A Matter Of Time - What Happens Next? podcast on exploring our history

Dr. Susan Carland:

Welcome back to What Happens Next. This time we'll be pondering what happens if we stop exploring our physical history? What would we lose? What have we got wrong about how we explore the past? How does understanding our deep history help us understand what it means to be human today? And how should this shape our future? Our experts help us get to the bottom of these big questions, just don't mention Indiana Jones. 

Justin Adams is a palaeontologist finding previously unknown facts about extinct species, such as the Tasmanian tiger. He tells us why we need to keep looking for new information about who we once were and why that matters today.

Justin Adams:

Hi, I'm Justin Adams and I am a comparative anatomist and palaeontologist and medical anatomist and anatomy educator and I'm a bit of an academic platypus. You look at me and you wonder how I came to be.

Susan Carland:

Justin Adams, welcome. Why do you think it is so important that we continue to explore human history in particular?

Justin Adams:

I think in one way, if we abandoned the pursuit and the understanding of human history, we are divorcing ourselves further from the shared experience that we all have as humans, and it makes it harder to get to that level of empathy and altruism. It's a really important thing I think that across the sciences, we sometimes lose sight of which is that there are these practical things that come out of it. And some of it is the tangible, right? Like I find a fossil and that fossil demonstrates a thing and I can tell a scientific narrative around it, but at its core, it's a reminder about our common shared origin, our common shared history. And that it's been incredibly fragile for a really long period of time. And that fragility continues because what are we now looking at? What we're seeing is the continued fragility of us as a biological organism on this planet and the things that we're all having to come together to try to respond to.

Susan Carland:

What does your deep research into the deep history of humankind tell you about what it means to be human?

Justin Adams:

It reinforces the fragility and the uniqueness of where we actually are. We're one of the only species that we're aware of - and obviously I don't want to get into a debate about animal intelligence - but we've obtained a level of self-awareness and sophistication as an organism, that is seemingly singular and unique. And when we go extinct, we have no idea if there's going to be another organism that will inhabit this planet, which will share that same level of self-awareness and intelligence. What do we do with it? What we choose to do with it is not anything we're going to be judged by cosmically, but it is something that we have to look at and consider in terms of right thoughts, right actions as organisms. So I think in my studies and going back to your original question, which is what does this tell us about being human?

Is that it's the parable of, for the want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. So that's a parable around the idea that small things can have giant consequences downstream. And for us, it is that all of these random events that took place in our evolutionary history could very much have gone a different direction. And so our existence as a species on this planet is based on these really unique events and features that took place in particular sequence and in response to certain events, and it could very much have just not happened. And so it's the preciousness of it all. Like there did not need to be a reason why we're having this conversation right now, very much a whole sequence of events that occurred millions of years ago could have gone a completely different direction and it need not have necessarily led to any of the things that we have. But since we have these things, it reinforces that specialness and then we need to consider what we then do with that unique position that we now occupy and how responsible we're going to be with it as organisms.

Susan Carland:

Do you think we are doing enough research into deep human history?

Justin Adams:

Collectively, I think the will is there and certainly we are graduating enough students. There are more scientists now on the planet than there has ever been scientists on the planet. That's an amazing thing, we are an incredibly capable species in the sense of being able to investigate the world around us, including our own history. I think the real challenge though, that we're facing is that we are struggling with how we make that pursuit feasible. We're struggling with how we encourage people to continue on being researchers, because there was a time... We're trying to adapt a system that never really was meant. It's almost like an organism that finds itself in a brand new environment. For centuries science was gentlemen scholars - for all of the loaded, sexist, classist problem that that invokes. You had 17th century landed gentry who were able to just think about whatever they wanted to and do whatever experiments they wanted because they were freed from the confines of earning a living. And we've tried to replicate that a bit within a modern society where we free certain individuals, a proportion of our society, to think, to take their capabilities that they have as humans and to explore those and exploit those. And then a lot of those things end up giving us all sorts of side benefits and unintended benefits. And then-

Susan Carland:

Like what?

