Introduction

Creationist and and intelligent design writers frequently emphasize “gaps” in the fossil record, and, in particular, claim that there are “missing links” in the human family tree between “apes” and humans. So what are the facts here? Is there indeed an unbridgeable “gap” between apes and humans?

Hardly. To appreciate how far the study of prehuman fossils has come, even in the 1990s it was generally thought that the first hominins (the group that includes modern humans and their extinct predecessors) appeared about four million years ago, and then descended in a fairly “linear” fashion to Homo ancestors who

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