Professor Lee Berger and colleague John Hawks have hit back at their detractors.
Eleven days after he announced the discovery of a new species of human relative, Homo naledi, the scientific world appears to be ganging up against Berger.
Berger – an acclaimed palaeontologist at the University of the Witwatersrand – hit back at what he said was media grandstanding by three scientists who have recently criticised the description of Homo naledi as a new genus.
Berger and his team of 60 scientists and cavers pieced together 1 500 fossil fragments which together made up an assemblage of 15 individuals found in a remote cave system at the Cradle of Humankind.
“It isn’t bothering me at all… it’s normal scientific discourse.
“Once they come and look at the fossils, look at our measurements, then we can have a scientific argument,” Berger stated yesterday.
Berger took to Twitter yesterday, saying reporters were quoting “people who had not bothered to read the papers or look at the fossils of #homonaledi”.
He referred the public to read a blog written by Hawks on why naledi was in fact a new species.
One of Berger’s detractors, Professor Tim White, argued that the fossils were of the well-known Homo erectus genus.
“These are small, primitive H. erectus, whatever the date turns out to be,” White said.
White went on to say that of the 80-plus traits listed in the e-LIFE supplemental material, “only a small fraction of them are even claimed to differentiate those fossils from earlier described H. erectus, and that fraction of characters is known to vary among members of the same species of both H. erectus and H. sapiens”.
White said Homo naledi was an example of “artificial species inflation in palaeontology”.