Those Who Argue against Au as Ancestor
Australopithecine specimens from Tanganyika and South Africa were long regarded as off the main evolutionary line. Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey (son of famed Louis Leakey who shifted the focus of anthropogenesis to the continent of Africa) judged Au to be only a relative of our forebears, one who reached an evolutionary “dead end.” Louis Leakey, like his son, rejected Au as our ancestor, voting instead for Homo habilis, the next higher type with his modern lightness of skull. The elder Leakey, some say, tended to deny that anything (including Peking Man and Neanderthal Man) other than his own (African) finds was ancestral.
TABLE 1.1. SUITE OF AUSTRALOPITHECINE TRAITS, DISPLAYING MIXED GENES
Primitive (Asu blood) Manlike (Ihin blood)
Heavily muscled body Vertical foramen magnum (opening inoccipital bone of cranium): walker
Shoulder joint faces more upward: climber Broad sacrum and lumbar curve, shortened hip bone
Pelvis not modern, funnel-shaped torso Lower leg and ankle well shaped; “leg and foot bones essentially manlike”*13
Toes curved, long midtoe, heelbone without tubercule Hands with precision grip; Olduvai hand bones modern
Large jutting face and jaw, receding forehead, large brow Flat, smooth face
Large molars and canines; palate archaic Manlike dentition and enamel; some lack projecting canines
Skull vault low, thorax broad at base Small occipital lobes, thin-walled skull
Small brain, less than 600 cc Prominent frontal lobes
Anatomist and anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith dismissed Australian anatomist and anthropologist Raymond Dart’s finding of Au. africanus in Taung, South Africa in 1924 as “just another fossil ape.” In his last book Keith (wisely) changed his mind—twenty years after Dart’s finding.
Several authorities rejected Au on the basis of brain size. England’s curmudgeonly zoologist Lord Solly Zuckerman is remembered for his brisk dismissal of australopiths “as having anything at all to do with human evolution.” “They are just bloody apes,” howled Zuckerman, underscoring his lifelong rejection of the australopiths as human ancestors. He didn’t even think they were proper bipeds. And Earnest Hooton, distinguished professor of physical anthropology at Harvard in the first part of the twentieth century, also said “no” to Au as ancestor because of brain size.
Others who did not think Au was on a direct line to humans were archaeologist and anthropologist Brian Fagan and evolutionary zoologist Charles E. Oxnard. Oxnard’s computer analysis in 1975 presumably settled the matter, making Au an extinct ape unconnected with human ancestry: “they must have been upon some side-path.”5 (We’ll look at these “side paths” in a moment.)
More recently, in 2008, paleoanthropologists Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall noted that numerous australopiths came and went over a period of over two million years without significant change in body structure, and therefore, no known Au anticipated human beings.6 Besides, there is no one to fill the one-million-year gap between the australopith Lucy (Au. afarensis) and the first Homo (H. erectus).
Those Who Argue in Support of Au as Ancestor
Although Au were not yet known in Charles Darwin’s time, the father of evolution nonetheless predicted that such a type, once found, would prove to be “our semi-human progenitors” (The Descent of Man). He envisioned “the divergence of the races of man from [such] a common stock.” Raymond Dart, the first to discover any australopithecine (the Taung Child in South Africa, 1924), thought Au was indeed an ancestor, especially considering the position of Taung’s foramen magnum, indicating upright posture.
Among other supporters of Australopithecus as ancestor of man are John Robinson, also of South Africa, who placed all the more gracile Au material within the genus Homo; British-American anthropologist and humanist Ashley Montagu; and Donald Johanson. Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy in 1974, saw Au as the root stock of all future hominids, even though they were “not men”—yet. Still, “you and I have in our teeth and jaws some characteristics that we get almost directly from Lucy,” said Johanson. “We see her, in a sense, as the mother of all humankind. . . . Not everyone has agreed.”7
There have been some fence sitters. Sir Wilfrid E. Le Gros Clark, the great English anatomist and paleontologist of the past century, thought the genus Au as a whole might include our ancestral stock, following Robert Broom, the Scotch–South African physician and internationally renowned vertebrate paleontologist, who thought that Au—based largely on dentition—was a direct ancestor of mankind. In the 1930s, Broom (see figure 8.7) discovered Au in Sterkfontein, South Africa, nicknamed Mrs. Ples (short for Plesianthropus transvaalensis, or near-man from the Transvaal), who was generally accepted as human (or almost human) by the 1950s.
Le Gros Clark (1955) had to agree with Broom, but only provisionally: though Mrs. Ples’s pelvis was modern, the small brain bothered him. Carleton Coon, chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Pennsylvania till 1963, also thought Mrs. Ples was a direct ancestor, but rejected the East African australopiths. Paleontologist and geologist G. H. R. von Koenigswald, like Le Gros Clark, was inclined to accept australopiths based on dental form—but felt the geology was too recent and the teeth were actually too big.
THE FIX IS IN
Pursue thy studies, O man, and thou shalt find that supposed exact science is . . . only falsehood compounded and acquiesced. . . . Is the man who finds the vertebra of an insect, not said to be scientific? But he who finds the backbone of a horse, is a vulgar fellow. Another man finds a route over a mountain or through the forest, and he is scientific! Why, a dog can do this.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE 1:36–7
With the origin of man our subject is history, really. We only make it science, clothe it in science, in order to study it. Evolution is a descriptive body of knowledge decked out in hypothetical models, formulas, theories, and best guesses. Though its methods are no doubt empirical, it remains an interpretive field of study. Which is fine. “The ambiguous nature of fossil evidence,” as one critic sees it, “obliges paleoanthropologists to pursue the truth mainly by hypothesis and speculation . . . a science powered by individual ambitions and so susceptible to preconceived beliefs.”8
Mark Isaak, one of the Darwinian fraternity, declares that “[t]he theory of evolution still has essentially unanimous agreement from the people who work it.”9 Does a majority vote among paleontologists add up to the truth? These experts of course are trained professionals, trained to look at the evidence through the Darwinian lens.
This is the simple formula: supposition plus consensus equals fact. “There is something fascinating,” Mark Twain once commented, “about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
The various family trees for man are admittedly provisional, indeed “highly speculative”—in Charles Darwin’s very own words. His expositions are dotted with such terms as feasible, plausible, in principle. As one author went to the trouble of counting, Darwin uses the phrase we may suppose and similar qualifiers more than eight hundred times in his two major books.10 Some have complained of his “constant hedging” and “guile.”11 Darwin’s approach, though certainly rational and databased, is, in its most important aspects, profoundly conjectural. It is still, and will remain, only an opinion that man has a phyletic relationship to the apes—that our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has evolved from a different, earlier species.
Paleoanthropologists seem to make up for a lack of fossils with an excess of fury, and this must now be the only science in which it is still possible to become famous just by having an opinion.
J. S. JONES, NATURE
There is only one opinion that is shared by all: “The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all”12 (biologist Sir Peter Medawar). So now evolution is the sacred cow (or is it sacred ape?), and to oppose it is something close to blasphemy, sacrilege. “People made a religion of them [my ide
as],” Darwin him-self once fretted.13 Evolution has become (oxymoronically) a secular religion—or call it scientific naturalism. A new orthodoxy for a material age, fundamentalist Darwinism’s central dogma is faith in mutation and transmutation, the process that allows one species to turn into another species (also called speciation). The official creation story of modern humanism, it is our shared origin myth, maintained and glorified by its own scientific priesthood and bully pulpit. Richard Leakey and many others besides have trumpeted evolution as the greatest scientific discovery of all time. And so it has come to pass that of all scientific gospel, evolution is the most sacrosanct. And like all myths, it contains a few truths but is riddled with a mass of errors.
