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COMMENTARY

Is Paleoanthropology Science? Naming NewFossils and Control of Access to ThemIAN TATTERSALL* AND JEFFREY H. SCHWARTZ

Progress in paleoanthropology is impeded when new fossil materials are published but unavailable for comparativestudy, as is too often the case. In this commentary, we review the stages of description and analysis that new fossilsmust undergo and conclude that it is disingenuous to argue that fossils have not been properly published whendescriptions and new names formulated in accordance with the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature haveappeared in leading scientic journals. Once such names and descriptions have been published, it is imperative thatthe original fossils concerned be available to the scientic community for comparative analysis, for by the very natureof science, no statement about such fossils, however carefully prepared by the original describers (or anyone else),can be regarded as denitive. Science is a system of provisional knowledge that constantly requires re-examinationand testing. It cannot function as a system in which assertions have to be left unchallenged for want of free accessto the primary data. Anat Rec (New Anat) 269:239241, 2002. 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

KEY WORDS: fossils; paleoanthropology; comparative anatomy; evolution; morphology; systematics

A recent News Focus article inScience (Gibbons, 2002) has againbrought to the forefront an importantand contentious matter for all inter-

ested in comparative morphology andhuman and vertebrate evolution. Thematter in question is the crucial one of access by scientists to published typeand other specimens belonging to fos-sil hominid and other species. And be-cause the difculties for the progressof science that this issue raises wereoriginally addressed in the pages of The New Anatomist by Weber (2001),it seems worthwhile to attempt toclarify some of the issues that readersmay have found a little hazy in theScience report.

Paleoanthropology is a comparativescience that depends on fossil speci-mens, all of which are individuallyunique. Fossils representing the same

species are frequently distributedamong several institutions around theworld, and all must, ideally, be seenby researchers working on the groupsto which they belong. In beginningthis commentary, it may thus beworthwhile to review the sequence of events involved as new material entersthe arena of scientic debate.

New fossils are found by individualsor eld teams and are deposited inmuseum or equivalent collections. Tobecome part of the scientic database,

they have to be identied to speciesand they have to be described in arecognized vehicle of publication. If they are believed to represent a previ-ously unidentied species, they addi-tionally have to be formally named.Also standard practice at this stage isa preliminary interpretation of thematerials phylogenetic signicance.However, such interpretation by thedescribers merely introduces an ongo-ing process that will continue inde-nitely, and will invariably involvemany other systematists in the eld.

All of this may seem pretty straight-forward, but in practice, complica-tions have nonetheless arisen over sci-entic access to published fossils,

especially those ascribed to hominidspecies.

Description of fossils is usually a rel-atively uncomplicated process, even if it is not based on a standard formula.Naming of new species has to be donefollowing rules laid down in the Inter-national Code of Zoological Nomencla-ture (ICZN, 1999). This documentspecies minimum standards which,if met, make the new name ofcialunder international agreement. Oneof the requirements, in addition to a

list of distinguishing features, is thedesignation of a type specimen (ho-lotype), which will be the name-bearer for the species. A crucial factoris the scientic accessibility of suchspecimens, for all specimens that areallocated to a particular species haveto be compared with the holotype of that species to conrm their specicidentity. For this reason, the Codespecies procedures for replacingtypes in the case of their nonavailabil-ity for study.

It naturally takes a certain amount

Dr. Tattersall is Curator in the Divisionof Anthropology, the American Museumof Natural History, New York, New York.Dr. Schwartz is in the Departments of Anthropology and History and Philoso-phy of Science, University of Pittsburgh,Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.*Correspondence to: Ian Tattersall, Di-vision of Anthropology, the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, New York,NY 10024. E-mail: iant@amnh.org

DOI 10.1002/ar.10187Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com).

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2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

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of time to describe a new fossil, todetermine its af nities, and to publishit. During this period, it is generallyagreed that the nders of the materialin question have the right to exclusiveaccess. Once the publication has ap-peared, however, the specimen is inthe public domain. It has entered thescienti c database and can no longerbe ignored by other scientists whorequire direct access to it to test theoriginal describers claims for it, or tocompare their own specimens with itto determine whether or not all belongto the same taxon. Nonetheless, thereis a growing tendency for some ndersnot to permit access even after thiscrucial rite de passage . In such cases,the usual claim recently has been thatthe initial publications, even when

prepared in accord with the dictates of the Code and published in major vehi-cles such as Nature and Science , merelyconstitute announcements (Gibbons,2002; B. Asfaw, personal communica-tion). Publication, it is disingenuouslycontended, occurs only with the ap-pearance of a long interpretive mono-graph.

Very occasionally, such a mono-graph appears within a few years of the original publication; but as com-monly, this process takes decades, if indeed it is ever completed. LouisLeakey s Homo habilis type materialswere monographed only some 30years after their discovery (Tobias,1991), while the important craniafrom Forbes Quarry and Steinheimhave still not been monographed, re-spectively, 150 and 69 years after theirdiscoveries. Among more recently dis-covered fossils, several new hominidspecies legally published as early as1994 still remain off-limits to re-searchers not belonging to the de-scribing cliques. This has potentially

harmful consequences, for, if not rap-idly subjected to informed scrutiny,the initial describers interpretation of the specimens signi cance tends au-tomatically to become establishedwisdom in the eld. In this way, un-tested notions readily become incor-porated into textbooks, the secondaryliterature, and the vast reaches of thepopular media, without any consider-ation of alternative interpretations. Asthings too often are, alternative inter-pretations are dif cult or impossibleto formulate, because even casts (poor

substitutes for the originals in anyevent) are rarely available and, asmost readers of this journal wellknow, photographs of specimens pub-lished in Nature or Science tend to beso small and lacking in contrast thatmuch useful information is obscured.

