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Trachilos footprint
Credit: Andrzej Boczarowski (CC BY) |
Six Million-Year-Old Human Footprint Discovered in Crete Raises Major Questions About Our Evolution
A neat illustration this week of how the popular media distort and misrepresent science in order to appeal to a wider audience and in doing so, feed and reinforce popular misconceptions.
First, we have MSN news announcing that six million year-old
human footprints have been found in Crete. This then, of course, is presented as raising 'major questions' about
our evolution. Creationists groups on Facebook and elsewhere are already full of claims that this proves science has got everything about evolution all wrong, either neglecting the six million years of explaining them away as proving science even gets the dating wrong.
The source of this story was the
press release from Upsala University, Sweden, which announced the publication of a paper by a team based there. Unlike the MSN headline - "Fossil footprints challenge established theories of human evolution" - the headline on this press release was more muted (and of course more accurate). No mention of human footprints there, although there was an attempt to associate the discovery with current understanding of human evolution.
But what understanding was challenged, exactly?