BARE BONES
Today East Africa’s Turkana Boy (Homo erectus or Homo ergaster), discovered in Kenya in 1984, and Lucy (Johanson’s famous Au find) are among the most partially complete skeletons of any pre-Neanderthal hominids—with more than 50 percent of Turkana’s bones recovered and 40 percent of Lucy’s. It is unusual to collect more than a few fragments. Peking Man was named and classified (1927) on the basis of a single tooth! The first human ancestor discovered in the New World was also identified on the basis of a single tooth, which turned out to be a pig’s molar—this “Nebraska man” was actually an extinct wild peccary. As William Howells, in Mankind So Far, cautioned, there is “a great legend . . . men can take a tooth or a small and broken piece of bone . . . and draw a picture of what the whole animal looked like . . . If this were true, the anthropologists would make the FBI look like a troop of Boy Scouts.”
A bone, a femur, a tooth, a mandible, a pinky fragment. All of evolution is a grand and daring reading between the lines of the past. In graphic reconstructions of our ancestors, everything depends on the angle used to put these fragments together. Paleoanthropologists Franz Weidenreich’s and Ian Tattersall’s reconstructions of the same Peking Man look quite different. Teasing out a picture of our ancestor is, to one critic “deceptive evolutionist artistry,”14 while Harvard’s Prof. Hooton in Up from the Ape warned, “To attempt to restore the soft parts is . . . a hazardous undertaking. You can with equal facility model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. . . . Put not your trust in reconstructions. . . . The faces usually being missing . . . leaves room for a good deal of doubt as to details. . . . These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value.” Without having found any nasal bones of Au. afarensis, the artist’s reconstruction gives a superplatyrrine (flat) nose, very much like our simian “cousins.”
Figure 1.2. Mr. and Mrs. Hesperopithecus (1922), body structure based solely on what turned out to be the molar of an extinct pig!
Neanderthal is often represented with his big toe diverging in apelike fashion, which he never had. Artist Peter Schouten gives Homo floresiensis a gorilla face; after all, his brain, like the ape, was only one-third the size of ours. Though wild-looking, H. floresiensis did not really resemble an ape.
Figure 1.3. Trinil Homo erectus reconstructed. Note that the shaded area indicates the only portion known. As stated in Fossil Man, French paleontologist Marcellin Boule thought such reconstructions “far too hypothetical. . . . It is astonishing to find a great paleontologist like Osborn publishing attempts of this kind.”
DEAD ENDS AND HOMELESS FACTS
Paleoanthropologist Tim White and colleagues thought Ardipithecus ramidus (who corresponds to Asu man) was, if not our direct ancestor, at least a close relative (“sister”) of that ancestor. All such early types (human though they are) that do not quite meet our idea of ancestral are labeled sisters, cousins, collaterals, dead ends, or divergent offshoots from the main line of descent.
So what becomes of human evolution if Neanderthal and Java Man and Au and Ardi are not man’s ancestor but merely an extinct side branch or “failed attempts at becoming human”?15 No, they are not failures, just—as these chapters lay bare—race mixtures. Louis Leakey believed that most lineages have their dead branches, which quietly moved on to extinction. He thought that Au left the Homo line about 6 or 7 mya, and that most of our collected fossil types are simply “aberrant offshoots” from the main stem. American anthropologist Loren Eiseley concurs, deferring to the school of thought that “the true origin of our species is lost in some older pre–Ice Age level and that all the other human fossils represent side lines and blind alleys.”16 Now that we have washed our hands of all these unqualified ancestors, what is left of our family tree? The answer is—a bush (in which the ancestor, nonetheless, still hides).
The complications of interbreeding make it impossible to draw neat branching lines of descent on the family tree.
JOSEPH THORNDIKE JR., MYSTERIES OF THE PAST
And so, with ever more hybrids (rather than ancestors) turning up, paleoanthropologists take care of the problem by calling it diversity or variability and changing the family tree to a bush—but still in an evolutionary context, thoroughly blindsiding the factor of crossbreeding, and all those hybrids. As we have seen, numerous evolutionists concur that Au is off the main evolutionary line to H. sapiens; but as these irrelevant branches continue to multiply, it leaves us with a family tree that is all branches and no trunk! So many also-rans but no winners. No ancestors. Indeed, almost all the nodes or branching points remain unidentified, with big question marks printed at the point when species first appeared.