Justin Adams:

Well, it's like experimentation and the basic science is leading to vaccines or cures, or other kinds of research. Basic science research ends up playing into all sorts of different outcomes within medicine, within biology, within engineering, and so that discovery process, I think we all appreciate and acknowledge that there's this beauty to having the Academy in its broadest sense at its most progressive sense, it's most open sense, but of course that has to operate within the real world. And operating within the real world makes it challenging, because as much as we want to encourage the next generation to come through and do some amazing things -  and I have to shout out at this point to my lab students, my PhD students are some of the most brilliant people I've ever had the opportunity to work with. They're just truly inspiring people, but it's a really uncertain future for them. And it's not just a COVID thing. It's not just a proximate thing. It is a thing that we are facing in the scientific community. And we see that in threads around how we encourage women in STEM. We see that across how we encourage underrepresented populations in the sciences. But I think overall, one of the hugest challenges that we have is how do we move forward as a species doing this thing called science and have it adequately supported so that the next generations feel like it is a worthwhile pursuit to take on? Because if there aren't jobs in science, if there isn't work in science that pays your bills, we're losing a huge number of people that could otherwise be making those advances that make vaccines possible and cancer treatments possible. 

Again, it's about what we do with the knowledge we have. And unfortunately, budgets are budgets and finances are finances, and that ends up picking winners and losers. And unfortunately the way that science is funded now, so few people end up getting funding. You can't tell me that 90% of the people who lose out in a grant round, haven't written a good grant. They are legitimate scientists, they're doing their best, but you can only do so much within the limitations of the way that we structure science in the Academy now.

Susan Carland:

And what do we, as a species lose if we continue down that path?

Justin Adams:

Right. We lose a lot. It's not just, I think, losing the fact that, say like in fossil research, there's this classic thing of, you can go to a field site one year and there's nothing. You wander around and there's nothing in the exposures and that, and then the rains come in and then the next year they might be present. And then the year after that, they may have washed down into a river valley and disappeared forever. And we'll never locate them again. There's a discovery aspect within certain fields like the fields that I'm involved in, where we know that if you don't time it properly, you can miss out on these opportunities. The infamous Lucy find from the 1970s with Don Johanson and his team-

Susan Carland:

Tell us about who Lucy was.

Justin Adams:

Right. So Lucy made... This was I think one of the first examples of someone in fossil human research, other than say, Louis Leakey back in the 50s, who had quite a bit of popularity, but Don Johanson, really became sort of like the scientist Playboy type. It was that interface between popular science and discovery and making science sexy for-

Susan Carland:

He's like Indiana Jones in the way he was perceived.

Justin Adams:

And he played it. I've met Don a couple of times, not bagging on him in any way, but he did have a penchant for the tan suits. He filled a really critical role within the scientific discipline, but Lucy was the discovery of a roughly 18 year old female of a species we call Australopithecus Afarensis. And she was discovered based on the finding of a knee joint. So basically the part of your body that makes up the knee. And she was scattered across a wide surface area, because progressively when she died, which occurred on a lake margin, and then she was trampled and buried in soil and she was largely preserved. So her whole body was fossilised, which is a relatively rare event within palaeontology. And I mean rare with an asterisk next to it. But anyway, you end up with her in the fossil record and then she gets buried under sediment and sediment and sediment, and then water works its way through those sediments of her time and it exposes these older deposits.

She pops back up on the surface and then she starts getting scattered. And so she was found across a fairly large field because that's just part of the geological process that exposes fossils. But you could imagine during that season in Ethiopia, that if they hadn't been looking at the right spot at the right time, or if they'd come back a year later, she would have been lost forever. And she was a critical specimen in terms of really sinking home, at the time, one of the earliest known species of our evolutionary history, really establishing a huge amount of knowledge about body proportions and being a female at that time. And it tied into a whole bunch of hypotheses about human behaviour and socialisation and the evolution of all those things. So there are certain things that we know that if we don't strike now or when we can, there is the potential to lose information that will never gain back.

