Skeletons in the cabinet: popular palaeontology and the Pleistocene extinction debate in historical perspective

Abstract

How can historical examination of the Pleistocene extinction question in Australia shed light on ways that scientific debate is influenced by the cultures of science and extra-scientific concerns? In Europe, investigation of the antiquity of man occurred against the background of the invention of glaciology and its incorporation into Charles Lyell's gradualist paradigm, and speculation about fossil fauna. Broadly speaking, these three elements define the terms of a debate that continues today: climatic versus human causes for Pleistocene megafaunal extinction. This paper briefly considers four case studies which illuminate the often contingent nature of scientific knowledge. From nineteenth-century London to 1880s Adelaide to Melbourne in the first decade of the twentieth century to Australian Quaternists in the twenty-first, acceptance or otherwise of Aboriginal testimony and other more material evidence has been conditioned by scientific or political agenda as much as by its intrinsic reliability. These arguments are won in public forums by the weight of rhetoric more than the weight of evidence, perhaps one reason that less deterministic, multi-causal models are rarely debated in the popular media.

Key words:

• extinction
• debate
• knowledge
• Australia
• megafauna