Human Evolution's Supporting Cast
Quotable Quotes
Although I have visited most of the major natural history museums in the United States and some overseas, I have never seen an original human fossil. Neither have most of the anthropologists who teach human evolution in our universities. Neither have you. In fact, you may not have even seen a picture of an original fossil. What you thought were pictures of original fossils may have been pictures of reproductions.
No prisoner on death row is under greater security than those ancient relics called human fossils. Most of the original fossils are sequestered inside vaults of concrete or stone and accessible only through massive steel doors, the type you would expect to see at the First National Bank. Few can even see them—let alone study them.
This process of seclusion was true with the original 1856 Feldhofer Cave Neandertal. ‘The skull and the bones were Fuhlrott’s private property, and he did not show them to many. Only very few scholars in Britain and on the Continent had seen the skull or obtained a cast.’ Even Rudolf Virchow, the greatest medical man of his time, ‘could only study the remains in Fuhlrott’s house after gaining access from his wife when Fuhlrott was away.’ William King never saw the original fossils, although he is the one who, in naming them Homo neanderthalensis in 1864, declared them to represent a different species from modern humans. Darwin never saw these or any other fossil humans, although he published an entire book on human evolution in 1871. Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, never saw the original fossils either, although he described them in his famous 1863 work, Man’s Place in Nature.
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Given the unavailability of the originals, casts are the next best medium of study. Yet it is common knowledge that casts or reproductions, while giving a general impression of the original, often lack the detail of the original. Becky A. Sigmon (University of Toronto) says there is a general feeling among paleoanthropologists ‘that casts should not be used as resource material for a scientific paper.’ However, there is another problem with the use of casts. Casts of only a small percentage of the total fossil material and less than half of the most important fossil material are available for study. This in itself is a serious situation. It would seem to place a degree of contingency on all conclusions reached in a study of human origins.
Descriptions of fossils in the scientific literature, although a poor substitute for casts, are probably the most common tools used in the study of the human material.
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Perhaps the best example of the problem facing paleoanthropology is that many of the scholars who felt that casting technology was now able to provide copies as good as the originals, after studying the originals in the American Museum exhibit, admitted “that technology still has a long way to go.” The crowning blow came at the beginning of the public display. The precision mounts for the original fossils were carefully prepared based on casts supplied in advance. When the original fossils were placed in those mounts, most of them did not fit.
~ Marvin L. Lubenow, Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils (Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2004), p. 21-22, 27-28