tgamble

"A five million-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib, ...He [Dr. T. White] puts the incident on par with two other embarrassing [sic] faux pas by fossil hunters: Hesperopithecus, the fossil pig's tooth that was cited as evidence of very early man in North America, and Eoanthropus or 'Piltdown Man,' the jaw of an orangutan and the skull of a modern human that were claimed to be the 'earliest Englishman'."

"The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone.'"

(Dr. Tim White (anthropologist, University of California, Berkeley). As quoted by Ian Anderson "Hominoid collarbone exposed as dolphin's rib", in New Scientist, 28 April 1983, p. 199)

I know about piltdown and nebraska man but what about the first one cited? How long did that last?

and how can Dr. White put Nebraska man and piltdown man on the same level? piltdown was a deliberate fraud that lasted 40 years. Nebraska man was an honest mistake that lasted about 5 years.

Ergaster

Grin. It got really slow a while back on my paleoanthro mailing list, so I pulled out a recent article by White and quizzed the group on all the examples he used (some were a tad obscure), including that one. Here are the replies:

I don't know if White equated that episode with Piltdown and Nebraska Man; he may well have. He's rather outspoken and can be, um, impolitic at times, but he also has very specific views about what the practice of paleoanthropology should be and isn't afraid to let people know. Most others disagree with him, but he is an exceptional scientists and has made enormous contributions to the field. Just something we've got to live with....


[ April 14, 2002: Message edited by: Ergaster ]</p>