new fossils and extraordinary claims

An amazing fossil find was revealed this week, a complete skeleton of an early primate the discoverers call Ida. The fossil even includes the impressions of some soft tissue, and the contents of the stomach. Wonderful.

But the discoverers can't let it go at that, they have to announce that their fossil represents a crucial stage in the evolution of humans:

Scientists have discovered an exquisitely preserved ancient primate fossil that they believe forms a crucial "missing link" between our own evolutionary branch of life and the rest of the animal kingdom.

The 47m-year-old primate – named Ida – has been hailed as the fossil equivalent of a "Rosetta Stone" for understanding the critical early stages of primate evolution.

Why are the early stages of primate evolution more "critical" than the later stages? Why is the group consisting of monkeys, apes, and humans "our evolutionary branch of life"? Why isn't our branch primates, or mammals, or hominids? Of course, those are all "our branch," and every step in evolution is equally critical. But nobody ever got a research grant or a BBC documentary by playing down his discovery.

This is an amazing fossil in part because we have so few primate fossils from the Eocene; but that also means that we can't really assess how close Ida was to this or that evolutionary branching.

Why can't people just say this is an amazing fossil without loading it with a bunch of unsupportable claims for its importance?