Southern Bread

Man, it’s been waaay too long since I’ve seen a good “missing link” story come out of the celebrity science media. But, my friend just shot me this link to the latest one. So, as I did last time, I’ll run through the article and give some commentary to show how the anatomy of a “missing link” story works.

First, you must make up a random date and then make a big claim that you don’t intend to substantiate:

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.

Then, you clear the playing field so that you don’t have to actually provide hard evidence for any of the stories you are about to make up:

The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin’s time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today’s apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree.

…the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.

“This find is far more important than Lucy,” said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. “It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn’t look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between.”

The neo-darwinians have been trying to do this for years now. Establish the idea that there actually was no transitional form between apes and man. They realize how absurdly weak the fossil record is and that it’s never going to get any better for them. So instead, they change their story. Now, there isn’t any “missing link” they need to find. Instead, there is only a mythical “common ancestor” that they don’t have to find. Convenient, no?

Now, let’s bring in some radiometric dating nonsense:

The Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were discovered in Ethiopia’s harsh Afar desert at a site called Aramis in the Middle Awash region, just 46 miles (74 kilometers) from where Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974. Radiometric dating of two layers of volcanic ash that tightly sandwiched the fossil deposits revealed that Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago.

This is simply impossible. I’m sorry, but the flaw here is in misunderstanding the magnitude of what “millions” of years really means. Look, it takes teams of researchers sometimes decades to reconstruct and understand events from just a few hundred years ago. Why, do these people think they can possibly know who or what lived 4 MILLION years ago. Just stop and think about that for a minute. A million years. I cannot believe that we have instruments capable of accurately measuring in millions of years. I’m just not buying it. It’s naive.

And, here’s where we get into the typical Lucy BS. Skeletal amalgamations:

While important, however, none of those earlier fossils are nearly as revealing as the newly announced remains, which in addition to Ardi’s partial skeleton include bones representing at least 36 other individuals.

The way this works is that you take various bones from all sorts of critters and you just put them all in an arrangement that looks as much like a hominid as possible. This “skeleton” contains bones from 36 different creatures.

Now, with all of the preliminaries out of the way, we can move on to the meaty stuff. The storytelling. This is how modern hollywood-like science is done. You clear the field, throw out a bunch of claims, and then get on with spinning a good yarn that you couldn’t possibly really know happened:

The biggest surprise about Ardipithecus’s biology is its bizarre means of moving about.

All previously known hominids—members of our ancestral lineage—walked upright on two legs, like us. But Ardi’s feet, pelvis, legs, and hands suggest she was a biped on the ground but a quadruped when moving about in the trees.

Combined with modifications to the other toes, the bone would have helped Ardi walk bipedally on the ground, though less efficiently than later hominids like Lucy. The bone was lost in the lineages of chimps and gorillas.

Modern chimps and gorillas have evolved limb anatomy specialized to climbing vertically up tree trunks, hanging and swinging from branches, and knuckle-walking on the ground.

“What Ardi tells us is there was this vast intermediate stage in our evolution that nobody knew about,” said Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University in Ohio, who analyzed Ardi’s bones below the neck. “It changes everything.”

But it doesn’t stop there. No, he has to go full-silliness with a line like this:

Lovejoy sees these changes as part of an epochal shift in social behavior: Instead of fighting for access to females, a male Ardipithecus would supply a “targeted female” and her offspring with gathered foods and gain her sexual loyalty in return.

To keep up his end of the deal, a male needed to have his hands free to carry home the food. Bipedalism may have been a poor way for Ardipithecus to get around, but through its contribution to the “sex for food” contract, it would have been an excellent way to bear more offspring. And in evolution, of course, more offspring is the name of the game.

This is typical neo-darwinian story telling pure and simple. They do provide pictures though.

From this:

They got this:

Complete and utter silliness.