Comment Re:we weren't the first (Score 1) 91
You are acting like our fossil sample would be totally biased to exclude that particular lineage, supposedly changing at vastly different rates and directions than the other
Nope, I'm pointing out that the fossil record is unbelievably short of the big picture at any given point. Another poster explained it fairly well:
Consider dinosaur fossils. We've found maybe, what, 50 T-Rex fossils and not a single 100% complete skeleton. Admittedly, there are probably tons more of them to find out there, but that's not the point, even though scientists are looking, they haven't found them yet. How many T-Rex actually existed in the 15 million or so years they walked the earth. If there were never more than a million alive at one time, and they lived for 100 years, that's 150 billion of them, largely swept away by the planet over the years, and traces of civilization just don't fossilize as well as bones do.
Do you see what's being said? Its not only possible that entire lineages, many of them, are absent from the fossil record, its all but guaranteed.