Because of comments she had re-ceived from the leader of one of thesedescribing cliques to the effect that hehad assembled the best possible teamto study one set of fossils concerned(and thus by implication that it wasunnecessary for others to see them),the author of the Science report askedus if it really mattered whether onlythe describers and their cronies sawthe type specimens of new species atrst-hand. And while on the surfacethis question might seem to be per-

fectly reasonable, the appropriate re-sponse to it requires understandinghow science works. Science is not a

system of absolutes. A minimal de-scription of a specimen will certainlyserve to make it a legal holotype, but itis not a statement for the ages. Thepractice of science is a dynamic, self-correcting process, constantly testing(and discarding) ideas, rather thanseeking to engrave them in stone.

Even what appear to be observa-

tions and plain descriptions are con-ditioned by hypotheses and expecta-tions. For example, Tim White (whowas, like us, interviewed for the Sci- ence report) was clearly a receptivestudent of Milford Wolpoff at a timewhen the latter was the leading advo-cate of the single-species hypothesis of human evolution. According to thishypothesis, there never was and onecological principle could never havebeen more than one species of hom-inid on Earth at any one time. Accord-ingly, White is an even rmer believer

than his teacher in chronospecies (White, 2002), the notion wherebyspecies are no more than ephemeraland arbitrarily delimited segments of evolving lineages. This outlook pro-duces an entirely different picture of human evolution and of the signi -cance of particular fossils than theone that emerges from the growingawareness that species are individu-ated entities and that hominid historyhas been a matter of diversity and evo-lutionary experimentation. We do notwish to argue here the relative meritsof these two evolutionary models. Wemerely wish to point out that this dif-ference of mindset leaves its markeven at the level of basic description,let alone that of analysis, and that nosingle exegesis of a fossil s form and

signi cance will ever be de nitive.Science itself ourishes on diversity,and the attempt to eliminate diversityof ideas and interpretation only re-dounds to the profound disadvantageof the scienti c enterprise.

What is more, every branch of sci-ence is a corporate enterprise involvingthe activities of very many individuals.In paleontology, no one individual orgroup has found, or controls, all of thefossils necessary to carry out a particu-lar research project. Everyone requiresaccess to fossils in the control of othersto carry out such research, and the fos-sils any individual nds will never bemore than a fractional part of all thefossils he or she will ever study. Mutualrecognition of this fact among paleon-tologists is crucial; and although no-body should ever disparage the effortsof those who undergo considerable dis-comfort and even hardship to nd (or,worse, as we well know, not nd) im-portant new hominid fossils, it is none-theless true that that discoverer s bias(the feeling that only I know how to

interpret my fossil ) is a danger that isnot always avoided.Paleoanthropology, like the rest of

science, is thus inherently a corporateeffort; and as a result, those with thegood fortune to nd important fossilsneed to accept the implicit responsi-bility to make them available to thescienti c community, much as thosewho discover genetic sequences in thelaboratory formally recognize as acondition of publication that those se-quences need to be accessible to theircolleagues by means of GenBank. To

The practice of scienceis a dynamic, self-correcting process,

constantly testing (anddiscarding) ideas, ratherthan seeking to engrave

them in stone.

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put this another way, for paleontolo-gists to claim that any fossil isuniquely theirs for study after it hasbeen published, and thereby incorpo-rated into the scienti c canon, isequivalent to claiming that, for in-stance, only Kary Mullis should be al-lowed to carry out studies involvingthe PCR. Clearly, this would be ab-surd; and it is equally absurd to act asif the nders of particular fossils arealone quali ed to study them.

There has been a good deal of infor-mal discussion over how long thosewith control over particular fossilsshould retain exclusive access. Fiveyears is accepted by many as reason-able; but numbers are always subjectto dispute, and we would urge an al-ternative approach.

In our view, those who nd fossilsshould never be obliged to share themwith anyone before publication, i.e.,the Code-legal announcement of anew name in a recognized journal, oran equivalent description of new ma-terial of species already named. In-deed, there should never be an obliga-tion (although there will normally bea responsibility to funding sources) to

publish them at all. If nders want totake years or even decades con den-tially preparing a monograph to themost exacting standards of perfection,ne; and even if they prefer simply togloat secretly over their discoveries intheir cellars, then so be it. But it mustbe recognized that any form of legalpublication throws new fossils into

the public domain. This is particularlytrue for holotypes and paratypes thename-bearers of new species. But italso applies to other new fossils, too.For, once new materials are publishedby one group of paleontologists, otherpaleontologists cannot pretend theydo not exist. They have to be able tomake informed judgements about

them. What is more, despite new tech-nologies of imaging and visualization,making such judgements will almostinvariably involve rst-hand examina-tion and documentation of the fossilsconcerned. In a comparative science,this is the minimum requirement formaking progress. It is one thing forhigh priests in temples to reserve ac-cess to religious relics; science is anentirely different case. Science is not amatter of faith (or of power); it is amatter of the free ow of information.

LITERATURE CITED

Gibbons A. 2002. Glasnost for hominids:Seeking access to fossils. Science 297:1464 1468.

International Commission on ZoologicalNomenclature (ICZN). 1999. Interna-

tional code of zoological nomenclature.4th ed. London: ICZN. 306 p.Tobias PV. 1991. Olduvai Gorge, Vol. 4.

The skulls, endocasts and teeth of Homo habilis . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni- versity Press. 921 p.

Weber GW. 2001. Virtual anthropology(VA): A call for Glasnost in paleoanthro-pology. Anat Rec (New Anat) 265:193 201.

White TW. 2002. Monkey business. Bioes-says 24:767 768.

It must be recognizedthat any form of legal

publication throwsnew fossils into the

public domain.

COMMENTARY THE ANATOMICAL RECORD (NEW ANAT.) 241