Human evolution

Piltdown was a hoax that went wrong.

From a study of the femur and the skull it follows with certainty that this fossil cannot be classified as simian … And as with the skull, so also with the femur, the differences that separate Pithecanthropus from man are less than those distinguishing it from the highest anthropoid … Although far advanced in the process of differentiation, this Pleistocene form had not yet attained to the human type. Pithecanthropus erectus is the transition form between man and the anthropoids which the laws of evolution teach us must have existed. He is the ancestor of man.
— Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois (1858 – 1940), quoted in Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman, The Neandertals, Vintage 1994, 140.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
— Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), An Essay on Man.

There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape, self-named Homo sapiens.
— Desmond Morris (1928 – ), The Naked Ape.

Descended from the apes? My dear, we will hope it is not true. But if it is, let us pray that it may not become generally known.
— Alleged to have been said by the wife of a canon of Worcester Cathedral.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
— Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 – 1910). Following the Equator.

Nevertheless an unexpected hindrance has arisen. Dr. Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum, using the fluorine dating method (fluorine content of a fossil bone increases with age), has shown that the Piltdown skull, instead of being an early ‘dawn man’, probably belongs to the third interglacial.
— Loren C. Eiseley (1907 – 1977), ‘The Antiquity of Modern Man’, Scientific American Reader (1953), 462.

But the most remarkable implement, fashioned in all probability by Eoanthropus himself, is a piece of bone which has been taken from the femur of some ancient species of elephant — not the mammoth, but a larger elephant, probably E. antiquus. It is a more or less flat slab, sixteen inches long by four inches wide and one to two inches thick. It is truncated at the base by transverse cuts which have been achieved with difficulty and at the other it is rudely cut into a sort of wedge. Its purpose is unknown, but, as Prof. Breuil remarks, the man who made it must have been accustomed to working in wood. Bone implements are not known elsewhere before the Mousterian period and do not become common until much later.

But the Piltdown bone is sui generis, no other Palaeolithic age has produced anything like it.
— W. J. Sollas (1849 – 1936), Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives, London: Macmillan, 1924. The object in question is the ‘Piltdown cricket bat’.

Coolidge is a better example of evolution than either Bryan or Darrow, for he knows when not to talk, which is the biggest asset the monkey possesses over the human.
— Will Rogers (1879 – 1935)

There is a strange power in bog water which prevents decay. Bodies have been found which must have lain in bogs for more than a thousand years, but which, though admittedly somewhat shrunken and brown, are in other respects unchanged.
— Danish almanac of 1837, quoted by Peter V. Glob (1911 – 1985), The Bog People.

POOH-BAH: You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable.
— W. S. Gilbert (1836 – 1911), The Mikado, Act I.

There once was a brainy baboon,
Who always breathed down a bassoon,
            For he said, ‘It appears
            That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune’.
— Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 – 1944), New Pathways in Science.  

You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.