Across the long arc of scientific inquiry, moments arrive when accumulated evidence quietly outpaces the frameworks built to contain it. That threshold appears to have arrived in paleoanthropology: researchers are now openly questioning whether biological history can be told as a single, authoritative story, as anatomical gaps in the fossil record and proposals like Matthew Haber's challenge the foundational assumption of universal common descent. The field has not yet found its new language, but it has begun to sense that the old one is no longer sufficient.