Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, The Origin of Species, did not mention human evolution. Darwin was reluctant to confront the religious orthodoxy of nineteenth century Christianity with the idea that all species, including Homo sapiens, had evolved. While Darwin knew that all species were related by descent and that these lines of descent could be traced through fossils, he backed up his evolutionary theory with uncontroversial examples including obscure marine organisms, extinct clams, and so on.
Long before Charles Darwin, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) had recognized that fossils are the remains of creatures that had gone extinct or currently existed in a different form. In his textbook Biological Anthropology, Michael Park writes:
“Robert Hooke recognized that fossils represented the remains of extinct creatures or creatures that still existed but in different form.”
In developing his theory of evolution in 1800, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829) used mollusk fossils from rocks in the Paris Basin. By the nineteenth century, fossils were being used as evidence of evolution.
Charles Darwin was rather shy and preferred to avoid any controversial public limelight. Fortunately for the theory of evolution by natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley, an aggressive and imaginative scientist, took on the role of promoter and debater. Huxley has often been called “Darwin’s Bulldog.” In their book Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey write:
“While Darwin lurked in his home like a timid and anxious turtle, Huxley was out front, arguing.”
In her short biography of Huxley in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Sherrie Lyons reports:
“More than anyone else, Huxley was responsible for disseminating Darwin’s theory to the Western World.”
In 1863, Thomas Huxley published Man’s Place in Nature in which he discussed the evidence for human antiquity. In their book Extinct Humans, Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz write:
“At the time Huxley wrote this essay on human evolution, we must admit, the fossil evidence was pretty scrappy.”
Among the fossils that Huxley considered was the Feldhofer Grotto Neanderthal, which was not universally accepted as being ancient by people at this time—there were those felt that it was less then a century old. Huxley, with little other data, classified this fossil as Homo sapiens.
With regard to human evolution, Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey report:
“It was Huxley who publicly associated humans with apes. He pointed out the great range of similarity between man and what he recognized to be man’s closest living relatives, the gorilla and chimpanzee. From this he reasoned that the three had a common—and not terribly remote—ancestor. Since those apes were found living only in Africa, Huxley suggested that fossils of the joint ancestor might be found there also.”
In the nineteenth century, however, there was no known fossil record of human ancestors in Africa. In fact, the only fossil human ancestors which had been found by the time Huxley was promoting the idea of an African ancestry for humans, were European and would later be classified as Homo neandertalensis.
1864,William King, a professor of geology at Queen’s College in Galway, Ireland,presented a paper at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in which he argued that Neanderthal should be recognized as a distinct species. Thus, Homo neandertalensis became the first species of extinct humans to be formally named.
Fossils are simply the preserved remains or traces of organisms from the remote past. The English word fossil is from the Latin fossilis which means “obtained by digging.” In general, specimens from the ancient past are considered fossils if they are more than 10,000 years old (this is an arbitrary timeline). A fossil has three basic attributes: what it looks like, where it comes from, and how old it is. Dating fossils is often difficult and controversial. Dating methods are usually drawn from geology and multiple dating techniques are used.
The fossil record provides evidence of all forms of ancient life, both plants and animals and it provides insights into the evolutionary sequences of many species. In his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, Bill Nye writes:
“The deeper we dig, the older the animals and plants we find. We can trace the development of certain species for millions of years.”
With regard to the insights into evolution provided by the fossil record, Michael Shermer, in an article in Skeptic, writes:
“Not only are the dates consistent, but the fossils show intermediate stages—something antievolutionists still insist don’t exist.”
While the fossil record of the evolution of many species was fairly clear, for human evolution and evidence of human ancestry, the fossil record was fairly sparse until the last part of the twentieth century. Fossils of early humans, such as Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, and others, coupled with pre-human fossils of the austrolopithecines, has given us a much better picture of human evolution. However, Henry Gee, in his book The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, cautions:
“Piecing together the tale of evolution from fragmentary fossils is a hard business. Because fossils are so rare, and because an unknowably large proportion of the history of any lineage will have been erased, what fossil hunters can never do with confidence is look at a fossil and assert that it is the actual ancestor of any creature now living (or of any other fossil).”
More Human Origins
Human Origins: Clothing
Human Origins: Humans as naked apes
Human Origins: Sex
Human Origins: Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin
Human Origins: Domesticating Fire
Human Origins: Menopause
Human Origins: The Great Chain of Being
Human Origins: Cultural Evolution
