Cling to it, yes, and pound it into schoolkids’ heads, by force of law.
Here’s a human evolution book that might definitely be worth reading, to judge from Henry Gee’s review, “Palaeoanthropology: Craniums with clout” Nature, 478, 34 (06 October 2011): “A look at two early human fossils reveals the prejudices in ideas about human evolution, finds Henry Gee”.
Reviewing Dean Falk, The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution (University of California Press: 2011), he writes,
We have all seen the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that, as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh. Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates.
Palaeoanthropologist Dean Falk debunks some modern myths in her brilliant book, The Fossil Chronicles, by comparing the case histories of two famous fossils. A career spent teasing meaning from the brain casts of fossil hominins (creatures more closely related to Homo sapiens than to chimpanzees) has led Falk into the debate on the cognitive abilities of Homo floresiensis. This dwarfed hominin — nicknamed the Hobbit — lived on the Indonesian island of Flores between approximately 95,000 and 14,000 years ago, and was discovered in 2003 (see Nature 431, 1055–1061; 2004). Falk also describes Raymond Dart’s 1924 discovery in South Africa of a juvenile skull of Australopithecus africanus, the Man-Ape of South Africa, and locates an unpublished manuscript by Dart on the find that chimes with her views.
Apparently, the defenders of the Piltdown Man fraud prevented a lot of good science along the decades-long way.
(You have to pay to read the article right now, but keep watching.)