Part 8:5F Fossilised evidence of our species’ cooperative past has also been dismissed and then ignored by mechanistic science

Yes, just as the evidence provided by bonobos of our species’ cooperative past has been denied by mechanistic science—first by claiming that our ancestors behaved competitively and aggressively ‘like most ape species’, and, when bonobos clearly didn’t fit that model, by simply ignoring the anomaly of bonobos altogether—the fossilised evidence of our cooperative past has also been dismissed as irrelevant and, when that strategy became untenable, it too was simply ignored.

For instance, it was stated in Part 8:4E that the fossil record reveals that our ape ancestors had small canine teeth. Although it was explained there that the only accountable explanation for the reduction in canine size in our ape ancestors is that it was caused by female sexual selection against male mating aggression—that small canines are ‘indicative of minimal social aggression’—mechanistic scientists initially tried to avoid the implications of these small canines by maintaining that they were only a recent development, and that the fossil record would inevitably provide evidence of an aggressive heritage. For example, in 1915 it was said, ‘That we should discover such a race [a human race in which the canine teeth were pointed, projecting, and shaped as in anthropoid apes], sooner or later, has been an article of faith in the anthropologist’s creed ever since Darwin’s time’ (Sir Arthur Keith, The Antiquity of Man, 1925, p.459 of 519). However, as subsequent fossil discoveries pushed back, by millions of years, the age at which our ape ancestors still had small canines it became increasingly impossible to maintain this ‘article of faith’ of an aggressive ‘human race’. As noted in Part 8:4E, other attempts to account for our ancestors’ canine reduction that did not cite a reduction in aggression have also been rendered untenable by these ongoing discoveries, such as by what we now know of their diet.

So, through the recent discoveries of Ardipithecus, Orrorin, and the 7 million year old Sahelanthropus, and the conclusive evidence they provide of our species’ cooperative heritage, it appears that human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic scientists have been cornered into simply ignoring this evidence. For example, Richard Wrangham published the Chimpanzee Violence Hypothesis in 1999, and yet failed to mention the discovery, only 7 years earlier, of Ardipithecus—a find that had confirmed the existence of small canines at least 4.4 million years ago. Similarly, E.O. Wilson’s attempt in his 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth to portray war as a ‘universal and eternal’ presence in human history (a claim that was repudiated in Part 4:12I), makes no mention of the fact that small canines characterise our ape ancestors, despite Wilson discussing both Australopithecus and Ardipithecus in his book. In 2009 the popular science magazine Scientific American (a subsidiary of the leading journal Nature) failed to make a single reference to a suite of papers—which had been some 15 years in the making—on Ardipithecus ramidus that had been published in a 2009 special edition of Science, ‘the most extensive special issue of Science since Apollo 11’ (Tim D. White, Letters, Scientific American, 2010, Vol.302, No.1). As Tim White, team leader of the Ardipithecus researchers, asked, ‘How and why did the Scientific American editorial miss that story?’ (ibid). It is as if the fossil evidence of a cooperative past has become too strong to refute but the implications too daunting to acknowledge, rendering the majority of mechanistic scientists speechless. While a handful of scientists have broken the silence since the Ardipithecus discoveries were published, predictably most have done so in order to deny their cooperative implications on the only grounds left, which is by arguing that Ardipithecus, Orrorin and Sahelanthropus are not part of the human lineage, despite all the evidence indicating that they are.

Yes, mechanistic science’s strategies for dealing with the fossil record’s evidence of a cooperative past have followed a pattern similar to that which they employed to deal with the bonobos—first denounce the evidence as irrelevant on the false basis that our past is aggressive, and, when that position becomes untenable, simply ignore the evidence.

A further point of significance, and one that was also raised in Part 8:4E, is that the fossil record, particularly the 1992 discovery of Ardipithecus, clearly shows the physical and behavioural similarities between our pre-australopithecine ape ancestors and bonobos. But if bonobos themselves needed to be ignored, it follows that any evidence that links our ancestors to them will be treated the same way—as indeed it has. As Frans de Waal explains in his 2013 book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, ‘a scientist on the Ardi [Ardipithecus] team…could think only of chimps as a comparison…​[despite] The bonobo’s body proportions—its long legs and narrow shoulders—seem[ing] to perfectly fit the descriptions of Ardi, as do its relatively small canines. Why was the bonobo overlooked?’ (pp.60-61 of 289).