Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature. It is a rare paleontologist indeed who announces that he has found a cache of bon...
It is the patchiness of the record that makes each new find look so sudden and distinct from all the others. If we had tens of thousands of skeletons distributed at regular intervals through the historical record, there would be appreciably more degr...
The shortage wouldn't be so bad if the bones were distributed evenly through time and space, but of course they are not. They appear randomly, often in the most tantalizing fashion. Homo erectus walked the Earth for well over a million years and inha...
Some continue to observe the two hominid genera suggested by Howell in 1960, but others place some of the australopithecines in a separate genus called Paranthropus , and still others add an earlier group called Ardipithecus. Some put praegens into A...
In an attempt to introduce some order, in 1960 F. Clark Howell of the University of Chicago, following the suggestions of Ernst Mayr and others the previous decade, proposed cutting the number of genera to just twoAustralopithecus and Homo and ration...
At Black's urging, more determined excavations were undertaken and many other bones found. Unfortunately all were lost the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 when a contingent of U.S. Marines, trying to spirit the bones (and themse...
Broom was an accomplished paleontologist, and since he was also resident in South Africa he was able to examine the Taung skull at first hand. He could see at once that it was as important as Dart supposed and spoke out vigorously on Dart's behalf, b...
Meanwhile, and half a world away, in late 1924 Raymond Dart, the Australian-born head of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, was sent a small but remarkably complete skull of a child, with an intact face, a lower jaw, and...
The next year Dubois's workers found a virtually complete thighbone that looked surprisingly modern. In fact, many anthropologists think itis modern, and has nothing to do with Java Man. If it is an erectus bone, it is unlike any other found since. N...
Many people refused to accept that the Neandertal bones were ancient at all. August Mayer, a professor at the University of Bonn and a man of influence, insisted that the bones were merely those of a Mongolian Cossack soldier who had been wounded whi...
