Toumai ‘ape-man’ suffers another blow
by Carl Wieland
14 October 2002
Towards the middle of 2002, we responded on this site to sensational newspaper claims
about the ‘Toumai’ skull, Sahelanthropus tchadensis (see New ‘Ape-Man’ Preliminary Response).
Nature magazine’s Dr Henry Gee said, ‘It came out of the ground
entire, normally one finds bits and pieces’ (actually, it was still fragmentary
and incomplete, but certainly a lot less so than most of these ‘ape-man’
skulls).
Famous British ‘human evolution’ expert Dr Chris Stringer said it ‘shows
rather human features, and that is very surprising at six million years’.
At the time, it was labeled in the media as ‘the most significant find in
living memory’, being ‘the oldest human ancestor’.
In our response, we pointed out, for instance, that a skull with a combination of
chimp and australopithecine features, which was being claimed for the Toumai skull,
is hardly a big deal considering the accumulated evidence displacing australopithecines
from our family tree.
Then of course there is the tentative nature of interpretation of fossil finds,
as well as the way in which such interpretation is influenced by the philosophy
and (inevitable) bias of the interpreter. Shortly after the hype, we published a
brief item, Skeptical evolutionists say latest ‘ape-man’
just a female gorilla, based on claims by Dr Brigette Senut, of the Natural
History Museum in Paris, France.
Now a row over this Toumai skull has hit the pages of the prestigious journal Nature
that reinforces this skepticism. Senut is joined by fellow evolutionary paleoanthropologists
Martin Pickford, Milford Wolpoff and others in arguing strongly that the skull is
not on the human line at all (see
Debate continues over ancient skull, based on Wolpoff et al., Sahelanthropus
or ‘Sahelpithecus’?, Nature 419(6907):581–582,
10 October 2002).
They say it is from an early gorilla or chimp, or a similar now-extinct species.
Its short face and small canine teeth, rather than being evidence of ‘humanness’,
are likely to be because it is female, a phenomenon called ‘sexual dimorphism’.
Amazingly, considering the strong claims made at the time of the initial ‘hype’,
Wolpoff says, ‘I don’t see how you can tell what it is, but it is not
human’. He points out that the muscle attachment ‘scarring’ on
the skull shows ‘quite clearly’ that the creature did not walk upright
as humans do—‘it is not human’ he says.
In the competitive field of what one could almost call ‘human ancestor worship’,
there are huge rewards in terms of fame and fortune for finding a definitive ancestor
candidate. So, not surprisingly, the discoverer of the Toumai skull, Michel Brunet,
hits back strongly in the same issue (p. 582). Senut and Pickford also have an axe
to grind; they were the discoverers of another batch of bone fragments which they
say were from the same period and which they called
Orrorin tugenensis (aka the ‘Millennium Man’). If Toumai
occupies the ancestral spotlight, Orry can’t.
In the slanging match, one thing seems clear; the truth of the assertion one researcher
made, ‘Fossils are fickle. Bones will sing any song you want to hear’
(J. Shreeve, Argument over a woman, Discover 11(8):58,
1990).
Stringer now seems to be moving to a position of greater caution; he points out
that we don’t have any fossils of chimp or gorilla ancestors, and it is ‘too
early’ to say where either of the above specimens lie in relation to the human
line. Mark Collard, from University College London, said that there was no reason
to accept either team’s conclusion, and that one could not say for certain
whether it was an ape or a human ancestor.
Challenge
We challenge all the media organs that ‘hyped’ the Toumai skull to fairly
present this challenge to the skull’s claimed human ancestry (from within
the evolutionary camp itself) and give it the same publicity as the original. Sadly,
this is unlikely to occur. Over and over, one sees the spectacle of the popular
media promoting the ‘find of all finds’, the definitive ‘ancestor’
that will prove human evolution at last to all doubters. Once the brainwashing has
sunk in to millions, behind the scenes other evolutionists almost invariably ‘demote’
the particular specimen off the human line. But how often do we see these retractions
get the same, if any, ‘splash’ as the original discovery? (Compare the
Mars Life hype and the National Geographic
with the Archaeoraptor hoax.)
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