Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison on Early Human Origins

Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison, two of the preeminent scholars in the study of human origins think that we are assimilating too many fossils into our family tree. In an article in PhysOrg, the author writes:

The paper, "The evolutionary context of the first hominins," reconsiders the evolutionary relationships of fossils named Orrorin, Sahelanthropus and Ardipithecus, dating from four to seven million years ago, which have been claimed to be the earliest human ancestors. Ardipithecus, commonly known as "Ardi," was discovered in Ethiopia and was found to be radically different from what many researchers had expected for an early human ancestor. Nonetheless, the scientists who made the discovery were adamant it is a human ancestor.

Wood and Harrison have a point here. One of the things that we castigate those that are unfamiliar with evolutionary theory about is “unilineal” thinking—that you can have transitional forms in the fossil record that do not reflect direct ancestry but “collateral” ancestry. This is especially true in the transition from the late theropod dinosaurs to birds. Yet, because we are talking about our own lineage, we tend to slip into a unileal way of thinking. Witness the brouhaha about Ida last year. Everyone wanted to roll her into the human fossil line even though there was no concrete evidence of such.

This does not mean that Sahelanthropus, Orrorin and Ardipithecus are not transitional. It just means that there is no direct evidence that they are ancestral to the human line. In the article, Wood and Harrison write:

There is no reason why higher primate evolution in Africa in the past ten million years should not mirror the complexity observed in the evolutionary histories of other mammals during the same time period. Nor is there any reason, especially with the lessons from Ramapithecus and Oreopithecus fresh in the minds of researchers, to assume that hominins should not be prone to the same limitations and uncertainties of phylogenetic analysis as other fossil primates.¹

This does not make them any less worthy of study or of producing excitement in the palaeoanthropological community.

¹Wood B., Harrison T. (2011) The evolutionary context of the first hominins. Nature 470:347-352.
10.1038/nature09709

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Top Fossil Stories of 2009

Foxnews has a list of the top fossil stories of 2009, the most obvious of which were Ida and Ardi. There are some others on the list that were interesting, though, like the Snake from Hell.

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Ida May Not Be Related to Humans After All

The Guardian is reporting work being published in Nature suggesting that Ida is not on the line that gave rise to the higher primates. The story, by Ian Sample states:

"Our analysis and results have convinced us that Ida was not an ancestor of monkeys, apes, or humans, and if anything has more relevance for our understanding of lemur and loris origins," said Erik Seiffert, a fossil hunter at Stony Brook University in New York who led the Nature study.

Researchers behind the Ida fossil, known formally as Darwinius masillae, immediately defended their own interpretation, which is based on two years of meticulous measurements of the remains.

"We expected a challenge like this and it's interesting it has taken five months for the first attack to come," said Jørn Hurum, a palaeontologist at Oslo University's Natural History Museum where the fossil is now lodged. "What we claim about Ida is really quite controversial."

So controversial, in fact, that it might be wrong. Which ever way this one goes, it will be a classic example of science in action. Palaeoanthropologists have no vested interest in whether or not Ida is an ancestor to humans. This research will, however, provide us with a good example of a primate that was running around c. 50 million years ago. Hopefully, more discoveries will allow us to see how she fit into the grand scheme of things.

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Science, Ken Ham and Common Ground

Shelly Emling of the Atlanta Journal Constitution profiles Ken Ham of the Creation Museum in Kentucky as part of a larger article on the gap between science and creationism. Of Ham, she says this:

Ken Ham, whose Creation Museum in Kentucky just celebrated its second anniversary this weekend, has never been more sure that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that God created everything in six divinely ordered 24-hour time slots.

To Ham, it doesn’t matter that scientists have recently unveiled Ida —- the 47-million-year-old fossil hailed as the evolutionary link between modern primates and more distant species —- the latest in a string of significant fossils to be hyped by the media.

“No other book gives an account of origins as specifically as the Bible,” said Ham, whose museum just 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati has attracted 720,000 visitors since opening in 2007.

Herein lies part of the problem, of course. It should matter. How much evidence does Ken Ham just ignore or dismiss out of hand? Here we have a primate fossil that is 95% complete, represents a primate that doesn't exist today, has not existed in the last two thousand years and is unlike any living primate. Is the thinking here that this simply represents yet another fossil that was resident on the Ark? How many species does that make, now?

