Earlier this week, I listened to a National Public Radio report by correspondent Jerome Socolovsky on the discovery of early hominid fossils in Spain. According to Socolovsky’s report, the first fossil discovered at the site, a cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca hills north of Madrid, was a “1.2 million-year-old jawbone fragment from a species known as Homo antecessor,” making it the oldest hominid fossil found to date in western Europe. Recent discoveries include what seems to be a mass grave containing the remains of 28 individuals, dating back “at least half a million years.”
I knew that Neanderthals lived in Europe some 200,000 years ago, but didn’t know that early hominids lived anywhere outside of Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika, or that they managed to migrate so far to the north. I was fascinated.
It wasn’t until two or three hours later that the really fascinating part of Socolovsky’s report hit me . . . the part of the report that wasn’t there. Because the report, which you can read in its entirety by following the link at the beginning of this entry, was straight science. Early hominid fossils have been found in what is now Spain, they have been dated, and they are from 1.2 million to 500,000 years old.
What wasn’t there? The now-obligatory Fair & Balanced™ evening of the scales. Socolovsky interviewed scientists but not one single “young earth” creationist. When’s the last time you heard a science report on any radio or television network, let alone NPR, without the loud and distracting presence of some denialist or paid industry lobbyist, shouting down the evidence with appeals to ignorance and superstition?
Frankly, given NPR’s record over the past decade, I think Jerome Socolovsky intentionally slipped this report past NPR’s corporate overlords. Had they caught it in time, this woman would have been given equal time:
But before I get all teary-eyed over one NPR correspondent’s return to serious and responsible reporting, there is this, from no less a person than Paul Krugman:
I was tentatively scheduled to be on a broadcast dealing with — well, I won’t embarrass them. But first they had to find someone to take the opposite view. And it turned out that they couldn’t — which led to canceling the whole segment.
It really makes you think. How did we manage to get to the Moon and back? We’d never be able to pull something like that off today . . . mobs carrying pitchforks and torches would march on Cape Kennedy.
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Shades of Bishop Usher who declared, that through a study of Scripture, the earth was created on the morning of October 21, 4004 B.C. at 9 am. This woman obviously went to Sunday School and all intellectual development stopped there, at approximately the age of six. However, it is worth noting that civilization started to emerge about 6000 years ago when women invented agriculture. So there, we can blame it all on our mothers.
I just learned the world is going to end sometime in 2012, so I guess the whole thing is academic.