals (spinal stenosis).

If present, this complex of symptoms could be linked to a rare growth anomaly that goes by the fun name of spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia tarda. To carry out the analysis, they compare KNM-WT 15000 to a reference sample of 63 modern humans of various ages (I suspect that since these are archaeological specimens, their ages were estimated, rather than known. The researchers get around this by lumping their sample into broad categories, juveniles, adolescents, and adults, rather than specific ages). So, they found that:

• KNM-WT 15000's vertebral heights are more-or-less what you'd expect for his age group (i.e., they are not pathologically flattened relative to modern adolescent humans).
• The skeleton's vertebrae (as measured by superior surface area) do in fact appear to be small.
• The non-sacral neural arches that are preserved show no evidence for non-fusion. The 3rd through 5th sacral elements are unfused (see below).

Sacral elements of KNM-WT 15000. From Schiess and Haeusler (2013: Figure 4).

• A condylus tertius is definitely present.
• KNM-WT-15000's spinal canals are very small compared to the modern reference sample.

Schiess and Haeusler (2013: 372) therefore conclude:

[T]he apparent flatness of the vertebrae is typical for the immature age of the Nariokotome boy. There is no indication for spina bifida sensu stricto. An extension of the sacral hiatus from S5 up to S3 is normal in humans of the same age as the Nariokotome boy. The condylus tertius is a developmental anomaly that is relatively common in the normal population unaffected by spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia tarda. It has no clinical relevance. Both the relative smallness of the vertebral bodies and a narrow spinal canal are not classic features of spondyloepiphyseal dyspasia tarda. The criteria for spinal stenosis are met in the cervical, but not in the thoracolumbar region. Moreover, pedicle and canal shape are not typical of congenital spinal stenosis. Rather, a comparison with other fossils suggests that a narrow spinal canal and small vertebrae might be specific to early hominins.

It would have been nice to have included individuals with these skeletal abnormalities in the reference sample; surely there is variation in how these conditions manifest (I'm not sure how difficult it is to get a hold of such specimens). Overall, however, they make a convincing case. All of this is not to say that the Nariokotome Boy was perfectly healthy. Schiess and Haeusler do note that the last two lumbar vertebrae are asymmetrical, likely the result of a severely herniated disc, which in turn probably caused a significant limp. Nevertheless, these findings show that the incongruities of the skeletal and dental age-at-death estimates are not the result of a developmental disorder and, further, that this wonderfully complete skeleton can still serve as a useful reference for Homo erectus skeletal biology.

References:

Graves, RR, Lupo, AC, McCarthy, RC, Wescott, DJ, Cunningham, DL (2010). Just how strapping was KNM-WT 15000? Journal of Human Evolution 59, 542-554.

Schiess, R, Haeusler, M (2013). No skeletal dysplasia in the Nariokotome Boy KNM-WT 15000 (Homo erectus) - A reassessment of congential pathologies of the vertebral column. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 150, 367-374.