Chapter Summary

Often, when we read a necessarily brief article in the popular press about a new fossil find, we get the impression that the scientists conducted some sort of magic to arrive at their stated conclusions. In the October 3, 1994, issue of Time, for example, we read that a small fossil tooth and a few other fragmentary bones from Ethiopia had been discovered and heralded as “a new chapter in the history of human evolution” (Lemonick 1994). On the basis of these bones, a new species of hominid was established, and it is described as having been about 4 fee tall and probably bipedal, having been “ravaged by carnivores,” and having lived 4.4 mya in the forests. That’s pretty specific information from a handful of bones turned to stone.

You should now understand that arriving at such conclusions is not magic at all. Though data like these bones are from a creature millions of years old, we may still use scientific methodology to interpret them. We know what modern mammalian skeletons look like and what previous fossil finds look like, so we can compare our new fossils to them in order to give them at least a provisional taxonomic assignment. As the fossils were being recovered in Ethiopia, exhaustive data were recorded about their provenience, allowing us to generate hypotheses about their environment and, using technologies from physics, their date. We understand how fossils are formed and what their specific condition can tell us about how the creature died and became part of the fossil record. We know, for example, what bones that have been “ravaged by carnivores” look like.

Finally, combining the preceding techniques with new methods from genetics, we have been able to piece together a tentative family tree of the hominids and related primates. When a new set of fossils is found, we have a context into which it may be placed and a taxonomic system that can supply it with a name. We will meet this 4.4-million-year-old fossil species and many others in the next chapter, as we see exactly how these fact-finding techniques are applied.

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