[The newspapers don’t carry the full story, neither do the popular magazines. The technical details of science are not exciting enough for popular magazines, and would be beyond most readers’ comprehension anyway.]
Yeah- it would be icky and ‘boring’ to learn that entire ‘anatomically correct’ constructs were assembled from a single tooth, and it would be Waaaay beyond boring to learn that many in the scientific comunity were in fierce opposition to such constructs, or similiarly far-fetched constructs based on scant finds. Much more ‘exciting’ to publish the biAsed evo-friendly news that “a new hominid proves man came out of deepest darkest Africa... and here’s the photos that ‘many’ in the scientific comunity are so excited about”
No sense middying the waters by printing all that ‘technical stuff’ like “the dentrition was more in line with that of known monkeys than with man” or things like “Scientists caught the mistake early on (but ‘unoftunately not before elaborate drawings made their way into every major public journal and onto every news show across the world) that the bones found indicated a fully upright position as compared to the half-bent/stooped figures that you see so eloquently displayed in your highschool biology books”. Rickets as seen in some fossil femur discoveries hailed as ‘ape to man’ specimens is too ‘deep’ a subject for ordinary folks to grasp, and thus should be withheld from them- you know, for their own good.
Things like a fully human skeleton being discovered right above Leakey’s magnificent discovery of an ‘ape to ma’ creature, or that a young childs jaw was found amoung the tar pit “death traps’ that contained thousands of animals, many extinct, or that the bones of all these thousands of animals were scattered all over the place indicating a massive catyclysmic event. These are all somethign the public need not be told- don’t want to confuse them with scientific discoveries that don’t coincide with the preconception that old bones are always found without any evidences that would contradict the dAtes finally sdettled on after umpteen tests turn out just the right dates to support old dates.
Zzzzzzz. wake me when all these ‘boring’ things are finally buried deep enough that we don’t have to bother with them anymore.
Not to worry. All those boring things, like the details of science, are safely tucked away in our major libraries.
You are perfectly safe.