My time writing was cut a little short this weekend (my wife rescued me from the doldrums by suggesting we take a late-night trip to the beach) but I still was able to flesh out the sections dealing with the early history of paleoanthropology. I have the feeling that I'm going to have to edit both down (I'm already at the 19 page mark for the chapter and I haven't even gotten to A. afarensis yet, much less Orrorin and Sahelanthropus) but I'm going to leave that for another time. Indeed, the human evolution chapter may end up splitting into two at some point as there is so much material to cover and I don't want to present a 50+ page monster of a chapter, either.
In the sections I have been working on this weekend I have tried to explain the state of "paleoanthropology" prior to 1859 (I use quotes because this distinct discipline would not fully emerge until later in the 19th century). Human remains had been discovered in Britain and on the European continent but because the remains looked like modern humans and the finds were usually made by amateurs it was easy to undermine the significance of extending the "antiquity of man." A prime example is William Buckland's treatment of the "Red Lady," a partial skeleton stained with red ochre and found with some carved artifacts in Paviland Cave. The fact that the skeleton was found in association with some trinkets was enough for Buckland to call the skeleton a lady (he never used osteology to determine the sex) and other artifacts found at the site led Buckland to briefly suppose that he had found the remains of a cave-dwelling witch from the time of the Roman occupation of Britain. When she wasn't using a sheep scapula for divinations she may have been engaging in the oldest profession, Buckland suggested, and it seems that he never took the discovery of the skeleton entirely seriously.
I don't want to give too much away but the Red Lady incident, but it is definitely an interesting example of how ancient human remains were interpreted before geologists really knew what they had. The turning point centered around the excavation of Brixham cave in 1858, a cooperative operation between the Torquay Natural History Society and the Geological Society in London (with some funds from the Royal Society) that would quickly extend the age of humans. I'm still digging up more information (much of which, I'm sorry to say, will probably have to be edited down) but just as Darwin was publishing On the Origin of Species the great age of humans was being taken much more seriously than it had been just a few years previously. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but I do have to wonder if some of the interest in Darwin's book had to do with the confirmed discovery of ancient humans, the bones from Brixham cave stirring an interest in "Pre-Adamite Man" just as Darwin was unveiling his evolutionary mechanism.
(New sections are in bold)
Introduction
Huxley's rejoinder to Wilberforce at Oxford - Darrow puts Bryan in the hot seat - Behe's astrological mishap - One long argument - Flickering candles in the dark - Monstrous myths - Evolutionary archetypes -
Horses
Darwin's problems with paleontology - Evolution, sure, but natural selection? - Gaudry and Hipparion - Kowalevsky and Anchitherium - "A gift from the Old world to the New" - Marsh's "toy horse" - Huxley buried under bones - Ladder of horse evolution - Putting the litoptern before the horse
Whales
Koch's Missourium - The king of the seas flees to Europe - Maybe Basilosaurus, maybe not - Huxley's overlooked insight - Fast & furious fossil finds -
Birds and Dinosaurs
Noah's ravens vacation in New England - Hitchcock's Jurassic birds - A little fossil birdie told me about evolution - A misplaced feather - From London to Berlin - The source of Huxley's inspiration - Megalosaurus = an ossified, fossilized, underdeveloped chick - The unimportance of Archaeopteryx - Hypsilophodon as a good transition - Problems with the Pachypoda - How did we get such beautiful fossils? - Ornithosuchus or theropods? - The case of the missing clavicles - 75 years of pseudoscuhian narrative - Barnum Brown's forgotten Daptosaurus - Ostrom's "terrible claw" - "Tetrapteryx" and Microraptor
Human Evolution
Tyson's dissection of a "pigmie" - A chimp's place in the Chain - Where are the "missing links?" - White's 1799 attempt to save the Chain - The intellectual Rubicon - Without language there is no thought - Glorified apes and lowly humans - Buckland's "Red Lady" - She's no lady - Where were the ante-diluvian humans? - Cave contamination - Brixham cave - An unequal partnership - The Neanderthal that was mistaken for an Irishman - The Neanderthal fossils get named - Dubois goes to Indonesia - Skull of an ape, leg of a human - "Java Man" - The transitional gibbon-man - The discovery of "Peking Man" - Dart's Australopithecus - An irrelevant ape - Le Gros Clark to the rescue - Osborn vs Bryan - Harold Cook's Mystery Tooth - Hesperopithecus = Prosthenops - What makes us human? - Ask a stupid question... - Ape-like humans, not human-like apes - Caught in the Chain
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