|
|
Re: Java Man and "The Mysterious Origins of Man" Rebroadcast
Saulius Muliolis (muliolis@en.com)
28 Jun 1996 22:53:15 GMT
In message <4qusi1$40t@jupiter.ks.symbios.com> - jimf@vangelis.co.symbios.com (
Jim Foley) writes:
>
>In article <31cf295a.18146962@netnews.worldnet.att.net>,
>Chris Beetle <ghi@nerdc.ufl.edu> wrote:
>
>>We agree here. After all, a gibbon with "exceedingly large brain
>>volume and distinguished at the same time by its faculty of assuming
>>an erect attitude and gait" is not much of a gibbon at all.
>
> and:
>
>>Yes. We simply accepted what Nature said as authoritative when
>>actually it was misrepresenting the facts, thus we got a mistaken
>>idea. Perhaps you might include the Nature quote in your gibbon
>>document to show how people could be unknowingly misled.
>
>Thanks for these statements. Perhaps you could let Bill Cote know that
>he made a few whoppers? He might take a bit more notice of your opinion
>(especially Richard Thompson's) than of mine.
>
>
>>On 17 Jun 1996 19:43:54 GMT, jimf@vangelis.co.symbios.com (Jim Foley)
>>wrote:
>
>>>MOM's statement that Dubois recognized the femur as belonging to a human
>>>is also false.
>>
>>Yes, that is certainly true. I do not know where the producers of MOM
>>got that particular idea. It certainly was not from Forbidden
>>Archeology.
>
>I don't have Forbidden Archeology, but I have a library copy of "The
>Hidden History of the Human Race" (HHHR) (an abridged version of FA)
>which says that:
>
> "Indeed, late in his life Eugene Dubois himself concluded that the
> skullcap of his beloved Pithecanthropus belonged to a large gibbon."
>
>Since they refer only to the skullcap, HHHR presumably thought that
>Dubois considered the femur human (what else could it have been?). So
>although HHHR doesn't explicitly say that Dubois thought the femur was
>human, I think it is implied.
>
As luck would have it, I just finished reading an article by Gould that would
clear this up. Dubois did reclassify his Java Man fossils as gibbon, but he
did it to boost his claim that it was an ape - human intermediate. He
expected such an intermediate to have a brain capacity (adjusted
for body weight) intermediate between human and ape, and classifying it as a
gibbon allowed him to adjust his estimate of the living organism's weight to
what he expected from it's brain size. It's one example of a scientist
changing his observations to fit a theory (Nobody is perfect), and so wrong,
but he was in no way denying that Java Man was an intermediate between human
and ape. He was just claiming that the ape was gibbon. He was wrong, of
course, for obvious reasons. His find is now classified as -Homo erectus-.
It's all in "men of the Thirty-Third Division" from Gould's book, _Eight
Little Piggies_.
"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity" -- Robert A. Heinlein.
The t.o. FAQ file is at http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/
Saulius Muliolis muliolis@en.com
http://www.en.com/users/winderi/index.html
|