Molecular anthropology and the subversion of paleoanthropology: an example of "the emperor's clothes" effect?

Although the birth of "molecular systematics" may date to the turn of the twentieth century, the discipline did not gain momentum until the 1960s, when most paleoanthropologists believed that humans were distantly related to a great ape group (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan), within which the African apes were most closely related. From the beginning, interpretation of molecular data, initially protein immunoreactivity, conflicted with the interpretation of morphological data by favoring a human-African ape or even a human-chimpanzee relationship. As interpretations of protein sequences, DNA hybridization, and ultimately mitochondrial (mt) and nuclear (n) DNA sequences increasingly yielded a human-chimpanzee relationship, virtually all paleoanthropologists came to embrace this relationship not only as possible, but even as fact. This led to a general disparaging of morphology as being phylogenetically revealing which, in turn, sent paleoanthropologists scurrying to identify any anatomical feature or system that supported the molecular systematists' claims. The perennial problems were and remain that humans and chimpanzees share few potentially synapomorphic features and most fossils are known only from morphology. In exploring these problems, I summarize the history of morphologically and then, molecularly-based theories of human-ape relationship. I hope to make clear how this history contributed in human evolutionary studies to the subservience of paleoanthropology to molecular anthropology.