The article continues with a discussion of different approaches to the problem, including the views of Francisco Ayala and Simon Conway-Morris but then ends with this howler:

Perhaps one day the debate over evolution and creationism will be settled. But I doubt it. The arguments on both sides are too persuasive. Still, one can hope.

The arguments on the creationism side are persuasive only if one knows absolutely nothing about geology, palaeontology or biology. That's what they're counting on.

Palaeontology is Not Cheap!

UPI is reporting that Jorum Hurum admitted that he paid 750 000 dollars for the fossil primate remains named Ida. As the story notes:

Hurum said he had no regrets regarding his purchase of the controversial fossil from an amateur collector, who had kept the fossil in a basement for 25 years since it was initially discovered in Germany in 1983, The Times of London said Thursday.

"It's the only near-complete fossil primate ever found. There is absolutely nothing like it," said Hurum, who took the fossil to the Natural History Museum in Oslo after purchasing it. "She could easily have been bought by a private collector and disappeared for another 20 years."

The downside to this, of course, is that people will realize that money is to be made in this sort of endeavor and we may have a return to the problems of the early 1900s when palaeolithic sites all over Europe were "excavated" by people (Otto Hauser being one) who then sold their wears to the highest bidder. The most aggravated example of this in recent times is the discovery of a pivotal Homo erectus skull on the shelf of a curio shop in Manhattan. To be sure this happens more often than we suppose but the precedent is troublesome.

Ida and the Importance of Fossils

Jasmine Williams of the New York Post has a piece on Ida and also how fossils form and why they are important. She write:

Fossils can be found all over the world and range in size from the largest dinosaur bones -- more than 10 feet in length -- to plant spores that are a few 100ths of an inch across. The Earth's landscape is always changing and driving up long-buried fossils. While you may not find an Ida or Lucy, traces of ancient life are all around.

She also partakes in the kind of nonsense that generates problems for all concerned:

Until this discovery, the oldest known fossil linked to humans was that of Lucy, a 3-million-year-old adult female discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. However, Lucy was just 40 percent intact.

Ida lived 47 million years ago. She isn't a link to humans. She might not even be a link to modern-day lemurs and lorises. For crying out loud, we don't even know for sure which Miocene ape is the link to humans, and they lived within the last 10-15 million years. Ida is a neat fossil that tells us a great deal about EARLY primate evolution. It tells us zip about where humans came from.

A Warning About Ida

Brian Switek writes for the Times Online that the hype surrounding Ida, the 47 million year old primate fossil only gets in the way of real research and misleads people into thinking evolution predicts that which it does not. He writes:

There is some irony in calling Ida the missing link. She was named Darwinius in honour of Charles Darwin, but the phrase “missing link” harkens back to a pre-evolutionary idea of nature. Called the Great Chain of Being, this interpreted all life as forming an immutable hierarchy, ordained by God, from “lower” to “higher”. Scholars believed that God favoured a full creation and each rank connected to the next, but “missing links” presented a problem. The link between humans and lower animals was the most elusive of all.

Our understanding of evolution could scarcely be more different. There is no evolutionary end point or fore-ordained hierarchy of beasts. Life is better understood from Darwin's perspective - as a wildly branching bush constantly being pruned and sending out new shoots through evolution. Calling Ida a missing link may grab attention, but it is incongruous with what Darwin proposed.

There has already been one ill-conceived Answers in Genesis paper because of the hype.

Ah, the Intrigue of Palaeontology!

Here is some back story about the disovery of Ida and how it came into the hands of the scientists. It is the stuff of Nick Danger:

Hunched around a table at a vodka bar in Hamburg, Jørn Hurum, a palaeontologist, was about to make the scientific gamble of his life. Thomas Perner, a fossil dealer whom he knew well, had insisted they met; he had something very special to show him.

Looking nervously over his shoulder for prying glances, Perner put three ­photographs of a fossil on the bar table. "My heart started beating extremely fast," said Hurum. "I knew that the dealer had a world sensation in his hands. I could not sleep for two nights."

Rumours had been flying around for years in the palaeontological community about a spectacular primate fossil specimen. Now Hurum was one of the first people in the world to see it.

