28 THE MYSTERIOUS BIPED
mes impossible, to distinguise us from an early is likely to be bots can often arise over questions of identification from fragmentary remains—deciding, for instance, s a female Australopithecus boiseior a male homo habilis.
ittle to be certain about, scientists often o make assumptions based on ots found nearby, and ttle more t guesses. As Alan alker andPat Se tool discovery uremost often found nearby, you early ools ly madeby antelopes.
Perter typifies tary bundle of contradictionst rates and in different directions—time, er apeness. Some auties don’t believeegory at all. tattersall and z dismiss it as amere “ebasket species”—one into ly s.”
Even t species don’t agree on never came to anything.
Finally, but perure is a factor in all tists uraltendency to interpret finds in t most flatters tature. It is a rare paleontologistindeed to getexcited about. Or as Joatedly observes in t isremarkable en t interpretations of nes discoverer.”
All ts, of course, and nobody likes to argue more ts. “And of all ts per s Java Man —a book, it may be noted,t itself devotes long, o attacks on ticular thors’ former close colleague Donald Johanson. here is a smallsampling:
In our years of collaboration at titute unate, reputation for unpredictable and s, sometimes accompanied by tossing around of books orly to hand.
So, bearing in mind t ttle you can say about ory t bedisputed by someone some certainly whis:
For t 99.99999 percent