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CREATIONISM VS EVOLUTIONISM
III) SCRIPTURAL TESTIMONY & PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF A DESIGNED AND ORCHESTRATED CREATION, (cont.)
6) 'PREHISTORIC' MAN DISCOVERIES SUPPORT A DESIGNED & ORCHESTRATED CREATION NOT EVOLUTION
[Marvin L. Lubenow states, ('Bones of Contention, A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils,' Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994), pp. 29-32]:
"...approximately 4000... fossil hominid individuals have been discovered as of 1969-1976. This is a surprisingly large amount of evidence dealing with human origins.. ...The period since that time has seen the most intensive and successful search for hominid fossils in the history of paleoanthropology...
...Much of this fossil material is only thousands of years old. Going back in time, the amount of fossil material drops off significantly. Evolutionists say that because evolutionary change occurs so slowly, the older fossils are more significant, and these are the ones that are in short supply. Yet, it is the more recent fossils that effectively falsify the concept of human evolution, specifically recent Homo erectus, our alleged evolutionary ancestor, who may have been alive and well just a few hundred years ago (the Cossack skull)...
When a worker in this field [of paleoanthropology] speaks of the scarcity of the human fossils, he is actually saying, 'Although there is an abundance of hominid fossils, the bulk of them are either too modern to help me or they do not fit well into the evolutionary scheme...'
[Marvin L. Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 46-49]:
"Evolution always deals with populations: the collective gene pool. So, when we ask why Lucy [a supposed small, erect, chimplike animal which is purported to have evolved into man] isn't here today, we are asking why there are no small, erect, chimplike animals living today that are like Lucy. And the evolutionists' answer is, 'Lucy isn't here because we are.'
Since contemporary evolutionists are committed to the idea that a population of chimplike animals known collectively as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) evolved into us, there cannot be any Lucys. Whether they hold to the slow and gradual view of evolution (phyletic gradualism) or to the newer model of long periods of stability and short bursts of rapid evolutionary change (punctuated equilibria), the result is the same. Why isn't Lucy here? Because we are. Why isn't Homo erectus here today? The answer is the same: Because we are. From Lucy, it involved that long trail of three million years and five million mutational events, but here we are.
W. W. Howells (Harvard University) explains how the process takes place in each of the two evolutionary models:
In 'phyletic gradualism,' change is viewed as gradual and general over the species... In 'punctuated equilibria,' the apparent discontinuity, seen so often in a paleontological succession, is not simply the artifact of a gap in the record but is real. The process of change is not species-wide but results from allopatric [isolated] speciation [speciation in some other place]. A subspecies, ideally a peripheral isolate of the old species, becomes the new form in some significant respect and replaces populations of the old by migration. Thus the main body of the species does not undergo the gradual change to a new species.'
[William W. Howells, 'Homo erectus in human descent: ideas and problems,' Homo erectus: Papers in Honor of Davidson Black, Becky A. Sigmon and Jerome S. Cybulski, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981): 70-71. Bracketed material added]:
In the gradual model, the entire Lucy population would change into Homo habilis, and that entire population would gradually change into Homo erectus. The Homo erectus population would gradually change into archaic Homo sapiens, and they eventually into us. Should there be some isolated groups or individuals along the way who did not inherit those superior mutated gene, they would eventually die out, because they would be less fit to survive in a very competitive environment.
In the newer punctuated equilibria model, a small portion of the Lucy population, probably on the edge of the species range, obtains some favorable mutations. This small 'advanced' Lucy population, to use Howells's words, 'replaces populations of the old [species] by migration.' This replacement of the older population is accomplished by their death, since they are the less fit, and the advanced Lucy population represents the more fit. This process takes place again and again through Homo habilis, Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens, and on up to modern humans....
These two models have their differences. However, in both cases the time element - about three million years - is the same. The total number of mutational events needed to bring about these changes - approximately five million - is the same. And in each case those individuals who did not take part in that evolutionary process must be eliminated through death. In the evolutionary process the less fit must die as the more fit survive. The more fit survive because they are better able to compete for the limited food supply, and they reproduce in greater numbers. In other words, in both models, for species A to evolve into species B, species A must precede species B in time. Furthermore, after species A has evolved into species B, any species A remnants must soon die. It is thus basic to evolution that if species B evolved from species A, that species A and species B cannot coexist for an extended length of time.
