Nature, one of the premier science journals in the world today, recently published its editors' choice of science stories for 2011.¹

Primate fossils discovered in South Africa in 2008 are being hailed as an evolutionary "game changer." ABC News recently reported that these fossils provide a "key link in the process of evolution that led to modern human beings."¹ But neither is true, and it's not too hard to understand why.

In 2010, a new candidate was announced for humanity's evolutionary tree…Australopithecus sediba.¹ Now, recent analyses of its fossilized bones are being reported as further proof of its ancestral standing.

Something or someone supposedly walked across volcanic mud 3.66 million years ago, leaving behind footprints discovered in modern-day Laetoli, Tanzania.¹ Many who think modern humans evolved only about two million years ago have resisted interpreting these as human prints, because they are found in sediments that are "too old."