Science and fantasy
Our ancestors may have been cannibals, but not only that; they may have swallowed the Neanderthals, not just have eradicated them, but literally have eaten them up!
How do we know? Well, we don't know exactly, of course. To be more specific, it has been deduced from a Neanderthal jaw bone with parallel cut marks, which could have been carved into it when the flesh was scratched from the bone with a sharp instrument. And that's all. The rest is imagination. Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, who published the findings told the British Guardian newspaper "Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them."
Is that still science or is it really fantasy? It is a good question; do scientists need to enhance their findings with imaginative speculation in order to get more public interest? Some seem to believe so, at least.
Take the example of Ida, the monkey. She would never have heard that name, of course, as it was given to her nearly 47 million years after her death. Ida is no doubt extraordinarily well preserved, and this alone makes the fossil important. But if it really is a missing link in the ancestry of Homo sapiens, it is not as clear as the website suggests.
These examples highlight a recent unhealthy development in science; discoveries and inventions are not presented as what they are, but what they could mean, or perhaps could mean, or in the extreme case might possibly mean. In newspaper reports these intricate differences are not always properly clarified. An article may instead read like this:
Dr. Strangeman from Backwood s University has recently discovered a dinosaur skull with what he believes are burn marks around the nostrils. These prove he says, that some dinosaurs could indeed spit fire and were the prototypes of the mythological dragons. Dr. Sceptic from Ivy University does not agree: “This is an exciting theory. But there is a lot of evidence to the contrary as well. We need more hard facts before we can even discuss this idea”.
What would the average reader remember? Probably only the more outlandish and sensational theory. Scientists may thus be tempted to enhance the attractiveness of their findings by inventing ever more strange theories and feeding them to the public. The worst possible effect would be a competition for the interest of the general public by cooking up overly dramatic press releases and comments.
Science needs funding and public interest may help. On the other hand, if science is perceived as a sequence of sensational headlines, its credibility will suffer, and the fundraising will get more difficult instead of easier. Writing dramatic fiction may of course be easier than describing real findings and their implications in plain language. It may also reflect the opinion of some researchers who think that laymen wouldn't understand the significance of their work anyway, and need to be fed simple worst/best case scenarios (although they would never say that aloud, of course). Quite a number of scientists have put their reputations at stake because they succumbed to the temptation of speculating wildly about their findings in order to raise more public interest. Many of them were not aware, that a ten minute TV interview will be edited afterwards and cut down into a 10 second slot in the final version. Interviewers will tend to select the most dramatic statements, of course, which may not perfectly reflect the scientist's opinion.
In my opinion, scientists should refrain from publishing any speculation above that which they would also write into their peer reviewed papers. It definitely pays to stay with the truth and explain the real scientific significance of a finding in plain words. There is enough fascination in the discoveries or inventions themselves! If there isn't, they why bother with a press release at all.
I’m not saying that writing popular science texts is especially easy, but most universities have public relations departments for exactly this task. Well explained scientific advances definitely make a good story. Inflating them with speculation doesn't help anybody, neither the scientific community nor the general public.
Concerning the first example you cited, as I do not know the mentioned article and as I am by no means an expert in anthropology or paleontology, or, for that matter, forensic medicine, I need to ask, just for my understanding:
Is the data basis on which that scientist arrived at his statement really that slender?
I wager a wild guess in the dark, just putting together a scenario that may or may not be applicable here:
[Conjecture]
They found remains of Neanderthal bones. The bones showed scratch marks that are inconsistent with incisions made by the teeth of predatory animals, but consistent with man-made tool marks found on the bones of animals that are known to have been hunted by ancient homo sapiens, found in deposits near homo sapiens settlements. Such marks were not found on bones in similar deposits near Neanderthal settlements, indicating that Neanderthal man did not use this type of tool or did not peel meat of the bones of hunted animals in this fashion.
Based on these previous observations, it is surmised that the current find of scratch marks on Neanderthal jawbones indicates that the individual to which the bone belonged fell prey to one or several homo sapiens, who treated him as they would have "processed" a hunted animal. In other words, they used the neanderthal victim's flesh as food.
[End of conjecture]
I do not know whether this was the line of reasoning followed by the authors of the paper. perhaps some assumptions in my conjecture are wrong.
What I am getting at is that there may be a significant body of pre-existing knowledge that influences the interpretation of a specific observation. Just as the interpretation of the specific jaw bone find may have been influenced by existing knowledge of homo sapiens vs. Neanderthal hunting habits.
