Over the years, many missing link fossils have been revealed to be hoaxes, with the most famous being the Piltdown Man. ![]() Eight years later, Darwin published On the Origin of Species, in which, contrary to popular belief, he never used the term while describing his theories on evolution. The term "missing links" was first used in 1851 by Charles Darwin's mentor, Charles Lyell, to describe samples of fossils he had found. "We now know that the picture was much more complex than that, with a lot of now-extinct species jostling for ecological space and evolutionary success." "The notion of the 'missing link' dates from the early 20th century, when it was thought that human ancestors formed a sort of single chain receding into the remotest past," said paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. ![]() For example, the hominid biological family branch includes humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and their extinct ancestors, while hominins include those species after the human lineage split from that of chimpanzees. While all modern species have followed different evolutionary paths, humans share a common ancestor with some primates, such as the African ape. "The number of extinct side-branches is much larger than the number of true genealogical connections in the fossil record, and so when we find a fossil, we don't assume it's an ancestor of anything we interpret it as a sister group of some things." ![]() "Probably the most important thing is that most of the fossils we find aren't actually links," Hawks said.
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