Well, the fossil record seems to indicate that those “intermediate” creatures existed once at a time when other creatures did not exist. The fossil records is a snapshot in time of a breeding population. He provides precious little about where that population PRECISELY came from and where it PRECISELY went. A lot of the pre-modern humans may have been dead-ends, biologically.
Some of modern humans are dead-ends also
:-)
There’s a lot of lying and wishful thinking in the interpretations in the fossil record. Case in point: Ardi from a year or so ago was an ape, notaink