And I think that if we don't make real key investments in the future of science, particularly now, we have the potential to lose a lot of scientific literacy. And I think that's a real key part of this, because it isn't just the scientists in the "ivory tower" who are losing out when we don't adequately invest in science as a discipline. And not just as ancillary things, medical technology and things that cure human diseases or deal with climate change or any of the rest of it. It's equally that we end up losing the broader message, which is essential for that next generation to hear, to have critical thinking skills, to understand the grounding of themselves as organisms on the planet. All of that language that exists around scientific discovery when it does make its way to everybody, it's being saturated in it.

If you can be saturated in that language and those exposures and experiences, it makes a huge difference as to how you view the world. We see that, we see that with the progressive changes and how we combat huge, gigantic issues like racism. If you saturate people from an early age in an understanding that these old institutions are horrific and horrible, it counters those messages that have existed from generation to generation, have been passed over. So it's the same thing with scientific literacy. If you invest in people early and they understand the context of what they're living in and how they're all connected to each other as organisms, then that that fosters that next generation to then go on and ask those really good questions or to move forward and to take advantage again, of that innate capability that we have as a species.

Susan Carland:

Justin Adams, thank you so much for your time today.

Susan Carland:

Alistair Evans is a palaeontologist who explains why we need to keep exploring our history, if we want to understand our planet and ourselves. Let's hear from Alistair about why ongoing research is critical to conservation efforts, and also why humans can't grow wings. Here is Alistair.

Alistair Evans:

I'm Alistair Evans. I'm an associate professor in biology and palaeontology. I study how animals evolve, how they're built in an embryo and how they function throughout the 500 million years of vertebrate history.

Susan Carland:

Alistair Evans, thank you so much for joining us.

Alistair Evans:

Thanks for having me.

Susan Carland:

Why is it so important for us to continue to research, try to excavate animals and plants? Why do we still need to do that now?

Alistair Evans:

There is so much that we don't know about the history of life, where our own species came from, where all the animals and plants in our current environment, how they evolved and how they lived their life up until now. Because the time that we see now is basically a tiny sliver of the entire history of the earth and of the universe. And making decisions on just what's happening now and what we see now is going to leave us really unprepared for what might be happening in the future. And so by looking at fossils, describing them, understanding about their biology, we really get a good sense of what has happened in the past and how animals have changed over millions of years or even thousands of years to be where they are now.

Susan Carland:

Tell us about some of your favourite discoveries and what they've meant for our understanding of ourselves.

Alistair Evans:

I think recently some of the amazing things that we've discovered about ourselves, is by looking at the new fossils where we can extract DNA from hominin fossils. So being able to sequence the genome of modern humans, obviously it was about 20 years ago that we did that, but now we can sequence the genomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans and presumably many other hominin species or strains or lineages. We don't really know what they were, to be able to see where we fit into the complex branching of human history and human evolution. This old story of there being a very sequential linear pattern from the most recent common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, instead of simple linear progression is so outdated because of the complexity of the number of species and their relationships means that human evolution was so much more interesting and nowhere near as predictable as we had thought.

So by being able to look at the genome of Neanderthals, we can now see that what was once postulated, did we once used to breed with Neanderthals? Yes, we did. They were actually humans and Neanderthals that bred mostly in Europe, but some Neanderthal DNA has made its way back to Africa, which is presumably from interbreeding of homosapiens with other homosapien groups in Africa. But that's an amazing thing to be able to say that there was this extinct species and it was clearly a separate species from our own that we did interbreed with. Maybe there are characteristics that the Neanderthals had, that lived in a much colder environment than homosapiens did. Maybe there were some characteristics that we were able to get from them by this selective interbreeding. And that's an amazing thing that 20 years ago we would have thought was impossible.

Susan Carland:

Do you think Neanderthals get a bad rap? They're used as the punchline, is that unfair?

