Fossil Record Richness

More than 6,000 hominin fossils spanning 7 million years have been catalogued. The old complaint about "missing links" is outdated — we now have so many transitional forms that the real challenge is sorting out which branches connect to which, not filling gaps.

Homo floresiensis, just one meter tall on the Indonesian island of Flores, made sophisticated stone tools and hunted dwarf elephants. Its tiny stature once led skeptics to dismiss it as a diseased modern human, but the evidence holds: it was a separate species. Small does not mean simple.