A university is being torn apart by a debate over 130,000-year-old human remains that one side claims could be the missing link between Neanderthals and modern humans.
The argument became so fierce at one stage that an eminent professor was locked out of his laboratory because he publicly disputed his colleagues’ findings.
The row began six months ago when the journal Science published research by a team led by Israel Hershkovitz at Tel Aviv University. They claimed that a jaw bone and part of the dome of a skull found in the Nesher quarry near the city of Ramla belonged to an unidentified human ancestor that might be the “missing link”.
The authors claimed that Nesher Ramla Homo was different from either species but had stone-tool capabilities common to both. The discovery could help to explain how Homo sapiens evolved, they claimed.
A veteran researcher of Neanderthals from the same university department disagreed. Yoel Rak told The Times that he had been researching the archaic human species for 50 years. He said: “The moment I saw the article in Science, I said: ‘My God, that’s a Neanderthal. I’d put my head on it.’ ” The professor and a colleague wrote a response that was also published in Science claiming that the disputed bones were identical to other Neanderthal remains found in Israel over the years. “I could easily measure the mandible in their photographs and see that it was Neanderthal,” Rak said.
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“They claimed that based on differences in a piece of the dome of the skull they also found, it’s a different species. But no species has ever been classified just on the cranial thickness.”
The professor was not alone in his view. Philip Rightmire, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, also argued that the skull should be categorised as an early Neanderthal specimen.
The row did not end there. Since his response was published, Rak, 75, said that the locks to his office at the university had been changed.
He was denied access to the Neanderthal fossil collection that he obtained for the university 40 years ago and has used since for research and teaching.
In a statement to Haaretz, the newspaper which first reported the dispute, Hershkovitz denied that he had any part in the action against Rak.
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The university refused to comment. Since the lockout was first reported, Rak has been allowed to return to his laboratory. “It’s an academic disagreement,” the professor said. “They’re angry at me for ruining the hype they’ve tried to make out of the find.”
As with so much in modern science, it began with Isaac Newton, father of optics, calculus and the academic feud (Tom Whipple writes).
Throughout his life Newton fought against rivals, publishers and “little smatterers in Mathematicks”. He conducted a years-long character assassination of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who committed the crime of inventing calculus at the same time as him. Some historians believe that bitter rivalry led to Newton destroying Robert Hooke’s portrait.
Wallace Stanley Sayre, a political scientist, is alleged to have said: “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.”
In the early 1700s the British scientists Richard Mead and John Woodward fell out over, among other things, the treatment of smallpox (both were wrong). This resulted in a battle of satirical pamphlets, a comic opera deriding Woodward’s sexual prowess and a duel. In a conflict that became known as the current wars Thomas Edison tried to prove that his system for direct current electricity was superior to the alternating current (AC) suggested by George Westinghouse. He did this by travelling the country and, in front of crowds, using AC to electrocute dogs, calves, cats and on one occasion, a horse. He petitioned to have the word “electrocuted” changed to “being Westinghoused”. This proud scientific tradition continues. Just this year a paper carried a retraction notice that read: “The retraction has been agreed as all authors cannot agree on a revised author order, and at least one author continues to dispute the original author.”
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In research into ME, a notoriously controversial area, there were mass resignations from a journal and a spat that involved one editor dismissing another as a: “Disgusting old fart neoliberal hypocrite”.
