The First Human by Ann Gibbons

Author:Ann Gibbons
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307279828
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Lucy’s status as earliest hominid had been usurped by A. ramidus. The reaction to the ascension of A. ramidus to Lucy’s place of honor as matriarch of the human family was exuberant. An accompanying article that ran in Nature under the headline THE OLDEST HOMINID YET set the tone. Paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood, then at the University of Liverpool, wrote that the new fossils would push back humans’ knowledge of their own lineage by more than half a million years. The root ape was recognized as a long lost member of the human family, slipping nicely into the slot between apes and known hominids on the family tree. Encouraged by the editors at Nature, Wood invoked a term that had long since fallen out of favor, concluding, “The metaphor of a ‘missing link’ has often been misused, but it is a suitable epithet for the hominid from Aramis.”

Nature showed little restraint in its promotion of the seventeen fossils from Aramis as “a missing link,” and newspaper and magazine headline writers took the additional step of ignoring the qualifying article “a.” The news made the front pages of newspapers in London, New York, San Francisco, and around the world. The headline in the Times of London was typical, calling it THE BONE THAT REWRITES THE HISTORY OF MAN. More than one article said that the new fossils supported the view that there was a single line of descent from chimpanzees to humans, with diagrams of family trees showing A. ramidus as the direct ancestor of Lucy’s species, A. afarensis, and giving rise to all the different types of hominids that came later. It was pleasing in its clarity and logic. Lucy’s discoverer, Donald Johanson, would be quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying that beyond 4 million years ago there appears to be “a single line and a single lineage.” Even White would invoke the image of a missing link, saying that this new species of hominid was the “oldest known link in the evolutionary chain that connects us to the common ancestor with the living African apes. The discovery takes us one major step closer to this common ancestor.”

Those kinds of comments would prompt Henry Gee at Nature to eventually regret encouraging the use of the term “missing link.” In his book In Search of Deep Time, he wrote that the term initially seemed more palatable than phrases such as “the hominid closest to the evolutionary split between our lineage and that of apes.” He explained, “As editors of Nature, we were, on reflection, wrong to pander to the voodoo paleontology as portrayed by the media, because it presupposes a model of evolution that is linear, upwards, and progressive. We know that this model is mistaken, and yet it is deceptively easy to see evolution in this way, especially when we are discussing our own origins.”

The paleoanthropological community nonetheless welcomed the new fossils in 1994 with what Gee described as “quiet satisfaction,” because they fit nicely into a gap that was waiting to be filled.

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