DAMN THE EVIDENCE :

Oldest member of human family found : New-found skull could sink our current ideas about human evolution. (JOHN WHITFIELD, 11 July 2002, Nature)

After a decade of digging through the sand dunes of northern Chad, Michel Brunet found a skull 6-7 million years old. He named it Touma*.

Touma* is thought to be the oldest fossil from a member of the human family. It's a dispatch from the time when humans and chimpanzee were going their separate evolutionary ways. A thrilling, but confusing dispatch.

Sahelanthropus tchadensis - Touma*'s scientific name - was probably one of many similar species living in Africa at that time. "There must have been a group of apes knocking around between 5 and 8 million years ago for which there's a very poor fossil record," says anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington DC.

Touma* is the tip of that iceberg - one that could sink our current ideas about human evolution. "Anybody who thinks this isn't going to get more complex isn't learning from history," says Wood.

"When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder," he says. The ladder stepped from monkey to man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last.

Now human evolution looks like a bush. We have a menagerie of fossil hominids - the group containing everything thought more closely related to humans than chimps. How they are related to each other and which, if any of them, are human forebears is still debated.

The fanatic refusal of Darwinists to acknowledge the evidentiary problems with their theory reminds us of the guy whose wife busted him, getting his freak on with a neighbor lady. While he swore he'd always been faithful and was merely demonstrating the Heimlich manuever, his wife said : "But I saw you!" To which he replied : "Who ya' gonna' believe, me or your lyin' eyes?"

MORE :
A Fossil Unearthed in Africa Pushes Back Human Origins (JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, July 11, 2002, NY Times)

In studying the skull, Dr. Lieberman recognized a third reason, besides the specimen's age and location, for scientists to be excited and challenged by the discovery. That is the skull's mosaic of primitive and advanced characteristics.

"You expect something that age to be very chimplike," Dr. Lieberman said. "But this one's face is the face essentially of a Homo habilis, at two million years ago, and yet this face is almost seven million years old."

This is all the more puzzling because Australopithecus afarensis, the Lucy species that lived 3.2 million years ago, has a decidedly chimp like face. What's happening? Reversing evolutionary patterns and trends, Dr. Lieberman said, is "extremely rare, if not impossible."

Several scientists said the discovery thus seemed to undermine the simplest linear models of hominid evolution. If the earliest hominids like Toumai were directly ancestral to australopithecines like Lucy, Dr. Lieberman pointed out, there would have had to have been two reversals to reach the advanced characteristics of the Homo lineage.

MORE :
Ivan Bostock has called our attention to some amusing essays on Darwinism at the Royal Institute of Philosophy :
A New Religion (David Stove, Royal Institute of Philosophy)
So You Think You Are a Darwinian? (David Stove, Royal Institute of Philosophy)
I Rather Think I Am A Darwinian (Simon Blackburn, Royal Institute of Philosophy)
Stove's Anti-Darwinism (James Franklin, Royal Institute of Philosophy)

There are also many more links to essays--both pro and con--at our Evolution reviews page.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 11, 2002 11:57 AM