NEWS re Early Language

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/10/99 12:56:39 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote:

<<And I should think so.  Fossils are generally only valuable when they
are found *in situ*.  I'm sorry, but a fantastically ancient hominid
fossil found sitting on a shelf in a shop in Manhattan stretches my
credulity to breaking point.>>

This is my fault.  The article was very long and I clipped the part about how
the skull was traced back to being on the recorded inventory and drawings of
finds I think made by a British team.  It hit the black market at some point.
(Money like $500,000 will do that to many artifacts.) The account is in the
full article which I gave the URL for.  I'm sure you'll find it plausible.

<<How could any serious scientist *possibly* determine the source of a
unique fossil turning up in such a bizarre location, just by inspection?>>

I think it has an inventory ID# on it.  Matched a field drawing.

<<our unnamed experts decided at once that Manhattan Man comes from
Indonesia?>>

Ha.  Wait till they dig up the Brooklyn Man.  But I think that Delson did the
ID.  I may have clipped that.  B-T-W, this text came across on a Paleo wire
service, so it's third generation.  Again the original is at the URL.  Or the
actual real-life paper, if you guys get it over there.

<<And now, Dr. Swisher, who has apparently not yet carried out any dating
tests at all, is prepared to announce that the skull is between 100,000
and 1 million years old.  Uh-huh.  Sure.>>

Delson's team did the estimate based I would guess on the usual homo erectus
dating.  Swisher is a heavyweight in the field of physio-chemical dating, and
his methodology has earned some very serious respect over the years.

<<I see.  So this skull doesn't look like an *erectus* skull after all.>>

They were talking about the inside of the brain case versus the ridges and
such on the outside.

<<Oh, "the potential is there", eh?  What does this mean?>>

I think that the Broca's cap business is a bit out of date.  And it has been
found a number of times before in early homo.  The point I would take is the
same one you did:

<<The one thing that seems certain to me, an outsider, is that our picture of
human origins is becoming steadily more complex and bush-like than we used to
think was the case.>>

You also wrote:
<<I doubt it.  So far as I can tell, out-of-Africa is still very much the
majority view among specialists.  One of the "other recent stories"
alluded to is doubtless the recent brief article in Scientific American.>>

No. if you look at the NSF forum report I mentioned in connection with the
jaw canal studies you'll see that it seems the majority of the attendees were
multiregionalists.  I think the opinion generally breaks down to
paleobiologists versus generalist geneticists.  (Think of it as a little like
African cultural anthropologists suddenly announcing new evidence for Basque
linguistic origins.)

African Eve is of couse much more spectacular than all this, but there's a
lot that can go into genetic descent between then and now.  Not the least of
which is that the mtDNA tells us nothing about the male line.  There's
nothing to say that one of Eve's daughters didn't go for one of those
semi-erectus he-men along the way.  Rate of mutation, which is also heavily
assumed in Eve, is also a serious uncertainty.  There's simply no way to
confirm or disprove the assumed rates over 20,000 years, much less 100's of
thousands of years.

<<(who lives only a few miles from Piltdown)>>

And of course with a certain humility about what tomorrow may bring, we can't
exclude the possibility that what will turn up in that gravel pit next time
is African Eve.

Regards,
Steve Long