I am not an archeologist and have absolutley no idea what the true impact of this “human” skull they found in Chad is having on the world of skull finding. But I am reading these articles all over the place saying how it is changing the entire story of how long humans have been around and what we used to look like etc…
My main question is: How are scientists getting any solid conclusions about how this old “person” lived or more so how “humans” looked and lived in that time period?
In this article on MSNBC http://www.msnbc.com/news/778162.asp?pne=msn they talk about how the scientists took all kinds of measurements and are saying that this looks like a chimp from behind and a person from the front. It has a very large brow etc…
What I don’t understand about findings like this, and other ones in the past, is how we do we know that we didnt find a skull of a deformed human from that time? I am sure that the thing is really old, the oldest probably, but how can we get any scientific findings about human skulls from that period from just one skull? Why do we assume that it is not an anomolliy (sp) ? A skull of a deformed person, or ape for that matter? Why do we assume that the skull is from a “normal” human from that era and not deformed?
I always think it’s a bit odd when I read or hear about “a fossile that could re-write evolutionary history” or what have you. The problem is, its just one skull…or one skeleton…or one whatever. How can a scientist draw such broad inferences from a single peice of evidence? It can be a fluke, or a mistake, or a mutant, or…
It is different if they are muitliple specimens, from a large area, etc. Otherwise I fear folks are just playing a guessing game of inductive logic without any solid basis.
There is the story about how everyone thought Neaderthals were hunch-backed and bow legged…until someone realized the skeleton was of an old man with Rickets.
Basically, because we have so little evidence. I mean, we want to know something about the past, right? And from so long ago, complete skeletons are a raity. Dino skellies aren’t common either, but they had a much longer period to leave records from. With humans, particularly since the oldest ones are on a fault line in Africa, there is much less to go on. All we can do is try to examine the evidence and make a good guess. If you assume that any one skull is deformed or mutant, then , well, you’ve just damned all arhceology. There isn’t any cosmic signpost that God put out to say “this one is just wierd, pay no attention!”. In any case, the odds of getting a truly deformed adult creature is almost nil. They would likely not survive, and the relative population is low.
In this case, the skull seems to push back what we though was the early time of human evolution.
They don’t. But it’s how they get grants.
This is undoubtably an important finding. But the scientist’s are also hyping the thing. Media attention is a sure way of getting more funds, to do more research.
“Follow the money.” is a good way of looking at any thing in the news. It often leads to the answer. When scientists go public along the lines of: “This could really change…” it usually means: “Give me more money to study this.”
I was once at a museum (in Madrid, I think it was) where there was a glass case with the skulls of chimps, gorillas, modern humans, Neanderthals, and various proto-humans on display. Looking at the skulls, you could plainly see the difference between, say, the Neanderthal skull and the modern human skull. It jumps out at you. You could also plainly see that the proto-human skulls were not chimps or gorillas, being very different from those skulls, and much closer to human.
Every natural science museum should have this display, as it tends to dispel a lot of ignorance. It so happened that I was at the museum with a creationist. Like the OP, she had thought that the ancient remains that had been found were just deformed humans or apes. The display showed her the light, and made her re-think her position.
Many Neanderthal skulls have been found. They are clearly different from modern humans, and clearly similar to one another. And it is equally clear that they are not ape skulls.
And it’s not as if only one or two sets of earlier proto-human remains have been found. You have australopithecines of various varieties, homo habilis, *homo erectus, etc. Does anyone seriously contend that all of these ancient remains just happened to be humans who were deformed? And if so, why are they found in strata where no modern human remains are found?
You’re getting the story a little mixed up. It’s an old creationist argument against evolution that Neandertal fossils were really just plain ol’ humans whose bones were deformed by arthritis and/or ricketts. This is so stupid that it shouldn’t even deserve a response, but scientists have responded. Ricketts makes bones weaker, and Neandertal bones are big and strong.
This latest finding is being sensationalized, but we must remember that every piece of the human ancestry puzzle is an indespensible piece of information. This skull comes from a period of time where almost nothing is known about the ape-human lineage, so it is spectacular indeed, and we are anxious to see what can be learned from it.
Anomalocaris, it’s more than just that. They’re saying that they’re going to have to throw out what we thought we knew. They’re speculating that Lucy and her kind weren’t human ancestors after all. I haven’t studied it in detail yet, but I think it’s because this sample, although quite a bit older than Lucy (what was she called, Australopithecus Afarensis or something?), it is more human-like than she was. So she might have been on an evolutionary branch that led nowhere.
I’m inferring this from the tidbits I’ve heard so far. I’m pretty skeptical about the whole thing. Somewhat less skeptical than I was when they announced cold fusion or martian worms, but a single skull isn’t much data to extrapolate from.
It IS ridiculous that every time we find a new fossil, the media claims that “the find will re-write the textbooks”. Well, one would hope that each new find will add that much more information. But this is really a media thing…every new find has to be sensational, has to overturn every established theory. The trouble is that it doesn’t really overturn anything.
I remember reading the “Tyrannosaurus appearance radically different than we thought” stories a few months ago. Turns out someone theorizes that his nostril openings were closer to the front than we previously thought. Uh-huh. Or the ones that hyped the fact that we had to re-write the story of the peopling of America. Turns out that some sites that had been thought to be 11,000 years old were now thought to be 12,000 years old. Hmmm.
The reason that this fossil is interesting is that it is about as old as the currently estimated common ancestor of both chimps and humans. We currently expect these creatures to have chimp-like brains and human-like teeth, like the later Australopithecines. But we know the Australopithecines were bipedal. Chimps are knuckle-walkers. We don’t really know what our common ancestor would have been like. Remember that chimps are genetically closer to humans than they are to gorillas.
The point is, this fossil isn’t exactly startling. It had a chimp sized brain, but with somewhat human-like teeth. Hmmm. Shocking. Of course, the really interesting parts would be the pelvis and legs. Were hominids bipedal that early? If they weren’t bipedal, were they knuckle-walkers? Or something else?
The other thing is that this was found in a new area. We have lots of fossils from East Africa–Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania. And we have fossils from South Africa. But of course we can’t get the full picture from just two small parts of Africa. It is important that we get fossils from all over Africa. Even if the fossils from the new localities are pretty much like those that we already have it would still be important information.
The OTHER thing, is that people don’t realize exactly how many hominid fossils we really have. We really do have lots of fossils. Here’s a website that catalogues some of them: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html
Some very good points. I think hype, both from the media, and grant-starved scientists, go a long way to explaining this phenomena. One would hope that a scientist worth his Phd would be a bit more conservative about drawing extrodinary conclusions from such limited evidence.
I certainly am not trying to give creationists any more fuel for their fire. My point is more one of having a larger sample group before you start “rewriting history”.