Read the whole thing.

AIG Takes on Ida

Answers in Genesis has decided to wade into the fray involving Ida, the 47 million year old Eocene primate skeleton, which is thought by some to show transitional characteristics between modern prosimians and modern anthropoids. That Ida is important is unquestioned. How much information she can tell us is still open to debate. Currently, it is debated as to whether higher primates derived from the tarsidae, the omomyids that currently include tarsiers or the adapids, the group that likely gave rise to lemurs and lorises. Ida suggests that the adapids were the stem group.

AIG's response is nothing short of hilarious.

They write:

The well-preserved fossil (95 percent complete, including fossilized fur and more) is about the size of a raccoon and includes a long tail. It resembles the skeleton of a lemur (a small, tailed, tree-climbing primate). The fossil does not resemble a human skeleton.

This is the worst sort of straw man. Nobody in their right mind would confuse Ida with a human skeleton and AIG knows it. Ida is 47 my old. Humans have only been around in one form or another since around 6 my. After the preliminary information, they launch into their interpretation of the find. They make six points. I will analyze them one at a time:

1. Nothing about this fossil suggests it is anything other than an extinct, lemur-like creature. Its appearance is far from chimpanzee, let alone “apeman” or human.

Once again, this is a straw man argument and reveals that the writer knows nothing about primate evolution. Humans and chimpanzees did not split until around 8-10 mya, so it is clear that no creature at 47 mya is going to have characteristics like either of them. What it does show is characteristics that presaged the Oligocene primates. It was not until the Miocene that you get things that are recognizably apes. Therefore, of course it looks like an extinct lemur-like creature.

2. A fossil can never show evolution. Fossils are unchanging records of dead organisms. Evolution is an alleged process of change in live organisms. Fossils show “evolution” only if one presupposes evolution, then uses that presupposed belief to interpret the fossil.

Evolution is observable in modern species. It has even been shown to be the mechanism by which new species arise. Even some creationists have come around to this position, in the light of the evidence. If evolution is correct, then descent with modification has been occurring since the first life forms. Further, if the concept of common ancestry is correct, and if evolution describes the palaeontological record, then it should predict that as we go back in the fossil record, fossil remains will show more primitive (in the cladistic sense) traits and that different clades can be traced back to a common ancestor for those clades. As such, then the theory will predict what will be found in the palaeontological record.

There are countless examples of evolution's predictive power, from the discovery of of the fishapod Tiktaalik, found in Devonian shallow sea deposits, to the prediction that human ancestors would be found in the same continent as modern-day higher apes to the discovery of frogamanders that show stem characteristics of both salamanders and frogs. Many other examples of this exist. Is is possible that there is another explanation for this? Absolutely. But right now we already have an explanation for these things. It is called evolution. Are these fossils dead organisms. Yup. But they show characteristics that are intermediate between those that came before and those that followed. If one presupposes progressive creation, then one is forced to consider that God created numerous, slightly different species that followed each other and then killed off 99% of them over the course of biological time. If one presupposes an antediluvian time where these animals were all part of the biosphere, then one is forced to consider that, as crowded as our earth is right now, it is nothing compared to the wall-to-wall dinosaurs, primates, elephants, tigers and other animals that occupied the earth at that time.

3. Similarities can never show evolution. If two organisms have similar structures, the only thing it proves is that the two have similar structures. One must presuppose evolution to say that the similarities are due to evolution rather than design. Furthermore, when it comes to “transitional forms,” the slightest similarities often receive great attention while major differences are ignored.

This is peculiar. One almost gets the feeling that the author wants to include the design argument here. Is it true that two animals that have similar structures show, well, similar structures. But that is where the inference of common ancestry comes in. If you find animals in the fossil record that show characteristics of two different families of modern-day animals (say a frogamander) and you can show that, as you go back into the fossil record, those two forms have successively primitive and similar characteristics, then you can make inferences about why the two animals have similar structures. This is the all-important distinction between analogy (similar function but different form) and homology (different function but similar form). Bats and butterflies, for example, have similar structures that allow them to do the same thing: fly. On closer inspection, however, the wings of butterflies and the wings of bats are composed of very different structures. The wings are analogous. The fins of the latest lobe-finned fishes in the Devonian are composed of the same elements and are similar in form to the earliest limbs of the first tetrapods. They are homologous. That is why the discovery of Tiktaalik was so important. It showed characteristics of both the lobe-finned fish and the early tetrapods.

