I had some of my faith in paleoanthropology restored when I caught Ira Flatow’s Science Friday feature on NPR’s Talk of the Nation show. The recent skull find was the main topic and Ira’s nutshell assesment was a modest “this will make scientitst scratch their heads just a little bit more.”
The discussion was more enlightening than other articles I had read so far, talking about the vertical face plane and small teeth that didn’t seem to fit what has come before. The guest, Daniel E. Lieberman, talked about the difficulty in forming a clear picture of human evolution with the scant hard evidence available. It’s unfortunate that this isn’t the kind of information the general public hears.
The problem is that science is boring. Really, really, really boring. Decades from discovery to explanation. And know what the explanation consists of? Lots of math and obscure vocabulary and stuff that you gotta go to school for ten years before you can even begin to understand it.
If you have an opportunity to observe a press conference on a scientific topic, please do so! It’s very educational. If you’re feeling very scholarly, take notes about the questions particular reporters ask. The reporters are kind enough to let you know right up front which newspapers their distortions will appear in. Then, the next day, compare what you heard at the press conference to what ends up in their articles.
It’s like a game of telephone. Only the most-repeated and loudest words get through, and they appear in combination with the most perplexing gibberish. . .
Spoofe, by guessing I meant drawing broad conclusions about human ancestory based on scant evidence. At least now some admit that the family tree of homo saphiens may be more like a tangled bush than the classic tree with a single root. Australopithacine (sp?) and the new find may very well be direct descenants but putting them at a specific place in the human pedigree is a big stretch.
Or, to put it another way, they make tentative conclusions based on the evidence they currently have, and update their conclusions whenever new evidence is uncovered.
Nobody ever claimed that our documentations of history are 100% accurate or complete. Yes, in a sense, they ARE guessing, since that’s all they CAN do. They’ll never have all the evidence, and they’ll never have a complete view of history. All they can do is guess.
I would add in my homo laymanicus way that there are levels of certainty in the theoretical conclusions drawn by paleoanthropologists (physical anthropologists, whatever). Some of the more basic conclusions about the relationships among various primate/homonid remains (let alone stuff like the age of the Earth and the geologic time line of extinctions, ice ages, etc.) are pretty solidly held. But the finer details of the hominid family bush (arrg! “bush family”, I’m aneuryzing!) are drawn with some degree of conjecture. I imagine this done by comparing all the skull and bone specimens that have thus far been found and, armed with info on their age and location, looking carefully at specific features, and then trying to find patterns which suggest a certain arrangement.
Variation over time in things like brain capacity, forehead slope, brow ridges, robustness of jaw, etc. suggest a linear development. But the more subtle the variations in the comparison being made, the more tentative the conclusions about the exact relationship between the specimans are, and more “cousin like” and less linear it is likely to be.
Apparently enough can be gathered from care examination of the new speciman by the trained eye to see that it falls far enough outside the pattern to cast doubt that goes deeper than the shifting sands of minutiae to conclusions held with the firmness of soft clay, while leaving the bedrock (arrg! “flintstones”, I’m losing it!) of more robust scientific conclusions untouched.
