Rob Scott

PROFILE

A common thread among the anthropologists profiled on these pages has been a focus on Africa, the continent now regarded as the cradle of humankind. Some of Rob Scott’s research has taken him into the neighboring lands of western Eurasia, regions he regards as possible crossroads to Africa. He looks millions of years into the past, to a time before the early splits in the lineage leading to humans, chimpanzees and gorillas, a time when this common ancestor may have been on the move. He is searching in Turkey for fossil apes that may have been key to the genesis of humankind.

Fossil apes that migrated from Africa perhaps 17 million years ago have been found in Turkey. The real question according to Scott is whether some descendant of these fossil apes migrated back into Africa around 8 or 9 million years ago, becoming ancestors to the earliest members of the human lineage. “It may have been a migration into Africa from somewhere in Turkey that was a critical event surrounding the split between the lineages leading to chimps and humans,” Scott says.

His recent work focuses on newly discovered Turkish sites rich in mammalian fossils, sites that can open doors to understanding the environmental, geographic and faunal context of these early apes.

The excavation and discovery of new specimens is a worthy quest that can help fill some of the many gaps in the fossil record but technology is offering another way to get more information from the fossils we already have. Scott was instrumental in pioneering the use of the confocal microscope in examining tooth surface texture in three dimensions to show dental microwear (tiny pits and scratches). In dealing with questions of diet and dentition, microwear study coupled with computer software applications is providing new and more refined and repeatable information.

As an example, anthropologists and anatomists over the last-half century have used dentition and dietary inferences to contrast two very different looking early human relatives. A few million years ago, these two creatures lived in Africa. Fossils of one conjure up images of a robust, muscular individual (Paranthropus) whose teeth suggest a diet of hard, dense foods. The other, a smaller, more delicate cousin (Australopithecus) had a dentition that may have been associated with softer pursuits.

Numerous specimens of both Paranthropus and Australopithecus have been in the hands of scientists more than 80 years and have been studied extensively. However, with the application of the new microscopy coupled with sophisticated software, a greater overlap in the two creatures’ diets has been demonstrated. This now provides an alternative theory to the popularly held notion of dietary divergence.

Scott asserts that the specializations seen in the robust form may be viewed as potential adaptations that allowed the creature to exploit an alternate set of foods in times of scarcity, a potentially important dynamic in human evolutionary history.