Problems with Current Theory
Mainstream physical anthropologists agree among themselves that hominids, the biological group that includes today’s humans and their supposed ancestors, split off from the African apes around 6 million years ago. There is, however, little agreement about the identity of the very first hominids. In the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century, physical anthropologists and archeologists uncovered fragmentary remains of a variety of new hominid species. From some of these early hominids came Australopithecus. There are, we are told, many species of Australopithecus. The earliest of these came into existence about 4 or 5 million years ago. From one of them arose Homo habilis, the first toolmaker. Next came Homo erectus, the first hominid to use fire. Then came early modern humans and the Neandertals. Finally, anatomically modern humans arrived on the scene about 100,000 years ago. It all sounds so perfectly clear when you hear a teacher say it, when you read it in a book, or when you see it in a museum display or on television. But behind the scenes, there are major ongoing disputes about each stage of this progression.
When scientists say that humans came from apes, they do not mean the modern apes we see in zoos, such as gorillas and chimpanzees. They mean the extinct dryopithecine apes of Africa. These apes, supposedly the common ancestors of both modern apes and modern humans, lived in the Miocene period, from about 5 to 20 million years ago. The human line (the hominids) and the modern ape line supposedly split off from their common dryopithecine ancestor about 6–7 million years ago. There are many species of Dryopithecus, however, and scientists cannot yet say exactly which of these extinct apes is our primeval ancestor. Nor can they tell us much about the very first hominids, the ones that existed before Australopithecus. Their fossil remains, mostly discovered after the publication of Forbidden Archeology in 1993, are fragmentary and subject to multiple interpretations.
Lemonick and Dorfman (2001) give a good review of the current confused state of early hominid paleontology. In 1994, researchers uncovered bones that they attributed to a creature called Ardipithecus ramidus, who lived in Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago. In 2001, researchers from America and Ethiopia announced the discovery of more Ardipithecus bones, this time 5.8 million years old. Ardipithecus had roughly the same size and body structure as a chimpanzee, with an important exception. The researchers found a toe bone with a humanlike structure, indicating Ardipithecus walked upright. But Donald Johanson, director of the Institute for Human Origins at the University of Arizona, pointed out that the toe bone was found ten miles from the other bones and was several hundred thousand years older. It was therefore not clear that the highly significant toe bone belonged to Ardipithecus. Perhaps it belonged to actual humans present millions of years ago in Africa? That is not impossible, because there is plenty of evidence that anatomically modern humans did exist millions of years ago in Africa and elsewhere. In any case, the Ardipithecus researchers proposed that the line of human origins went through the older Ardipithecus at 5.8 million years to the younger Ardipithecus at 4.4 million years to Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) at 3.2 million years and then on to the first members of the genus Homo at around 2 million years ago.
In the year 2000 a team of French and Kenyan researchers led by Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford uncovered some bones of a creature they called orrorin tugenensis, popularly known as Millenium Man. Senut and Pickford said that Ardipithecus is simply an ape, with no direct place in the human lineage. They also denied that Australopithecus afarensis was a human ancestor. The bones of Millenium Man were 6 million years old. Senut and Pickford believed the bones showed that Millenium Man walked upright on two legs, a key human trait, but other researchers such as Meave Leakey remained unconvinced. Furthermore, Bernard Wood (Culotta 1999), of the George Washington University, questioned the whole idea that early primates with skeletal remains indicating bipedalism should automatically be considered human ancestors. Maybe they were just apes that happened to walk on two legs and had no connection with humans.
In late 2001, Meave Leakey introduced even more confusion into an already confused picture. She announced in nature (Leakey et al. 2001) the discovery of a new hominid. Leakey and her colleagues found a nearly complete skull of the creature in August of 1999, near Lake Turkana, in Kenya. The creature is 3.5 million years old, roughly the same age as Australopithecus afarensis. Instead of identifying her find as a new member of the genus Australopithecus, Meave Leakey stirred up the hominid world by creating a new genus and species for it: Kenyanthropus platyops. The name is significant. Anthropus means “human” whereas pithecus means “ape.” So Leakey was obviously putting Kenyanthropus platyops in the human line, implying that Australopithecus is nothing more than an extinct ape, unrelated to humans. Leakey suggested that Kenyanthropus platyops might be linked to later fossils currently attributed to Homo rudolfensis. Although Meave Leakey called for further research, it appeared she was positioning Kenyanthropus platyops so as to permanently remove the australopithecines from the line of human ancestry. My reply is that neither Kenyanthropus nor Australopithecus are human ancestors because there is evidence that anatomically modern humans existed alongside them and before them.
In short, the picture of newly discovered early hominids is quite confusing and contradictory. In all these cases, scientists are speculating about fragmentary fossil remains, seeing in them human ancestors, when they most likely are simply varieties of apes with some few features in common with modern humans. These features are, however, not necessarily signs of an evolutionary connection.
Despite the confusion surrounding Australopithecus, many scientists still accept this creature as a direct human ancestor. The first specimen of Australopithecus was discovered in 1924 by Dr. Raymond Dart in South Africa. Dart believed it was the earliest human ancestor, but most of the influential scientists of his time thought it was just a variety of ape. It was not until the late 1950s that Australopithecus won general acceptance as a human ancestor. But there remained important scientists who did not agree. Among these scientists were Louis Leakey, one of the most famous anthropologists of the twentieth century. Meave Leakey’s interpretation of her Kenyanthropus platyops as the ancestor of the Homo line, bypassing Australopithecus, can be seen as continuing Louis Leakey’s work.
Lord Zuckerman, a respected British zoologist, carried out many exacting statistical studies showing that Australopithecus was not a human ancestor. The work of Lord Zuckerman has been carried into the present by Charles E. Oxnard, now a professor of physical anthropology at the University of Western Australia. For a strong antidote to modern propaganda about the australopithecines being human ancestors, one should read his books uniqueness and Diversity in Human evolution (1975) and The order of man (1984). These books have been largely ignored by the scientific establishment, challenging as they do one of the articles of faith of human evolution studies. But they are required reading for anyone who wants to know the truth about Australopithecus. The anatomical studies of Oxnard place Australopithecus close to the gibbons and orangutans and distant from the African apes and humans. Given this set of relationships, it is difficult to see Australopithecus as a direct human ancestor.