Anthropology: Shelf Three

On Shelf #3: On the left, you see the infamous Piltdown Man. Imagination and desire are powerful forces that shape human thinking. Driven by nationalist competition, English scientists, who wanted to be able to claim that the earliest humans had been found on their island rather than in the territories of the imperial competitors, in the first years of the 20th century were duped by the supposed discovery in 1912 in the south of England of the bones that were given the now defunct designation “Eoanthropus dawsonii” and that were said to be the remains of a possibly 50 million year old ancestor of humans. Fifty million years would put a comfortable distance between humans and apes, but the clincher was that these remains seemed to indicate that the human brain had achieved it large size eons ago. It was shown in the years right after the Second World War, that these bones are not fossils but were a combination of a modern human cranium and an orangutan’s jawbone. Who perpetrated the hoax and why it was done remain a mystery. Sharing space on this shelf are replicas of two authentic fossils, The Taung Child (Australopithecus africanus) and Toumaï (Sahelanthropus tchadensis [found between 2001 and 2002, in the Djurab Desert region of Chad by teams led by Michel Brunet; ~7 Mya]). 

•  The Taung Child was found in 1924 by quarrymen working near the town of Taung in South Africa and scientifically described by anthropologist Raymond Dart in 1925. Based on features of its face, skull and teeth, Dart asserted that it was an early human ancestor. The paleontological community of the time, however, refused to accept that assertion and based on its brain size (the endocast, that is the “fossilized” brain of the Taung Child is the smooth rock like object against which the remains of the skull are resting), dismissed the remains as those of an extinct ape. It was not until much later that it was generally accepted that the exaggerated brain size of our species was a more recent evolutionary development.

•  Toumaï, which means “hope of life” in the Dazaga language of Chad, the country in north central Africa where these remains were found. Some feel that Toumaï is an early member of the human family, some claim that this species may be the so-called “missing link”, that is the last common ancestor shard by humans on the one hand and bonobos and chimps on the other and still others assert that Toumaï’s species may be an early ancestor of the gorilla. Discovered in 2001, the condition of the remains and the vagaries of reconstruction lead to varying interpretations. Note that scientists arguing for different and very often changing interpretations of fossils is not unusual and is indeed the expected process. Knowledge in science grows not through agreement and consensus but through disagreement and reasoned conflict.