The last statement is nonsensical since there is no evidence to back it up. The reason there is nothing to back it up is that none exists. Without an understanding of the differences between homology and analogy, it would seem that some characteristics are not seen to be as important as others. The statement, then, stems more from a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory and basic biology as anything else.

4. The remarkable preservation is a hallmark of rapid burial. Team member Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo said, “This fossil is so complete. Everything’s there. It’s unheard of in the primate record at all. You have to get to human burial to see something that’s this complete.” Even the contents of Ida’s stomach were preserved. While the researchers believe Ida sunk to the bottom of a lake and was buried, this preservation is more consistent with a catastrophic flood.⁴ Yet Ida was found with “hundreds of well-preserved specimens.”⁵

This is one of those statements that creationists dare not take to their logical conclusions. Does Ida show rapid burial? You bet. Okay, now extrapolate that rapid burial to the rest of the planet. It cannot be done. While the geological record shows some areas of rapid burials, it also shows depositional environments that were very slow, such as varves, chalk cliffs, buried coral reefs, dessication cracks and so on. These things are simply not possible in a rapid-burial environment. So, yes Ida was rapidly buried...in the Messel Pit.

5. If evolution were true, there would be real transitional forms. Instead, the best “missing links” evolutionists can come up with are strikingly similar to organisms we see today, usually with the exception of minor, controversial, and inferred anatomical differences.

I would like to think that this statement reflects nothing more than "culpable ignorance" rather than being a flat-out lie. There are thousands of transitional fossils at every major level, from orders down to species and at all points in the fossil record. The human fossil record, alone, has hundreds of fossils that are transitional between what came before and what came after. These are not minor, controversial differences. Homo habilis has facial characteristics of Australopithecus but a massively expanded braincase. Not minor. Over the course of a million years, the brain case of Homo erectus expanded from 700 cc to 1100 cc. Again, not minor. The discovery of non-avian dinosaurs with feathers was not a minor discovery. It showed that feathers evolved because they are remarkable insulators. The transitional characters of Archaeopteryx are not minor. They show an animal with both sauropod characteristics and avian characteristics. It is not a "true" bird, and it is not a "true" dinosaur, despite what creationists might want to believe. It is a "true" transitional form. AIG has to go out of its way to ignore this evidence.

6. Evolutionists only open up about the lack of fossil missing links once a new one is found. Sky News reports, “Researchers say proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution,” while Attenborough commented that the missing link “is no longer missing.” So are they admitting the evidence was missing until now (supposedly)?

Again, this is nonsense. Palaeoanthropologists have complained for years and years, publicly even, that they wished they had more fossil data to bolster their hypotheses about where certain forms came from. The discovery in the last fifty years of whale precursors was a boon for the study of modern and palaeocetaceans because finally, scientists could begin to draw relationships between them and that the idea that a land mammal went back to the sea suddenly wasn't so crazy after all. Palaeoanthropologists are not bashful at all about the fact that we don't have a good record of the ape-human split. We have fossilized precursors to chimpanzees and we have early bipedal hominid fossils that date to around 6 to 7 million years ago. We don't have anything before that until around 10-11 mya. That sucks but whaddya do? You wait for more fossils to come out of the ground so you can draw more relationships and you work with what you have. Nobody said the fossil record was perfect. It is far from it. But it is good enough to show relationships between species, genus, families and orders.

Ida isn't the "missing link." Practicing scientists know that there is no such thing as the "missing link." It is an idiotic notion concocted to sell newspapers that creationists have latched onto. Each fossil find is a piece of the puzzle that tells us more about how the great story of life unfolded. Over time, we can put together enough of the pieces to determine what we think happened over here in this corner or that corner of the puzzle. It is a long way from being complete, but it gets better every year. And every year, it continues to show that the theory of evolution is remarkable in its ability to explain how the puzzle came to be.

As is usual, AIG's analysis is crippled by their complete lack of understanding of how the natural world is put together and what evolutionary theory actually posits and predicts. Without that basic understanding, their analysis is facile and misguided at best.