Posted on 07/12/2002 8:56:17 AM PDT by Junior
PARIS (Reuters) - A prehistoric skull touted as the oldest human remains ever found is probably not the head of the earliest member of the human family but of an ancient female gorilla, a French scientist said on Friday.
Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris said certain aspects of the skull, whose discovery in Chad was announced on Wednesday, were actually sexual characteristics of female gorillas rather than indications of a human character.
Two other French experts cast doubt on the skull as Michel Brunet, head of the archeological team that discovered it, was due to present his findings at a news conference at Poitiers in western France.
A self-confessed heretic amid the hoop-la over the skull, which dates back six or seven million years, Senut said its short face and small canines merely pointed to a female and were not conclusive evidence that it was a hominid.
"I tend toward thinking this is the skull of a female gorilla," she told Reuters in an interview. "The characteristics taken to conclude that this new skull is a hominid are sexual characteristics.
"Moreover, other characteristics such as the occipital crest (the back of the neck where the neck muscles attach)...remind me much more of the gorilla," she said, saying older gorillas also had these characteristics.
So little is known about the distant period of history represented by the skull that one scientist who has seen it told Nature magazine the discovery would have the impact of a "small nuclear bomb" among students of human evolution.
The London-based journal broke the news on Wednesday.
SHORT FACE, SMALL TEETH
The skull, discovered last year by an international team of palaeoanthropologists, has been nicknamed "Toumai," the name usually given in the central African country to children who are born close to the dry season.
Ten million years ago the world was full of apes and it was not until five million years later that the first good records of hominids -- or members of the human family, distinct from chimpanzees and other apes -- appeared.
Senut contested the theory that Toumai represented the missing link of human evolution between the two benchmarks.
The skull's braincase is ape-like, the face is short and the teeth, especially the canines, are small and more like those of a human.
But she said these were characteristics of female gorillas and cited the case of a skull which was discovered in the 1960s and accepted for 20 years as that of a hominid before everyone agreed that it was a female.
French media have reported extensively on the skull, not least because it came to light after years of digging through the sand dunes of northern Chad by Brunet, a Frenchman from the University of Poitiers.
Despite the national pride, Senut was not the only French scientist to raise questions about the hominid theory.
Yves Coppens of the College of France told the daily Le Figaro that the skull had an ambiguous shape, with the front looking pre-human and the back like that of a large monkey.
"The exact status of this new primate is not yet certain," he said. "Michel Brunet believes it is a pre-human, other respected palaeoanthropologists...see it as one side of the big primitive monkeys. "Others suggest a shared ancestry before the divide between hominids and monkeys took hold."
His colleague at the same institution, Pascal Picq, suggested that chemical research to establish Toumai's diet or a reconstruction of the skull by computer imaging could determine whether it was man or monkey, though for him it was "pre-human."
But no one contests the significance of the discovery.
"Even if it is a big monkey, it's even more interesting," Coppens said. "Because until now, in the genealogy of monkeys, there is a big missing link stretching over millions of years."
You really ought to study equid evolution in some detail. It's got very fine detail.
So, if I adopt your line of reasoning - that evolution is improbable & should be scrapped - then there needs to be a new theory. That's the relevance of my line of questioning in this discussion.
I assume, based on your past answers, that you think either creationism or ID is the logical alternative.
If that is the case, then you need to point to some scientific evidence or even a good scientific theorem for Garden of Eden, woman created from man's rib, etc - that does not include the Bible.
The other theory - ID - is nothing more than a "good golly, this sure is complex - God must have done it" theory with no possible way to verify or test it.
"Initial confusion". I like that. It gives us a specimen, a theory, and an opportunity to judge the commitment to reality of one thinking mind in an area where the evidence is equally available to all. I'm no authority on skulls but I am as much an authority on "initial confusion" as you or anybody.
More fully: ..."some initial confusion about how to classify it..."
So: does this bear the mark of initial confusion?
"Initial confusion" is when the discoverer and attendant experts see some stigmata they understand along with others they don't. They have to reconcile the signs and that takes time. So, one would think, they would delay any public characterization of the specimen until they had sorted it out. And then, since true science is so certain and self-correcting, when the experts have peer-reviewed each other and winnowed out the confusion, they announce to the hoi polloi what the darn skull is.
