“Ida” was not an ancestor of humanity, say scientists

A group of anthropologists are now stating as a certainty what some scientists were arguing, though less definitely, last May—that “Ida,” the remarkably complete 47 million year old primate fossil, was not in the line of evolution that led to the great apes and humans, but in the line that led to lemurs. And, therefore, as the story from the University of Texas at Austin puts it, Ida is not a “‘missing link’ between humans and early primates.”

Ok, that’s another shovelful of earth on the grave of the massive disgraceful hype about Ida’s discovery last year, which was discussed in detail by VFR at the time. The Ida hype was so over-the-top that even Time magazine, one of our culture’s principal generators of hype, tore it apart. Also, see my evisceration of the Wikipedia article on Ida, where I expose the deceptive phrases that were at the heart of the fraud. As I wrote in that entry:

For Wikipedia to suggest that Ida is an ancestor of humans, because she has nails and forward facing eyes, would be like finding the fossil of a very early fish, and saying that it is an ancestor of humans, because of its “human-like bilateral symmetry.” Yes, the fish has bilateral symmetry, like humans. But, of course, all vertebrates have bilateral symmetry [just as all primates have nails and forward-facing eyes].

However, I would add that even if researchers had determined that Ida was in the line that led ultimately to humans, she still would not be a “missing link” between early primates and humans, for the painfully obvious reason that she lived 40 million years before the first hominids (great apes with some man-like features) appeared. She would have been a link between some very early primates, and some later but still very early primates, not a link between early primates and humans.

We live in a society in which orchestrated falsities designed to control human beings have become the norm. One of the main tasks of traditionalists is to make truth, rather than manipulative hype, the recognized standard of public discourse. And the first requirement for such a restoration of truthful discourse is that the terms we use (in this case, “missing link”) be defined and used in a manner consistent with the definition.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 03, 2010 01:24 PM | Send