While I’m actually hoping for more scientific feedback on this, GD seems more appropriate as my source is a Creationist one, and the study of fossils seems to be as much interpretation as hard facts.
This website - http://www.faithchild.com/fossils.shtml - links to various claims that neanderthal and “early man” fossils are mainly mistakes. I do notice that three of her sources are “Chick” publications - would that perhaps be the same Chick that has those bizarre fundamentalist comic strips?
I’m particularly interested in this claim, about Neanderthal Man:
Have most “early human” fossils truly been debunked by mainstream science?
“Most?” I think not. Some fossils (of early hominids and other creatures) have been reconstructed and corrected from earlier assemblies after more research. I’ll go look for cites now, but I think you’ll find that “mainstream” science, which is to say science has only increased it’s understanding of human evolution and proven it beyond any reasonable (meaning Chick-less) doubt.
The whole list of fossils (and the comments about them) there looks like it is pretty much inspired by Chick’s Big Daddy* tract - his website is down right now, so I can’t check.
Yes, it’s true. The entire scientific community is in a massive conspiracy to drum up fake evidence for evolution. Thousands of researchers meet in secret every month and only a few brilliant creationists have been able to crack the cabal. Riiiiiiiight…
Interesting. I can remember a teacher - not even slightly of a creationist bent - mentioning in class that scientists at first thought Neandertals were stooped, knuckle-dragging ape-ish creatures because one of the first Neandertal skeletons to be studied was of an older man crippled by arthritis. When more skeletons of younger and healthier individuals were studied, it was discovered that they walked upright just like us H. sapiens, but by then the popular image of the hunchbacked slack-jawed Neandertal was set and it’s still around to this day. But now that I’ve seen a clearly false creationist claim that’s so similar, I’m getting suspicious. Any truth to this, or was my teacher taken in by a bit of academic folklore?
Shhh!!! You are not supposed to say this to someone without the secret handshake.
BTW, why don’t Christians decry Chick for violating the commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”. Unlike homosexuality, this is explicitly called out in the ten commandments so is presumably a more serious “offense”.
Well, as usual with the Creationists, the main weapons here (on this overtly anti-evolution website) are the sweeping generalization and the vast over-simplification.
No. This is not what “most experts” now believe. What Lucy is now understood to be:
So, what it is that “most experts” agree is, not that Lucy is merely a chimpanzee, but that Lucy is a sort of intermediate primate, somewhere on the bush that comprises “primate evolution”, but not necessarily a direct ancestor of homo sapiens. But the way Faithchild has phrased it, it makes it sound like “most experts” have thrown Lucy out of the primate evolution bush altogether, which isn’t true.
If by “human origin”, Faithchild means “now they think it was just a a homo sapiens jawbone,” AFAIK this is not correct. Heidelberg Man was based on a single jawbone at first, yes–but then 32 more skeletons were found. AFAIK the jawbone is still currently thought to be of non-homo sapiens origin.
And, paleontologists base new species on single specimens all the time, it’s not that big a deal. But Faithchild makes it sound like something stupid, or unreasonable, to have done.
This is actually true. However, in the biased context, it makes it sound worse than it was.
This is actually true, too, but what Faithchild isn’t telling you is that it was a deliberate hoax, not a “misidentification” by over-eager evolutionary biologists.
It doesn’t prove anything, but included in the list as it is, it seems to bolster Faithchild’s case, that scientists, in their anxiety to “debunk” God, will rush to identify anything as an “ancestor” of humans.
Right, that’s all substantially correct, if greatly oversimplified–but what Faithchild isn’t telling you is that the business with the arthritis involved only the one specimen, and that it proved only that that one specimen may have had arthritis.
And Fairchild also isn’t telling you that it is still agreed that that one specimen is still a Neanderthal, albeit one with arthritis. It doesn’t discredit the entire body of evidence for a human species called homo neanderthalensis. And there is a substantial body of evidence for it, DNA and everything.
First, it’s the classic example of the quote taken out of context and used to prove a point.
Second, it makes it sound like even scientists admit that we don’t know anything about primate evolution. But look at the date–1978. That was almost 30 years ago, and we’ve amassed a great deal of information on primate evolution in the last 30 years.
Also, as I said, David Pilbeam is a paleoanthropologist, so it’s ludicrous to take a remark of his out of context and use it to suggest, ever so delicately, that maybe even he doesn’t believe in evolution.
But this is what they’ve done. Here’s an AnswersInGenesis discussion of the 1978 article, in which they make it sound as though a scientist who is actually arguing for keeping an open mind, and who is simply saying “We don’t have all the answers”, is actually saying, “Evolution is not supported by the evidence.” Yes, back in the 1970s the study of primate evolution DID take a major turn away from the “homo sapiens descended in a straightforward linear fashion from apes” theory to the “bush” theory, the one that has many different kinds of apes, including * homo sapiens*, branching off from a common primitive primate ancestor. But quoting David Pilbeam in 1978 saying “We don’t really know anything, and I’m rethinking my position on a few things” to support a position of “even scientists admit we didn’t descend from apes and therefore evolution is wrong” is silly.
They’ve done the same quoting out of context thing with Stephen Jay Gould, based on his punctuated equilibrium theory. I’ve come to the basic conclusion that Creationists, the ones leading the movement at least, are deliberate liars.
