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You are attempting to put words in Dr. Rana's mouth, and mine. He was not trying to claim that Collard and Wood have DISPROVEN hominid evolution from phylogeny, but rather that one cannot PROVE hominid descent from phylogeny. There is a difference.

He also never claimed to use the quote to show that Collard and Wood were not "believers" in evolution, only that they doubt that this particular line of evidence can establish an evolutionary pathway. Slander does not become you, especially when the article is posted and Freepers can read his words for themselves and see how unfairly you mischaracterize him.

Again, he was not trying to claim that Collard and Wood have DISPROVEN hominid evolution from phylogeny, but rather that one cannot PROVE hominid evolution from phylogeny. In other words, conclusion-jumpers like yourself should not use each new box of fractured skull parts to do precisely what you are doing- declare that the evolution of man is a many-times proven fact and anyone who says otherwise is in denial.

As far as not being able to make final judgement of the evidence from my small picture, I quite agree- nor can one make it from the small pictures shown in the article. We need more data. It is possible that this is the ancestor of modern humans, it is also possible that it is the southernmost Neandertal find, and there are other possiblilties as well.

Slander does not become you, especially when the article is posted and Freepers can read his words for themselves and see how unfairly you mischaracterize him.

Rana's article makes a mountain of the molehill of the Collard and Woods study. Rana's artful quote,

Without a reliable phylogeny, little confidence can be placed in the hypotheses of ancestry…”

will be interpreted by the rabidly anti-E readers of Reasons.org as evidence that evolutionists themselves do not believe in common descent. I do not slander in noting what is there to be seen.

Rana's own words are indefensible. Saying that the study " ... calls into question the veracity of the evolutionary paradigm," means that it raises questions of whether evolution has happened at all.

That's just silly. The study is far too limited in scope for anyone to make such a broad-brush claim. The study restricts itself to questions of the reliability of cranial and dental morphology as cladistic tools in primate studies. That won't bring home the anti-E bacon.

Failure to establish clear lines of descent is almost a given in paleontology. Science can postulate a likely-looking line of descent and is always doing so. However, more data coming along (say, the discovery of a contemporary of one fossil species in a series, where the new species obviously fits the overall trend better) will have science revising the tree to the cackles of the yahoos for whom any "change of story" is proof that gran'pappy weren't no goddam monkey.
There are other inputs to the question of descent. For instance, while we can't be sure that the line of human descent goes through Australopithecus afarensis, it's virtually a cinch that it does go through Homo erectus. (Do you know why, without my having to shoot it into your brain? There are non-morphological data to be considered, and obvious points of logic.)

Your own brandishing of Rana as a "Get-out-of-checkmate free" card--OK, something of the sort was inevitable--and your screaming words "DISPROVEN" and "PROOF" shows that your bar remains infinitely high for drawing inferences any real scientist will make in a heartbeat. (Else he wouldn't be a scientist. A real scientist is inquisitive.)