This article at Science illustrates one of my pet peeves:
A remarkably complete skeleton introduced in 2010 as “the best candidate†for the immediate ancestor of our genus Homo may just be a pretender. Instead of belonging to the human lineage, the new species of Australopithecus sediba is more closely related to other hominins from South Africa that are on a side branch of the human family tree, according to a new analysis of the fossil presented here last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
I really, really wish that paleoanthropologists would stop using morphology as their means of relating species. It’s an awful indicator. It ignores variation within species.
I realize it’s all they have but that’s no excuse.
