EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

How a Dumb Skull Spoke

The difference between my method of looking at art and the conventional one is, in essence, quite simple: I spot-the-same while most others spot-the-difference. I notice this all the time which is why a recent advance in paleontology also caught my attention. According to news reports, the discovery of a nearly-complete hominid skull 1.8 million years old has provided compelling evidence that all primordial peoples of the Homo genus stock belonged to just one species and not what they previously believed, three or more. That’s a revolution in paleontological thought as the Wall Street Journal reported: "[This] conclusion breaks with recent practice in the scholarly search for human origins. Typically, researchers discuss the differences between various human fossils, often assigning each new discovery to a separate species, and not grouping them by physical traits they had in common.”¹ They report that the skull’s discovery, while useful, could not have changed understanding on its own as long as scientists emphasized the differences. As in art, they first needed to switch to a paradigm based on discovering the similarities. Only then could their eyes make new sense of what they saw and change history.  

 

1. Robert Lee Hotz, "Skull Suggests Single Human Species Emerged From Africa, Not Several: Well-Preserved Find 1.8 Million Years Old Drastically Simplifies Evolutionary Picture", Wall Street Journal, Oct. 13th 2013, online at: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304384104579141600675336982?tesla=y