Missing link found?

From Missing Link: Scientists In New York Unveil Fossil Of Lemur Monkey Hailed As Man’s Earliest Ancestor from Sky News:

Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution.

This 95%-complete ‘lemur monkey’ is described as the “eighth wonder of the world”

The search for a direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom has taken 200 years – but it was presented to the world today at a special news conference in New York.

The discovery of the 95%-complete ‘lemur monkey’ – dubbed Ida – is described by experts as the “eighth wonder of the world”.

They say its impact on the world of palaeontology will be “somewhat like an asteroid falling down to Earth”.

Researchers say proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle.

Sir David Attenborough said Darwin “would have been thrilled” to have seen the fossil – and says it tells us who we are and where we came from.

I’m sure this will be a hot discussion topic in the blogosphere.  But I have a few reservations, specifically about how this thing is being presented.

Were we really just missing one piece that would single-handedly prove the theory of evolution (at one point, the article’s author calls it the “final piece of Darwin’s jigsaw”)?  I’m sure it will be incredibly valuable for science, and it’s wonderful that it’s yet another prediction fulfilled for Darwin’s theory, but it seems to me that heralding this as the Proof of Evolution 1) trivializes too much perfectly good evidence already extant in favor of common descent and 2) overstates what science can and can’t do — namely, definitively “confirm” anything.  Most scientists I am familiar with never make such extraordinary claims, so I think this kind of talk within that article is probably mostly due to sensationalist, and badly informed,  journalism.  For instance, the title – “man’s earliest ancestor”?  Um…no…that would be a single-celled organism hundreds and hundreds of millions of years before Ida.

One thing’s for sure — even if the academic community accepts Ida for what Attenborough and the others in this article claim it to be, it won’t be convincing anyone who’s already decided for religious reasons s/he doesn’t want to be descended from primates.  But here’s hoping lots of interesting and useful information does arise from what definitely appears to be an important missing link in our ancestry.

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[UPDATE: I found a much more scientific and measured description of this same fossil and its importance.  Check out this article from UPI and compare.]

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