Tue, 25 Oct
|Endless Forms Seminar Series
Seminar with Professor Bernard Wood
"Towards a more realistic interpretation of the human fossil record"


Time & Location
25 Oct 2022, 17:00 BST
Endless Forms Seminar Series
About the event
The majority of attempts to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the hominin clade
proceed as if the hominin fossil record is a precise, accurate, and comprehensive
record of human evolutionary history. In this contribution we review the various ways in
which the apparent scarcity of early hominins on the landscape means that the existing
hominin fossil record almost certainly falls short of this assumption, especially with
respect to taxic diversity, as well as the spatial and temporal distribution of known taxa.
We also suggest that interpretations of the hominin fossil record are particularly
affected by practices that likely violate the principles of reproducibility, as well as by
confirmation bias. The hominin fossil record should be seen for what it is; an
incomplete record of human evolutionary history that limits what should be said about
it. Generated narratives should be treated as heuristic devices, not as accurate and
comprehensive descriptions of past events.