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Written by E.F. Winslow
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Wednesday, 20 May 2009 20:37 |
Anthropologists Discover a Broken Link
Tuesday, with great fanfare a fossil was unveiled at a news conference at the American Museum of Natural History that was quickly dubbed the "missing link" of human evolution. The primary scientist behinds the discovery is Dr. Jorn Hurum of the University of Oslo, who nicknamed it "Ida," after his own six-year-old daughter.
Roughly about the size of a racoon, the purportedly 47 million year old fossil is a nearly 95% complete, and has almost all the characteristics of a modern day lemur. It is only slightly different in that it doesn't have fused teeth, rather teeth more like that of a monkey, and doesn't have a "grooming claw".
The hype has been so great on the discovery that even google for the day has replaced its normal logo with a modified logo featuring the fossil, and name the image "missinglink.gif"
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Perhaps the most perplexing question that many inquisitive people might raise is "just how does this fossil fit in as the missing link in human evolution?". The common understanding of the quest for the so-called "missing link" is the gap in the fossil record which would demonstrate some transitional species between human and lower primates. Despite the fact that many in the press and scientific community have used the phrase "missing link" for Ida, the fact is that no one is trying to seriously make the case that this is the "missing link" in the traditional understanding of the word.
To make this even farther removed from the idea of being the "missing link" between humans and other primates, the scientists behind the discovery, in a more subdued tone, have even noted that Ida may not have anything to do with the human evolutionary chain at all, never mind fitting in between apes and humans. They said in a paper on the subject that "“[The species] could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates evolved [the line leading to humans], but we are not advocating this here.”
Looking at the fossil, it looks like a lemur, is the size of a lemur, and probably acted like a lemur. This might lead uneducated people to believe that..it IS a lemur.
How, one might ask, did it make the headlines on CNN, top of the Drudge Report, and the front page of the New York Times? Pretty simple. It was a calculating publicity campaign that is running in advance of a book (entitled "The Link), and series of promotional "documentaries".
It is a sad observation of our culture to note that the public is being deliberately misled about the significance of a scientific discovery for no other reason than the promotion of a book. However, that is clearly the case, and the media is a willing party, banking on the sensationalism earning pageviews for websites, and Nielsen ratings for television shows.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 20 May 2009 20:39 |
