Oldest Human Femur Wades Into Controversy. Science. 2004 Sep 24;305(5692):1885. Gibbons A.
Here goes: Emphasis mine.
PARIS. Tempers flared last week in a sweltering salon at the French Academy of Sciences here as scientists hotly debated the attributes of anthropology's most famous thighbone, the 6-million-year-old femur of an ancient Kenyan hominid called Orrorin tugenensis. More than 100 scholars packed the academy's opulent, wood-paneled Grande Salle to witness the first face-to-face gathering of the discoverers of the three oldest putative hominids. In talks and a panel discussion, the researchers discussed whether Orrorin and other contenders for the title of earliest human ancestor walked upright and in what manner. Bipedalism is a traditional hallmark of membership in the human family rather than being an ancestor of chimpanzees gorillas, or quadrupedal apes. The speakers were particularly interested in learning more about Orrorin's legs. Paleontologist Brigitte Senut of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris presented recently published computed tomography (CT) scans of Orrorina's thighbone (Science, 3 September, p. 1450). According to Senut, the scans sho that the bone is thicker on the bottom of the subhorizontal neck of the femur, indicating that weight was put on the top of the bone. Other features also suggest that the hips were stabilized in a manner similar to those of modern humans. In fact, Senut proposed that Orrorina's gait was more humanlike than that of the 2- to 4-million-year-old australopithecines. If so, australopithecines would be bumped off the direct line to humans a dramatic revision of our prehistory.
But paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, immediately attacked this view of Orrorin. He said that the resolution of the CT scans was so poor that it was impossible to be certain of the pattern of bone thickness. CT scan expert James Ohman of Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., who was not a the meeting, agreed that the published scans were taken at the wrong angle. White further grilled Senut about the fossil analysis, asking if her team had directly measured the internal structure of the bone at a preexisting break, a more reliable means of gathering the data than CT scanning. Senut responded that colleagues had suggested doing the scans to make her case stronger an added in an interview that the bone was broken in a zigzag pattern that made it difficult to photograph. In her view, other features on the bone make it clear that Orrorin had
walked uprighta'so there was no need to unglue the bone and measure it. White accepts that Orrorin walked upright and so is one of the first members of the hominid family. But he says Senut has offered little evidence as to Orrorinas gait. "Was it human, an Australopithecus pattern, or something different?” he asked. Even standard x-rays would help answer that question. As the discussion grew more heated, White called Senutss displacement of australopithecines "une position crationniste," because it suggests that Orrorinas femur was quite modern 6 million years ago, rather than evolving in stages. Senut declared indignantly that she is not a creationistand then asked White to provide his own evidence about the mysterious Ardipithecus ramidus. A partial skeleton of that 4.4-million-year-old species was discovered by White’s team, the Middle Awash Research Project, in Ethiopia from 1994 to 1996, but the bones remain unpublished. White responded by projecting images of the Ardipithecus skull for the first time in public. The CT scans were startling: The skull was so crushed that the top of the vault was smashed almost to the base, forming a slab of hundreds of chalky pieces. White described it as "road kill."The reconstruction uses microCT scans to reassemble the specimen. This is the most fragile hominid skeleton ever found," says White. We are very sorry it's taken us this long to do, but I think you want the right answer instead of the quick answer.ANN GIBBONS
Wow, a whole hypothesis based on a few teeth and a fragmented skull. But hey it must be science.
Following article written by Dr. Bergman
Dr. Bergman teaches biology, molecular biology, chemistry, anthropology, and anatomy at Northwest State in Ohio, where he has been on the faculty for over 20 years.
Many studies find that the so-called objective field of human evolution is anything but objective — bias is common, and cases of corruption and fraud have been documented.
Well-known examples include Piltdown man and Hesperopithecus, but many other examples exist. One of the best-known examples of greed, revenge, and open frauds involved the war between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh in the bone war of the late 1800s (Wallace, 1999).
Part of the reason for controversy is that the anthropological field is divided into “camps” or “schools” that, not uncommonly, are in competition with each other.
