Nebraska Man
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Nebraska Man was the name applied by the popular press to Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, a putative species of ape. Hesperopithecus meant "ape of the western world" and it was heralded as the first higher primate of North America. Though not a deliberate hoax, the classification proved to be a mistake.
It was originally described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1922 on the basis of an ape-like tooth found in Nebraska by rancher and geologist Harold Cook in 1917. An illustration of H. haroldcookii was done by artist Amedee Forestier, who modelled the drawing on the proportions of "Pithecanthropus" (now Homo erectus), the "Java ape-man", for the Illustrated News of London. Osborn was not impressed with the illustration, calling it: "a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate". Many other palaentologists questioned the identification of this tooth as that of an ape.
Further field work on the site in 1925 revealed that the tooth, despite its resemblance to that of an ape, was probably that of a peccary and William Gregory, a colleague of Osborn's at the American Museum of Natural History published a retraction of H. haroldcookii in Science in 1927.
Although the identity of H. haroldcookii never achieved general acceptance in the scientific community, and although the species was retracted within five years of its discovery, this episode has been seized upon by the creationist movement as an example of the scientific errors which they allege undermines the credibility of palaeontology and hominid evolution. [1]
[edit] References
- Gould S.J. (1991): An essay on a pig roast. In Bully for brontosaurus. (pp. 432-47). New York: W.W.Norton ISBN 0-393-30857-X
- Wolf J. and Mellett J.S. (1985): The role of "Nebraska man" in the creation-evolution debate. Creation/Evolution 16:31-43. [2]
[edit] External links
Also see: Brian Regal, Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).
