Nebraska Man

This illustration of H. haroldcookii, by artist Amédée Forestier, was modeled on the Java Man.

Nebraska Man was a name applied by the popular press to Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, a putative species of ape. Hesperopithecus meant "ape of the western world," and it was heralded as the first higher primate of North America. Although it does not appear to be a deliberate hoax, this original classification proved to be a mistake.

It was originally described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1922, on the basis of a tooth that rancher and geologist Harold Cook found in Nebraska in 1917. An illustration of H. haroldcookii was done by artist Amédée Forestier, who modeled the drawing on the proportions of "Pithecanthropus" (now Homo erectus), the "Java ape-man," for the Illustrated London News. Osborn was not impressed with the illustration, calling it: "a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate."

Restoration of what Prosthennops may have looked like in life

Further field work on the site in 1925 revealed that the tooth was incorrectly identified. Other parts of the skeleton were also found. According to these newly discovered pieces, the tooth belonged neither to a man nor to an ape, but to a fossil of an extinct genus of peccary called Prosthennops, and its identification as an ape was retracted in the journal Science in 1927.^[1]

Although the identity of H. haroldcookii did not achieve general acceptance in the scientific community,^[2] and although the species was retracted a decade after its discovery, critics of evolution have promoted this episode as an example of the many scientific errors that can ultimately undermine the credibility of how paleontology and hominid evolution theories are crafted, and how such information is peer reviewed or accepted as mainstream knowledge. The fact that the proposal of this species was eventually rejected by the scientific community as being obviously flawed does, however, work in favor of the scientific method, which constantly seeks to critique and validate its theories, and to remove those that do not stand up to evidence.

References

1. ^ Gregory, W.K. (1927). "Hesperopithecus apparently not an ape nor a man". Science 66 (1720): 579–81. doi:10.1126/science.66.1720.579. PMID 17810385. 
2. ^ Wolf, J.; Mellett, J.S. (1985). "The role of "Nebraska man" in the creation-evolution debate". Creation/Evolution (National Center for Science Education) 16: 31–43. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/wolfmellett.html. Retrieved 10 October 2009. 

Further reading

• Gould S.J. (1991): An essay on a pig roast. In Bully for brontosaurus. (pp. 432-47). New York: W.W.Norton ISBN 0-393-30857-X
• Brian Regal. Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).

External links

• Nebraska Man at the TalkOrigins Archive