Taxacom: hominid construction evidence

[John Grehan]

Jared - it does not matter that such things were not explicit in their
paper, but press releases often lead to careless exposure of thinking that
is otherwise hidden. In the rush for click bait and notoriety, authors
often expose their thinking (witness all the teleology that scientists pile
into their 'explanations' in press releases or other propaganda media). It
is apparent from their publicity that these authors have a center of
origin mindset. Not surprising with human evolution where a narrow center
of origin in one form or another has persisted from the beginnings of
evolutionary anthropology. With respect to age of origin, there are many,
many evolutionary biologists who do indeed explicitly believe the fossil
record can be read literally. If the authors of this paper think otherwise
and state that, then fine, but otherwise their statement falls in line with
literal reading of the fossil record.

I did get the following response from one of the authors (not named since I
am posting this without explicit permission).

Thank you for your kind words and for bringing orangutans into focus.  I do
envisage a continuum in the scale of tool dependency and complexity across
primates including ourselves.  If the conditions for preservation allowed,
hominin wood-working would probably be much older than the glimpse we are
seeing at Kalambo which is a reminder of what's missing in our narratives
of human development.

John Grehan

On Thu, Sep 21, 2023 at 5:16 PM Jared Bernard <bernardj at hawaii.edu> wrote:

> Agreed. But at least that's only in a press release for the University of
> Liverpool; in their paper, they don't even mention H. sapiens, or any
> phrasing similar to that quote.
>


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