Word: speciesism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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The baseball man. Once you forget the lines like "when you cut him, he bleeds tobacco juice," you realize that this rare species does exist--the professor in a grammar school game, the practical historian of the pastime.
Even before Johanson assembled Lucy's remaining bones, he could see that she had been bipedal: the clue was a telltale knee joint. In addition, Lucy's tiny skull suggested a brain too small to place her among previously discovered toolmaking hominids. At first, Johanson and his partner...
Johanson's announcement, however, left most colleagues puzzled. The bones have been around for more than four years now, long since dated by potassium-argon tests, and many anthropologists who have studied them are generally convinced that Lucy is an Australopithecus africanus, not some new species.
Also, the notion that man became bipedal in tandem with his brain growth is no longer widely held. (More likely, changing survival needs led him out of the jungle to the African savanna, where he stood to peer over tall grasses.) As for Johanson's announcing a "new" name...
Johanson and White's assertions have already been widely and uncritically reported in major U.S. dailies, and will be published formally this week in a review article in the respected magazine Science. But a backlash has also begun, and if the initial skepticism of some of his colleagues is...