Q: How can anyone trust a “science” that gets rewritten every time a
new bone turns up?
Reporter Michael Marshall, who believes humans evolved from apes, doesn’t know what to think any more. Read his embarrassing opening sentences:
Stuff happens, he says, and it happened in the past; we know because stuff got found. Those ending sentences betray a long-standing problem in evolutionary anthropology: it is constantly being rethought.
At this point it’s a truism that the story of human evolution is being rethought. Discoveries in recent years have forced us to rethink many crucial points, such as how old our species is – about 300,000 years old as opposed to 200,000 – and what extinct hominins like the Neanderthals were really like.
2023 was equally dizzying: discoveries continued to come thick and fast. But because there are so many species and eras involved, it’s hard to discern the common threads linking them – at least, beyond “we found out some more stuff”.
Stuff happens, he says, and it happened in the past; we know because stuff got found. Those ending sentences betray a long-standing problem in evolutionary anthropology: it is constantly being rethought.
That has become a “truism” that continued into “dizzying” 2023. A truism is a “self-evident, obvious truth”—in this case, that human evolution is constantly being rethought. If thoughts don’t stick, they must not be very good thoughts."
CEH