Each school is often dominated by a small number of people who are often charismatic leaders. Each camp tries to “prove” its own theory of human evolution, oftendogmatically, by using fossil bones, most of which are badly damaged fragments. Sides are taken in these conflicts and, as Morell (1995) eloquently demonstrates, the participants sometimes end up in conflicts where unethical behavior (and almost everything else) is fair game. Only physical aggression is ruled out (though not always).
A major issue in dealing with this problem is that no small amount of arrogance exists within the scientific community. Hooper claims that some scientists dogmatically believe that they have the answer, and only they have the right to ask questions —and if they don’t ask them, no one else should (2002). A review of this history vividly shows the “other side” of the leading scientists in each camp — those who dominate the literature in Nature, Science, and other leading scientific journals.
Because fossil evidence accounts for less than 10 percent of the animal, it can be interpreted in many ways, even in the rare situation where a skeleton is relatively complete. Lucy, for example, is the most complete skeleton to date, and around three quarters of it is missing. Most other finds consist of, at best, a few bone fragments or sometimes just teeth.
At the center of the war
For the last half century, the Leakeys have been at the center of this war. The endless, vicious, and sometimes physical confrontations between the Leakeys and others, such as Donald Johanson and Timothy White, are extremely illuminating as to how critically important preconceptions are in understanding the extant fossil evidence.
As a young man, Louis Leakey was very “zealous about his Christianity and sometimes stood on corner soap boxes to deliver sermons” (Morell, 1995; p. 28). During his studies at Cambridge, though, his “growing knowledge of evolutionary theory” and his “more liberal views” led him away from the church and into full-time science work. Louis Leakey, along with the leading atheists and secularists of the day, became a supporter of the atheistic document, the “Humanist Manifesto.”
He later became very hostile toward Christianity, an attitude that was passed on to at least one of his sons, Richard. When Richard was asked to be a guest on Walter Cronkite’s television program to discuss evolution and creationism as an “ardent anti-creationist,” Richard agreed to appear (Morell, 1995; p. 520). This ploy to get him on the show turned out to be a trick —
Cronkite wanted to pit Leaky and Johanson against each other to debate their radically different opinions about Australopithecus afarensis and other putative hominids. On the show, Johanson was less interested in an intellectual exchange to achieve a better understanding of human evolution than he was in attacking those with whom he disagreed. In my opinion, Richard Leakey came out better in this exchange, but some people felt otherwise. Shortly after the Cronkite show, the National Geographic Society, the Leakeys’ main source of financial support, turned down Richard’s grant application for funds to support his Koobi Fora research and for new explorations north and west of Lake Turkana (Morell, 1995; p. 523).
One common trait in the field is the difficulty the leading scientists have in evaluating the data fairly and objectively. Many, such as Tim White, professor at the University of California Berkeley are anything but reasonable and objective. In the words of Tim White’s University of Michigan professor, Milford Wolpoff, Tim knows the “right” way…andthat’s with a capital “R”.... I used to think once he got a job and was treated with professional respect he’d calm down a bit. But I waswrong… White’s self-righteous stance surfaced [in the field]....leading him to be “unspeakably rude and arrogant to others.” (Morell, 1995; p. 477) Morell concludes that, like Wolpoff, Richard Leakey also “assumed that White would eventually outgrow this behavior. Instead, Richard himself became a target” (Morell, 1995; p. 477). For example, when Leakey explained his concerns about White’s interpretation of a fossil, White “started shouting at me, calling me a dictator, said that it was a disgrace that I should be in charge — all this rubbish…he wanted to have nothing more to do with me, and finally walked out of my office and slammed the door.” (Morell, 1995; p. 478)
Debates are required to make progress in science — but the viciousness that Morell eloquently documents is hardly what we would expect of anthropologists who are interested in the truth and who desire others to rationally evaluate their ideas. The behavior shown by these individuals was so extreme that it could not be discussed in a family publication. In addition, the morals of some of the leading scientists leave much to be desired.
