by Paul Garner
First there was Walking With Dinosaurs, then Walking With Beasts,1 and now the BBC has brought us Walking With Cavemen. The new series purports to trace the origin of human beings from ape-like ancestors living in Africa millions of years ago. As the series unfolds, we will be providing some informed comment about it on our web site. Here are some thoughts on the first of the four episodes: ‘first ancestors’.
Plenty of fossils – but not much evidence for evolution
Early in the programme, the presenter, Professor Robert Winston, said that all the fossils which supposedly prove that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors would fit into the boot of his car. Similar claims are common in the evolutionary literature. For example, an article in New Scientist stated:
“The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table.”2
A cover story in Time magazine said:
“Scientists concede that even their most cherished theories are based on embarrassingly few fossil fragments.”3
However, we need to understand that it is a myth that only a few ‘hominid’ fossils have been found – there are actually many thousands of such fossils.4 What Robert Winston and his evolutionary colleagues mean when they make such statements is that most of the ‘hominid’ fossils do not help them tell an evolutionary story! Most of the fossils are too modern or do not fit easily into the evolutionary scheme. So in this sense, Robert Winston is right – the case for human evolution rests on a pitiful handful of controversial specimens.
Lucy – the upright ape?
The first programme in the series concentrated on ‘Lucy’ – or to give her kind its technical name, Australopithecus afarensis. The story was developed around a turf-war between rival males in Lucy’s troop, conflict with a rival troop of afarensis, and Lucy’s care for her infant. Much of the behavioural reconstruction was clearly speculative, but that aside, what are the facts about Lucy and her tribe?
Lucy was a 40% complete female skeleton unearthed by Dr Donald Johanson’s expedition to Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974. The skeleton became known as Lucy because the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was playing on the camp radio on the evening of the discovery.
Lucy’s skeleton is very ape-like and she had a small brain (about 400 cc), but Walking With Cavemen claimed that she was able to walk upright. It is this characteristic more than any other that is said to mark afarensis out as our ancestor. Nevertheless, even the Walking With Cavemen web site acknowledges that scientific opinion is divided on this issue. If afarensis habitually walked upright, it does not seem to have been in the human manner. Her anatomy suggests that she may have had a gait similar to that of modern apes, such as chimps and orangutans, which sometimes walk upright for short periods. Furthermore, a study published in Nature has shown that some australopithecines, including Lucy, had wrists designed for knuckle-walking.5 However, because the authors ‘know’ that the australopithecines walked upright, they argue that their wrists were just a left-over from an earlier ancestor that walked on its knuckles. Such is the flexibility of Darwinian interpretations!
In Walking With Cavemen, Lucy and her kind were portrayed by actors in suits – but this gave a false impression of what Lucy would really have looked like. The fossil bones show that Lucy had very chimp-like body proportions, with long arms, short legs, and long, curved hands and feet. Using actors made these creatures look much more like modern humans than they would have done in life.
Lucy’s missing ancestors
Robert Winston also spent some time discussing Lucy’s eight-million-year-old tree-dwelling ancestors – though he admitted that we have no fossil evidence that they existed! Despite this, he said that we know some important things about them – an astounding claim which appeared to be based on faith in Darwinian presuppositions rather than scientific evidence. The programme attempted, rather unconvincingly, to explain why the transition from tree-dwelling to upright walking took place. We were told that Lucy’s ancestors inhabited rainforests that began to retreat because of climatic change. Upright walking evolved because it was more efficient way of moving around the new grassy plains that replaced the thick forests. Although it was slower and more dangerous, walking upright saved energy which could then be invested into building relationships within the troop and raising infants. This was the decisive factor that led to the survival of these creatures. However, Winston acknowledged that upright walking would have saved no more calories in an entire year than would be obtained from consuming a single packet of chocolate biscuits! This seemed a rather flimsy explanation for the tremendous physical modifications that would have been required to convert a tree-dweller into an upright walker.
Conclusion
On more than one occasion, Robert Winston agreed that Lucy was just an extinct ape – a unique kind of ape, perhaps, but an ape nevertheless. The best that could be claimed was that Lucy’s kind were apes with possibilities – the potential to evolve into you and I – but the viewer was largely expected to take this on faith. This approach characterized the whole programme – it was long on assertion but short on evidence. It is difficult to disagree with The Sunday Telegraph television guide6 when, in reviewing this first episode, it summed it up thus:
“Judged on this instalment, Walking With Cavemen is that rare beast – a factual programme without facts. Set alongside a series as accomplished and analytical as, say, Attenborough’s The Blue Planet, Winston’s planet of the apes is both tedious and trite. What does the BBC take us for – a load of monkeys?”
References
1. For a critique, see Garner, P. Walking With Beasts: a retrospective. Origins 2002; (33):16-19.
2. Reader, J. Whatever happened to Zinjanthropus? New Scientist 26 March 1981, p.802.
3. Stoler, P. Puzzling out man’s ascent. Time 7 November 1977, p.77.
4. Lubenow, M. Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils. Baker Books; 1992. pp.28-32.
5. Richmond, B.G. and Strait, D.S. Evidence that humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor. Nature 2000;404:382-385.
6. Programme of the day. The Sunday Telegraph TV & Radio 23-29 March 2003, p.43.
