Saturday, November 20, 2004

What does the "missing link" mean?

The New York Times > Science > Fossils Found in Spain Seen as Last Link to Great Apes
In their report, the researchers noted that the skeleton showed that those early great apes 'retained primitive monkeylike characters' and thus did not seem to support 'the theoretical model that predicts that all characters shared by extant great apes were present in their last common ancestor.'

This doesn't shock me as much as the mini-human discovery. I don't think it's quite in the same league; there was no real doubt among scientists that there was a primate ancestor of both humans and gorillas. The primary surprise seems to be that we actually found something from the miocene. Now we'll look for more.

It doesn't seem surprising that gorillas would have evolved over the past few million years. Why wouldn't they?

Of course this won't have any effect on the anti-rational anti-evolutionists. They're in a different universe.

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