That dread phrase has indeed been uttered in this very program not long ago. Which annoyed Colin Groves. Dr Groves is an anthropologist and studies bones at the Australian National University in Canberra. In 1864 the great British palaeontologist Hugh Falconer wrote to a relative about a primitive-looking skull from Gibraltar, about which he and a colleague had just presented a paper at a scientific meeting. It has become part of the English language with a vengeance, and a more misused term I cannot imagine.
Human evolution is much more complicated than all that.
The reality is far more complex, and far, far more exciting. On the contrary, it is a sign of a dynamic field of inquiry. The first controversy concerns the time of separation of the human line from that of other living apes - specifically from the line leading to the chimpanzee, our closest living relative. Ramapithecus consisted of some partial upper and lower jaws from fossil sites in India, Pakistan, Kenya and Turkey. In the 1980s and '90s, new methods such as DNA sequencing, gave support to the 5 to 8 million date, or even lowered it further.