Slate, April 8, 2010
The news began bubbling out over the weekend: “Missing link between man and apes found,” declared an April 3 story in the London Telegraph. When I saw that headline, I thought to myself, “Please, please, not again.”
Whenever scientists make a major discovery about human evolution, we get treated to a lot of misconceptions. The most popular of them all is the myth of the missing link—the idea that paleontologists are on an eternal quest for ancestors linking us directly back to earlier forms of life. Last May, for example, scientists reported the discovery of a 47-million-year-old fossil of a primate called Darwinius. “ Fossil is evolution’s ‘missing link,’” blared a headline in the Sun.
