Regarding Phizzy's comment about the WT brochure's quote of the book by Henry Gee, while the context in the book does say that the fossil found by Gee might be of a giant civet (though it also says that Gee thinks it might be ancestor of Gee) and that if so, "it would
be the oldest known record of this species by a million years", the example of the possible civet fossil is used by Gee to illustrate the idea that because fossils don't come with a pedigree then there is no way to know if a specific fossil is an actual linear ancestor (direct ancestor) of the fossil of another individual or even of a specific species (and that is a major theme of Gee's book). As such, I think the WT's handling of the specific quote was not a misquote. Gee's book is also about the idea that family trees of specific species descending from other specific species presume far too much, and that cladistic diagrams should be used instead. The quote is from the first chapter of Gee's book, and that entire chapter of Gee's book is posted online at https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gee-time.html (that page also has a link to a review of the book). Here is a large context of the quote. [The boldfacing is mine.]
"Before I told everyone else about my own
find, straddled on that ridge overlooking an expanse of space and,
figuratively, an expanse of time, I wondered fleetingly if it might have
been part of a hominid — perhaps half a tooth, like the one Gabriel
found. In my mind I was already holding
the fragment between finger and thumb, turning it over in the light. The
question immediately presented itself: could this fossil have belonged
to a creature that was my direct ancestor?
It is possible, of course, that the
fossil really did belong to my lineal ancestor. Everybody has an
ancestry, after all. Given what the Leakeys and others have found in
East Africa, there is good reason to suspect that hominids lived in the
Rift before
they lived anywhere else in the world,
so all modern humans must derive their ancestry, ultimately, from this
spot, or somewhere near it. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that
we should all be able to trace our ancestries,
in a general way, to creatures that
lived in the Rift between roughly 5 and 3 million years ago. So much is
true, but it is impossible to know, for certain, that the fossil I hold
in my hand is my lineal ancestor. Even
if it really was my ancestor, I could
never know this unless every generation between the fossil and me had
preserved some record of its existence and its pedigree. The fossil
itself is not accompanied by a helpful label.
The truth is that my own particular
ancestry — or yours — may never be recovered from the fossil record.
The obstacle to this certain knowledge
about lineal ancestry lies in the extreme sparseness of the fossil
record. As noted above, if my mystery skull belonged to an extinct giant
civet, Pseudocivetta ingens, it would
be the oldest known record of this
species by a million years. This means that no fossils have been found
that record the existence of this species for that entire time; and yet
the giant civets must have been there all
along. Depending on how old giant civets
had to be before they could breed (something else we can never
establish, because giant civets no longer exist so that we can watch
their behaviour), perhaps a hundred thousand generations
lived and died between the fossil found
by me at site LO5 and the next oldest specimen. In addition, we cannot
know if the fossil found at LO5 was the lineal ancestor of the specimens
found at Olduvai Gorge or Koobi Fora.
It might have been, but we can never
know this for certain. The intervals of time that separate the fossils
are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible
connection through ancestry and descent.
...
A fossil can be thought of as an event
in Deep Time. Compared with the immensity of time in which it is found, a
fossil is a point in time of zero extent: a fossil either exists or it
doesn't. By itself, a fossil is a punctuation mark, an interjection,
an exclamation, even, but it is not a
word, or even a sentence, let alone a whole story. Fossils are the
tableaux that are illuminated by the occasional shafts of light that
punctuate the corridor of Deep Time. You cannot
connect one fossil with any other to
form a narrative.
So there I was, confronted with a fossil
that might have been half a tooth of a hominid, a scrap of flotsam from
the ocean of time. Let us give a name — Yorick -- to its deceased
owner. Yorick might have been my lineal ancestor; but we can never
establish this for certain.
The events of Deep Time — fossils — are
so sparse, because an animal, once dead, only rarely becomes a fossil. A
million years passed between one fossil of
Pseudocivetta ingens and the
next. The process of fossilization and discovery is a concatenation of
chance built upon chance. It's amazing that anything ever becomes a
fossil at all.
