Scientific research is all about bringing the light of understanding to bear upon our ignorance. Research scientists must therefore constantly forge ahead into dark and uncharted territory. During pioneering investigation, it is sometimes the case that initial interpretations turn out to be incomplete or inaccurate in some way. In fact, real progress is often made when new discoveries are subsequently reviewed by additional researchers; as a fresh perspective is applied to the problems which are inevitably presented. Sometimes, these auxiliary researchers may themselves make fresh discoveries; as for example when, in 1973, Simon Conway Morris48 found previously overlooked life forms when he reviewed all the fossil finds made in the Burgess shale by Charles Walcott.

In the scientific search for the ancestor of modern man, there is plenty of scope for imagination in our attempt to interpret the surviving evidence but there is equal scope for error. Upon examination of the various ape and hominid fossils which have been found by palaeontologists, it is indeed curious that our most immediate ancestors are apparently missing from the fossil record. Commenting on the well known missing link, Jacob Bronowski says in The Ascent of Man ‘the blank hides the most intriguing part of the story, when the hominid line to man is firmly separated from the line to modern apes49’.

We are fortunate to have such a remarkable account of the life forms which lived and breathed upon the planet in its distant past. However, when we examine the fossils, we find that transitory life forms are notably absent from the record; a problem which Darwin acknowledged50. The celebrated missing link, ‘a blank in the fossil record of five to ten million years51’, in the supposed chain of evolution of mankind from the apes, in fact has its parallels throughout the entire animal kingdom. It turns out that there is not just one missing link but a whole series of missing links or jumps in the fossil record.

Specimens which are cited as transitory fossils by supporters of the theory do exist: perhaps the most famous of these is archaeopteryx52, which is a small dinosaur with feathered wings. Hailed by evolutionists as an example of evolution in progress, this is a transitory life form which fits into the ladder of progress somewhere between reptiles and birds. But despite the impact of this, undoubtedly impressive fossil, the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould calls into question the conventional interpretation: he says, ‘in an error that I call “life’s little joke” … we are virtually compelled to the stunning mistake of citing unsuccessful lineages as classic “text book cases” of evolution53’ .

Another text book classic is Neanderthal man. The traditional view says that ‘the earliest members of our species are termed archaic forms … one group of archaic humans is the Neanderthals54’. However, this view is opposed by Gould, ‘as for Neanderthal, these creatures were probably close cousins belonging to a separate species55’ (my italics). In fact, he calls the conventional iconography of the ladder of progress, which shows a sequence of extinct ape-like and manlike creatures culminating with modern man, an ‘embarrassment'56 .