The latest popular book by the head of Wits University’s renowned palaeoanthropology unit contains so many mistakes it is destroying South Africa’s credibility in the field, say critics writing in the latest South African Journal of Science.
Lee Berger, head of palaeoanthropology at Wits, has also recently published a new theory about the age of Southern African hominids that has drawn his colleagues’ fire.
But his most recent book, The Official Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind, has led to some of the most intemperate language yet seen in the normally bone-dry peer-reviewed pages of scientific journals.
The book was the subject of a major row between Berger and Ron Clarke, his colleague and rival, soon after its release last year.
Berger’s government-approved guide was intended to serve as a high school textbook.
Berger’s previous book for the lay market, In the Footsteps of Eve, has also come in for heavy criticism.
Ironically, many of the central themes of both books have been turned on their head by his latest work on dating fossils, which was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in September.
Back in South Africa, five pieces in the latest issue of the Journal of Science blast Berger’s professional ability.
Tim White, one of the world’s leading palaeoanthropologists who is based at the University of California at Berkeley, said Berger’s book is full of basic factual errors. He also attacks Berger personally and stops just short of calling him incompetent.
Mistakes he identified in his review range from placing Olduvai Gorge in Kenya instead of Tanzania to a statement that Australopithecines are descended from chimpanzees, a claim White said even undergraduate students should know is wrong.
”The effect is damaging to our science and to all the institutions and people involved,” said White. ”The book’s contents epitomise the peril that palaeoanthropology faces in the new South Africa.
”Berger has rapidly positioned himself to facilitate the exploitation of South African resources by his network of overseas friends. In this sense he adopts a model of patronage, publicity and power that was employed for decades in East Africa and as a result of which Kenyan palaeoanthropology today is but a ghost of what it might have been.
”Berger’s notion of palaeoanthropological ‘education’ for the public has been demonstrated by two parallel, self-promoting popular books that masquerade as science.”
White said Berger ”reveals to the world that South African scientific and academic standards are dropping to the point where ambition, politics and access to money can substitute for scientific competence, thereby damaging the very core of ongoing research and jeopardising its future”.
Judy Maguire, a researcher at Wits, also wrote a scathing review. She said the book had ”the potential to blemish and undermine the image and credibility of its sponsors and endorsers, as well as that of the University of the Witwatersrand and the Cradle of Humankind itself, to say nothing of the quality of South African science reporting delivered for public consumption.”
Pippa Parker of Struik publishers acknowledges that the book has errors. ”We will rectify the errors in a new revised edition,” she said. ”But I believe that the unfortunate personality clashes between the scientists have fuelled the hype and criticism surrounding the book.”
Clarke and Tim Partridge, of the climatology research group at Wits, have been involved in dating the Sterkfontein hominids. Both contributed bleak assessments of Berger’s new dating theory in the same issue of the Journal of Science.
Clarke said the Berger team’s revised estimates of the age of fossils at Sterkfontein are based on unrealistic interpretations. He said that Berger and his team have never worked at the Sterkfontein site.
Berger’s new findings estimate that the famous Little Foot skeleton Clarke is excavating at Sterkfontein is younger than three million years and that an area of Sterkfontein that had been dated as between 2,4-million and 2,8-million years old is only between 1,5-million and 2,5-million years old.
The arguments about dates are important because they determine whether Australopithecine fossils like Little Foot are possible direct ancestors of modern humans. Berger’s dates imply that Little Foot is not a direct ancestor.
Berger said he is disappointed that South Africa’s pre-eminent science journal has published such personal attacks. ”I will be dealing with all the academic issues raised in the reviews and articles in a peer-reviewed academic journal,” he said.
”New finds are popping up regularly and the whole science of palaeoanthropology is changing. In new editions of In the Footsteps of Eve and other publications of mine the changes will be rewritten and reviewed,” he said.
”We are at a critical stage in examining South African palaeoanthropology history. It is important to put aside all these childish personal attacks and work together. We have to build bridges in the science world, not demolish them.”