...
The fact is that we know so little of the past. We depend on the minute
fraction of the life that Earth has produced that has left any record.
We have hardly begun to count the species with which we share this
planet, yet for every species now living,
perhaps a thousand, or a million, or a
thousand million (we will never know for certain) have appeared and
become extinct.
...
Because we see evolution in terms of a
linear chain of ancestry and descent, we tend to ignore the possibility
that some of these ancestors might have been side branches instead —
collateral cousins, rather than direct ancestors. The conventional,
linear view easily becomes a story in
which the features of humanity are acquired in a sequence that can be
discerned retrospectively — first an upright stance, then a bigger
brain, then the invention of toolmaking,
and so on, with ourselves as the
inevitable consequence.
New fossil discoveries are fitted into
this preexisting story. We call these new discoveries 'missing links',
as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our
contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention
created after the fact, shaped to accord
with human prejudices. In reality, the physical record of human
evolution is more modest. Each fossil represents an isolated point, with
no knowable connection to any other given
fossil, and all float around in an
overwhelming sea of gaps.
...
In cladistics, presumptions about particular courses of ancestry and
descent are abandoned as unprovable or unknowable. Yet cladistics does
more than state that we are all cousins. It is a formal way of
investigating the order in which organisms are cousins,
by examining the possible alternatives.
Cladograms are statements of collateral relationship of greater or
lesser extent. Given that, they sidestep the question of whether Yorick
is my ancestor, or if any fossil is the
ancestor of any other, because the
answer to these questions can never be known. In other words, cladistics
acknowledges the discontinuities of Deep Time and, by acknowledging
them, transcends them.
"
As a result I found Gee's book useful for my research about evolution, but it is also depressing to me. It depresses me because it makes the strong case that we can never never know for sure if a specific extinct species (represented by specific fossils or by only one fossil) is the actual ancestor (linear ancestor/direct ancestor) of another specific species. Consider hominid evolution for example.
The more hominid fossils that are found the more hominid species are known to have existed, and these have many similarities with each other. As result it becomes increasing difficult to be confident of which species descended from a specific other species It even become hard to define which species to assign a particular fossil to. Hominid evolution is now thought of being much more like a bush (or a thicket) with numerous intertwined branches and twigs, than a tree. For example, the KNM-ER 1470 fossil was first assigned to Homo habilis, but many years later in science books it tended to be more commonly assigned to Homo rudolfensis, then later sometimes to Australopithecus rudolfensis instead, and now sometimes to Kenyanthropus rudolfensis instead.
For many years (especially until the fossil named "Lucy" was found") evolutionist anthropologists made family trees saying that our species descended from Australopithecus africanus, but years later the family trees in science books usually showed our species as not descending from Australopithecus africanus, though descending from Australopithecus afarensis (and sometimes also Homo habliis). [When Australopithecus africanus is shown these days in family trees, it typically is shown as leading to a dead end.] Many recent evolutionist biology books and evolutionist anthropology books don't even include family trees of hominids, instead they simply show a chart which indicates the time periods various hominid species existed and sometimes cladograms are also presented to indicate the relationships between the various hominid species.
For decades Homo erectus was presented as an ancestor of Homo sapiens, but now sometimes it is depicted as not being an ancestor of Homo sapiens. Instead of being shown as our ancestor some scientists assign some fossils to the species Homo ergaster - fossils that previously were assigned to Homo erectus (and that still are assigned to Homo erectus by other scientists). As a result, diagrams of family trees made by those scientists (the ones who split the species Homo erectus into Homo ergaster and Homo erectus) show our species, Homo sapiens, as having descended from Homo ergaster but not also from Homo erectus.
Thinking has also changed regarding the classification of Homo floresiensis. Initially it was thought to have descended (as a dwarf species) from Homo erectus, but now it is known to be more primitive than what researchers had thought. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-the-hobbits-of-indonesia-2012-12-07/ and https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/10/12/1480331.htm for more information about that new viewpoint.
