Fossil Find Provides "Missing Link"

Personally, I have no issue with the fact that I and my fellow humans descended over the millennia from primates. Nor do I find the concept irreconcilable with the Bible since I don't presume to want to control God/the Creator in a rigid box formed by mankind's limited knowledge and understanding of the universe as written down more than 2,000 years ago in the Bible. But Christianists - now that's a whole different matter! Their weak faith and delusional need to cling to a limited checklist of beliefs seems to increasing run head long into the brick wall of growing scientific knowledge. Thus, I'm sure the creationists will be having vapors and whining and grumbling over the news that perhaps the so-called "missing link" has been found thereby bringing closer the day that their house of cards belief system collapses entirely. Here are highlights from the London Times on this new discovery:

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A missing link in human evolution may have been filled by a remarkable fossil that could be the common ancestor of all apes and monkeys, including our own species. Darwinius masillae, a small lemur-like creature that lived 47 million years ago, illuminates a critical chapter in the human story when the primate family tree split into two branches, one of which led ultimately to us.

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Sir David Attenborough, who will present Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link, a BBC documentary on the discovery on BBC One on Tuesday at 9pm, said: “This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all mammals. The link they would have said until now is missing, is no longer missing.”

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The almost complete skeleton, which is missing only a part of one leg, was unearthed in 1983, in the Messel Pit near Darmstadt, Germany. Its significance had not been noticed before because the fossil was split into two parts. The pieces have now been reunited by a team led by Jørn Hurum, of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum. The first analysis is published in the journal Public Library of Science One. As well as the bones, the fossil preserves soft features of the animal such as fur, and even its last meal: it was a herbivore that ate fruit, seeds and leaves.

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Another one of the religious writers that I like and who has a number of books that helped me recover from my Catholic brainwashing is John Shelby Spong. One of his books, "Why Christianity Must Change" looks at precisely the issue of how a strict adherence to increasingly documented scientific untruths will ultimately kill Christianity. The discovery of this "missing link" is yet another step down that path. The irony is that the fundamentalists who want to protect Christianity are actually the ones hastening its demise.