Missing link (human evolution)

The term originated to describe the intermediate form in the evolutionary series of anthropoid ancestors to anatomically modern humans (hominization).

The term "missing link" has been supported by geneticists since evolutionary trees only have data at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference and not evidence of fossils.

[citation needed] However, it has fallen out of favor with anthropologists because it implies the evolutionary process is a linear phenomenon and that forms originate consecutively in a chain.

[3] Radical thinkers like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck saw a progression of life forms from the simplest creatures striving towards complexity and perfection, a schema accepted by zoologists like Henri de Blainville.

After Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the idea of "lower animals" representing earlier stages in evolution lingered, as demonstrated in Ernst Haeckel's figure of the human pedigree.

For instance, the headline of the Philadelphia Inquirer on February 3, 1895, was "The Missing Link: A Dutch Surgeon in Java Unearths the Needed Specimen".