What Can We Responsibly Believe About Human Evolution?

We've been looking at the recentFlores man find(not really a "new species") and the gradual reassessment of the Neanderthals as not very different from us eitherphysicallyormentally. Human evolution studies seem to have reluctantly absorbed this change in view, though popular culture may lag.

"In the minds of the European anthropologists who first studied them, Neanderthals were the embodiment of primitive humans, subhumans if you will,"notedFred H. Smith, a physical anthropologist at Loyola...