Uncovering the fossil records of other species had been “a very slow and fortuitous process,” he noted, and geologists hadn’t yet explored the regions where our apelike ancestors were likely to be found. A handful of Neandertal bones had been found in Europe, but experts disagreed about whether they came from an ancient type of human or just diseased modern humans. OtwellĪt the time, 150 years ago, Darwin had little fossil evidence to draw from. Still, a lot of the continent is left to study. Have mostly set their sights on eastern and southern Africa (major areas of exploration are shown), turning up interesting finds most everywhere they have looked. As such, he wrote, “it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” Since the search for hominin fossils in Africa began in the 1920s, paleoanthropologists He pointed out that among all the living animals, the African apes - gorillas and chimpanzees - were the most similar to humans. In The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin hypothesized that our ancestors came from Africa. But soon he had enough thoughts on the subject to fill an entire book. More recently, fossils of a "bird-dinosaur" were labeled as a missing link by National Geographic in 1999, but were later discovered to be the deliberately combined body of an early toothed bird with the tail of a dinosaur.In his 1859 treatise On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin devoted little more than a sentence to human origins.
It was nothing more than the lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a modern human. More than 40 years later, the Piltdown Man was proven to be a fraud. In 1912, a skull and jawbone found in a gravel pit in England were declared by scientists to be concrete proof of the connection between humans and apes.
Over the years, many missing link fossils have been revealed to be hoaxes, with the most famous being the Piltdown Man. Eight years later, Darwin published On the Origin of Species, in which, contrary to popular belief, he never used the term while describing his theories on evolution. The term "missing links" was first used in 1851 by Charles Darwin's mentor, Charles Lyell, to describe samples of fossils he had found. "We now know that the picture was much more complex than that, with a lot of now-extinct species jostling for ecological space and evolutionary success."
"The notion of the 'missing link' dates from the early 20th century, when it was thought that human ancestors formed a sort of single chain receding into the remotest past," said paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. For example, the hominid biological family branch includes humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and their extinct ancestors, while hominins include those species after the human lineage split from that of chimpanzees. While all modern species have followed different evolutionary paths, humans share a common ancestor with some primates, such as the African ape. "The number of extinct side-branches is much larger than the number of true genealogical connections in the fossil record, and so when we find a fossil, we don't assume it's an ancestor of anything we interpret it as a sister group of some things." "Probably the most important thing is that most of the fossils we find aren't actually links," Hawks said.