No surprise, then, that when a new fossil species attracts a blaze of publicity and Missing Link attribution, discerning observers are inclined take the history of the author into account as they appraise the relevance of the announcement. Especially when the fossils are often so broken, distorted or incomplete that opposing interpretations of the same features can be proposed with equal validity, and the points distinguishing them may be so slight, or so ambiguous, that interpretation depends as much upon the proponent’s preconceived notions and force of argument as upon the evidence of the fossils themselves. Untangling the fossil evidence to reveal our line of descent is a challenging task. ![]() They were one of several (perhaps many) primates whose evolutionary trajectories were similar to ours, and who lived at the same time. Some practitioners managed to find (or even manufacture, in the case of Piltdown Man) specimens that filled the gaps with Missing Links.Īccumulating evidence (genetic as well as fossil) has shown that the ancestors who lived in Africa millions of year ago were not alone. Even in the 1950s there were fewer than a dozen fossils covering the several million years during which modern humans had evolved from an ape-like ancestor, with plenty of space (both temporal and morphological) between them for erudite speculation. The Missing Link was in the news again.Įver since 1857, when the discovery of Neanderthal Man showed that prehistoric humans did not look like us and 1863, when Thomas Huxley wrote that one day ‘some unborn palaeontologist the fossilised bones of an Ape more anthropoid, or a Man more pithecoid, than any yet known’ – for 150 years, the Missing Link has been a beacon of palaeoanthropological research.įor the first 100 years or so, the study of fossil humans was more of a debating society than a science, with its participants more numerous than the objects on which their interest was focused. sediba as a link between the two species, the inference was clear and not discouraged. Though Berger did not explicitly describe Au. ![]() sediba was marked with twelve points of similarity: six linking it to Au. As well as extensive TV, radio and front-page coverage, the fossils found by Lee Berger and his team at a site near Pretoria in South Africa featured prominently in National Geographic, with an illustration of the three species striding manfully across the page. A blaze of media attention recently greeted the claim that a newly discovered hominid species, Australopithecus sediba, marked the transition between an older ape-like ancestor, such as Australopithecus afarensis, and a more recent representative of the human line, Homo erectus.
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