Blame it on the monolith. (Arthur Clarke's 2001)

Otherwise we would still be stupid Neanderthals living in harmony with nature. Just think how wonderful it would be. (Except, of course, for the lack of public housing to satisfy Jesse Jackson.)

Randall, don't forget public transportation.

Obviously the reason Neanderthals went extinct is they all wanted their own stone wheel to push around and refused to carpool.

They were replaced by the little known girlie-man-thals. No bones have been unearthed as yet, but we know they're out there someplace because we have large colonies of their progeny living right here in our midst. They go by the name of liberal democrats now.

Too bad the Cro-Magnums who look like they were some tough dudes didn't wipe them out way back then when removing threats to your community wasn't frowned upon.

It was always my understanding that the fossil record created more problems than it resolved as far as the natur;ists presumtpions regarding speciation are concerned. Apparantly readers of that record have always seen what they wanted to see in order to nbelieve what they wanted to believe. Luckily forthe true believers, the theory was never posited in such a way that repeatable experiments could be conducted so the theory could be verified or debunked beyond the level of microbes. The scientists mentioned above seem to be making a rather startling point which, alas, cannot be proven either although `the Darwinists will try to rationalize it away with nothing but conjecture, speculation, which is what they have always done. Fine, but stop calling it a disinterested search for verifiable, scientific truth.

The real problem being exposed is the ambiguous definition of species. Paleontologists must necessarily rely on a morphological definition while Neo-Darwinists have moved on to an interbreeding unit behavioral model. The former has difficulties distinguishing varieties as discussed in this article, the latter is worthless for interpreting the fossil record since mating behavior is unknown.

Isn't the problem that fossilization is such a rare and random phenomenon that studying all of creation through the fossil record is like studying Americans by digging up the bones of three people who died sometime in the last 300 years?

This is nice, but what about the Bigfoots?

jd is about one-third right.

The definition of species was ambiguous until about 1940.

It is not any more, for living populations.

The discovery that, gasp!, fossil evidence is a lot less complete than we'd like is not worth 6 paragraphs in even such a worthless rag as The Telegraph.

As everyone already know, Neanderthal average brain sizes appear to have been somewhat larger than modern white people's (although measuring brain size from a skull is not as straightforward a job as most people might guess).

That widely separated, in time and space, fossils have been identified as different chronospecies is not surprising.

But paleontologists combine separated species when they get enough evidence, a well known habit this story fails -- dishonestly or ignorantly -- to mention.

Heidelburg Man, for example, no longer has his own branch.

This story is, to put it in a few words, silly garbage. That Orrin thinks it offers ammunition for his views only shows that he is not thinking clearly.

Even people who know no more about human evolution than they could get from reading the captions in National Geographic ought to remember that the dividing line between fossil humans and prehumans has always been controversial, Leakey arguing for Homo earlier than most of his contemporaries would have done, though since his death most have moved toward his position.