Fossils Found in Ethiopia

Factual Questions
1

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46631-2003Jun11.html

The article basically says that there were some skull fragments found in Ethiopia which leads some scientists to believe that humans developed from one specific ancestor, instead of resulting from the interbreeding of several species.

My questions is this: how much can really be learned from skull fragments?

2

This fossil is an important find, but doesn’t really upset any of the common understanding of human evolution.

There are two cometing theories:

  1. The overwhelmingly accepted version is the Out of Africa theory that we all evolved in in Africa about 150-200k yrs ago, then spread out from there to replace any other living hominid species (eg Neanderthals) without innterbreeding with them. This fossil fits neatly into that theory.

  2. A small number of anthropoligist subscribe to the Multiregional Theory, which holds that all the pre-sapiens species around the world (Neanderthals in Europe, Erecuts in Africa and Asia) evolved simultaneously into modern humans, spreading their genes back and forth during the process. Since these guys do believe that modern humans evolved in Africa, this fossil fits neatly into their scheme as well. They would just say that this represents the African part of the puzzle.

But the skull is a pretty good one, from pictures I’ve seen and the OoA folks might argue that since it shows no Neanderthal features, there was not any gene flow between Europe and Africa in this timeframe. ANthropoligists are used to working with very incomplete skeletal bits, so this one is not at all unusual.

3

Thank you, John Mace. Appreciate it.

4

ALthough the skulls were found as small fragments, apparently there were enough of them so that nearly complete skulls could be reassembled. Assembly of the jigsaw puzzle took the researchers several years.

5

So they found these fossils several years ago? Why was nothing mentioned then?

6

In this particular case, it took a long time to clean up the fossils (carefully seperate the fossils from the sediment they were encased in). Then they had to be analysed and reported in a reputable scientific journal, subject to peer review.

Any scientist who had a new release right when he found his fossils would be laughed out of the scientific community. Too easy to reach mistaken conclusions without taken the time necessary to do the rigorous analysis.

7

The original press release on the findings is online here.

Unlike a typical press release, this is a complete popular science article with more information than any of the newspapers had.

8

All too true, as one famous recent discovery proves.

http://ceirp.cornell.edu/Review/NGArtHlt.html

“Last November the magazine trumpeted the fossil’s discovery in an impoverished region of northeastern China as providing “a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds” and patted itself on the back for helping fund the research. Two months later, when it turned out that the fossil had been artfully assembled from parts of unrelated creatures, that is, it was a fraud, Allen was in quick succession shocked, humiliated, and furious.”