A127-Nebraska_Man.txt Graham L. Kendall Modified 11/15/2005 http://www.grahamkendall.net/ Email grahamkendall74135@yahoo.com I am found on IRC Efnet/Undernet/Dalnet as glk AREA:EVOLUTION "Nebraska man" incident. The peccary tooth, discovered in 1917 and submitted to the American Museum in 1922, was published in 1922 by Osborn as the first anthropoid ape from North America. Note that "anthropoid ape" does not mean human or hominid. All apes and monkeys belong to the Anthropoidea. Doubts about the anthropoid status of the specimen were expressed in print in 1922 and 1923 by other authorities. Field work at the discovery site was undertaken in 1925 and immediately revealed the tooth to be from a peccary. A retraction of the anthropoid claim was published in 1927. The incident was short-lived, it never had any significant impact on scientific opinion, and it demonstrates the self-correcting nature of science. It has no bearing on the validity of the hundreds of undoubted hominid fossils found elsewhere and meticulously studied and documented. > I asked about Nebraska Man last fall, and received some helpful > responses. However my correspondent has replied with further > information about this toothy event, and I'd appreciate any comment: > Nebraska Man was given a scientific name, Hesperopithecus > haroldcooki. > It was used as factual evidence in the Scopes > Monkey Trial. This is a point of contention. If your correspondent will give the date and witness, I'll look it up in my copy of the court transcript to give a supported/unsupported determination. Until the SciCre-ists document this, I think it is in error. > Some references written about this are The > Ape-Man of the Western World in The Illustrated London News, > June 24, 1922, and the Evolution of Man, London, Oxford > University Press, 1924, by G.Elliot Smith. The Pedigree of > the Human Race, 1926, by Harris H. Wilder. Hesperopithecus, > The First Anthropoid Primate Found in America, by Henry > Fairfield Osborn, in 1922, published in Science, Vol. 60 > - also published in American Museum Noviates, No. 37 1922, > and Nature, Vol. 110, 1922. Osborne published this in Nature in 1922, although he emphasized the uncertainties. Science published the retraction in 1927, and it was front-page news in the NY Times as well. Nature also published a notice about this. PA> I had the impression that someone found a fossilised peccary PA> tooth, and for a while thought that it might have had human PA> origin; then he changed his mind. You've got it pretty much right. H.F. Osborn was involved in the original description of Hesperopithecus, which took place in 1922. Osborn organized expeditions to find more evidence. Those expeditions took place in 1925 and 1926, and they found much more evidence -- their "hominid" was really an extinct peccary. A retraction of the hominid claim resulted, which was published in Science in 1927. Note the dates of your correspondent's references: all within the period when Hesperopithecus was considered to be valid. No references arguing validity for Hesperopithecus are given after 1927. Again, this is a great example of the self-correcting nature of science -- mistakes are corrected, not worshipped. Gould, Stephen Jay. Jan 1989. An Essay on a Pig Roast. Natural History, Jan., pp. 14-25. ABSTRACT A description is presented of the 1922 trial between William Jennings Bryan and Henry Fairfield Osborn on evolution vs. creationism. The trial began events which culminated in the more famous Scopes trial. "The story of Hesperopithecus was certainly embarrassing to Osborn and Gregory in a personal sense, but the sequence of discovery, announcement, testing, and refutation -- all done with admirable dispatch, clarity, and honesty -- shows science working at its very best. Science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths. The fundamentalists, by "knowing" the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science -- or any honest intellectual inquiry. The actual story of Hesperopithecus could teach creationists a great deal about science as properly practiced if they chose to listen, rather than to scan the surface for cheap shots in the service of debate for immediate advantage, rather than interest in truth." Among other items in the article, I found out that while Osborn organized and participated in the follow-up expedition to Nebraska, his name was not on the article retracting the claims of primate affinity for Hesperopithecus. That honor he left for his colleague Gregory. So, while Osborn did not actually go into print retracting his earlier claims, he certainly was foremost in coming up with the evidence and interpretation that showed the earlier claims to be false. Osborn did engage in self-correction. A timetable: February 25, 1922: Harold Cook informs Henry Fairfield Osborn of his find of a fossil tooth "that closely approaches the human type." April 25, 1922: Osborn presents papers describing Hesperopithecus haroldcookii based upon Harold Cook's specimen and a previously unidentified tooth in the American Museum of Natural History's collections. 1923: William Gregory publishes two articles on Hesperopithecus, noting the bad condition of the specimens and stating uncertainties of affiliation. 