Has the real "missing link" ever been found?

Question

The link that supposedly will connect human beings with primates? Are neanderthals the missing link?

Answer 1

You can think of the fossil record as venturing to a cemetary and selecting 5 graves.  Are these graves of your ancestors?  It is difficult to be sure.  Perhaps one is a relative, perhaps it is closely related, perhaps it is from someone only distantly related.   Your family ancestry is like a chain with each parent a link (it is actually more complicated than that since there are two parents from different backgrouds).  If you follow that chain backward a million years, you will probably have a hundred thousand links and much more if you go back a few million years.  The fossil record is so incomplete because not only do they find very few fossils from any individual, they may only be teeth, or a fragment of the skull.  You can see that trying to trace back your ancestry with any degree of certainty is difficult.  We have found fossils that certainly indicate we evolved from common ancestors with other primate.  DNA evidence adds to this mountain of evidence.  Clearly, we evolved from apes that are common ancestors with living apes, yet it is still difficult to see how all the pieces fit together.  Neanderthals are a side branch and did not evolve into us.

Answer 2

NO , of course not.

but on the other hand, when i donated my late X,the institution (famous one) sent me a registered letter & a check for 2.5 million for donating his body to scince. He had been the missing link!!

Answer 3

It never will, because Evolution is a bunch of BS.

Answer 4

Yes... it has evolved into a humanoid that goes by the nick tractordriver88 on most Yahoo boards.

Answer 5

The term "missing link" is somewhat of a misconception.

Here is why.

Let's say you are an anthropologist and you find three sets of remains. At the deepest level, you find some ape like creature, at the top layer you find what looks to be a human, and in the middle layer you find something that looks to be between the ape and the human.

You might proclaim that the ape-man you found in the middle layer is the missing link, and maybe genetic analysis proves they are all related, but how do you know there isn't a species between the ape and the ape-man, or the ape-man and the human?

You don't. Sometimes there's more to be found, sometimes there isn't.

The relation of neanderthals to humans is still greatly debated but humans do not appear to be directly descended  from them.

Answer 6

Evolution is a subtle and gradual process.

Fossil records are quite incomplete.  We see individuals separated by thousands and millions of years, without intervening fossils.  So, it appears that one form turned into another quite suddenly.

But, everyone of us is a missing link!  Since evolution happens so gradually, each generation of the population is the missing link to the next generation!

Answer 7

Every hominin fossil found, IS the missing link, because it bridges the gap of a half-million years or so, between the previous gaps...

Hominins are 4 million years old, and all of the fossil evidence ever found of humans & pre-humans, which are rare, can fit into the back of a pickup truck...

Also, unfortunately from our point of view, early humans and primates did not willingly jump to the deaths into lava flows or mudslides, to increase their chances of becoming fossilized, for future archeologists to find...

Finding hominin skeletal remains is more rare than finding a needle in a haystack!

Answer 8

There are not any missing links in human evolution.

http://www.becominghuman.org/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/evolut...

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/

Answer 9

yep, its called bigfoot, sasquatch, yeti...

Answer 10

The concept of "the missing link" is a defunct one, pretty much. We have found numerous fossils that bridge the gap between the ape-like ancestor we have in common with modern apes, and us. So you could say that all of them are "missing links".