In this last week’s issue of Science, researchers present two remarkably complete and well-preserved partial skeletons of a species called Australopithecus sediba discovered 3 years ago in a South African cave. The new report extended a flurry of spinning speculations on the possible human “missing link” status of A. sediba.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an article entitled “Examining Ancient Fossils for Clues to Human Origins”. The Wall Street Journal chimed in with “Fossil Trove Sheds Light on a Stage of Evolution”. The Boston Globe speculated with the title “Skeleton could be human relative”; TIME with “Rethinking Human Origins: Fossils Reveal a New Ancestor on the Family Tree”.

The Los Angeles Times hinted of an issue with the discovery with the title “Hominid fossils may shake up the human family tree”. Even the National Geographic response was guarded, weighing in with “Human Ancestor May Put Twist in Origin Story, New Studies Say”.

Ironically, the discovery is raising more evolutionary questions than answers. In fact, despite the media hype, the report in Science points out that only a “Few other researchers are convinced that A. sediba was a direct ancestor of humans.” In other words, contrary to the contention that A. sediba is a human ancestor.

The flurry can be traced back to August 15, 2008 when South African paleoanthropologist Lee Berger’s nine-year-old son, Matthew, stumbled upon a fossilized bone while exploring the hills north of Johannesburg on the Malapa Nature Reserve.

“Sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died”, Matthew later recalling the 2008 event. The fossil belonged to a 4 foot 2 inch male, the skull of which was discovered later in March 2009 by Berger’s team.

In 2010 the skull along with more skeletal reamins were initially described in two papers in the journal Science by Lee R. Berger and colleagues. Sediba means “natural spring”−presuming to be the spring from which humans evolved. According to Berger, “They do represent a model that could lead to the genus Homo”. In total, 220 bones belonging to five individuals have now been recovered in South Africa, an area touted as the “Cradle of Humankind”, conforming to the still controversial “out of Africa” theory of evolution.

A. sediba has since been affectionately re-named as Karabo. The name was selected over 15,000 other South African entry submissions during a naming competition sponsored by Standard Bank and the Palaeontological Scientific (PAST) in association with Wits University. In Setswana, Karabo means “answer”.

At issue, though, what “answer” does A. sediba bring to the table? For researcher Kristian Carlson at the University of Witwatersrand,  “Whether or not it’s on the same lineage as leading to Homo, I think there are interesting questions and implications.” ”Questions” and “implications”, however, are not to be confused with “answers”. For Philip Rightmire of  Harvard University, “Evolution is [now] more convoluted than we thought.” Ironically, Matthew’s finding, rather than having an “answer” to the question of human evolution, applies an even greater centrifugal forces on the current models of human evolution.

Paleontologists Timothy White of the University of California, Berkley, and Ronald Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Institute for Human Evolution in Germany in an accompanying news article published in Science refutes Berger’s claim that A. sediba represents a transitional species on the way up.

In the wake of the article this week in Science, anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University noted, “Just because it shares a bit of anatomical morphology with Homo does not mean it is Homo or ancestral to Homo.”

Writing in The Telegraph (UK), science writer Tom Chivers entitled his article “Australopithecus sediba: can we stop calling it a ‘missing link?” concluding “What it is not, however, is a ‘missing link’.”

 A. sediba was soon recognized as a new species and classified with the australopithecines. The most famous member of this group is Australopithecus afarensis, better known as Lucy discovered in Ethiopia in November 1974 by Tom Gray and Donald Johanson.

In analyzing the skeletal features of Lucy, Charles E. Oxnard concluded in 1984 in his book The Order of Man that it “is now being recognized widely that the australopithecines are not structurally … similar to humans.”

In the journal publication Natural History, Stephen Gould, in 1986, took the same stand as Oxford against the human ancestry of A. afarensis: “In short, he [Oxnard] sees Australopithecines as uniquely different from apes and humans, not as imperfect people on the way up.” Later in 1987 in Natural History, Stephen Gould acknowledged that problems with the fossil evidence for human evolution overwhelm any cohesive theory since “we do not know which branch on the copious bush of apes budded off the twig that led to our lineage … no fossil evidence exists at all.”

Ann Gibbons published in the journal Science in 1996 how convoluted the evidence for human evolution has become: “The story of human evolution has lately become as complicated as a Tolstoy novel.”

“They’re going to have to make a stronger case,” said paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson of Arizona State University, who discovered Lucy. Johanson, a friend of Berger’s who has seen the fossils, said the only solution would be to look for more evidence. “I know this is a terrible thing to say,” he said. “But we’d all like to [understand] the shape of the [human family] tree and the positions on the tree — and we really do need more fossils.”
In the 1976 Presidential Address at the Geological Association, D. V. Ager dismayed of the fossil record, and went on the record to say, “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student … have now been ‘debunked.’”

The fossil record problem continues to be a question mark−not an answer, not a Karabo. In The Panda’s Thumb, evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Gould, feeling the agony noted that in reality, the “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.”

Last week’s spinning the Australopithecus sediba saga underscores the desperation of the evolution industry to use even Matthew Berger’s inconclusive A. sediba fossil evidence to prove evolution as “a fact”, especially since the topic of evolution has entered center stage in the 2012 Presidential campaign. The fact is, the emperor indeed has no clothes.

Little did Matthew Berger know how his excitement would re-ignite evolution’s primary problem−the lack of fossil record evidence.

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