News Finding: This implies that for 20 million years before dinosaurs became extinct, early versions of primates also lived and evolved.
Paper Finding: It is not clear whether a more sophisticated model would be possible to justify, and such a model is likely to introduce more uncertainty into the estimates of the divergence times, not less.
News Context: Under the new estimate, Toumai would fall within the period after the human lineage split from chimpanzees, Martin said. This implies that for 20 million years before dinosaurs became extinct, early versions of primates also lived and evolved. It challenged the accepted theory that primates and other mammals didn't really thrive on the planet until dinosaurs were gone.
Paper Context: The model used is relatively simple to code and understand, hopefully making our inference and assumptions transparent. It is not clear whether a more sophisticated model would be possible to justify, and such a model is likely to introduce more uncertainty into the estimates of the divergence times, not less. Most of the uncertainty in our final estimates comes from the uncertainty in results for the fossil calibrations and any uncertainty introduced by examining the model discrepancy (not shown here).