1922-1925: Osborn sends molds of the Hesperopithecus tooth to colleagues worldwide. Summer, 1925 and 1926: Osborn mounts paleontological expeditions to the formations in Nebraska to find more specimens. December 16, 1927: William Gregory publishes retraction of Hesperopithecus, classifying the original teeth and subsequently discovered material as belonging to the genus Prosthennops. (Prosthennops had been described by W.D. Matthews and Harold Cook in 1909.) Prosthennops is an extinct genus related to modern peccaries, or wild pigs. Gould challenged SciCre-ists to retract their Paluxy man-tracks claims in his article. While some have already done so, much of the literature of the SciCre-ists has not been revised to reflect this. In the case of "Nebraska man" which the SciCre-ists are so fond of citing, the claim-test-retract cycle took just over five and one-half years. One wonders how long it will take the SciCre-ists to remove even the claims concerning Paluxy from their rhetoric. They have had almost twice the entire cycle time of Hesperopithecus already. --- Creationist Arguments: Nebraska Man http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/homs/a_nebraska.html Nebraska Man (Hesperopithecus haroldcookii) was named after a humanlike tooth was found in 1921 (Osborn, 1922). As creationists tell it, evolutionists used one tooth to build an entire species of primitive man, complete with illustrations of him and his family, before further excavations revealed the tooth to belong to a peccary, an animal similar to, and closely related to, pigs. The true story is much more complex (Wolf and Mellett, 1984; Gould, 1991). The imaginative drawing was the work of an illustrator collaborating with the English scientist Grafton Elliot Smith, and was done for the Illustrated London News, not for a scientific publication. Few, if any, other scientists claimed it was a human ancestor. Some, including the finders, identified it only as an advanced primate of some kind. Many others were skeptical even of that. It is an exaggeration to claim that Nebraska Man was widely accepted as human, or even as an ape, by scientists. Identifying the tooth as belonging to a higher primate was not as foolish as it sounds; pig and peccary cheek teeth are extremely similar to those of humans, and the specimen was worn, making identification even harder. Creationists often claim that Nebraska Man was used as proof of evolution during the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, but this claim is apocryphal. No scientific evidence was presented at the trial. (Some evidence was read into the trial record, but even this did not refer to Nebraska Man.) Nor is it true, as Ian Taylor (1995) has said, that the correction of the original identification was not publicized and never made the headlines. The New York Times and The Times of London both announced the news (the NYT put it on the front page), and both also printed editorials about it (Wolf and Mellett, 1984). Taylor's other claim, that the retraction was announced in the scientific literature in only four lines in the back pages of Nature, is almost correct (it was 16 lines) but highly deceptive, since it conveniently ignores the fact that a one and a half page article retracting the claim was printed in the prestigious journal Science (Gregory, 1927). Moreover, Taylor should have known about this article, because it was referenced by the item in Nature to which he did refer. Nebraska Man should not be considered an embarrassment. The scientists involved were mistaken, and somewhat incautious, but not incompetent or dishonest. The whole episode was actually an excellent example of how the scientific process should work. Given a problematic identification, scientists went out, found further data which falsified their earlier ideas, and promptly abandoned them (a marked contrast to the creationist approach). http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_nebraska.html http://www.execpc.com/~jwolf/hesper2.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This page is part of the Fossil Hominids FAQ at the talk.origins Archive. === In 1922, a Nebraska geologist sent a fossilized tooth to Henry Osborn, head of the American Museum of Natural History. Osborn was involved with the Scopes Monkey Trial, and was delighted at the new evidence for his side. He rushed to publication, and announced the new species Hesperopithecus ("Ape of the western world"). It seemed, he said, more human than ape. But what happened next? The answer is that Osborn himself went to Nebraska in the summers of 1925 and 1926. Many more teeth were found, and it became apparent that they weren't from an ape. They belonged to an extinct peccary, Prosthennops. A retraction of Hesperopithecus was published in 1927. Now, was there a fraud? No. Osborn made every effort to obtain more evidence, and when he found it, he published that too, even though he was embarrassed and disappointed. Did the scientific community swallow this whole? Well, yes and no. Some colleagues stated that Osborn was wrong. One foolishly had a drawing made of Nebraska Man, but Osborn himself referred to that drawing as "a figment of the imagination of no scientific value". Some Creationists have claimed that Nebraska Man was part of the evidence at the Scopes Monkey Trial. In fact, Judge Raulston excluded all expert testimony, except that of William Jennings Bryan. No mention was ever made at the trial of the supposed anthropoid ape, and certainly not "Nebraska Man." Osborn withdrew from the trial because that season's digs made it clear it was not an ape. Nobody, ther than Grafton Elliot Smith, ever said the tooth was hominid, and virtually nobody agreed with him. For more detail, see: Chapter 29, An Essay on a Pig Roast, Bully for Brontosaurus, Reflections in Natural History, Stephen Jay Gould, W.W. Norton 1991 End A127-Nebraska_Man.txt