Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link"

To be clear, us and chimps do have a common ancestor which links us, although that's true of any two extant species of any kind of life on the planet, not just us and chimps. To describe that particular specimen as "missing" is accurate, but it's a rather melodramatic adjective - it's not like we need that one specific specimen in order to discover anything about our relationship to chimps (or whatever else).

So really, "missing link" is just a headline-grabbing way of saying "common ancestor that we haven't dug up yet (and probably never will because fossils are extremely rare)".

Regardless, Ardi does not "disprove" a missing link in any way, shape, or form. Ardi does not invalidate the theory that there is a common ancestor between us and chimps; she merely shows that it probably doesn't look like we think it does. Until now, scientists figured the common ancestor looked more like a chimp than a human; now we know that's probably not the case.

That is true, but then again hardly any specimen we find is going to literally be your great^n grandparent. When an animal dies, it rarely leaves around a fossil; so most or even all of what we've found is stuff that is closely related to, but is not exactly, our ancestors.

A visual analogy would be that we're an apple from the top of the tree; the fossils we find are apples from lower branches. Our apple didn't grow from theirs, but the branches we grew from did grow out of the branches that their fruit grew from.