Rejecting a quotation from publication and erasing it from the record are two different decisions. This page is the record.
What this page is
This page is written for the next researcher, not for the article's reader. It carries the wording as it was originally given, the exact fetch that was tried, and the specific document somebody would need to obtain to overturn the verdict.
Five status words are used.
- REFUTED — the attribution is demonstrably wrong. Somebody opened the named source and the text is not in it.
- UNVERIFIABLE — no route to the named source has been found yet. That is a statement about this project's reach, not about the quotation.
- MISUSED — the text is real and correctly attributed, and quoting it the way it is normally quoted would invert or overstate what its author meant.
- SUPERSEDED — the text is real and was once the mainstream figure, and the field that produced it has withdrawn it.
- RECOVERED — a later re-check reached the source. The entry says what changed.
A standing rule applies to every entry below. Nothing here was established with Claude's WebFetch tool. Every quotation on this page was read off downloaded bytes: curl for web pages and PDFs, bin/iapdsearch.py for archive.org printdisabled books.
Entries
"In fact, there are many persons with 700 to 800 cubic centimeters." — Stephen Molnar, via Lubenow
Status: RECOVERED, and it reverses. Lubenow, Bones of Contention (2004), p. 309, quotes Molnar for this and cites A. H. Schultz for a Melanesian at 790 cc as "the lowest on record for a normal human" and Marvin Harris for variability starting at 850 cc. The Lubenow text was read by bin/iapdsearch.py on bonesofcontentio0000lube_s0n6 and is accurately reported in the article as Lubenow's. On 2026-09-06 the Molnar primary was reached. The sentence is on p. 57 of Molnar, Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups: The Problem of Human Variation, Prentice-Hall, 1975 (racestypesethnic0000moln, leaf 75; _scandata.xml gives leaf 75 = page 57, offset leaf − 18 anchored at leaf 20 and leaf 150). It is verbatim, and it rests on nothing: the same paragraph asserts, with no citation, that "variation of plus or minus 400 cc about the mean is seen in most European populations." Molnar then withdrew it. The 1992 edition, retitled Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups (humanvariationra0000moln, leaf 164 = page 148, offset leaf − 16 anchored at leaf 20 and leaf 250), rewrites the paragraph, deletes the 700-to-800 sentence, and reduces the within-population spread to "+100 cc about the mean ... and among these populations means may differ as much as 400 cc." The quotation is therefore real, correctly attributed by Lubenow, and abandoned by its own author. The article now says so. Lubenow's endnote text is not returned by the search-inside endpoint, so which edition he used remains unknown. Still unverified: the Schultz original, and any measured series behind any of the three numbers. What would change the verdict: the intracranial-volume distribution from a large modern MRI cohort, which would settle the question with data rather than with textbook assertions.
"Virtually none." — Erik Trinkaus, as recalled by Lubenow
Status: held back, not refuted. Lubenow, p. 128: "In the question period following a lecture at Colorado State University by Neandertal authority Erik Trinkaus, I asked him, 'Other than brain size, what are the differences in cranial morphology between Homo erectus and Neandertal?' His reply was, 'Virtually none.'" The text is real and correctly located. It is a personal recollection of a question period, not a published statement by Trinkaus, and cannot be checked against anything Trinkaus wrote. Not used in the article. What would change the verdict: a published statement by Trinkaus to the same effect.
"If you found the Dmanisi skulls at isolated sites in Africa, some people would give them different species names." — David Lordkipanidze, via Rupe and Sanford
Status: UNVERIFIABLE against the primary. Quoted in Contested Bones chapter 4, read by bin/iapdsearch.py on contestedbones0000rupe. The sentence is a press-interview remark, not a line from the 2013 Science paper, and the interview was not located. The article uses Lordkipanidze's published wording from Science 342:330 instead, which makes the same point. What would change the verdict: the press interview, probably the Guardian or Science news coverage of 17–18 October 2013.
"the most recent study of the Mongolian fossil now lists it at about 34,000 years old" — Jeffrey Tomkins, ICR, 2019
Status: MISUSED. The date is real and correctly cited to Devièse et al. 2019, Nature Communications 10:274. But Tomkins keeps the 2006 description of the Salkhit skullcap as showing "similarities with Neanderthals, Chinese Homo erectus, and West/Far East archaic Homo sapiens," and the 2019 paper is the one that overturned that description. Its abstract, fetched by curl from nature.com and saved as sources/web/deviese-2019_salkhit-radiocarbon-mtdna.html, reports a complete mitochondrial genome that "falls within a group of modern human mtDNAs (haplogroup N) that is widespread in Eurasia today." The article reports this as a citation turned against itself. What would change the verdict: nothing about the date; the archaic reading would need a morphological study post-dating the mtDNA result.
"as recently as 10,000 years ago" erectus features at Kow Swamp — Tomkins, from Thorne and Macumber 1972
Status: MISUSED. The Thorne and Macumber quotation is genuine. The interpretation has not held: Line 2018, Journal of Creation 32(3):88–96, read from the dl0.creation.com PDF, reports Durband's finding of strong shape similarity to known deformed crania, Curnoe's contrary finding for KS 1, and the 1990 repatriation that makes re-measurement impossible. Robusticity is not erectus status, and no erectus-diagnostic trait is claimed for Kow Swamp. The article cites Line 2018 in place of the ICR piece.
"Had he grown to maturity, it is estimated he could have been six feet tall." — Lubenow on Turkana Boy
Status: SUPERSEDED. Lubenow p. 126, read by search-inside. Accurately reports Walker's 1996 figure, which Walker built on a human dental age and a Dinka adolescent growth curve (Wisdom of the Bones pp. 191, 194, read off the running heads on wisdomofbonesins0000walk). Graves et al. 2010 withdrew it: 163 cm, growth finished by 12.3 years (abstract from NCBI E-utilities, PMID 20846707). The article reports both the original figure and its withdrawal. Any article repeating the six-foot figure as current is citing a superseded estimate.
Ngandong erectus at 27,000 to 53,000 years — Swisher et al. 1996, as used in creationist literature
Status: SUPERSEDED. Creationists cited this for decades as proof that erectus overlapped modern humans. Antón 2003 p. 131 already allowed for a systematic error in the U-series/ESR results; Rizal et al. 2020 re-excavated the site and modelled the bone bed at 117–108 ka on 52 ages by four methods (abstract fetched by curl from nature.com). Do not cite 27–53 ka as current.
"at least three of which are edible--live, wild barley, and wild grape" — Goren-Inbar 2004, Crossref deposit
Status: deposit typo. The abstract retrieved from the OpenAlex mirror of the Crossref deposit reads "live" where the published text reads "olive." The article does not reproduce the sentence. Any quotation from this deposit must be checked against the Science page before it is printed.
The Dmanisi crania at "600–775 cc" — Ferring et al. 2011
Status: superseded within the mainstream. Ferring's p. 10432 figure predates the CT measurement of Skull 5 and uses older estimates. Lordkipanidze 2013 gives 546–730 cm³ for the same five crania. The article cites Ferring only for the dating and the 2013 paper for the volumes.