A tree with no trunk might get knocked down with the first storm; or as the delightful British author Norman Macbeth so aptly put it, “these forms, being ineligible as ancestors, must be moved from the trunk of the tree to the branches. The result is that the tips are well populated while the trunk is shrouded in mystery . . . we see forms that purport to be our cousins, but we have no idea who our common grandparents were.”17
Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History breezily mentions that the tree is really “quite luxuriantly branching.” Yet in transforming our family tree into a bush, what has really been laid bare is the multiplicity of crossbreedings that make up the human lineage. The molecular revolution (see chapter 6), we might also note, forced us to scotch the tree and go for the bush, since “genes move quite freely between the branches.”18 Can we interpret that to mean intermixtures? If so, we do not need evolution at all to account for the ascent of man! All we need is the blending of types.
First it was an evolutionary “ladder” (linear model), and when that didn’t work, it was changed to a “tree.” But there were problems with tree so they changed it to “bush”; now, as problems arise with bush, they’re changing it to “network”—where will it end?*14
Louis Leakey considered Neanderthal, Java Man, Peking Man, Au, and others as mere evolutionary experiments that ended in extinction. Others say the evolution of a successful animal species involves trial and error and failed experiments. What is this experiment that everyone is bandying about but an empty conceit probably personifying the materialist’s god of nature? “It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments,” writes Loren Eiseley,19 while William Jungers, a paleoanthropologist of the State University of Stony Brook, New York, says, “We’re far from the only human experiment.” After all, the apes, except the bipedal ones, were “failed evolutionary experiments.”20 But we are not an experiment and the apes are not a failure. Science engages in experimentation—not nature or the universe. Pray, who is the experimenter?
GOING IN CIRCLES
Evolutionary arguments tend to be jargon happy, model obsessed, and insufferably pedantic: Is it really necessary to say lithic technology instead of stoneworking? If not empty rhetoric, the arguments are couched in forbiddingly technical language and nomenclature (“pompous polysyllabification,” as one critic saw it). There are often surprise changes in the terminology, which forever keeps you off balance in the paleo world. For example, East Africa’s Paranthropus boisei was originally called Zinjanthropus boisei, then changed agai
n to Australopithecus boisei. But it was also known as Olduway Man, Dear Boy (a pet name), and Zinj, as well as Titanohomo mirabilis and FLKI. (One of the Leakeys’ stage names for this creature, Nutcracker Man, had to go: as it turned out, he did not eat nuts after all; he ate grasses and sedges.) Today Olduvai is a safari destination, sporting a stone plinth marking the site of Zinj’s discovery.
Ndangong man of Java, depending upon which book you read, may be called Homo Javanthropus, Homo soloensis, Homo sapiens soloensis, Homo primigenius asiaticus, Wadjak Man, Homo sapiens, or Homo neanderthalensis soloensis. Or try researching Swanscombe Man. He is one and the same as Homo sapiens protosapiens, Homo marstoni, Homo swanscombensis, and Homo sapiens steinheimensis. In my own research, it took months before realizing Homo rhodesiensis was the same fellow as Broken Hill Man, Kabwe Man, and Rhodesian Man (and it doesn’t help that Rhodesia was changed to Zimbabwe).
Embarrassing gaps and jumps in the record are called “systemic macromutations” (swiftly turning a liability into an asset). I am certainly not the first to point out the circularity of Darwinism’s basic premises. Example: “The process of human evolution [is] a series of adaptive radiations . . . the basis for each radiation was a mixture of adaptations to local conditions and geographic isolation.”21 Translation: species evolved by evolving. The buzz phrase adaptive radiation is itself circular, the concept founded on nothing more than the assumption of evolution itself. “Adaptive radiation strictly speaking refers to more or less simultaneous divergence of numerous lines from much the same adaptive type into different, also diverging adaptive zones . . . a rise in the rate of appearance of new species and a concurrent increase in ecological and phenotypic diversity.”22 Say what? Do these words mean anything at all? Bipedal locomotion (which I discuss in chapter 9) is given as another (meaningless) instance of adaptive radiation. The Cambrian explosion is another. Every big set of changes is an adapative radiation. Why? Because the experts say so.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 5