The case at hand may not be so simple and clear-cut as that of simply basing a theory on one single find - which indeed, there I agree, would be far-fetched.
@Michael
Even if your scenario is basically correct, and the Neanderthal fell at the hands of Homo sapiens, I can think of a dozen other reasons for the animosity between the two. The most parsimonuous would be a tribal conflict, I guess. To assume that the former was prey is really a wild guess.
Now if we would discover that the Neanderthal had been seasoned... ;-)
I wasn't trying to argue in favor of the proposed theory of cannibalism. Nor was I trying to disprove it. I freely admit I know nothing about the topic at hand, so I am forced to apply massive conjecture.
(I feel that conjecture is OK, even in the scientific process, as long as it is clearly stated to be conjecture and there is not risk of confusion with proven theory)
Now, I may be completely off track here, but I assume that the marks left on bones from which the flesh was removed with tools, as a hunter does with his prey, are different from fractures or incisions inflicted during an assault or attack.
Someone more conversant than I am with forensic medicine should correct me on this.
Assuming that such a distinction is feasible and that differences are discernible, my feeling is that it is well within the limits of due scientific process to draw conclusions and to make comparisons with other deposits of animal bones near ancient human settlements.
I simply wanted to point out that there may be a bit more involved than simply a lot of conjecture based only on one bone.
@Michael
Now you made me look that up. John Hawks wrote about it at his weblog. It turns out that you were absolutely right. The jaw had cutmarks, similar to those found on faunal remains. For that, I bow to you ;-). John also notes that
Some kind of mortuary practice is probably just as consistent with the scanty information we have as cannibalism.
So I was a right too. *whew*
I don't think the issue is being right or being wrong. I liberally peppered my statement with caveats about my ignorance on the topic at hand, and anyway, had nothing to offer but conjecture. So being wrong was definitely an option for me, and not one that would have made me felt ashamed. A conjecture is there for being proved or disproved, either is acceptable.
I merely brought this up because in subjects that I do know about, i.e., astronomy, it is, for better or for worse, necessary to make more or less educated guess based on very scant data.
Case in point: Let's say that a new extrasolar planet was found. The most common way of finding such planets is by detecting very minute oscillations in the frequency of the light emitted by the star the planet is revolving about. The gravitational attraction due to the mass of the planet, much smaller than that of the star, makes the star move very slightly in the direction of the planet so it actually wobbles about the common center of mass of star and planet.
This wobble is detectable via a minute *apparent* variation in the frequency of the starlight, or rather, a minute Doppler shift. The star appears to be slightlier redder, then slightly bluer. The only plausible explanation for such a variation, especially one with a short period, is the effect of a planet.
From the period of the orbit, if one has an idea of the mass of the star, one can deduce how far from the start it revolvves, and from the amplitude of the variation, one can deduce its mass, of course with (sometimes significant) error margins.
So far, so good. All solid science. There isn't much data, but there is nothing that can be done about that, at least in the majority of cases.
Now you will find that when the event is presented, the scientist will make lots of added references to how similar this new exoplanet might be to the Earth, what the temperatures on the surface might be, whether he might have an atmosphere, whether there can be liquid water, whether there can be life.
Hm. All of that taken just out of nothing more than a measured squiggle in the frequency?
Well, yes, up to a point. One knows a lot more, of course. From the brightness and the spectral type of the star, one can deduce its mass and size quite accurately. And of course there are other cases where the exoplanet was observed also by other, independent methos, so you can compare the current measurements with reference cases. So in fact there is more than just a squiggle on a frequency plot to draw from.
That said - another thing you do find is that suddenly, nobody talks about the error margins I mentioned. As if it were all cut and dried. And that certainly goes too far, this is where I agree with the gist of the article, namely that often the line between fact and fantasy is transgressed.
But I also have to mention something else - and this I know from multiple, personal, bitter experience. What an expert tells a journaist and what a journalist then goes and write can be two very distinct matters. Cannbalism is a popular, sure-fire topic, certain to be reported, sometimes with lurid additins that the expert never said. But burial rites? Nah, boring stuff, nobody wants to read that. And presto, the printed press article has a slant that doesn't represent what was actually said or written or implied by the researcher.
I am not saying that this was the way it turned out here - I don't know this case - but I know that this happens, not quite commonly. It's something I try to keep in mind when judging media reports about scientific findings.