Fraud among Darwin researchers
The scientific method is an ideal approach to gaining knowledge, but it is an especially difficult way to “prove” certain science hypotheses, such as those involving origins. A good example of this difficulty is “the theory of evolution (which) is ... a theory highly valued by scientists…but which lies in a sense too deep to be directly proved or disproved” (Broad and Wade; 1982, p. 17). One famous case of evolution fraud, that of Viennese biologist Paul Kammerer, was the subject of a now-classic book titled The Case of the Midwife Toad (Koestler, 1972). Dr. Kammerer’s fraud involved painting “nuptial pads” with India ink on the feet of the toads he was studying. Even though his work, which was forged to support the Lamarckian theory of evolutionism, was exposed, it was used for decades to support certain evolution ideologies, including that by Trofin D. Lysenko (Kohn, 1988; p. 47). In a similar case, William Summerlin faked the results of a test in the 1970s simply by drawing black patches on his white test mice with a felt-tip pen (Chang, 2002). Another recent case of fraud in evolution is that of Archaeoraptor, the “evolutionary find of the century” that purportedly proved bird-dinosaur evolution.
The National Geographic Society
“trumpeted the fossil’s discovery ... as providing a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds” (Simons, 2000). Archaeoraptor was used by “some prominent paleontologists” to prove a “long-sought key to a mystery of evolution.” High-resolution X-ray CT work found “unmatched pieces, skillfully pasted over.” The fraud was also determined to be “put together badly-deceptively” involving “zealots and cranks,” “rampant egos clashing,” “misplaced confidence,” and “wishful thinking.” It was the Piltdown man story all over again. Simons adds that this is a story in which “none” of those involved look good.
One of the “most pungent” cases of fraud involved paleontologist Viswat Jit Gupta who discovered a treasure trove of fossils that made “astonishing additions to the faunal lists” of species in the area he worked (Talent, 1989). After extensive investigation researchers concluded that Professor Viswat Jit Gupta salted the area with fossils, evidently stolen from teaching collections. He published close to 300 papers about the finds over a period of 25 years —all of which are now in doubt. Talent (1989) concludes, as a result of this case, “the database for the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic of the Himalayas has, as a consequence of these publications, become so marred by inconsistency as to throw grave doubts on the scientific validity of any conclusions that might be drawn from it. Because the biostratigraphical underpinning of so much Himalayan stratigraphy is in question, the credibility of many years of labour by numerous geologists is at stake.” As Judson concludes: “The difficulty, labor, and time that have been required to clear up the mess are incalculable. A residue of doubt will long shadow later work” (2004, p. 134). Talent (1989) adds “similar cases of carelessness over data or confusion over concepts are rife.”
Anthropologist falsifies key discoveries
Inquiry has now confirmed that what the British Guardian called “one of archaeology’s most sensational finds” — a purportedly 36,000-year-old skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was falsified. This fragment was believed to be a “vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals” (Harding, 2005). The thirty-year academic career of the discoverer, distinguished German anthropologist Professor Reiner Potsch von Zieten, “has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other ‘stone-age’ relicts” (Harding, 2005).
The crucial skull fragment, once believed to have come from the world’s oldest Neanderthal, has now been determined to be a mere 7,500 years old, according to the Oxford University radiocarbon dating unit. Other skulls were wrongly dated by Von Zieten as well. After redating the evidence, it was concluded that he had methodically falsified the dates on numerous artifacts: he had simply made up the dates to fit his theories. Testing revealed that all the skulls dated by Potsch were, in fact, much younger than he had claimed. Thomas Terberger, who discovered the hoax, stated that as a result of the hoax, “anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago” (quoted in Harding, 2005). The committee also found that Von Zieten had committed numerous other “falsehoods and manipulations.” His deceptions were so serious that it “may mean an entire tranche of the history of man’s development will have to be rewritten” (Harding, 2005). Yet another of the professor’s finds, Binshof-Speyer woman, was determined to have lived in 1,300 B.C., not 21,000 years ago, and Paderborn-Sande man, which was dated by the professor at 27,400 B.C., died only “a couple of hundred years ago, in 1750.” Further research found that he had passed off fake fossils as real and had also plagiarized other scientists’ work. The scandal was finally exposed when Professor Von Zieten was caught trying to sell his department’s entire chimpanzee collection to a museum in the United States.
