Early man, late journalists

Science writers generally have it pretty easy. News usually doesn’t come as a surprise. A new finding is typically published in a journal, which reporters get in advance, or announced at a meeting. Sometimes, scientists simply too excited to wait even call a news conference. But every now and then, a bit of news slips out unannounced, and science writers are hung out to dry. That happened on Friday 16 April. The Associated Press (AP) newswire service included a story from Lisbon reporting “compelling evidence that humans as we know them today evolved from mating between Neanderthals and anatomically modern man.” Portuguese scientists said they had dug up a skeleton that seems to be a hybrid of early modern humans and Neanderthals, suggesting that our thick-browed relatives may have inbred with Cro Magnons rather than being driven to extinction by the ancestors of modern humans. Science reporters and editors might not even notice a story like this slipping onto the newswires at the end of a long week. And, in this case, those who did were left in a quandary. The AP story quoted the director of the Portuguese Archaeological Institute, Joao Zilhao, in a telephone interview. No mention was made of a scientific paper or a technical meeting where one might expect news like this to be announced. With not a mention of peer review — and barely one of peer awareness — what’s a reporter to do? Spend the weekend trying to find a home number for Dr Zilhao? Simply repeat the assertion made by a wire service reporter unknown to the science-writing corps? Or cross one’s fingers and hope the story, if indeed it’s for real, will keep until the following week? If you guessed that there were a lot of crossed fingers that weekend, you wouldn’t be far wrong. Some newspapers, such as the Buffalo News, simply ran the AP story over the weekend. Perhaps the most unlucky reporter of all was Gerd Korinthenberg. He covered a conference about Neanderthals in Mettmann, Germany that weekend for Deutsche PresseAgentur. But it seems, from his report, that not a word was spoken about the Portuguese discovery. “Culturally, the Neanderthaler is unbelievably close to us,” one scientist told the reporter, “but it is not quite clear whether he is close biologically.”