The 'survival of the fittest' has a flip side. It is the death of the less fit. For evolution to proceed, it is as essential that the less fit die as it is that the more fit survive. If the unfit survived indefinitely, they would continue to 'infect' the fit with their less fit genes. The result is that the more fit genes would be diluted and compromised by the less fit genes, and evolution could not take place. The concept of evolution demands death. Death is thus as natural to evolution as it is foreign to biblical creation. The Bible teaches that death is a 'foreigner,' a condition superimposed upon humans and nature after creation. Death is an enemy, Christ has conquered it, and He will eventually destroy it. Their respective attitudes toward death reveal how many light years separate the concept of evolution from biblical creationism.
It is possible to determine whether the concept of human evolution is a scientific theory or a philosophy. If it is a scientific theory, it must be capable of being falsified. Since human evolution is alleged to be a historic process, the evidence for it or the falsification of it must come from the fossil record. For instance, if Homo erectus people persisted long after they should have died out or changed into Homo sapiens, the concept of human evolution would be falsified. If one could show that fossils indistinguishable from modern humans existed long before they were supposed to exist (according to the process of evolution) this also would falsify the concept...
If human evolution is truly a scientific theory, the fossil record shows that it has been falsified. The fact that the evidence is ignored or disguised indicates that the concept of human evolution is a philosophy that is perpetuated in spite of and independent of the facts of the human fossil record.
If we humans evolved from a small chimplike animal like Lucy, it is obvious that we had to pass through a number of stages on this long evolutionary journey. We are classified as Homo sapiens. Not only are we said to have come from some form that was not our species, we are said to have come from some form that was not even our genus. This form, Lucy, is called Australopithecus afarensis (southern ape from Afar, Ethiopia). However, because of very recent fossil discoveries, some evolutionists are going back to the older view that our immediate non-human ancestor was Australopithecus africanus. Evolutionists then propose a sequence going to Homo habilis (handy man), Homo erectus (erect man), archaic Homo sapiens (primitive wise man), and then Homo sapiens (wise man).
In theory the progression appears rather tidy. In actuality, it is very untidy. First of all, it may surprise the reader to learn that there is no clear-cut, universally accepted scientific definition for any of these categories, including Homo sapiens...
[Secondly] ...We have the right to expect, if evolution were true, that the hominid fossil record would faithfully follow the time and morphology sequence set forth by evolutionists. Since humans are supposed to have evolved from something very different from what they look like today, we have a right to expect that very modern-looking fossils would not show up in Lucy times, or that primitive or archaic fossils would not embarrass the evolutionist by showing up in modern times. We also have the right to expect that if a significant number of fossils are so rude as to show up at the wrong time, the evolutionist would be honest enough to admit that his theory has been falsified. In actuality, many fossils have been that rude. And evolutionists have been less than intellectually honest.
Evolutionists work their own special magic on nonconformist fossils. With the waving of a magic wand, Homo erectus fossils can become sapiens or Neandertals, and Homo sapiens fossils can become australopithecines. To us, this is a serious matter of intellectual integrity. The evolutionist does not see it that way. To him, evolution is true. Hence, fossils must be interpreted accordingly....
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 159-168]:
"Louis Leakey was at least consistent. He recognized that for evolution to go from africanus to erectus to sapiens presented a problem. The cranium of africanus, although very small, is thin, high domed, and gracile. The erectus cranium is thick, low domed, and robust. The sapiens cranium is thin, high domed, and gracile. Thus, to go from africanus to erectus represents a reversal in morphology. And a reversal is an evolutionary 'no-no.' It was for this reason that Louis believed that neither Homo erectus nor the Neandertals were in the mainstream of human evolution. Both these robust groups, he felt, were evolutionary cul-de-sacs that led to extinction. The Homo habilis cranium, on the other hand, was thin, high domed, and gracile. By going from habilis directly to sapiens, Louis avoided the reversal problem. Although most evolutionists have accepted habilis into the hominid family, they have also retained erectus. Hence, they still have a reversal problem in going from habilis to erectus to sapiens.
