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A child’s jaw in coal?

The jaw identified by Johannes Hürzeler as
belonging to a human ancestor: even a non-expert
can see it is not human!

A jawbone, found at a depth of 183 m (600 feet) in a Tuscan coal mine, was identified by Dr Johannes Hürzeler of the Museum of Natural History in Basel (Switzerland) in 1958. It was badly distorted through its burial in the coal, but was sufficiently identifiable to enable it to be given an age at death of between five and seven. A number of biologists suggested that it belonged to a human ancestor, Hürzeler going so far as to claim it as “the world’s oldest man”, but this claim was not accepted by the overwhelming majority of palaeoanthropologists. It is now largely ignored as a potential ancestor. Creationists have taken this to mean that it was fully human, claiming it to be of modern morphology. This is nonsense: it belongs to a fossil primate, Oreopithecus bamboli, which flourished during the Miocene period, around twenty million years ago.

This page was last updated on 25 July 2007
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews