Humans may have evolved relatively recently from isolated chimpanzees, without formation of any fossils. This would mean that since the time of Darwin, the missing-link fossils that people have been looking for simply do not exist...
Humans may have originated from a group of
chimpanzees that were isolated for up to 30,000 years on the island of Bioko, Africa. They lived mostly in the sea, on a marine diet with high levels of essential fatty acids for brain
growth...
No fossils would have formed along the coast of Bioko, because it was an erosional geologic environment without deposition of sediments.
After this speciation event, sea level dropped during the next ice age, and the newly evolved humans could escape to mainland Africa. Modern humans such as Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis then begin appearing in the fossil record. Earlier fossils, those more than about 300,000 years old, are paltry, and do not really show evolution toward the modern human features...
There are far more paleoanthropologists than there are primate fossils or fossil localities. Only a few paleoanthropologists ever find a primate fossil themselves, and they have limited opportunity to study original fossil materials found by others. To protect the fossil evidence and encourage new discoveries, the science of paleoanthropology has adopted practices that are not very scientific. They accept discoveries and interpretations that are not testable or reproducible by impartial scientists. Skeptics and critics can be ignored.
Dealing with them would help the cause of creationism, a lobby with political influence that denies evolution and is always looking for scientific weaknesses...
Paleoanthropologists have no plausible explanation for human encephalization — the evolutionary increase of brain size. All paleoanthropologists seem to agree that human-sized brains appear suddenly in the fossil record with the first Homo sapiens.
Since brain size did not increase sufficiently before Homo sapiens, paleoanthropologists began to use bipedalism, not encephalization, to be the key feature indicating early human evolution. Many bones in the body could be used to show that an ape was bipedal. So even with scanty fossils, many paleoanthropologists could be involved in the discussions.
It should be remembered, however, that arboreal apes are often bipedal when moving on the ground...
All chimpanzees can walk on two legs when carrying something, and must do so when moving about in waist-deep water...
Lucy was an Australopithecus, about one meter tall and about 3.2 million years old. The skeleton was said to be 40% complete, which made it by far the most complete early human ancestor.
The bone fragments convinced specialists that Lucy was bipedal with an upright posture. No foot bones or hand bones were known from Lucy or from other Australopithecus. But Lucy was assumed to have had human-like feet...
An impartial geologist would have little to gain and much to risk by challenging the 3.6 m.y. ash-fall interpretation of the Laetoli layers. A debate about this would play right into the hands of creationists, who claim that fossil evidence is routinely misinterpreted...
They assembled a spectacular skeleton, popularly referred to as the Nariokotome skeleton or Turkana boy It is the most complete early human ancestor in existence, as it includes 108 of the 206 bones of the body. It is thought to be Homo erectus, or perhaps Homo ergaster. There is little agreement about species identifications, because the fossil material from other places is too scanty and varied to agree which species are the same...
The bones are said to show bipedality, and everyone assumes that the boy had human-like feet. However, the assembled skeleton has neither foot bones nor hand bones...
Did they perhaps find hand bones or foot bones that suggested an arboreal lifestyle, and therefore could not belong to this skeleton?...
When one reads paleoanthropologic descriptions with a measure of skepticism, one can find problems with all the discoveries. Most of the fossils could be fragments of unrelated apes. From genetics, it now seems that neither Java Man nor Peking Man could be ancestral to living humans.
The aquatic ape theory will never be able to point to a dramatic fossil discovery, which typically launches new evolution theories. But such fossils, although exciting, are not as certain as most people assume.
Acclaimed fossils might not depict human evolution
