Daily Mail.com
It’s one of the most famous images in the history of scientific endeavour. The Road To Homo Sapiens, by American-based artist Rudolph Zallinger, is a convenient shorthand to show the gradual evolution from primitive crawling apes to upright walking mankind.
The image was created for a children’s book in the mid-1960s and has since appeared in humorously subverted versions everywhere, from T-shirts to The Simpsons. But the past few days have seen a new discovery which perfectly illustrates what scientists such as myself have long known: the image is completely wrong.