Richard Leakey

• "Unfortunately, the fossil record is somewhat incomplete as far as the hominids are concerned, and is all but blank for the apes."

Gould, Stephen Jay

• [m]ost hominid fossils, even though they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of jaws and scraps of skulls."

Mary Leakey

• "Since scientists can never prove a particular scenario of human evolution," Leakey said "all these trees of life with their branches of our ancestors, that's a lot of nonsense."

unsourced in Science, V.274, p.1841

• "[H. erectus] would have been alive when modern human and Neandertals roamed the earth. ...If the dates are right, we have three different species coexisting at the same time..." 

Ian Tattersall

• "But quite as important as new Neatherthal finds in the 50’s was the recognition, finally, that the stooped-shoulder, bent-kneed, stereotype of these humans created by Marcellin Boule was totally false."

Gould, Stephen Jay

• What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth"

W. Howells

• "A great legend has grown up to plague both paleontologists and anthropologists. It is that one of these wondrous men can take a tooth or a small and broken piece of bone, gaze at it, and pass his hand over his forehead once or twice, and then take a sheet of paper and draw a picture of what the whole animal looked like as it tramped the Tertiary terrain. If this were quite true, the anthropologists would make the F.B.I. look like a troop of Boy Scouts."

Malcolm Bowden

• It must be emphasised that where there is sufficient evidence, ALL skulls can be identified as being either ape or human. There are NO other classes, for they are all the imaginings of the evolutionary paleaoanthropologists who insist on concocting a string of links between man and apes. In order to fill this enormous gap, any ape skull is greatly enlarged and the fossil's 'human' features exaggerated (e.g. Pekin man and 'Lucy'), whilst human skulls are decreased and their 'ape' features are similary emphasised (e.g. 1470 Man)

Gould, Stephen Jay

• The oldest human fossils are less than 4 million years old, and we do not know which branch on the copious bush of apes budded off the twig that led to our lineage. (In fact, except for the link of Asian Sivapithecus to the modern orangutan, we cannot trace any fossil ape to any living species. Paleontologists have abandoned the once popular notion that Ramapithecus might be a source of human ancestry.) Thus, sediments between 4 and 10 million years in age are potential guardians of the Holy Grail of human evolution -- the period when our lineage began its separate end run to later domination, and a time for which no fossil evidence exists at all."