The Ape’s Reflection? 357FIGURE 15.2. The hominid fossil record is now becoming
very complete, contrary to creationist falsehoods.
This table displays the huge collection of fossils of
Australopithecus afarensis discovered in Ethiopia and
described by Don Johanson and Tim White. In the
foreground is the partial skeleton of “Lucy,” the
oldest nearly complete hominid skeleton known. In
the background is a selection of modern chimpanzee
skulls for comparison, and a skeleton of Homo sapiens.
If we were to lay out all the thousands of fossils
of hominids in the cabinets of the Kenya National
Museum, it would be even more impressive. (Photo
courtesy D. Johanson, Institute of Human Origins)many times, and any creationist who wants to mine for quotes can find some person
(no matter how unqualified he or she might be) to say something that out of context seems
to deny the validity of a given fossil.
Let us not forget that anthropologists are humans and make mistakes, too. Like all
people who are trying to find out new information, they sometimes get ahead of their data
or their interpretations are colored by their expectations. Roger Lewin’s (1987) excellent
book Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins shows this side of
anthropology very nicely, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to see what
the profession is really like. Sometimes those biases can lead to serious mistakes. A good
example is how a clever forger duped the British anthropological establishment with
the Piltdown hoax, which fit their prejudices that humans evolved large brains first, and
seemed to put Raymond Dart’s Australopithecus africanus out of the picture. In another
case, Henry Fairfield Osborn got excited about a curious tooth that looked very like a
hominin and published a premature report on “Nebraska Man” before he was corrected
by other scientists.
The key point to all of this is that science is self-correcting. Individual scientists can make
mistakes or be misled by their biases, but there are so many other hard-boiled skeptical sci-
entific critics out there that mistakes are soon caught and corrected. The Piltdown forgery
was eventually exposed when new scientific methods came along that could show its fraud-
ulent nature, and it was already suspected as a fake before then because it was not consistent
with the emerging fossil record from Africa.