Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [495]
Oxnard believed that much of the evidence required to find an answer had dropped out of sight. Reviewing the decades-long controversy about the nature of Australopithecus, Oxnard (1984, pp. 317–318) said: “In the uproar, at the time, as to whether or not these creatures were near ape or human, the opinion that they were human won the day. This may well have resulted not only in the defeat of the contrary opinion but also in the burying of that part of the evidence upon which the contrary opinion was based. If this is so, it should be possible to unearth this other part of the evidence. This evidence may actually be more compatible with the new view; it may help open the possibility that these particular australopithecines are neither like African apes nor humans, and certainly not intermediate, but something markedly different from either.”
Of course, this is exactly the point we have been making throughout this book. Evidence has been buried. We ourselves have uncovered considerable amounts of such buried evidence relating to the antiquity of the modern human type.
11.8.4 Opposition to Statistical Studies
Some have claimed that the statistical approach employed by Oxnard and Zuckerman is inappropriate and misleading.
For example Robert Broom said: “I regard all biometricians in the field of morphology as fools” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 76). Donald Johanson, discoverer and defender of Lucy, ridiculed Zuckerman, accusing him of “kicking up more and more biometric dust” and firing off “statistical salvos” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 76).
Johanson noted: “To give Zuckerman his due, there were resemblances between ape skull and australopithecine skulls. The brains were approximately the same size, both had prognathous (long, jutting) jaws, and so on. What Zuckerman missed was the importance of some traits that australopithecines had in common with men” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 76).
In this regard, Johanson cited Charles A. Reed, of the University of Illinois, who said: “No matter that Zuckerman wrote of such characters as being ‘often inconspicuous’; the important point was the presence of several such incipient characters in functional combinations. This latter point of view was one which, in my opinion, Zuckerman and his co-workers failed to grasp, even while they stated that they did. Their approach . . . was extremely static in that they essentially demanded that a fossil to be considered by them to show any evidence of evolving toward living humans, must have essentially arrived at the latter status before they would regard it as having begun the evolutionary journey” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 76).
In citing Reed against Zuckerman in this way, Johanson was being somewhat hypocritical. Johanson and others sharing his views certainly did not characterize Australopithecus as an apelike creature with “incipient” human features. Rather they said Australopithecus was practically human from the neck down, especially in terms of humanlike bipedal locomotion. In other words, Johanson and others were themselves guilty of insisting that a distant ancestor of living humans had “essentially arrived at the latter status.” Reacting to this exaggerated claim, Zuckerman, and later Oxnard, were just saying it was wrong, and that the anatomy and locomotor behavior of Australopithecus were essentially apelike.
Johanson, Reed, and others have also ignored the implications of findings by Oxnard and Zuckerman that Australopithecus had anatomical features that were uniquely different from those of apes and modern humans (Section 11.8.5). Contrary to the usual view, Australopithecus was not, according to Oxnard and Zuckerman, morphologically intermediate between humans and apes. Thus it is unlikely that Australopithecus