Apparently the missing link has be found… again… this time in South Africa (though I think South Africa’s quite a hot spot for missing links). The news article goes a little something like this:

A prehistoric human skull from the Eastern Cape has provided a vital “missing link” in the fossil record which shows that modern people originally came from sub-Saharan Africa and migrated to colonise Europe and Asia around 30 000 to 40 000 years ago.

The 36 000-year-old Hofmeyr skull, named after the Karoo town where it was found, shows that people living in Africa at that time looked the same as people living in Europe then.

This critical piece of evidence, which is published in the journal Science on Friday, corroborates genetic evidence about the African origins of modern humans. It is the first fossil evidence to support the “out of Africa” theory, which holds that all modern humans evolved in Africa and then migrated to Europe and Asia.

Alan Morris of UCT’s department of human biology, was part of an international team, led by Frederick Grine of Stony Brook University in New York, that studied the skull.

“The skull is probably male and is completely modern. If he sat down next to you on the Sea Point bus you would not react, apart from wondering where he came from. He would not look like modern Africans or like modern Europeans, or like modern Khoisan people, but he is definitely a modern human being,” Morris said.

The skull was found decades ago, but was dated only recently. It was found in an erosion gulley in the mid-1950s near Hofmeyr, 70km north-east of Cradock.

Morris, who first saw the skull in the Port Elizabeth Museum in the 1990s, showed it to Grine a couple of years ago. Grine had it dated by a method developed by Richard Bailey of Oxford University.

Grine said in a statement that the field of anthropology was known for its hotly contested debates. One which had raged for years concerned the evolutionary origin of modern people. A number of genetic studies of living people indicated that modern humans had evolved in Africa and moved to Europe and Asia between 65 000 and 25 000 years ago to colonise these continents.

But he said other DNA tests argued against this Africa origin and exodus model.

DNA tests argued against this Africa origin and exodus model

“Instead they suggested that archaic, non-African people, such as the Neanderthals of Europe, made significant contributions to the genomes of modern humans in Europe and Asia. Until now, the lack of fossil evidence from sub-Saharan Africa has meant that two competing genetic models of human evolution could not be tested by palaeontological evidence. The skull from Hofmeyr has changed that,” he said.

Once the skull had been dated in Oxford, it was studied by other members of the team at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The scientists there had expected the Hofmeyr skull to have close resemblances to the Khoisan, because they are represented in the recent archaeological record in South Africa.

Instead, the Hofmeyr fossil was found to have a very close affinity with the fossil skulls of Europeans of the Upper Palaeolithic, and is quite distinct from Khoisan specimens.

Grine said the evidence from the Hofmeyr skull agreed with the “out of Africa” genetic theory, which predicted that humans similar to those who lived in Europe and Asia around 36 000 years ago, would also be found in sub-Saharan Africa during the same period.

The Hofmeyr skull from the Karoo provides the first fossil evidence to support this prediction.

I tried to scan in the article from the newspaper, but the pages were too big for the scanner so I’ve had to try and patch them together as best as possible, and the quality’s not great, but here they are:

Newspaper article 1

Newspaper article 2

I find it somewhat interesting that they say we wouldn’t have been alarmed to see him sitting next to us on the bus. Surely in 30 thousand years things should have to change a little, and he would be noticeably different? And why wasn’t the skull dated until now? And how do we know the specimen hasn’t been contaminated or tampered with. Considering the world’s been so desperately searching for “the missing link” all this time, surely someone would’ve wanted the fame and come forward sooner? Or was it perhaps dated previously, and it didn’t yield any juicy results so was put back into its box until someone discovered another dating method that would tell them what they wanted to hear. Why do they only use one dating method?

Let’s recap… we’ve got a skull which looks the same as “modern human” skull would, found some 50 years ago, supposedly sticking out of a deep erosion gully, which has been sitting in a museum until the 1990s, and some dating method says that it’s thousands of years old. Just “what if” the guy who found it bent the truth, and instead of “sticking out” it was just lying there? Yeh, nice hard evidence we’ve got going here - let’s see if it would hold up in court, but some how it’s all “science” (say “oooh, aaah” and act amazed).

Caught in a flash flood (second scanned in page), what a co-incidence, my bible mentions a flood a few thousand years back. It “could not be carbon dated” because “carbon had leached out of the bone”… well this is the first I’ve heard of this, and if carbon can “leach out of bones”, couldn’t this affect other bones that have been carbon dated? Can’t anything be carbon dated, I mean technically? It just wont return an answer, or a valid one, if their’s no carbon?

They couldn’t even find the gully where the skull was said to be found, because it had since been eroded so badly, and only one scientist went to see it! As for the dating method, Wikipedia says “Ages can be determined typically from a few hundred years to 100,000 years, and can be reliable when suitable methods are used and proper checks are done” - what do they mean CAN BE reliable? Shouldn’t they ALWAYS be reliable? If you don’t know how old something is, to start with, how do you know when you’ve used the “suitable methods” to calculate it’s age correctly? Why are there “suitable methods”, not THE method? “Crucial to the optical dating method is that there was adequate daylight exposure to the mineral grains before they were buried” - and what if there wasn’t adequate daylight exposure, in this case?

Sounds far more like a theory, than any scientific proof of anything, to me.

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