Alistair Evans:

It is unfair. And there's lots of reasons for that. One is that the very first specimen that was recorded did seem to have been diseased. And so when you say, "Oh, it was a bent over knuckle dragging type of guy that lived in caves." No, they were the same height as us, if not smaller, their brains were the same size as us. They were able to do a lot of the social. They used fire. They, I think, did some basic art. They used tools. So all of that indicates that they were a complex hominin species that was not too dissimilar from us.

Susan Carland:

How were they different from us?

Alistair Evans:

Well, we don't have evidence that they used language or symbolic art. They didn't survive as long as we did. Now, whether that was because we out-competed them or we killed them, we don't really know, there was a change in environment that they weren't able to live their life the same way that they were. They’re still open questions, but they were a legitimate and well surviving species, they lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. So they were able to live alongside us for some time.

Susan Carland:

You mentioned getting the genetic material of different species of humans or Neanderthals, how did you get that? How do we extract that? From where?

Alistair Evans:

So usually it's from bone and sometimes from teeth. So in every bone, there are cells that help to rebuild the bone when we break a bone. So the bone is not a dead tissue, it's actually a living tissue. And so when you break a bone, the cells wake up and say, "Oh, I've got stuff to do. I need to fix this thing." So when an animal dies and its bone is buried, those cells are trapped  inside the bone. And if it's not too long and it doesn't get too hot or too moist those cells contained DNA. And that DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years. And so we look at the DNA that's broken up into tiny little fragments and try to stick all them together. And from that, they've been able to actually get the full genome of Neanderthals and Denisovans and hopefully more species. And this of course goes with other extinct animals, like the sabre tooth cat. So they were sequenced very recently and there'll be many others.

Susan Carland:

Alistair, I've seen Jurassic Park. And I think we all know how this ends. Why would we want to do this?

Alistair Evans:

There's lots of reasons that we might want to be able to bring back extinct species. Let's leave apart the difficulty for the moment.

Susan Carland:

But we killed Neanderthals once, do we really want to reinvigorate that war?

Alistair Evans:

Well, we don't know, first of all, if we can. I haven't seen a lot of people arguing that we should bring back Neanderthals.

Susan Carland:

Okay. So we've sequenced, but we're not trying to recreate or rebuild?

Alistair Evans:

That's a different story. Yes. So by getting the full DNA sequence, the genome, we can look at, "Oh, did they have blue eyes? What colour was their hair? How tall were they?" Lots of things like that, we have the potential of revealing from their genes, but bringing back a hominin species, brings up so many ridiculously difficult ethical questions. It's hard enough thinking about that for modern humans, to our closest cousins, chimps, Bonobos, gorillas, and I don't think anyone is really postulating that they should do that. There's lots of other species that we might want to bring back. So the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine is one example that's worth discussing because it lived up until the 20th century. We caused its extinction, up until about 3000 years ago, it was present on mainland Australia as well.

And so we think that it would have played a very important role in the environment. It was what we call a middle-sized or a mesopredator that was able to hunt smaller animals, smaller vertebrates. And when it went extinct, it perhaps left a hole in the environmental niches that was perhaps filled by dingoes, or perhaps that was one of the reasons that the thylacine went extinct. But it also is probably a reason why cats and foxes are so successful in the modern environment, because they don't have the competitors of animals slightly larger than them that would out-compete them.

Susan Carland:

Imagine a future world for us, imagine the world in say 50 or a 100 years where we've just stopped doing this kind of deep research, what happens? What do we lose?

Alistair Evans:

I think in many ways we lose our place in nature. Being able to know the things that I was talking about before, about our extinct relatives, how we are a small branch on a much larger tree. I think not knowing that or not knowing more about that will diminish our understanding of how we are a single species. We are the most populous, account for the most biomass of any animal in the world. But if we could give ourselves a little bit more humility and say, "Well, yes, we are only one species, but look at the destruction we can cause." That should really give pause to the level of habitat modification that we have done and we will continue to do.

Susan Carland:

Does that deep research into humans’ history, but also the history of flora and fauna of the world, will that also tell us something about where we're going. Can we use anything from our past to predict our future?