The committee that investigated him involved ten different meetings with twelve witnesses to produce findings that were documented to beincreasingly bizarre. After a while it was hard to take it seriously.…It was just unbelievable. At the end of the day what he did was incredible. (quoted in Harding, 2005)
It was also found that the professor could not even operate the carbon dating machine that he claimed to have used to produce the now-discredited dates!
Professor Von Zieten was forced to end his career after confirmation of the “falsehoods and manipulations” came to light. This scandal is critically important in physical anthropology because his thirty year academic career yielded many sensational finds that were important evidence for modern evolution theory. Evidently he found that he could get away with the frauds, and continued to make outrageous claims until they became so ludicrous that somebody began to investigate. The university administrators admitted that they should have discovered the professor’s bizarre fabrications much earlier, but the “high profile anthropologist… [had] proved difficult to pin down.”
Evidence now exists that he began “inventing things” at the very start of his career over thirty years ago. After returning to Germany from America, where he did his doctorate, and accepting a professorship, he “simply made things up.” An example of his claims was a supposedly fifty-millionyear-old “half-ape” which he claimed was found in Switzerland, but was actually found in France. Continued investigation will likely reveal much more about this case, which has reminded many of the infamous Piltdown affair.
Honesty does exist
Evolutionists are at times very candid, such as Johanson's admission that now "nobody really places a great deal of faith in any human [evolution] tree"(Morell, 1995; p. 546, emphasis in original). Yet, many of their arguments are over this tree, which seems to change with each new find. The reason is that construction of these trees is based on evidence that is so flimsy and fragmentary that a wide variety of interpretations is possible — which in turn is a major explanation for the many heated conflicts that have characterized paleoanthropology. There are so little hard data that most of the findings can be construed in several different ways.
Another reason for so much controversy is that new fossil discoveries are rarely shared with other scientists for years, if ever, due to concerns over publishing priorities. Typically, to get full credit for a discovery, the finder must hoard the fossil for a decade or more before allowing others to study it so that he can publish first.
An additional consideration is that these fossils are generally very fragile and easily broken — working with them tends to damage them. Consequently, most researchers have access to only photographs or, at best, casts. In view of this fact, it is not surprising that major disagreements are common. Most anthropologists must rely only on descriptions and interpretations put forward by the discoverer of the fossils — the very person who has a vested interest in proving his own theories.
Conclusions
A review of paleoanthropology finds that the field is far less objective than physics, chemistry, or even biology. Furthermore, fraud and fakery have occasionally been demonstrated. In a field based on little evidence and many assumptions, the “bone wars” illustrate the conflicts which are common among scientists in this area. The unprofessional and at times even fraudulent behavior is not what one would expect from professionals. I teach anthropology at the college level, and after preparing this paper, I will from now on cover the evidence for human evolution in a very different way than I have in the past.
References
Broad, W. and N. Wade. 1982. Betrayers of the Truth:
Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science. NY:
Simon and Schuster.
Chang, K. 2002. On scientific fakery and the systems to catch it. The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, October 15, pp. 1, 4.
Harding, L. 2005. History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud. The Guardian, Saturday, February 19.
Hooper, J. 2002. An Evolutionary Tale of Moths and
Men: The Untold Story of Science and the Peppered
Moth. New York: W. W. Norton.
Howard, R.W. 1975. The Dawnseekers: The First History of American Paleontology. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Judson, H.F. 2004. The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. New York: Harcourt, Inc.
Koestler, A. 1972. The Case of the Midwife Toad.
New York: Random House.
Kohn, A. 1988. False Prophets: Fraud and Error in
Science and Medicine. New York: Barnes &
Noble Books.
Morell, V. 1995. Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Families and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
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Emphasis mine.
Just where does the fraud end?
After reading the following, i think it is safe to say:
Evolutionary theory is structureless, and predicts virtually nothing - It adapts to data like fog adapts to landscape.
The Unreliability of Hominid Phylogenetic Analysis Challenges The Human Evolutionary Paradigm
By Fuz Rana, Ph.D.
