Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind.
And if the blind lead the blind,
both shall fall into the ditch.
Matthew 15:14
Bye, Bye Heidelberg Man
"Is “Heidelberg Man” a non-person? Some anthropologists are now claiming that so-called Homo heidelbergensis is nothing more than “a paleoanthropologists’ construct.”Artists loved to portray this guy as a a hairy, stocky, beetle-browed ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans that lived supposedly 800,000 to 200,000 years ago. Trouble is, he may never have existed. Homo heidelbergensis may have been little more than a paleoanthropologists’ invention, a report by Michael Balter states in Science Magazine. He attended a private meeting in southern France where researchers on both sides debated the status of this alleged human ancestor.
'The big-brained H. heidelbergensis has claimed an important perch in the human evolutionary tree: It’s regarded by many as the common ancestor of modern humans and our extinct closest cousins, the Neandertals. Dating to roughly half a million years ago, it is thought to link those species and the earlier H. erectus, which had spread across Africa, Asia, and Europe beginning 1.8 million years ago. But based on a new look at the incomplete fossil evidence, some scientists argue that the picture was much more complicated, and that the transition between small-brained H. erectus and larger brained hominins occurred multiple times. If so, the concept of a single, multicontinental, intermediary species could dissolve into a plethora of hominin specimens with no single name to unite them.'
This is a good reminder that categories in science are human constructs. In historical evolutionary scenarios, the story comes first, then the data. Designations of ancestry are highly theory dependent. Did Heidelberg Man ever exist? Only in the imaginations of certain modern people with a particular world view to promote." CEH
