early human fossils in Africa

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Scott

Puritan Board Graduate
Interesting story of how the supposed early human fossils in Africa were found.

SCIENCE AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT
Patricia J. Princehouse

When I was a grad student, I had romantic notions about how knowledge was gained, how science was done and how democracy worked. Little by little, those notions have changed.

One blow came when I was doing field work at a 19-million-year-old fossil site in Africa. This wonderful site had six different species of fossil hominoids all living in the same place at the same time. It had been declared a national monument, and yet the shoestring budget couldn´t muster the funds to bring all the fossils back to the museum. Many had to be left to erode into dust, along with all the knowledge they could have offered.

I had the notion that scientific investigation was always well planned-out, with reasonably clear and specific expectations for how knowledge would advance. This view was challenged when my adviser at Yale explained how a crucial discovery in human evolution actually came about. They were in the field in Africa, he said, and they were really bored. No one had found much of anything and it was too hot to breathe anyway. The only thing they kept finding were piles and piles of fresh elephant dung. It´s not clear how it got started, but at some point somebody chucked a handful of elephant dung at someone, and pretty soon they were in the middle of an elephant dung slinging contest. At one point, he hit the deck to avoid getting plastered, and right in front of his eyes was a fossilized footprint. The dung-slinging escapade led to the discovery of a trail of 3 million-year-old footprints made by three individuals of the same species as the fossil hominid Lucy. Three million years ago, a volcano had erupted, and before the ashfall had hardened, these three had crossed the tuff. Two of the individuals were walking together, and the third, a tiny child, was stepping into the footprints of one of the adults. This wonderful find was the result of serendipitous elephant dung.

That´s not exactly how I thought science worked. But it turns out that gaining knowledge and doing science is a messy business, impinged on by all sorts of prosaic issues like funding and elephant dung. And I´ve come to love seeing how embedded science is in the rest of human endeavor. I´ve learned to value such stories as going to the heart of science as a very creative and very human enterprise.
The one point I will grant is that there is a strong association between the theory of evolution and what was being thrown around.
 
:lol: "...handful of elephant dung..." :barfy: Afterwards they went and celebrated with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Well, I've seen "Lucy" in person at the Peabody Museum in Harvard. If she is the evolutionary version of Eve, I'm a monkey's uncle.
 
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