According to multiple reports released yesterday, scientists will announce the discovery of a new species of two-million-year-old hominin this week. Do you know what that means? That’s right; writers are breaking out the pop-sci boilerplate to tell us all about the new “missing link.” To paraphrase what I have seen in the headlines alone, the find is the “missing link which will shed new light on human evolution and rewrite what we thought we knew about our history.”

I don’t believe the hype, but I can only speculate on the actual significance of the specimens in question. According to the reports already issued, paleoanthropologists have described the remains of several juvenile australopithecines (a large