ONE COULD HARDLY ASK FOR A FITTER TRIBUTE TO DARWIN...:

Recently Analyzed Fossil Was Not Human Ancestor As Claimed, Anthropologists Say (UT Austin, March 2, 2010)

A fossil that was celebrated last year as a possible "missing link" between humans and early primates is actually a forebearer of modern-day lemurs and lorises, according to two papers by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin, Duke University and the University of Chicago.

In an article now available online in the Journal of Human Evolution, four scientists present evidence that the 47-million-year-old Darwinius masillae is not a haplorhine primate like humans, apes and monkeys, as the 2009 research claimed.

They also note that the article on Darwinius published last year in the journal PLoS ONE ignores two decades of published research showing that similar fossils are actually strepsirrhines, the primate group that includes lemurs and lorises.

"Many lines of evidence indicate that Darwinius has nothing at all to do with human evolution," says Chris Kirk, associate professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin.

...than that the species that bears his name have no relation to human evolution.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 1, 2010 12:10 PM