Don’t worry, I haven’t become a creationist! But for heaven’s sake, can we please stop using this misleading evolution graphic?? AND all the endless permutations of the same misleading “progress of man” theme…OK, some of them are funny, & some are probably an appropriate commentary on the silly notion of evolutionary progress, but enough already! BBC, bloggers, even the Leakey Foundation for heaven’s sake – get a grip on the latest! We know this isn’t how it happened, & I know we can come up with something more accurate & trendy.
First of all – duh – our ancestors weren’t all male & they certainly weren’t caucasian. Secondly, some of our ancestors were on average taller than humans. Third, one of our closest cousins, the Neanderthals, had larger brains (note to self: no more labeling a dense person a neanderthal). Fourth, there wasn’t any kind of straight-line progression from our common ancestor with chimpanzees & bonobos (6-7 million years ago) to Australopithecus, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, & Homo sapiens. In fact, the hominin family ‘bush’ looks sorta like a favorite Italian dish:
Notice that some of the noodles are cut off – extinctions of some of our ancestors. Notice too that some show clouded areas – maybe more extinctions? maybe that hominin line continues to evolve into other hominins, into humans? …we don’t know for sure, yet. We may never know. Primate fossils are hard to come by, which is why when a new one is uncovered (most likely in Africa) , it’s always big news. But we do know that we had many close relatives over the past 6-7 million years, and that we are the only one, the only hominin, still living on earth.
So next time you see something like this – & it’s ubiquitous, believe me – instead remember spaghetti…it’s our human primate heritage.
[updated 9/8/19]
the everyday primate 
I love this stuff, Linda! Thank you for voicing the oft misunderstood point: evolution does not mean “progress” (like the old General Electric advertisement). I’m looking forward to a future blog on the other misunderstood and misused term: the “fittest.”
thanks jean! good idea for a future post too.
thanks for the timely reminder that there are no straight lines in nature. In Mostar, Bosnia we saw a tee shirt with the sequence of hominids at the top of your page except that the last “ape” was looking back and the caption underneath was “Stop following me”. Well the Croatians thought it was hilarious.
i’d love one of those t-shirts – perfect!
What a great post. You have me laughing and I love it. I will always think of spaghetti now. Love a good rant.
yay – laughing is good! yes, always remember spaghetti!!
Most of those dudes & dudettes on the spaghetti diagram are not our ancestors– just cousins.
hmm, that’s an interesting point. If they became extinct, could they still be an ancestor to the species which eventually evolved into us? One thing I like about this particular graphic is that it shows that we don’t yet know the ‘line’ from them to us.
Only if there is some “intermarriage”. Looks like some homo sapiens sapiens carry some Neanderthal DNA. (discovered in the last couple years) BTW, which– by definition– if there is fertile offspring, then the “cousins” are the same species.
yep that’s right…interesting that we haven’t heard much about how humans & neanderthals may be the same species…
lee berger recently characterized human evolution as a “braided” or “meandering” stream. i love that image – kinda like spaghetti, dontcha think?