Neanderthals were human who lived in a harsh climate. Natural selection would favor short, stocky phenotypes, much like the harsh climiate of the Eskimos led to a simalar body type. If you got rid of the dirt and excess body hair that conceptual artists like to add, you wouldn't think them out of place on the streets of any major city.
As for coelecanths, it used to be a "fact" that they evolved about 340 million years ago and become extinct about 70 million years ago—about the same final extinction ‘date’ claimed for the dinosaurs. This was because fossils of coelacanth fish are found in rocks the same evolutionary age as the dinosaurs, but not rocks ‘dated’ younger. So coelacanths were believed to have died out long before man came on the scene, and thus never lived at the same time as people. But... in the 1930s, live coelacanths were found being caught off the coast of Madagascar. So, what was considered a "fact" of evolution isn't any more.
The Archaeopteryx is supposedly the "link" between bird and dinasaurs. It was hailed in the scientific journals and even National Geographic magazine. It was "discovered" in 1980 and was evolutionary proof of another transitional form. Only later (circa 2000) with NG and other admit that is was actually not a true species, but a composit (hoax?) of a bird and a dinasaur.
Another "peer reviewed" fact bites the dirt.
If peer review before publication was what is it purported to be, there would me much less of these types of mistakes.
You didn't mention Lucy, but she is has the bone structure similar to a chimp, despite the fact that artists like to draw her with a barrel shaped chest, like humans and a human type foot (while she had a very apelike foot). Did you know that Lucy's pelvis is also chimp-like, which would make her walk on all fours like the chimp she was? But one of the researchers decided that the bones were fused together incorrectly. So after makeing a model of her pelvic bones, he took a bone saw and cut and restructured it so that she would have an upright pelvis like us. We don't want the fossils to get in the way of our preconceived notions, do we?
You should quit shopping for facts in comic books.
Permit me to make a gentle suggestion: Go to Google, type in "Archaeopteryx hoax" and tell me what you see.
Although now represented by a single (or possibly two) living species, as a group the coelacanths were once very successful with several genera and species that left an abundant fossil record from the Devonian to the end of the Cretaceous period, at which point they apparently suffered a nearly complete extinction, and past which point no fossils are known. It is often claimed that the coelacanth has remained unchanged for millions of years but in fact the living species and even genus are unknown from the fossil record. However some of the extinct species, particularly those of the last known fossil coelacanth, the Cretaceous genus Macropoma, closely resemble the living species.In other words, the coelacanths today are not the same critters found in the fossil record.
I also don't see your point about coelecanths. They were thought to be extinct because no one had ever seen one except as a fossil. Then they were discovered. Scientists were very happy. Since all of their fossils are very old and since no one familiar with modern taxonomy had ever seen them, it wasn't unreasonable to think they were extinct.
Archaeopteryx is not a hoax. You're thinking about Archaeraptor, which was falsified from two different fossils. National Geographic (which isn't considered a scholarly journal) jumped the gun and published an article about it while most of the scientific community was going, "Hmm, can I look at that more closely?" This "discovery" was not published with peer review. The journals Nature and Science (yes, those are scholarly journals) both rejected the article. I consider this a triumph of peer review.
Lucy is an authentic fossil and shows multiple modifications in her pelvis, femur, and tibia to allow bipedal movement. I'm afraid you're going to have to provide some evidence for your assertion.
The cloning fiasco is a bit different. In this case peer-review worked, it just wasn't sufficient to uncover the fraud. Peer-review determines whether research is plausible. Dr. Hwang had a reasonable protocol and seemed to have all of the evidence needed to show that his technique had worked. Other researchers, however, were unable to reproduce his results. A tipster reported he had engaged in unethical activity and an investigation of his work showed most of the photographs he had submitted were fraudulent. Even without the tipster his work would have been exposed as falsified simply because no one else could get it to work.
When you speak of the Archaeopteryx being a composite(hoax?), I would like to know where you got your information...I ask because I am now reading some very detailed books, published in 2002, and they hardly make mention of this claim that your are making...please provide some information as to where you got your information, because it certainly does not jive at all with what I have been reading, in very recently published books...and there have been some very, very recent fossil finds in China, which show, as Archaeopteryx, the link that you so easily seem to dismiss...new discoveries are being made all of the time, China is rich in fossils which still are being unearthed and studied...as they find more and more fossils, the picture becomes clearer and clearer...
As regards the Coelacanths, it was thought that they were extinct...when something is declared to be extinct, its usually because its been so very long since its been seen...the species in general is thought to be extinct...but how can anyone know for sure that every single member of a particular species is gone, since we cannot search every single inch of the earth and the ocean and seas and lakes at the same time, to declare that...a species, in general may be thought to be extinct, however its always possible that some few members of a species still survive...when one of the members of a species thought to be extinct, turns up, that does nothing to invalidate evolution, and I cannot imagine why anyone would think that it does...