Neontology is a part of biology that, in contrast to paleontology, deals with living (or, more generally, recent) organisms.
Stephen Jay Gould said of neontology: All professions maintain their parochialisms, and I trust that nonpaleontological readers will forgive our major manifestation.
[3] As a result, information gaps arose within the fossil record of species, especially in Homo sapiens.
The anthropologists who accepted the synthetic theory reject the idea of an "ape-man" because the concept had mistaken paleontology with neontology.
Since the concept was based on paleontology, the idea of an ape-man could possibly be represented by the fossil hominids.
By incorporating neontology with different biological research methods, it can become clear how genetic mechanisms underlie major events in processes such as primate evolution.