Book ReviewsTHE ORIGINS AND PAST OF MODERN HUMANS—

TOWARDS RECONCILIATION (Recent Ad-vances in Human Biology, Volume 3). Ed-ited by Keiichi Omoto and Phillip V. Tobias.Singapore: World Scientific. 1998. 267 pp.ISBN 981-02-3203-9. $76.00 (cloth).

This volume reports papers originally pre-sented in a workshop held at the InstituteforAdvanced Studies in Kyoto, Japan, March21–24, 1996. Organization of this workshopcentered on attempting resolution of currentquestions regarding the highly controversialissue of modern human origins. While asingle outcome did not result, and morequestions were perhaps raised than an-swered, this volume is still valuable becauseof the intentional inclusion of scholars froma variety of different disciplines—genetics,paleontology, archaeology, and linguistics.As is most often the case with edited vol-umes, the nature of individual papers variesgreatly, ranging from attempts at broadsynthesis to specific case studies.

The book consists of 16 papers in fourmajor sections, along with some concludingremarks by Omoto. The first section in-cludes six papers focusing on genetic data.Many of these results have been publishedelsewhere in somewhat different form. Dekaand colleagues examine a number of micro-satellite loci using phylogenetic analysis,concluding that patterns of variation sup-port a recent African origin model. Hardingand her colleagues present some of her workon b-globin gene trees, reaching a differentconclusion and arguing that the genetic datasupport a multiregional interpretation withancient African and Asian ancestry. Taka-hata and Klein examine models of popula-tion diversity and support an African originmodel. Their paper is important because itraises the question of the possible geneticimpact of extinction and recolonization oflocal populations. While I do not necessarilyagree with their conclusions, I think this isan important area that must continue to beaddressed.

With the exception of Harding’s paper, areader would conclude that the genetic evi-dence favors a recent African origin. I do notdisagree that much of the genetic data arecompatible with a recent African origin. Theproblem, however, is that the same data canalso be explained by one or more multire-gional interpretations (Relethford, 1998).Compatibility is not proof unless all alterna-tive hypotheses are incompatible with thedata. I would have liked to see more detaileddiscussion along these lines.

The remaining two genetics papers focuson hypotheses of the origin of specific Asianpopulations. Horai and Omoto address hy-potheses of the origin of the Japanese. Basedon their analysis of mtDNA polymorphismsthey support a ‘‘hybridization model’’ wheremodern Japanese populations reflect pastmixture of Jomon and Yayoi populations.Tokunaga and colleagues focus their analy-sis of HLA haplotypes on the genetic affini-ties of the Ainu. Among their findings is thesuggestion that theAinu are the descendants ofnortheastern Asian populations that also gaverise to NativeAmerican populations.

Part 2 consists of four papers focusing onthe fossil record. Wolpoff questions the desig-nation of ‘‘modern’’ humans, noting the diffi-culty in deriving a definition that includesall living humans. He also describes brieflymultiregional interpretations of the geneticdata. Brauer and Broeg examine the mor-phology of the Mladec remains and severalother fossils from the Czech Republic, con-cluding that there is no evidence for regionalcontinuity in this part of Europe. Rightmirereviews the fossil evidence for early modernhumans from South Africa and the Levant,arguing that the fossil hominids from Kla-sies and Skhul/Qafzeh provide the mostancient evidence to date of modern morpho-logical characteristics. Wu examines morpho-logical relationships between archaic and mod-ern hominid remains in East Asia and Africa,noting evidence for EastAsian continuity.

Part 3 consists of four papers on archaeol-ogy. Pope reviews the archaeological evi-dence from the site of Xiachangliang, the

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only open-air lake site in Lower PaleolithicEast Asia. Based on chronology and archae-ology, he concludes that the data do notsupport any model of long-term biological orcultural isolation of Homo erectus. Miracleexamines archaeological evidence for thespread of modernity in Europe, testing thehypothesis that the transition from archaicto modern Europeans was due to an influx ofmodern humans with a different technology.He concludes that this hypothesis is notsupported, and that the Aurignacian is not asingle culture uniquely associated with mod-ern humans. Bellwood examines the ways inwhich archaeological data can contribute toan understanding of population history byusing examples from Australia and Oceania.A major emphasis of this paper is examiningevidence for and against rapid dispersalmodels. The final paper in this section, byAoki, outlines a complex mathematical modelfor population movements into Europe, find-ing that replacement is likely under certainscenarios, but not under others.

The final section of this book presents twopapers on linguistic variation and evolution.Ruhlen describes recent work on a newlinguistic family, Dene-Caucasian, which in-cludes groups previously considered as iso-lates, such as the Basque. Ruhlen proposesthat the reconstructed linguistic history of thislanguage family fits a recent African originmodel better than a multiregional model. Wangreviews various ways in which linguistic analy-sis can shed light on human evolution, conclud-ing that a multiregional model is more likely.

It should be clear from my brief synopsesthat the participants varied greatly in their

relative support of replacement versus conti-nuity models, even within disciplines. Therewas no uniform support for one model ver-sus another. Nonetheless, the book is inter-esting because of the variety of approachesto similar questions of origins. I feel it isincreasingly important for geneticists to be-come more familiar with the fossil record,and for paleoanthropologists to become famil-iar with the genetic evidence. Further, bothdisciplines need to become more familiarwith evidence from archaeology and linguis-tics. Conferences such as these are a neces-sary first step to overcome hyperspecializa-tion and limited communication across fields.As such, the book will be useful to research-ers who have not come across previouslypublished works by the participants. Themajor value of this book is the need tocontinue to view the modern human originsdebate as an anthropological question, re-quiring more attention to contributionsacross all disciplines and the need to commu-nicate findings in broad and widely readanthropological journals and books. Hyper-specialization in research and publication isnot as productive for further efforts to dealholistically with these questions. We would dowell to continue the efforts started in this book.

JOHN H. RELETHFORD

Department of AnthropologyState University of New York Collegeat OneontaOneonta, New York 13820

LITERATURE CITED

Relethford JH. 1998. Genetics of human origins anddiversity. Annu Rev Anthropol 27:1–23.

SEX AND GENDER IN PALEOPATHOLOGICAL PER-SPECTIVE. Edited by Anne L. Grauer andPatricia Stuart-Macadam. 1998. Cam-bridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge Uni-versity Press. 1992. 192 pp. ISBN 0-521-62090-2. $54.95 (cloth).

This slim book is full of thought-provokingpapers that underscore the problems andpromise of exploring the complex relation-

ships between sex differences in humanphysiology, cultural practices, and health inmodern and ancient societies. It is a signifi-cant contribution to the rapidly growingliterature that views sex differences in healthfrom a biocultural perspective. The looselyrelated set of papers that have been broughttogether in this volume make it clear howcrucial it is to adopt an integrative approachin research on gender differences in health.

110 BOOK REVIEWS