Also, instead of the President encouraging people to buy new cars… maybe he should be encouraging them to live within their means. But that wouldn’t exactly be what he’s doing with the budget now would it?

I want to remain optimistic about his presidency, but he is making it excrutiatingly difficult.

To be fair, this is mostly what the media and cable companies are saying, not the scientists. Read the scientists, and you’ll find moderate excitement about how neat the find is, to plenty of skepticism about how significant it really is in the big picture.

Of course, this fossil IS more evidence for human evolution in the sense that it fits into the overall picture exactly as we would expect. But that was already very well established to begin with.

“Let me pose a question: is it possible that the skeleton is the remains of a creature that evolved into a monkey-type creature (if it evolved at all), and ended there?”

Of course, and indeed that’s the case for most fossils. But that’s not particularly relevant to the overall question. Each fossil tells us lots about what sorts of features and traits were around in what sorts of lineages at what time. Just because this or that fossil wasn’t a DIRECT ancestor of whatever species happen to be alive today doesn’t mean it can’t tell us lots and lots about the ancestral connections between various groups. It can, basically the same way that DNA studies can reveal who YOUR ancestors and relations were and are: by matching up all the patterns of similarity and dissimilarity and fitting them into a timeline/geographic distribution.

“Why are there still many, many varieties of monkey and apes?”

This like asking why you people have brothers and sisters and cousins and second cousins, and so on. We’re talking about an ever-diversifying family tree here, not one single line of beings changing over time.

I can understand why the hype machine atmosphere bothers some people. But on the other hand, it IS a really exciting find.