John,
What a morning I have had, I was looking through you links and went to the Smithsonian web page, 'KNM WT 15000 "The Turkana Boy". Apparently Dart's Turkana Boy was associated with the Piltdown Man scandle. You really have to check this out, it had me reeling:
The evidence was there the entire time. Any researcher could have looked at the teeth with a microscope and noticed an artificial wear pattern, or the fact that one tooth had a coat of paint on it. But why didn't anyone recognize this forgery? One reason is that beacause Piltdown affirmed many scientists' hypotheses, they were reluctant to put it under scientific scrutiny that might have proved it wrong. Museums prominently displayed casts of Piltdown as scientific fact. Ales Hrdlicka, a leading anthropologist here at the Smithsonian, was one of the few scientists to question whether the jaw and cranium went together. But even here in our museum there was an exhibit on display: "Evolution of the Bony Chin" -- from chimpanzee through Piltdown Man to modern humans! -- see to the right. The Piltdown mandible is the second from the top. Many researchers not associated with the forgery simply saw what they wanted to see in Piltdown. Publications on the "ape-like qualities" of the cranium of Piltdown were not uncommon, and these were authored by trained anatomists looking at a fully modern human cranium.
The Piltdown Man Scandle
Earlier they discuss the Peking Man (Homo erectus) where 40 individules were found.
"Cranial capacities of Homo erectus average around 1000cc, which is far greater than earlier australopiths and even early Homo. The dentition of Homo erectus is nearly identical to modern humans, although the cheek teeth do remain larger, and the mandible is generally more robust. "
homo erectus
The fossils they show are just skull caps and they think it's about 1,000 cc. The reconstruction shows a protruding (ape like) face. They base this on a skull cap and I am far from trusting of paleontologists for this kind of thing.
This morning before I got into the Homo erectus and Piltdown Man pages I was looking at Richard Dawkins 'The Ancestors Tale'. Ronald Clarke finds a hominid foot in a box of monkey bones and half a shin bone. This box had been put there 16 years previously. So he decides he wants his African assistants to go look for the other half, I'm not putting you on, this comes straight from the leading Darwinian of our day.
"Bits of Little Foots left foot were dug up from Sterkfontein in 1978, but the bones were stored away, unremarked and unlebelled, until 1994 when the paleontologist Ronald Clarke, working under the direction of Phillip Tobias, accidentially rediscovered them in a box in the she used by workers at the Sterkfontein cave. Three years later, Clarke chanced upon another box of bones from Sterkfontein, in a stree room at Witwatersrand University. This box was labelled Cercopithecoids. Clarke had an interst in this kind of monkey, so he looked in the box and was delighted to notice a hominid foot bone in amongst the monkey bones several foot and leg bones in the box seemed to match the bones found in the Sterkfontein shed. One was half a right shinebone, broken across. Clarke gave a cast of the shinbone to two African assistants, Nkawne Molefe and Stephen Motsumi, and asked them to return to Sterkfontein and look for the other half.
The task I had set them was like looking for a needle in a haystack as the rotto is an enormous, deep dark cavern with breccia exposed on the walls, floor and ceiling. After two days of searching with the aid of hand-held lamps, they found it on 3 July 1997.
Molefe and Motsumis jigsaw feat was the more astonishing because the bone that fitted their cast was
At he opposite end to where we had previously excavated. The fit was perfect, despite the boine having been blasted apart by lime workers 65 or more years previously. To the left of the exposed end of the right tibia could be seen the section of the broken-off shaft of the lift fibula. From their postitions with the lower limbs in the correct anatomical relationship, it seemed that the whole skeleton had to be there, lying face downwards.
Actually, it wasnt quite there but, after pondering the geological colapses in the area, Clarke deduced where it must be and, sure enough, Motsumis chisel found it there. Clarke and his team wre indeed lucky but here we have a first-class example of that maxim of scientists since Louis Pasteur: Fortune favours the prepared mind.
(Richard Dawkins, The Ancestors Tale)
They find it after two days of searching and this has become know as Little Foot. Ok, that was the little tangent I got off on but I have a little information on the Australopithecus africanus. The Smithsonian attributes this species to a collection of over 300 fossils. The Laetoli foot print was discovered by Mary Leakey who discovered 80 fossils from two different sites near Lake Turkana. Get this, no skull was ever found.
I have some other things I want to share with you but it's playoff time and I'm going to watch the Colts game. I just wanted to let you know what I found this morning, especially about the Piltdown Man scandle.
These are prime examples of people seeing what they want to see in the evidence. This is why the single common ancestor model is prejudiced and leading well meaning scientists astray. I don't know how many times I was told that there are mountains of evidence supporting evolution. What it really comes down to is suppostion and starting with the conclusion rather then following the evidence.
Grace and peace,
Mark
P.S. pardon the typos I know have to be throughout this post. I'll edit it later but right now I'm a little short on time.
I can tell you about the paper if you are interested though. Two points jumped out at me when reading it for the first time. First of all, they said that the Homo genus had precision thumbs as compared to opposable ones. All apes have opposable thumbs but only humans have precision ones. They described the finds at this site as having precision thumbs and describe them as capable of making tools. I have seen neither the tools nor the fossils that indicate precision thumbs and I find that frustrating. 
