Breaking News: Figures Represented In These Cartoons Not To Scale... And Not Accurate

A report in the journal Nature sheds some new light on the early evolution of hominids. The new research by famed paleontologist Meave Leakey in Kenya shows our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, calling into question the evolutionary relationship between Homo habilis and Homo erectus. Were they or were they not contemporaneous? Check out the article for the findings.

But that's not the news that interested me the most in the piece I read from the Associated Press. What really stunned me was the asinine lede,

Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution with its knuckle-dragging ape and briefcase-carrying man.

And the equally ridiculous conclusions,

Overall what it paints for human evolution is a chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us.

Ya think?

How long was Steve Gould saying this with every other breath and in writing since at least 1980? These march of progress, or MOP diagrams as he called them, were wholly misleading oversimplifications. The evolutionary development of our species was not a linear march to our current form, but rather a process of diversification of hominid species and subsequent pruning of lineages through extinction, with the present point in time, where we are the only extant hominid, being historically atypical.

That MOP diagrams persist is a long story that involves text book sales and simplification, human misconceptions of evolutionary progress, and of course overall scientific illiteracy. Despite this sudden epiphany from the news media, I wouldn't hold my breath that MOP cartoons will disappear. We're exquisitely visual primates, and these pictures convey not only information but also humor, hopes, (and fears).
















And this one is for Bora (the only MOP cartoon I can find that's arranged from right to left.)