The concept of reversals in the fossil record is intriguing. A rule in evolution, Dollo's Law, says that reversals are not supposed to happen. Evolutionary lineages are believed to go from a generalized to a specialized condition. The basic idea in evolution is that a species is successful when it is able to adapt to its environment. The better it adapts, the more specialized it becomes to that environment. Specializations usually involve feeding and defense mechanisms. The species not able to adapt dies out. However, adaptation has a flip side. Major extinctions in evolutionary history follow catastrophes or extensive environmental changes. Those species that have become well adapted (specialized) to the former environments cannot change rapidly enough to meet the new situation, nor can they reverse themselves and go back to their former generalized condition. Hence, mass extinction.
Evolutionists have a logical reason for holding to this 'you-can't-go-back' idea. Mutations are, they say, the raw material for evolutionary change. When mutations occur in an organism, those mutations represent permanent changes in the genetic structure of the organism. Whether the mutational events are for better (there is no observational or experimental support for 'good' mutations) or for worse, the genes that had programmed the former condition are gone. Through mutations, those genes are permanently changed and have become different genes which program for something a bit different. To believe that chance mutations could occur that would exactly restore the former genes would be like believing in the tooth fairy. Hence, reversals have not been considered a part of evolutionary theory.
This lack of reversals gives to evolution a one-way directionality which is basic to the system. Phylogenetic trees and evolutionary relationships have been developed on this generalized-to-specialized concept. It is also basic to fossil and rock correlation on a worldwide scale. If a rather generalized fossil and rock correlation on a worldwide scale. If a rather generalized fossil organism is found in a certain rock layer, and what appears to be a more specialized form of that same organism appears in an connected rock layer some distance away, it is assumed that the specialized form evolved from the generalized form, never the other way around. On the basis of that first assumption - that the specialized form evolved from the generalized form - it is further assumed that the rock containing the specialized form is more recent in age than the rock containing the generalized form. The importance of these concepts in worldwide stratigraphy cannot be overemphasized...
..In the paleontological literature I discovered a number of well-documented cases of reversals in the fossil record of insects, worms, ammonites, fishes, mammals, and humans. These were cases where organisms had seemingly gone from a specialized to a more generalized condition. Because the paleontological literature is so vast, I suspect that the results of my research are just the tip of the iceberg, that further research would reveal many more documented cases of reversals...
..That was fifteen years ago. Today reversals are openly talked about in the evolutionary literature. Richard Klein, citing McHenry, states that to go from habilis to erectus to sapiens means reversals in both cranial thickness and in brow ridge development...
[Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural origins (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 161]:
...However, in spite of the many references in today's literature to reversals, seldom is there any hint that evolutionists understand the serious implications these reversals have for their theory. So much for reversals..."
[Dr. Don R. Patton, op. cit., Tape #3]:
"Often creationists are corrected by evolutionists when [the creationists] say [that evolutionists maintain] that man came from apes. [Creationists are then corrected by evolutionists as follows]: 'No. We teach that [man and apes] came from a common ancestor'...
While obviously they teach that we came from a common ancestor, the truth is that [that] common ancestor was undoubtedly an ape according to their own teaching. Consider the statement by Earnest A. Hooten, [who] at the time of this statement was head of the anthropology department at Harvard, this was made in his book UP FROM THE APE [p. 332] which gives you a pretty good impression of his view... He says, 'If we are descended from apes our remote ancestors ought to look their part. You may not be willing to admit that you resemble an ape... But if that thousandth ancestor's forebearers become progressively more simian as you trace back the genealogical lines you will have to admit that somewhere in your family tree there squats an ape.'
There is no doubt as to his position in the matter. Yes! They teach [that] we came from apes. But even though Earnst Hooten teaches that very plainly, consider the warning that this avowed evolutionist gives. He says in that same book [p. 332], 'To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip, leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little if any scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public... So put not your trust in reconstructions.'
