What beliefs would we consider reasonable for a self proclaimed Christian to hold?

[He lives]

There are millions of monkeys and billions of men, so where are the brillions of links between  the monkey and the man? I think that is a fair question.

Homo sapiens sapiens (modern) (Fossils)

Modern forms of Homo sapiens first appear about 195,000 years ago. Modern humans have an average brain size of about 1350 cc. The forehead rises sharply, eyebrow ridges are very small or more usually absent, the chin is prominent, and the skeleton is very gracile. About 40,000 years ago, with the appearance of the Cro-Magnon culture, tool kits started becoming markedly more sophisticated, using a wider variety of raw materials such as bone and antler, and containing new implements for making clothing, engraving and sculpting. Fine artwork, in the form of decorated tools, beads, ivory carvings of humans and animals, clay figurines, musical instruments, and spectacular cave paintings appeared over the next 20,000 years. (Leakey 1994)

Even within the last 100,000 years, the long-term trends towards smaller molars and decreased robustness can be discerned. The face, jaw and teeth of Mesolithic humans (about 10,000 years ago) are about 10% more robust than ours. Upper Paleolithic humans (about 30,000 years ago) are about 20 to 30% more robust than the modern condition in Europe and Asia. These are considered modern humans, although they are sometimes termed "primitive". Interestingly, some modern humans (aboriginal Australians) have tooth sizes more typical of archaic sapiens. The smallest tooth sizes are found in those areas where food-processing techniques have been used for the longest time. This is a probable example of natural selection which has occurred within the last 10,000 years (Brace 1983).

Hominid Species

Fossil hominid skulls: Labeled with specimen name, species, age, and cranial capacity in milliliters (cranial capacity is the volume of the space inside the skull, and correlates closely with brain size). Images © 2000 Smithsonian Institution, modified from: TalkOrigins Common Ancestry FAQ

That graph illustrates one particular aspect of human evolution, the growth of the brain over the last 3.5 million years of human evolution. At no point could anyone credibly point to a discontinuity between our australopithecine ancestors and modern humans which is not filled by some ancestral fossil form.



Transitional Fossils Are Not Rare

Thank you for sharing. I am familiar with these findings. However, shouldn't a lot of these links species have survived and be here with us today? Perhaps they were just abnormalities of chimpanzees and early humans. I am not really sold on carbon dating. I would bet that two samples of dirt from different places would have different carbon dates although all of the dirt is the same age.