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 [1], the classification proved to be a mistake.
It was originally described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1922 on the basis of a 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 London News. Osborn was not impressed with the illustration, calling it: "a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate".
Further field work on the site in 1925 revealed that the tooth was falsely identified. Other parts of the skeleton were also found. According to these newly discovered pieces, the tooth belonged neither to a man nor to an ape, but to an extinct genus of Peccary called Prosthennops and its identification as an ape was retracted in the journal Science in 1927.[2]
Although the identity of H. haroldcookii did not achieve general acceptance in the scientific community, and although the species was retracted a decade after its discovery, creationists have promoted this episode as an example of the scientific errors that they allege undermine the credibility of how palaeontology and hominid evolution theories are crafted, and how information is peer reviewed or accepted as mainstream knowledge.
[edit] References
- ^ Citation needed
- ^ Gregory, W.K. (1927). "Hesperopithecus apparently not an ape nor a man". Science 66: 579-81. doi:.
- 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.
- Brian Regal. Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).