[Compare several other quotations from Dr. Patton's notes:
'A great legend has grown up to plague both paleontologists and anthropologists. It is that one of these wondrous men can take a tooth or a small and broken piece of bone, gaze at it, and pass his hand over his forehead once or twice, and then take a sheet of paper and draw a picture of what the whole animal looked like as it tramped the Terriary terrain. If this were quite true, the anthropologists would make the F.B.I. look like a troop of Boy Scouts.'
[W. HOWELLS, Harvard, MANKIND SO FAR, p. 138]
'I am also aware of the fact that, at least in my own subject of paleoanthropology, '''theory''' - heavily influenced by implicit ideas - almost always dominates '''data.''' ....Ideas that are totally unrelated to actual fossils have dominated theory building, which in turn strongly influences the way fossils are interpreted.'
[DAVID PILBEAM, Yale, quoted in BONES OF CONTENTION, P. 127]
'We then move right of the register of objective truth into those fields of presumed biological science, like extrasensory perception or the interpretation of man's fossil history, where to the faithful anything is possible - and where the ardent believer is sometimes able to believe several contradictory things at the same time.'
[LORD ZOLLY AUCKERMAN, BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER, p. 19]
Well, we want that which is scientific.... Yet [the UNSCIENTIFIC, like misleading restorations,] is exactly the kind of evidence that has left a major impression with a generation of school children. We look, for example, at TimeLife's book, 'Early Man'... We see in the lineup of the supposed lineage [of living creatures] that led to man, beginning with the modern gibbon which they say [in the article] in fine print had absolutely nothing to do with man. They progress on upward in size, finally leading to modern man who is tallest of all...
But when we look at the fossil record we'll see [that] this is a misrepresentation of the evidence.... Regarding [this], Roger Lewin who is Editor, Research News in SCIENCE magazine, in his recent book BONES OF CONTENTION [1987, p. 123], points out, 'The key issue is the ability correctly to infer a genetic relationship between two species on the basis of a similarity in appearance, at gross and detailed levels of anatomy. Sometimes this approach... can be deceptive, partly because similarity of structure does not necessarily imply an identical genetic heritage; a shark (which is a fish) and a porpoise (which is a mammal) look similar...'
So things that look similar are NOT necessarily kin... But the whole basis of [the evolutionists' portrayal of the lineage] of man is similarity. And we know that's not a scientific basis... And... [if] you put that unscientific basis of similarity together with the unscientific basis of reconstruction and you have a tower of unscientific evidence...
We look... [at an] outline of the lineage proposed by Lawrence C. Boice in his ATLAS OF FOSSIL MAN. This is a book that's taught from in most of the universities today... And it's a... [simplistic] view of the lineage of man beginning down at the bottom of the chart with Ramapithecus... to Australopithecine and then to Pithecanthropine or Homo Erectus to... Neanderthals and finally to Moderns...
Let's be reminded of the point made by Richard Lewontin, one of the leading evolutionists in our country, professor of zoology at Harvard: 'Look, I'm a person who says in this book [HUMAN DIVERSITY, 1982] that we don't know anything about the ancestors of the human species. All the fossils which have been dug up and are claimed to be ancestors - we haven't the faintest idea whether they are ancestors... ...All you've got is Homo sapiens there, you've got that fossil there, you've got another fossil there... ..and it's up to you to draw the lines. Because there are no lines.'
[HARPER'S, 2/84]
Now many people forget that. They see the lines drawn and they assume that's the way it is in the fossil record... That's not the case... They line them up on the basis of similarity and [the] similarities come from the reconstructions. And so that's not a scientific basis..."
b) REAL DISCOVERIES SUPPORT DESIGNED CREATION WHEN PROPERLY INVESTIGATED
1)HOMO SAPIEN DISCOVERIES CROMAGNON & MODERN MAN
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 169-178]:
"Fossils that are indistinguishable from modern humans... ...extend all the way back to 4.5 m.y. on the [so-called] evolutionary time scale...
...At the bottom of... ...the lowest bed at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, a circular stone structure was found that could only have been made by true humans. This object, fourteen feet in diameter, is to be the world's oldest man-made structure. Technically, it is an artifact rather than a fossil. Mary Leakey discovered it on the oldest of the occupation sites (or living floors) at Olduvai during the 1961-62 digging season.
