Lucy's discoverer, Donald Johanson, would be quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying that beyond 4 million years ago there appears to be "a single line and a single lineage." Even White would invoke the image of a missing link, saying that this new species of hominid was the "oldest known link in the evolutionary chain that connects us to the common ancestor with the living African apes. It was pleasing in its clarity and logic. afarensis, and giving rise to all the different types of hominids that came later. ramidus as the direct ancestor of Lucy's species, A. More than one article said that the new fossil supported the view that there was a single line if descent from chimpanzees to humans, with diagrams of family trees showing A. The headline in the Times of London was typical, calling it THE BONE THAT REWRITES THE HISTORY OF MAN. ramidus was “the missing link” was widely reported in the press and supported by the idea that it was an early representative of a single lineage of hominins in the early phases of human evolution: Nature showed little restraint in its promotion of the seventeen fossils from Aramis as "a missing link," and newspaper and magazine headline writers took the additional step of ignoring the qualifying article, "a." The news made the front pages of newspapers in London, New York, San Francisco, and around the world. This is why evolutionary biologists do not use the term “missing link”-and why creationists work so diligently to lead religious adherents to believe that “missing links” are all we are trying to find.Īs Gibbons describes, the idea that Au. It is by understanding the phylogenetic relationships among these fossils that we can test hypotheses about their common ancestors. In reality, paleontologists work to discover cousins, some of which may be ancestors of later forms, but many of which are not. Probably the worst is that every fossil hominin must have its proper place on a single evolutionary chain. “Missing link” is a term that has led to terrible misconceptions about the evolutionary process. He ended his piece with a piece of hyperbole: The metaphor of a "missing link" has often been misused, but it is a suitable epithet for the hominid from Aramis. ramidus and the accompanying article on the geological context of the find by Giday WoldeGabriel and colleagues. Wood reviewed the major findings of the description of Au. The paper was published together with a two-page perspective article by Bernard Wood. On page 145, Gibbons describes a problem that emerged at the publication of Australopithecus ramidus in 1994 by Tim White and colleagues. This time provided some of the most contentious discoveries ever by characters like Tim White, Michel Brunet, and Maeve Leakey, and Gibbons covered the field for one of the main journals publishing hominin fossil remains. Her 2006 book, The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors gives an account of the discovery of African fossil hominins from the early 1990s up to the early 2000s. When Australopithecus ramidus was the missing linkĪnn Gibbons is a science writer specializing in paleoanthropology for the journal, Science.
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