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| Neanderthals |
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 05, 1999
Evidently experts either see more than is there or nothing at all. They are either omniscient or nescient, seeing all or seeing nothing depending upon whether new observations slot into their paradigm or not. Those expecting only the conventional can be, to all intents and purposes, truly blind.
John Ostrom of Yale University relates the story of how he found the clawed hand of a dinosaur, subsequently called deinonychus, protruding from an eroded mound. Yet only feet away were the recent footprints of his team of experts who, while prospecting the site for specimens, had passed by missing it completely.
On the other hand Richard Owen's training with Cuvier seemed to give him a degree of omniscience. Given a mere fragment of fossilized bone, he was able to identify it as a struthious bird nearly equal in size to the ostrich, belonging to a heavier and more sluggish species. In this instance Owen was spot on: the bone proved to be one of the giant moas of New Zealand, quite unknown at the time.
That shows expertise at its best. What of its worst?
Paleontologists had a bias for the aquatic lifestyle of the duck-billed hadrosaurs. The well known dinosaur classifier, Joseph Leidy, had originally thought them aquatic because they had beaks rather like a duck's and an animal with a bill must feed like a duck and ergo be aquatic like a duck. The logic is impeccable, don't trouble us with facts! Direct evidence testified otherwise. The petrified contents of the hadrosaur's stomach included twigs, needles from conifers and the remains of willow and poplar, showing that the creature browsed on lowland forest trees not on soft weed in slow moving rivers or lakes.
To construct and name new species from inadequate fragments is fraught with hazards even if you are an Owen or a Cuvier. For lesser men it is mayhem. Witness the variety of species described initially as being megalosaurus. After William Buckland's description in 1824, any partial remains of Jurassic carnivores were attributed to megalosaurus. Reports of it came in from all over Europe and as far afield as Australia and North America. David Norman, an authority on dinosaurs, says that at least 26 instances have occurred. Trying to sort them out causes more muddle. Omniscience replaces nescience and suddenly the classifiers have not one but lots of different species.
Neither the original specimen nor the others were sufficient to merit the attempts to name them. A complication of tyrannosaurid teeth is that their shape varies from the front to the back of the jaw. Experts attempting a Cuvier or an Owen came to think that differently shaped teeth came from different animals. The result was a variety of names given by different authorities at different times to bits of the same animal. Norman comments: This welter of names provides yet another example of how dangerous it can be to name new species on the basis of inadequate material... If these scientists had resisted the temptation to name the teeth until better material, such as skull and jaws had been discovered, much confusion could have been avoided.
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To judge how the intelligent dinosaur might have evolved, we shall be looking at the evolution of mankind, the intelligent mammal. Here again experts were at work debunking new ideas and discoveries just as they had in other realms. The discovery of fragments of a skull and skeleton of a primitive man at Neanderthal in the mid-Nineteenth century aroused widespread interest but impressed the experts little.
It is not a primitive skull at all, they announced. It is merely the skull of a Dutchman" offered one German anatomist (German anatomists at that time being highly respected). Another expert retorts, Nonsense, it is the skull of a Cossack who died while pursuing Napoleon's retreating armies in 1812. Thomas Huxley dryly observed that this Cossack had removed his clothes in a freezing continental January, disposed of them, climbed a 60 feet high cliff, died, and buried himself.
It plainly is thick skulled so it must be an Irishman, reasoned yet another expert, this time French. You are all quite wrong, announced Rudolf Virchow, the doyen of German pathologists. The poor man's unusual features are nothing to do with primitiveness but are simply due to rickets and arthritis together with some severe buffeting about the head.
These learned men failed to appreciate the antiquity of the skull which was thereafter put away and forgotten for many years. Then Marcellin Boule of the French Museum of natural history published three tomes, supposedly seminal, on it from 1910 to 1913. Boule was so astonishingly lacking in objectivity that his work defies explanation even for an expert. Let us merely highlight his most well known error which was to fail to take account of the poor man's arthritis, noted correctly by Virchow, which was cripplingly severe and had seriously distorted his body. The skeleton was that of an old man.
His conclusions influenced subsequent generations into thinking that Neanderthal man was brutish, dim-witted and subhuman. Today Neanderthal is still a term of abuse even though W.Strauss and A.J.Cave wrote this about Neanderthal man in the 1950s: If he could be reincarnated and placed in a New York subway, provided he were bathed, shaved and dressed in modern clothing, it is doubtful whether he would attract any more attention than some of its other denizens. Indeed one wonders whether a Neanderthal man would risk travelling alone on the New York subway.
Over a hundred years ago Edouard Piette discovered that Homo sapiens had domesticated horses in very early times. The most respected authority of the time, the Abbe Breuil, another churchman, vigorously rejected the idea. Piette died at the turn of the century and it was not until 1966 that the question was reopened with the description of a 15,000 years old carving of a horse's head in a quite elaborate bridle. If horses were being handled in this sophisticated way 15,000 years ago there is strong reason to believe that horses were captured and held tethered in less sophisticated ways many thousands of years before that. In fact, there is evidence from the wear of horses' teeth 30,000 years old that they were tethered even then.
Learned men proved their blindness more recently when Raymond Dart, an anatomist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, discovered the skull of the Taung child. Sir Arthur Keith, Keeper of the Hunterian Collection at the Royal College of Surgeons, at first seemed supportive but then dismissed Dart's claim that the skull was hominid. It is the skull of a young chimpanzee, pronounced Keith. Hominid jaws are distinguished from other apes by the lack of large canine teeth and the corresponding absence of a gap (the diastema) in the opposing set of teeth to accommodate the canines when the jaw is closed. The Taung skull had small, human-like canines and no diastema proving to any anatomical tyro that the skull was not a chimpanzee's.
Keith's fellow experts, Sir Arthur Smith-Woodward, Sir Grafton Elliot and Dr W.L.H.Duckworth, all blind as moles, joined in the skepticism in varying degrees towards Dart's discovery. Only as he approached 80 did Keith concede that he had been wrong about the Taung child. For that he deserves some praise - most experts are not gracious enough to admit it though they know they are wrong.
Keith was so blind that he confirmed the blatant forgery, the Piltdown skull, as authentic, naming it Eoanthropus Dawsonii, after its discoverer and possible forger. Woodward, who had been present at the Piltdown site, backed him in his judgment. Woodward went on to devote most of the later part of his life to the Piltdown skull, going so far as to write a book about it with the appalling title, The First Englishman. One wonders whether later Englishmen were as ignominious as the first. Only those who are experts, perhaps.