After putting it off for too long, I finally began my re-write of the human evolution chapter today. I feared what I would find when I began working with it again. I had written about 25 pages, but that was back in April, May at the latest, and I knew that a lot of it would have to be thrown out.
I am not exactly starting from scratch, though. Instead of starting with a blank sheet I decided to re-mold what I had already put down, injecting new ideas and examples as I go along. Not all my prose is horrific, and to an extent I am mining what the Brian of last spring wrote for whatever useful material there might be in the conglomeration of words.
To get myself in the spirit of things, I picked up the recently-published textbook Human Evolution by Ayala and Cela-Conde this morning, but I quickly became disgusted with it. It is poorly-organized, the cladograms and charts are poorly presented, and there are plenty of little errors/omissions that make me doubt the overall quality of the book. (In a comprehensive list of hominins, for instance, they didn't include Australopithecus afarensis! I checked four times to make sure I wasn't going crazy!) To remedy this I read a little of Corbey's Metaphysics of Apes, which had more to do with what I was covering today. (Adam's Ancestors by Livingstone came in handy, too.)
I have little doubt that this is going to be the most difficult chapter to write. I can't omit it, but it truly requires its own book, which could very well make for a challenging future project. It's going to be a difficult job, but I think I will be able to meet my self-imposed deadline and finish it in the next month. We'll see. Here's the Wordle for the chapter as it is now;
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For previous posts dealing with this project, see the "Books" and "Great Book Project" archives.
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I'm going to assume you have, or have read, Conroy's book. If not, it's pretty phenomenal as far as human evolution texts go.
I've not seen the book in question, but in Cela-Conde & Ayala (2003), this species was listed under the name Praeanthropus africanus. Cela-Conde and Ayala effectively restricted the name Australopithecus to species actually closer to the type species (A. africanus) than Homo, and used the genus name Praeanthropus for the paraphyletic series beneath the Australopithecus-Homo clade.
(Warning: convoluted taxonomy ahead) The hypodigm for Australopithecus afarensis Johanson in Hinrichsen, 1978, includes the type species of the older name Meganthropus africanus Weinert 1950. If Weinert's species is included in Australopithecus, then the name africanus is, of course, already taken by Australopithecus africanus Dart, 1925, and can't be used for Weinert's species (hence Australopithecus afarensis, the next most senior option). This clash doesn't happen if africanus Dart and africanus Weinert aren't in the same genus, so africanus Weinert is potentially a valid name (and used as such by Cela-Conde and Ayala).
What Cela-Conde and Ayala seem to have not been aware of is that in 1999 the ICZN passed a resolution suppressing the name africanus Weinert, 1950 in favour of afarensis Johanson in Hinrichsen, 1978, so that even if afarensis is not included in Australopithecus, its name remains afarensis. If Ayala and Cela-Conde are still using the name Praeanthropus africanus, they're in the wrong - the name should be Praeanthropus afarensis.
Thanks, Chris. Lewin goes over this issue a bit in Bones of Contention, although it wasn't recent enough to include the ICZN decision.
I opened up the new Cela-Conde and Ayala book, and A. afarensis (or its equivalent) is nowhere to be found. It is on page 107, and the table contains the genera Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Paranthropus, Kenyanthropus, and Homo. Under Australopithecus, there is A. anamensis, A. africanus, A. bahrelgazhali, and A. garhi.
They do discuss A. afarensis in the book, but unless they're taking Tobias' view and lumping it under A. africanus, I don't see how they could have left it out and not noticed.
Ah, so they are using the more popular definition of Australopithecus in the book - in the 2003 paper, all the species you've listed for Australopithecus except A. africanus were included in Praeanthropus (and Paranthropus was sunk into Australopithecus). Sounds like the omission of A. afarensis was a typo after all.