Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
turf guarding often seemed to motivate the negative receptions to new
hominin discoveries. Recall, for example, that Raymond Dart's difficul-
ties with the Piltdown gang were related to turf guarding by the Brit-
ish scientific establishment in the face of a young Australian upstart (a
former colleague of theirs, no less) who had the nerve to find a fossil
in far-off South Africa that challenged their rigid views about human
evolution. Similar turf guarding may have contributed to the outcries
about
Homo floresiensis,
which once again swirled around an independent-
minded Australian scientist—Mike Morwood. But turf guarding has
not been confined to scientists. As we saw in earlier discussions about
the announcement of
Australopithecus africanus
and the Scopes monkey
trial, which occurred a mere five months later, this is an activity at which
creationists also excel.
reaction from religious fundamentalists
It did not take long for fundamentalist Christians to comment on
Homo
floresiensis.
On the day the discovery was published in
Nature,
Australian
Carl Wieland expressed his opinion that the hobbit remains (as well
as those of Neanderthals and
Homo erectus
) represented humans who
had descended from Adam as described in Genesis and then diversified
creation and its short time-scale for the earth's history, so he was recep-
tive to the suggestions of some scientists (such as Jacob) that LB1 was
more recent than her discoverers believed and that she may have been
Wieland did not rule out the microcephalic hypothesis, however:
“Whether the tiny people of Flores were indeed microcephalic modern
types, or whether they represent a pygmy version of so-called
Homo
erectus,
the point is really the same. Namely, that there is no reason not to
classify them all—the Flores inhabitants as well as
H. erectus
—as
Homo
To support his assertion, Wieland cited evolutionary anthropologists
