I Expected Better!

There was a paper published within the last few days makes the claim that anthropoid
primates diversified initially in Asia and then moved into Africa from there instead of the other way around (Jaeger et al., 2010). I don't really feel the ability to comment on this since monkeys, as well as the Eocene, are outside of my area of expertise. No, I wanted to compare the way two different blog posts on this same paper covered this paper, I am going to focus mainly on the headlines because this is where the two articles are the most different.

This first headline says this:

Instead Of Originating In Africa, Human Ancestors Colonized There From Asia, Says Study

This headline, from here, seems to imply that early relatives to humans, such as the hominids (yes I know I am pushing this back to the great apes), evolved in Asia. While this headline is not incorrect but perception is the key. My initial thought when I saw this was that it was about a paper that was going to claim that humans evolved in Asia and moved to Africa where we found them later. If I can make this mistake and I am a scientist who, mostly, understands human evolution imagine what a non-scientist would think. Part of what makes this worse is probably the fact that this post is part of a blogging community known as Scientific Blogging.

The other headline/article title reads:

Where did all these monkeys come from? – Fossil teeth may hint at an Asian origin for anthropoid primates

This title, from this article, leaves very little to the imagination, and if you want a good summary of the paper I recommend this article, and doesn't confuse you into thinking that humans evolved in Asia and then migrated to Africa. This particular article was written by Brian Switek who maybe one of the best science bloggers out there. I follow both of his blogs Laelaps and Dinosaur Tracking, and now the author of Written in Stone, and if you want to keep up on paleontology related papers I highly recommend both of them.

Ironically enough the Laelaps article ended like this:

Given how often news about fossil primates gets hyped and framed with “missing link” imagery, it is also worth considering how this story has hit the headlines. [...] Nevertheless, the Daily Mail gets off to a terribly start by pulling out that old bit of bullshit boilerplate “The human family tree may have to be rewritten” in the first line of their coverage before confusing themselves by trying to tie this discovery to the later origin of hominins over 30 million years later. In contrast, Dan Vergano of USA Today presents the story well, as does Ann Gibbons at Science NOW and Ewen Callaway at the Nature “Great Beyond” blog. For once, I don’t have very much to complain about!

You win some, you lose some I guess.

Reference

Jaeger, J., Beard, K., Chaimanee, Y., Salem, M., Benammi, M., Hlal, O., Coster, P., Bilal, A., Duringer, P., Schuster, M., Valentin, X., Marandat, B., Marivaux, L., Métais, E., Hammuda, O., & Brunet, M. (2010). Late middle Eocene epoch of Libya yields earliest known radiation of African anthropoids Nature, 467 (7319), 1095-1098 DOI: 10.1038/nature09425