It is sometimes hard to tell, among certain Creationists, whether they are deliberately lying or they are truly as ignorant as they seem. (Gish and Hovind, of course, are dishonest.)
The whole “arthritis” issue has more to do with early discussions of posture than with actual identification of Neandertal. The “stooped” posture attribued to the earliest complete skeleton has been ascribed to bone disease–by mainstream scientists supporting evolution. However, the distinction between Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalis ( or Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis for those who prefer that nomenclature), is not based on posture, but on distinct differences in the jaws, cranial ridges, and lengths and diameters of other bones.
Regarding the other bogus claims:
Lucy is not regarded as a chimpanzee by any serious paleontologist. Lucy is classified as one example (of several) of Australopithecus afarensis. She is placed among the apes, not the humanoid groups, bit is still considred to be one stage in the eventual development of humans.
Heidelberg man was not “built completely from a single jaw.” Rather, the jaw of the Heidelberg discovery was found to have an age that falls into the overlapping range of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens and the structure of the jaw is also sufficiently like and unlike both of those species to cause paleontologists to argue over where Heidelberg should be classified.
Nebraska Man is the most persistent lie told by Creationists. The discovery of a single tooth in 1921(?) was speculated to be of proto-human origin. In fewer than two years, the paleontological community (including the discoverer) had recognized that the tooth was actually that of an ancestral pig. (Humans and swine each have a couple of teeth that are quite similar in construction.) The original discovery was never held up as an example of any particular ancestral human, although one magazine “punched up” their story on the discovery with a “cave man” drawing that had no connection to the actual report written by the discoverer.
Piltdown Man was a deliberate fraud that was never accepted by the paleopontological community, as a whole, and was discovered to have been a fraud by paleontologists.
There are many examples of Homo erectus, including Java Man and Peking Man. In the late nineteenth and earliest 20th centuries, when the initial discoveries were rare and it was more difficult to recognize the differences between individuals vs the differences between groups, several of the initial discoveries were given different classifications and different names. As the number of fossils accumulated for each group, allowing broader comparison for those groups, most of these individual discoveries have been recognized as belonging to one or another group.
You might want to clarify this. A. afarensis is no more “placed among the apes” than we are. Luci is a hominid (upright ape), as are we. Whether Lucy’s kind represent a direct ancestor of ours, or a side branch is not known. But if you had to pick an ancestor from among the fossils, she’d be at least as good as any.
Do you have a cite for this? I was under the impression that Piltdown was pretty well accepted when it was first “discovered” and only gradually marginalized until it was finally debunked many years afterwards.
Based on the genus, Australopithecus, I guess it is a matter of perspective. I do agree that Australopithecus* (literall, southern ape) is included in Hominidae (“our” family) rather than among Pongidae, the current apes. I guess I have been reading too many paleos who want to merge the pongids and hominids.
My memory of Piltdown has been that those who simply accepted Dawson, accepted Piltdown, but that those who looked at the evidence began raising objections almost immediately. I am not claiming that no one was ever taken in by the hoax, only that acceptance led to pie-in-the-sky speculation rather than serious investigation. There did tend to be a more general acceptance of Piltdown in Britain, (owing either to the rerspect acorded Dawson or the delight in finding an earlier ancestor on the island), but the French, the Americans, and the Germans never really gave much credence to the find. The American Museum of Natural History, for example, labeled the fossils as being from separate species.
Yeah, it’s hard to call taxonomy “real” science. I was more reacting to the impication of your original post that Lucy and her kind were “apes” but that we aren’t. Australopithicus, as a genus, was created long before our current understanding of the underlying genetics. Then you have Walpoff who wants to put pretty much everything into Homo sapiens…
We must also realize that the existence of an “elderly” (by the standards of before the 20th century–IIRC he was nearly 40!), arthritic, nearly crippled, Neanderthal indicates a supportive group structure that kept Gramps around long after he was particularly useful as a hunter, not the crazed, animalistic view of Neanderthal society promulgated in the 19th century.
The story of “Nebraska Man” is also kept alive in Anthropology courses as a lesson in not theorizing from only a couple teeth. We (“Whadya mean ‘we’? You’ve been out of the business since 1976!”) try to learn from our mistakes.
tomndebb and John Mace: The problem (as both of you probably already know) is that “ape” is pretty well impossible to defend as a taxonomic classification anymore. The relationships between existing apes looks something like this:
With the species labeled in blue classified as “apes”, and the species labeled in red commonly not classified as an “ape”, which is really not tenable.
Of course, by cladistic theory there can be no such family as “Pongidae”, unless it contains only the orangutan, with the common chimp, gorilla, bonobo and human placed in Hominidae. I don’t see why the orang is so different from chimps that it warrants its own family, so I’d lump it in with the hominids.
The reason Pongidae is an artificial group is that chimpanzees are included in a group with their distant relatives the gorillas and orangs, but excluded from a group with their closer relatives, the humans. Not kosher.
But as MEBuckner indirectly points out, Hylobatidae IS a valid family, since all of the half-dozen species of gibbons are more closely related to each other than any is to any other Anthropoids. I’d give Anthropoids only two families, Hylobatidae and Hominidae, gibbons in one, and everyone else including humans in the other.