Dr Napier and Dr Weiner quote from my preliminary reports and add, ‘All these opinions must be regarded as quite provisional for only detailed anatomical and statistical investigation will permit the assessment of the precise position of these new East African hominids within the evolutionary sequence’. Having said this, they then proceed to devote several pages to trying to assess the position of these new discoveries, when neither of them has made any detailed anatomical or statistical investigation of any of the skull and jaw material referred to, while the first author (at the time of writing) was only at an early stage of his study of the limb bones of the pre-Zinjanthropus juvenile.