Evidence of the Missing Link Found?

HUADPE writes to tell us CNN is reporting that scientists in northeastern Ethiopia recently discovered a skull that they think may be evidence of the "missing link" between Homo erectus and modern man. From the article: "The hominid cranium -- found in two pieces and believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old -- 'comes from a very significant period and is very close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human,' said Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia."

Comments

Re:Is it just me...

[Charles Dodgeson]

is "the missing link" found every couple of months?

Well, not quite that often, but you are right. Almost all the major finds have been since the publication of The Descent of Man which is when the challenge was first posed. The article itself says that this find joins a handful of others between homo erectus and ourselves. And of course homo erectus is also a "missing" link discovered since The Descent of Man.

This is only one skull. Weigh in the likelihood that it could be just a deformity of something distinctly not a missing link.

You are right. It's happened before. For decades the thinking about Neanderthal was distorted because the first major find turned out to me a severely arthritic and deformed individual. It will take more finds before we can more confidently draw conclusions.

Evolution occurs through generation and elimination of lines. Is there even the slightest evidence that this is not from one of the extinct lines? It's fully possible (and likely) that the species in question doesn't even have modern living descendants.

Again, this has been a mistake that's been made before. (Neanderthals again provide an example). But even if this branch of hominid doesn't turn out to be a direct ancestor, the more we learn about it the better picture of Human evolution we'll have. Also while it has certainly happened that there have been separate hominid species living at the same time, on the whole you don't expect there to be many distinct simultanteous species of something so mobile.

And for good measure, color me suspicious that the estimated age is on the same order of magnitude as the estimated error in that measurement.

The article doesn't say how the dating was done, nor whether further analysis should refine the estimate.