Recent work by two researchers from University College London (UCL) and George Washington University (GW) calls into serious question the capability of paleoanthropologists to detect and establish the evolutionary relationships assumed to exist among bipedal primates, or hominids.1
Evolutionary or phylogenetic relationships for the hominids are determined by comparing anatomical features of specimens found in the fossil record with those of extant species.
For the hominids, the available fossils in most cases are partial crania, partial jaw bones, isolated teeth, and infrequently, partial upper and lower limbs.2,3 Rarely do paleoanthropologists find a complete cranium, let alone a nearly complete skeleton. And only a few of the hominid species in the fossil record are known from an abundance of specimens. Typically a hominid species is defined by just a few fossilized bone fragments.4 Many times the hominid remains have been crushed, shattered and damaged prior to fossilization or have become deformed as a result of geological processes. This only serves to compound the difficulty of paleoanthropologists’ work.
Given the nature of the hominid fossil record, it is not surprising that most evolutionary biologists recognize that the best they can hope for are crude working phylogenies.5 (A phylogeny is believed to be the evolutionary pathway for an organism or group of organisms.) This becomes apparent when one examines textbooks and treatises on human evolution. The large number of proposed phylogenies shows that paleoanthropologists are far from a consensus on the pathway to human evolution.6, 7
The situation has recently worsened for those attempting to construct hominid phylogenetic relationships. Scientists from UCL and GW indicate, based on their findings, that evolutionary phylogenies postulated for human origins are hopelessly uncertain.8 These two paleoanthropologists compared phylogenies constructed from gene and protein sequences with those constructed from cranial and dental features for two currently existing groups of primates, the hominoids (gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans) and the papionins (baboons, mangabeys, and macaques).
In both cases, the molecular phylogenies differed significantly from those derived using cranial and dental characteristics. Since evolutionary biologists consider molecular phylogenies inherently more robust, the authors of the study are forced to conclude that craniodental characteristics cannot be used as reliable indicators of primate evolutionary relationships (including those of extinct hominids). As the researchers from UCL and GW put it, “Without a reliable phylogeny, little confidence can be placed in the hypotheses of ancestry…”9
In light of these results, the assertion that human evolution is a fact becomes scientifically untenable. What seems apparent is that evolutionary biologists have chosen to interpret their data exclusively within an evolutionary paradigm. From this framework, they then declare that their data supports human evolution. To demonstrate that humans evolved by natural processes, there must be rigorous evidence of clearly established evolutionary relationships with obvious transitions in the fossil record. This study shows that such determinations may never be possible, given that cranial and dental remains are the primary fossils available to paleoanthropologists.
Equally disconcerting for the evolutionary paradigm is the lack of congruence between molecular and morphological phylogenies. Truth demands internal consistency. The failure to establish consistency for molecular and morphological phylogenies calls into question the veracity of the evolutionary paradigm.
New discoveries in paleoanthropology increasingly undermine the plausibility of evolution as an explanation for human origins.
References:
1. Mark Collard and Bernard Wood, “How Reliable Are Human Phylogenetic Hypotheses?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97 (2000): 5003-6.
2. Roger Lewin, Principles of Human Evolution (Malden, MA: Blackwell Science, 1998), 117-18.
3. S. Jones, R. Martin, and D. Pilbeam, "The Primate Fossil Record," The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, ed.S. Jones, R. Martin, and D. Pilbeam, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 197-98.
4. Fuz Rana, “Up (and Away) from the Apes,” Connections 1, no. 4 (2000): 3-4.
5. Lewin, 296-307.
6. Lewin, 306.
7. Bernard Wood, “Evolution of Australopithecines” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, ed. S. Jones, R. Martin, and D. Pilbeam, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 240.
8. Collard and Wood, 5003-6.
9. Collard and Wood, 5003.
Looking at the above, i think it fare to ask: How much of human origins is imagination and how much is objective science?
Any anthropologists willing to post their version of human origins? No website link or google answers, just a list of hominid common ancestors according to your current understanding.
