Fossil Men Quotes

“Ardi, and the team that discovered her, seemed to be personae non gratae. One of them was even called “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” My curiosity was aroused. Anybody who must not be named certainly must be interviewed.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“One of Ardi's main lessons is that simplistic narratives contrived to fill gaps in the fossil record often turn out to be wrong. Consensus can be a poor predictor of who turns out to be right in science.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“their analysis of the femur suggested that bipeds likely evolved from ancestors similar to Miocene fossil apes—not ones like modern African apes.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“they concluded the human hand remained closer to the primitive proportions and chimp hands had evolved much more.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Of course, the crucial difference is that science puts its theories to the test of falsification and adapts to new information.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“AN OLD AMHARIC ADAGE WARNS: HE WHO IS NOT VIGILANTLY SUSPICIOUS will be displaced from this land.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“The idea of an arboreal-bipedal hybrid seemed as ludicrous as a horse-drawn automobile.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In December 1983, security forces in Addis Ababa raided a clandestine meeting and caught an American CIA agent conspiring with Ethiopian dissidents.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In 2010, a consortium of scientists revealed a startling discovery: DNA showed modern humans interbred with Neanderthals. Today, all non-African humans contain about 2 percent Neanderthal DNA (roughly equivalent to the amount we would inherit from an ancestor six generations back).”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“We can no longer assume that our family, or zoology in general, conforms to any simple model of a single family tree. The tree is not entirely obsolete, but the old, simplistic renderings fail to capture the sheer messiness of lineages that repeatedly split and then rejoin.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Papers on human evolution were obliged to account for her—the oldest skeleton in the human family, more than one million years older than Lucy. Unfortunately, the ancestor everybody expected wasn’t the one that turned up. Ardi fit no existing category, boggled imaginations, and required a new vocabulary.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“When it comes to terminology, we can pinpoint when and where our genus made its debut—1758 in Sweden. That’s when Carl Linnaeus classified modern humans as Homo sapiens. Beyond that, everything becomes more vague.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“The big revelations, however, remained firm. Ardi showed an evolutionary stage between Australopithecus and our common ancestors with African apes—a once-unimaginable creature and a reminder that some mysteries could be solved only with fossils.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Slowly the profession began to face the hard truth that the most hated men in paleoanthropology actually might be right about a lot of things.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In his judgment, the odd anatomy left only one explanation: Ardi was a climber in the trees and a biped on the ground. Against all expectation, he found himself concluding that the evidence of upright walking was even stronger than what the Ardi team had described. A member of the human family? “Hell, yes!” thundered Jungers.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“The great German physicist Max Planck once observed: “New scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“psychologists have demonstrated, the source of expertise is no secret: it is simply the ability to recognize patterns based on years of experience.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“a phenomenon known as “incomplete lineage sorting.” In practical language, this means that one gene may have a different “family tree” than another gene in the same animal”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“A number of studies now even suggest the gorilla lineage was still interbreeding with ancestors of humans and chimps when the latter two began to diverge. This means that speciation was a protracted saga of multiple populations isolating and remixing—a very messy and drawn-out divorce without a single moment when any sole last common ancestor of humans and chimps begat two lineages that immediately went in separate ways.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Natural selection boils down to one question: who produces more surviving offspring? The biology of any creature reflects its mode of reproducing itself. In primates, mate competition manifests itself in body size, canine fangs, female ovulation, and male sperm production”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“The notion of grasslands progressively replacing forests is a myth, and the environmental context of our evolution far more complicated. The savanna saga serves as a reminder of a human foible—trying to describe an entire forest when we can see only a few trees.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In recent years, comparative genomics and fossil discoveries have affirmed that the human family once was far more diverse. Modern humans are a paltry remnant of our past variation, and one of the least genetically diverse primate species. For example, just one regional subpopulation of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) has about twice as much genetic variation as all 8 billion humans worldwide.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“By 2002, Gould cast lumpers into a fringe group: “I don’t think that any leading expert would now deny the theme of extensive hominid speciation as a central phenomenon of our phylogeny.” Actually one leading expert did dispute it—Tim White.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Gould and Eldredge insisted gradual evolution was insufficient to explain the diversity of life. Raised a Marxist, Gould believed that western scientists were biased in favor of gradualism because it conformed to their bourgeois notions of progress. To Gould and Eldredge, evolution occurred by revolution—bursts of speciation followed by long plateaus of stasis. Their theory became known as “punctuated equilibrium.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Simpson distinguished three modes of evolution: speciation (splitting events), phyletic evolution (gradual change within a lineage), and quantum evolution (sudden “explosive” jumps). He considered phyletic evolution—slow changes in lineages—to be the main driver of evolution.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“He didn’t have time to remove all the rock matrix but had exposed just enough to reveal something very important. As psychologists have demonstrated, the source of expertise is no secret: it is simply the ability to recognize patterns based on years of experience.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“Already the line was disintegrating. Damn Alemayehu creeping ahead again! Why can’t people follow instructions? Years later, his frustration welled up anew as he reviewed his archival photos. “I’m really reluctant to call it a disciplined crawl,” he growled, gesturing at the imperfect line, “because there’s no FUCKING discipline with these assholes.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In October 1994, eight months after returning from the field, the Middle Awash team published a paper in Nature announcing the new species ramidus, after the Afar word for “root,” ramid.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“White was an apex predator of his discipline—a man who took to heart the idea that science was an endeavor distinguished by falsification, or putting theories to empirical test. Enemies not only resented him; they fucking hated him. He cared not one bit. “Self-criticism will enhance your science,” White later wrote, “self-esteem will not.” As far as White was concerned, there was a single version of truth.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

“In the fall of 1978, Kirtlandia carried an announcement of the new species (after interrupting the press run to remove Mary’s name). The journal had small circulation, so the worldwide announcement effectively occurred in January 1979, when Johanson and White published a paper in Science.”
― Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind