One book I'm reading now is Seven Skeletons by Lydia Pyne. In it, Pyne provides detailed narratives for as many human/hominin fossil finds that have occurred in the last 200 years. These include Piltdown Man and the Taung Child. And there's a certain interrelation there.
Raymond Dart was assigned to a post in the early twentieth century, when it was not the place to be for a natural historian interested in human origins. Good thing for him, because he wound up finding the Taung Child, the first recognized Australopithecus skeleton. His discovery and his conclusion weren't universally accepted, certainly not at first, but he wound up adding more evidence to the idea that human life began in Africa, as Darwin had thought.
By that time it was generally accepted in the scientific community that Darwin had been wrong on that point, and that humans had begun in Asia or possibly Europe. And Piltdown Man seemed to supThport that theory, being a skeleton with humanlike and apelike features, as much of a missing link as anyone could ask for, and found in Britain. So perfect that it, of course, turned out to be a hoax.
This is a brief rundown of the case, but it does go to show just how much of a consensus-based practice science isn't, or at least shouldn't be.
2 comments:
Her book sounds to be a fascinating study of how each separate discovery fascinated the mass media of the time then entered popular culture. I've often wondered too how it is that some fossils become famous while others sit forgotten in dusty old museum drawers. It's true that as the investigations have developed over the years we're given ever more complex histories of how we came to be as we are. Some are definitely quite strange:
Ian Tattersall's The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack. The title describes how people first reacted to the first Neanderthal partial skeleton found in the 1800s when it seemed a logical assumption that his legs were deformed by riding a horse and the heavy brow ridge from frowning in pain. Pretty good, eh?
Paleoanthropology is a fascinating subject, one we've learned much about that may well lead to even more momentious discoveries so long as we don't blow ourselves up. The subject that's interested me for many years is just how and when humans developed self awareness. While we likely enjoyed all the attributes of human consciousness at an early stage in his book Supernatural Graham Hancock developed a theory that we became actively creative (for example the painted caves in France and Spain among others) when psychedelics were first discovered.
Her book is quite fascinating, and she knows her subject well. She apparently was the student of a paleoanthropologist who himself was taught by Raymond Dart, which is pretty wild. There's a chapter on floresiensis, and while I don't agree with 100% of it she gets to the meat of the story. It is kind of mysterious how some fossils manage to spark the public's imagination while others don't.
The Old Man, yes. Being a Neanderthal in a time when nothing of that nature had been acknowledged even if other examples had been found, well, few knew what to do with him. I don't know if I've read The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack itself. The anecdote has show up elsewhere. I do know that I've read books by Tattersall, including The Last Neanderthal.
The fact that there are a couple of examples in the book from very recent years shows that the age of discovery in this area is definitely not over. There will always be controversies but it's evident that our history is a rich and interesting one. Hancock's theory is interesting. I'm not entirely sure I buy it. There's an overlap between creative people and psychedelics users, but not really a correlation.
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