ER1470 Reconsidered II

A bit over a year ago a poster by Dr. Timothy Bromage on the craniofacial development of the hominid ER 1470 received a lot of press because his reconstruction made the hominid look more ape-like. Bromage wasn’t the first to reconstruct ER 1470 like that – Alan Walker had reconstructed it differently to his colleague Richard Leakey along Australopithecine lines – but Bromage’s team were the first to use laser-scanning and 3-D manipulation of the skull to fit it according to known developmental principles. A surprise result was the small estimate of 526 cc for the brainpan’s volume versus the previous estimate of c.750 cc. Now a new paper by Bromage and colleagues estimates a volume closer to 700 cc, thus closing the discrepancy between the two.

When looking for this newer paper by Bromage, which he had said was forthcoming, I found an awful lot of Creationist propaganda using his work’s relatively tentative conclusions as some sort of definite “evidence” against concluding the species represented by ER 1470 is a human ancestor. But the affinities of a single skull is largely irrelevant to that question and the baseless propagandising should disgust any honest seeker of the truth.