Alistair Evans:

I think we can. We should be finding better ways of using or modifying the environment to feed the billions of people that are here, that are nowhere near as destructive or disruptive to natural environments. So if we could find ways of integrating say using kangaroos as a food source, that is not as environmentally destructive as cattle and sheep, that would be fantastic. And that may actually support the biodiversity of the modern Australian environment rather than make a monoculture of introduced grasses that are only fed on by introduced animals. If we can use native grasses, native trees and native animals or native mammals, then we may get back to what was more like our environment 50,000 years ago. And that should be something that we really should strive for, which is a better integration of humans into the natural environment.

Susan Carland:

Than bending it to our will.

Alistair Evans:

Yes.

Susan Carland:

Are humans still evolving?

Alistair Evans:

Very little, very little. So if we think about evolution, evolution is on the whole by natural selection. And so natural selection says, this guy, this individual, this population has a characteristic that enables it to have more kids than this one over here. And so they have more kids and they contribute more to the next population and the next generation. So for humans to evolve, we know it's often discussed, will we lose our little toe? Will we lose our appendix? It would have to be that those people who have a little toe have fewer kids than those people that do have a little toe, and that's not likely to be the case. That's not to say that there's no selection pressures on humans at all, because we are still fighting infectious diseases. We still have other environmental problems like you would have to be able to survive in our modified environment, which has different chemicals, allergens, poisons that we didn't see when we were earlier.

So all of those things are still going to be selection pressures on us. But in terms of changing our bodies in many ways, or even our brains, it's unlikely to be natural selection has happened. What has mostly happened over the last maybe 100,000 years is cultural evolution. So the changes in the way that humans deal with the environment and are able to invent new things, find new ways of doing it. And that's obviously one of the key characteristics of modern humans is that their brain is sufficiently complex and good at problem solving that we can, in many ways, bypass the natural selection aspect and go on to have cultural evolution.

Susan Carland:

Of what exists today, what will be the dinosaurs of the future? What could survive? And I know it's not just necessarily the most interesting animals, but what will die in conditions that will preserve it well enough? So human beings, whatever we are in a million years, we'll find it and go, "Ah, look at that strange creature."

Alistair Evans:

Well, most of the type of animals that are around now that would create the best fossil records, well shells from sea animals or snails, large boned animals. We have a good fossil record for things like giant whales, because they have big bones that when they're covered in sediment and they fossilise, they last a very long time. Elephants, rhinos, anything large and anything with hard parts. So teeth are often the best thing. So we know much more about animals and their teeth than we do any other part of their body, because they are the hardest parts of the body.

Susan Carland:

If you look at everything you've learned from the hominids that you've studied from thousands and tens of thousands of years ago, are there any life lessons that you've taken from the way they organised, the way they live that you think is still applicable for us today?

Alistair Evans:

So I think it's fairly clear that we're a very social species. And that has been the case for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, and that we can't live by ourselves. And so in times like the recent isolation, we really feel that very personally and that we can't live... We could find enough food perhaps by ourselves, but most hunter gatherer societies they're built on cooperation. So some hunting, some gathering, some looking after kids, some making home, fire, et cetera. We are definitely a very social species and that's not the case for all animals out there. And so recognising that as a society and making sure that our political systems and our social systems are able to support that I think is very important.

Susan Carland:

That we are wired that way. There's research that seems to suggest that the feeling that we have when we experience loneliness is as intense as a physical hunger, has the same pressure on the body. And it seems like in some ways we've been trying to deny that part of humanity, and perhaps that's something that COVID has revealed is this is how we are wired.

Alistair Evans:

Yeah, I think so. And it's only really fairly recently in modern society, as in maybe a few thousand years, that I think loneliness has been a potential problem because otherwise, if you're living then you were pretty much in a society. And so we're not used to being able to deal with that in any reasonable way.

Susan Carland:

Alistair Evans, thank you so much for your time.

Alistair Evans:

Thank you very much.

Susan Carland:

Some pretty fascinating food for thought there. Next time we'll hear from experts on what we need to learn from first nations cultures about discovering and preserving our history. I will catch you next time on What Happens Next?