Everyone can judge here: does this specimen, not a skull but a sequence of events, bear the marks of "initial confusion", or does it bear the mark of multiple groups of people interpreting the same set of observations by differing sets of criteria? The latter.
Perhaps one group puts more weight on the occiput; the other thinks the brow ridges win the day. In other words, they have no one agreed on algorithm by which to classify the specimen.
Are the people who originally called it classification A now relieved of their confusion? Do they all now agree it is a B? If the confusion was "initial" is it now all gone? Have they had time to sort it out yet?
There's nothing wrong with the lack of a system of classification -- it must be a universal stage in every taxonomic enterprise. BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY ARE SAYING.
So the deeper question: why the unwillingness to admit a specific level of uncertainty? Not only among the researchers, but among their defenders? This phraseology is an intentional minimization of an embarassing turn of events. All minimizations are for a reason; they indicate the speaker's hesitation to consider one or more implications of the observation being minimized. If truth is the goal, why dont the anthropologists just say WE DON'T YET KNOW HOW TO CLASSIFY THE SKULL?
If truth is the goal, why dont the anthropologist apologists just say HALF THE EXPERTS ARE WRONG.
One possible answer: because other skulls have already been classified (and, more importantly, presented to the public as enjoying a consensus) by the criteria now under debate.
So, at least in this one data point, the public face of anthropology bears the stigmata of Ego. Not analytical rigor, but ego. Perhaps its just an aberrance.
Of course, you can always just re-define your theory -- "initial confusion" -- to include this specimen and not only preserve your theory but know that it is now more verified than it was this morning.
Also, I see no reference to "Noah's Ark" in this conversation. I understand it is convenient shorthand for a body of opinion you disdain.
But, since, all the evolutionists in the world could be wrong and that would say nothing about whether creationism, defined however you like, is right or wrong Noahs Ark is a logical irrelevancy, introduced in a rhetorical rush to change the discussion into one you like better than the one youre in. Your language is inaccurate because your thought is imprecise, because you're trying to win (an imaginary) argument by means of sarcasm, instead of by argument.
Here is the specific argument of this thread: Some scientists were publicly wrong. That error has been touted as evidence of scientists reliability, and, further, has been characterized as initial confusion. It is, rather, an indication of an underlying disagreement in the interpretive framework of the discipline.
You are embarrassed by it. You shouldnt be. You are a lover of truth.
I have disagreed with the characterization.
Give me the names of some good books and I will check it out.
Check this talk origins FAQ; it has a big bibliography
Perhaps this skull is the missing link between hominids and Frenchinids.
Maybe I can better state my questions. Apparently in the last 4 million years man has gone through 6 or 7 major species changes while the modern ape has none. Assuming that both us and the apes are experiencing the same environment changes I wonder what factors yield a species that doesn't change much while a similar species changes at least 6 or 7 times that warrants a special name.
If there is a "stability" factor that some species have, what determines it and why doesn't man have the same ? What makes our time line so volatile ? Why didn't one of our types settle down for the long haul like the ape ?
The skeptic in me says that one of the reasons is that professors looking for funding might not be so interested in following ape species and may be more willing to see differences in human species. But skepticism aside these are my honest questions not coming from someone who is best described as an agnostic as far as evolution goes and not one who believes that the world has to be 6,000 years old. (In fact I believe the bible literally says the universe is about 5 1/2 days old but thats another thread. )
94 posted on 7/11/02 5:28 PM Eastern by VRWC_minion
That's another thread, but it would explain a lot if this all started last Sunday.
Good question. We do know that small isolated populations get to evolve quicker than large populations. (The driver of punk eek.) If the original hominids really did migrate out of the forest into the savannah, then they're the ones who moved into the new, challenging environment. Meanwhile the vast majority of the other ancient apes stayed where they were already successful, in the forests, where bones tend to disintegrate before they have a chance to fossilize. (Acidic soils, IIRC.)
The details are still controversial, for sure, but nothing in that scenario seems unlikely.
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