A team of paleoanthropologists, including Maeve Leakey and Fred Spoor, announced a couple of new fossils earlier this month. A small partial cranium dated at 1.55 mya that they identified as Homo erectus, and a broken maxilla dated to 1.44 mya which, based on tooth morphology, was classified as Homo habilis. The authors say the study suggests a long period of coexistence between the two species, and the possibility that habilis is not ancestral to erectus. Sadly, the anthropology section on my Google News was soon riddled with headlines, from the alarmist:
Fossil Find Challenges Evolutionary Theory - from Digital Journal
Only natural to doubt evolutionary theory - courtesy of an opinion piece in The Wichita Eagle
to the slightly more reasonable:
Fossils Could Force Rethink of Human Evolution – via Live Science
Finds test human origins theory – from BBC News
*Sigh* I can hear the creationists now. There’s controversy in evolutionary theory, even the scientists don’t know how it works, so it must be wrong. It’s no wonder the general public is confused, given the quality of “scientific reporting” going on. And while I understand that the source must be considered, and that many members of the public (or those writers reporting on the latest scientific news, apparently) won’t actually go read the original article, or listen to interviews with the researchers from Science Friday, the sensationalism and total lack of fact-checking continue to astound me.
