What are the biggest frustrations with the human fossil record?
The human fossil record by now is much better than it was even a short time ago, and in fact it’s a pretty good record in comparison to many other families of mammals, even though we do have this tendency to bemoan its incompleteness. Of course every fossil record is always incomplete. We’ll never have representatives of every species that ever existed. And if we did, we certainly wouldn’t have representatives of those species in all the time periods that they inhabited or in all the areas geographically that they inhabited. The human fossil record, like every fossil record, is always going to be incomplete, and that will carry along with it its own frustrations. But on the other hand, it is absolutely wonderful how our knowledge of human evolution through the fossil record has expanded in the last half century in particular and over the last 20 years. Let’s touch again on mosaic evolution. The notion of mosaic evolution is a notion that was designed to accommodate the fact that differ
