RE: RCA

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

> From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu]On Behalf Of
> Richard W Travsky
>
> On Tue, 13 May 2003, Steve White wrote:
> > Sacraligious as it may sound, I'm trying to find out whether
> it's true that
> > RCA was sent to Mongolia by Henry Osborn to try and find
> evidence that Human
> > origins lay in central Asia not in the, er, 'dark' continent.
> I'm sure I
> > read this years ago but can't find any reference for it now.
> Can anyone help
> > me out?
>
> http://www.cmnh.org/dinoarch/1998May/msg00087.html
> ...
> Andrews came back from his easy service during the war.  But rather
> than settle down and relax,  Andrews was planning with Henry Fairfield
> Osborn an expedition through the Gobi.  The purpose of the expedition
> was to find fossil evidence of a "missing-link" between humans and apes
> (an idea that is fundamentally racist as shown by Gould).  That was not
> the main reason for the expedition,  the others include : botany,
> zoology,  cartography,  archaeology,  geology,  ecology,  etc.  Andrews
> set off for Mongolia in March,  1921.
> ...

And, to be fair, Osborn and others (Matthews, for example) held that central
Asia was a "garden of Eden" for LOTS of mammalian taxa, not just hominids!
Check out some of their various works on biogeography and on human origins
for discussions of these.  While no doubt racism played some part of this,
there was a logic to idea that Asia was the center of origin of most
placental mammal clades independant of the question of the origins of
humanity.

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796