A mostly crushed fossil skull has apparently “thrown the origins of humankind into question.” Uh huh. Is it just me or do some fields of science draw broad conclusions based on small amounts of evidence such as the fossil record. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t hold lack of evidence to support fundie creation myths or othe crackpot theories. It seems that a few bone fragments can rock previous therories so much because reality is far more complex than what can truly be deduced from the fragments of evidence available. Maybe I’m just in a cranky mood today but the furor over the newly found skull is like dark matter: we can’t see all the stuff we think we should see therefore we invent some unseeable stuff that fills in the gap.
I do hold with the concept of evolution. I’m Christian but Genesis isn’t exactly a blueprint for the universe. God works in his own ways.
IANAP… I am not a paleoanthropologist, nor do I play one on TV.
I think that this is about all the evidence they have to work with - a few skulls, some bone fragments, etc. After X million years, the evidence tends to crumble away.
IIRC, there are only about a dozen or so actual, factual T Rex skeletons in existence. The rest are models made of casts of the originals, artists rendering, etc. And it’s VERY rare to find a complete skeleton, all in the same location. Most of the skeletons that have real fossilized bones are made up of bones from several or many different animals. Imagine trying to reconstruct what a modern human would look like if you had only a few bones from Arnold Schwartzennegger, Orson Welles, and the olympic gymnast Kari Strugg to work with.
Well, the family tree seems to be redrawn every six months or so. What’s really going on is that we are finding the hominid speceis to be more numerous than previously thought, giving said tree a happy bushiness. I doubt there are too many paleoanthopologists who think there was only one hominid species at a time, leading in an unbroken line from lemur to Homo Sapien.
Yous might have some interest in reading “In The Footsteps of Eve” (published in 2000) to get an interesting look at the South African fossil humans for yet another possible early ancestor, Australopithecus africanus, long shoved to the academic margins due to apartheid politics. It asks more questions than it answers, but that’s one of the things that makes this branch of science so much fun.
Guessing is what science is all about, although I’m sure they would prefer you to call it hypothesizing. As has been pointed out, ancient humanoids were very shortsighted about making sure that their remains stayed nice and tidy and available to paleoanthropologists.
So what is happening with this skull is what always happens: Reports are published and critiqued until new evidence is found. They can’t sit on their hands until a complete skeleton shows up. Gotta keep that grant money rolling in.
Do I sound crotchety enough? I should, the kind of day I’ve been having.
I realize it’s not the good scientists that are ticking me off just now but the way findings are funneled and homogenized by the news media into a simple chart worthy of USA Today. A good example is the poll on the MSNBC site.
"What do you think of the evidence regarding evolutionary theory?
The evidence is so strong that the theory is beyond doubt.
The evidence is not sufficient to support the theory.
Neither of the above. "
What freaking theory and what specific evidence are they referring to? Talk about useless poll results, this sounds something from The Onion or Brunching Shuttlecock. Are the only two choices are between Darwin and creationism? Sheesh!
I agree with Cher3 that science wouldn’t be anywhere without hypotheses, most of which are eventually superceded if not outright wrong. … that sounded clumsy but I think you get the point.
Paleoanthropoligists in genreal build whole careers out of theories based on tiny scraps of bone. The Leakey family - although their contributions are real - are some of the worst about making huge leaps and 90 degree turn abouts in their theories. I still remember my physical anthro profs talking about old Louis with a good natured roll of the eyes. Every time Lou or Mary would dig up a new tooth it was always the earliest human ancestor they had uncovered, nothing else would do, of course. So maybe Maeve has something, but until the studies are done, who knows - its the headline thats important anyway, right?
I hope Jois comes across this thread (and I may e-mail him about it). He has substantially more professional level data and access to it than we do.
Quickly, and not knowing more than your OP describes, here’s the gist of the situation:
Fossil hominids farther back than Homo erectus are fairly sparsely represented. There’s adequate specimen data to draw some conclusions, but nothing like the sorts of extensive fossil arrays of, say, Mesozoic sea creatures.
Typically, paleoanthropologists are rather fond of constructing elaborate family trees on relatively skimpy information. This is not to say they are wrong – just that they theorize linkages based on evidence that might be considered inadequate.
Newbie reporters on the science beat (and usually it’s something to which the newbie is relegated) have not learned balance in journalism. That Fred’s Pretzels is hiring 50 new employees is good news for the local economy, but it’s not going to make the radical shift in the employment and spending picture that the kid on the weekend local desk wants to picture it as.
The same sort of thing happens with new scientific discoveries. The paradigm-changing discovery happens maybe once every decade or two – the Heterodontosaur with a probable preserved four-chambered heart, which is a few miles from me, is perhaps the latest in dinosaur studies, and that’s over ten years ago. This skull probably confirms or corrects some lineage and is nowhere near the earth-shaking occurrence the press report suggests it is.
This article http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010321/sc/fossil_dc.html
may clear up some misconceptions about paleoanthopologistic guess-work. To paraphase; the skull in question was found approximately two years ago and was analyzed by someone other than the Leakeys. The skull itself is in pretty good condition compared to the rest of the skeleton. The scientists themselves state that the discovery raises more questions about human origins than it answers.
Also, it is my perception that no credible science draws broad conclusions based on small amounts of evidence. Perhaps spending some time studying paleoanthropology and/or scientific method would help in that respect.
What everybody has said above is perfectly true, of course. But it’s also quite possible to derive huge amounts of information from small fossil fragments. Teeth are especially revealing about their owners, since they show the kinds of food the species was adapted to eating, from which you can infer quite a lot about behavior. The question really becomes when inference crosses the line to mere speculation. And speculation, unfortunately, is the sort of thing that usually makes the best hook for a news report.
Scientist: “We have found a new species of australopithecus, or perhaps a new hominid species altogether.”
Journalist: “Is it time to throw Lucy in the dumpster?”
Honest, I swear I started a thread on this topic today. Probably lost it in the ether when SDMB hung and popped me out to one of those connection’s lost, gone, or missing notices.
As minty green said, “What everyone has said above is perfectly true.” And said it a great deal better than I could.
I don’t mind the new fossils, the more the merrier as far as I’m concerned. I’ll live with the revised family tree or branch or bush but are these paleoanthropologists or movie stars? Is this science or a card game? Is every new find earth-shaking? Going to change the textbooks?
This is the second time this month that “everything’s changed!”
And I’m getting more sure every day that all science journalists are trained by working for supermarket tabloids:
screaming headlines and the trash to go with them.
The professional journals are not standing back like wall-flowers, either. They have their own pre-press releases that they will admit are for publicity purposes to increase circulation. As if you routinely find Nature, Science and Cell below People and that Stewart person at the local Piggly Wiggly and would pick one up on impulse.
Paleoanthropologists (and I’m not one) are as (fill in something negative here, like upset but worse) as I am and more. Often the publicity goes out one to two weeks before the articles become available and they are left to answer questions without data.
When you have read enough of the pre-press publicity and want to see what was submitted and accepted in the peer reviewed article, email me.
Padeye, the “real” paleoanthropologists are often like other real scientists and say something like, “Wow, that’s great! Call me when you find the second one.”
Well, Jois will get this but you should rap with Phil…
Otherwise, you shouldn;t mistake the popular press reporting for real science. Not to diss the pop sci reporters who at least help diffuse this stuff, but at the same time you should keep in mind that you’re not seeing final product but scuttlebutt.
I agree with Yankee Blue that this is another Leakey hype. The whole family seems to devoted to the splitter philosophy of taxonomy. The problem is that people buy in or at least publicize any anthro statement made by a Leakey. There are still people out near Barstow CA excavating for Calico Man because Leakey saw some shattered pebbles that he identified as primitive hand axes.
I am going on memory here but what about the Leakey claim that skull 1470 (?) was a bona fide homo skull. Was that ever substantiated?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof not a paleo pedigree.
Scientist: “This one rock, which we suspect of being a meteorite, has a chemical composition closely resembling what we think Martian rocks are made of. Its radioisotope ratios are consistent with rocks that are 3 and a half billion years old on Earth and, we presume, this is also representative of rocks that come from other places within the inner solar system. We’ve discovered microscopic structures within the rock that are similar to the fossilized remains of bacteria we’ve found in Earth rocks. From this we conclude that there is a slight chance that, 3 and a half million years ago, microbes may have existed on Mars.”
Newspaper headline: "Scientists Find Life on Mars!!"
Tracer, that bit about life on Mars is a real classic worthy of framing.
Collounsbury, Phil did not breathe fire over this one, he was nearly “mild mannered” for some reason. He found the New York Times article “interesting” and more reflective than the “classically biased spill” (press leaks). The best quote might be, “…our current morphological understanding of apith, protohomo, and protopan is mearly the ‘tip’ of a very large and deep ‘iceberg’” with a little free advice for the Leakeys and the splitters, too.
I printed out the two press links and took them home.
Skulldigger’s reaction was not what I’d expected:
My own inclination is to bide my time. We both made the brief acquaintance of Maeve Leakey, and were impressed with her intellectual probity. There is, however, a tendency in the Leakey family to take a proprietary interest in human evolution, and to tend to restructure what little we know of the sequence whenever a significant new find brings more evidence to the picture. Clearly there is a strong dichotomy between Australopithecus afarensis with strong jaw, relatively heavy teeth, and relatively small cranial capacity, and Kenyanthropus platyops, with small teeth and what looks in the picture like a slight sagittal ridge – the “crest” from front to back of the center of the skull that otherwise shows up strongly only in Paranthropus.
A comment made by Gould in reference to equine evolution, summarizing an attitude by many paleontologists over a wide variety of specific lines of evolution, is that more and more we are replacing “lines of descent” in terms of species sequences with “bushes” where a variety of forms are known contemporaneous with each other, one or more of which obviously gave rise to successor species, but where it is unclear which one(s). IMHO, that’s where paleanthropology is right now.
… and finally, weekly world news grabs the story and runs the headline “scientists find life on mars!!” accompanied by picture of artists conception of martian which looks something like yoda.
I’m only an amature anthropologist, but chiming in…
From what I’ve read, this new skull is interesting because of the plane of its face. There’s a fancy Latin word for this, but damned if I can remember it right now.
This new skull, Kenyanthropus platyops, has a facial plane that’s much closer to modern humans than’s Lucy’s (A. afarensis). If you saw the skulls lined up in a row, you’d seen the dramatic difference. A. afarensis, with it’s heavy jaw and low forehead has a facial plane at an angle, compared to H. sapiens which is nearly vertical.
With K. platyops’s face being nearly vertical, like a modern human yet older than A. afarensis, it’s a puzzle where this fits into the lineage that produced humans, if it fits at all.
I agree that the sensationalism of the media is almost sickening. What’s next? We find that Lucy (A. afarensis) is Elvis’s love-child?