Mary quickly realized that there was a pattern in the distribution of these stones, an intentional piling of stones on top of each other. The stones themselves are lava rocks that are not indigenous to what was a lakeshore when the structure was built. The several hundred rocks were brought from a source some miles away. Other stones on the occupation site are scarce and haphazardly scattered.
...The people of the Okombambi tribe in Southwest Africa construct such shelters today. They make a low ring of stones with higher piles at intervals to support upright poles or braces. Over these poles are placed skins or grasses to keep out the wine. Turkana tribesmen living in the desert of northern Kenya make similar shelters.
What staggers the mind is that the living floor where this structure was found was dated by evolutionists at 1.8 m.y.a. (K-Ar). Revisions published in late 1991 indicate that it may be as old as 2 m.y. (Laser-fusion 40Ar/39Ar).
[R.C. Walter, P.C. Manega, R. L. Hay, R. E. Drake, and G. H. Curtis, 'Laser-fusion 49Ar/39Ar dating of Bed of Bed I, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania,' Nature 354 (14 November 1991): 145-49]
[Dr. Don Patton, op. cit., tape #3, cont.]:
"[The Leakey expedition] found a stone dwelling - a circle of stone - just exactly... like the stones that formed the foundation of the dwellings that modern natives in the same area live in today... [this discovery of a circle of stones] is underneath all of these fossils that are supposed to have led to man.. Now, then, if we've got what they have today, underneath all of that, then I think we can see some serious reasons to question the idea [of the] evolutionary sequence that led to man..."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 169-178]:
"...Mary Leakey also found the usual stone and bone waste, as well as Oldewan tools. These tools are normally considered by evolutionists to be very primitive. However, Mary reports that a similar type of stone chopper is used today by the remote Turkana tribesmen to break open the nuts of the doum palm.
[Mary D. Leakey, 'Primitive Artifacts from Kanapoi Valley,' Nature 212 (5 November 1966): 581]
...The conceptual ability required to make such structures, the physical ability to carry hundreds of large stones several miles, and the fact that similar structures are made by humans today constitute strong evidence that true humans were on the scene at Olduvai at about 2 m.y.a. on the evolution time scale.
Beginning in 1978, associates of Mary Leakey discovered a series of what appear to be human footprint trails at site G, Laetoli, thirty miles south of Olduvai Gorge, in northern Tanzania. The strata above the footprints has been dated at 3.6 m.y.a., while the strata below them has been dated at 3.8 m.y.a. (K-Ar). These footprint trails rank as one of the great fossil discoveries of the twentieth century.
Mary Leakey told the story in the April 1979 issue of National Geographic. She described the footprints as remarkably similar to those of modern man.'
[Mary D. Leakey, 'Footprints in the Ashes of Time,' National Geographic, April 1979, 446]
..Three parallel trails are seen, made by three individuals, with one individual walking in the footprints of another. The trails contain a total of sixty-nine prints extending a length of about thirty yards. More prints may yet be uncovered. The prints were made in fresh volcanic ash spewed out by Mount Sadiman to the east. A unique combination of circumstances caused these amazing prints to be preserved...
..The specialist who has conducted the most extensive recent study of these footprints is Russell H. Tuttle (University of Chicago). He did so at the invitation of Mary Leakey. The footprint trails at Laetoli appear to have been made by individuals who were barefoot, probably habitually unshod. When Tuttle began his study, he discovered that very few studies have been done on habitually unshod peoples. Studies done on the footprints of shod people would not necessarily be applicable to the Laetoli prints.
As a part of Tuttle's investigations he observed the Machiguenga Indians in the rugged mountains of Peru, a habitually barefoot people. More than seventy individuals from ages seven to sixty-seven, both male and female, constituted his study. He concludes: 'In sum, the 3.5-millin-year-old footprint trails at Laetoli site G resemble those of habitually unshod modern humans. None of their features suggest that the Laetoli hominids were less capable bipeds than we are.'....
...If the Laetoli footprints are so much like those of modern humans, why would Tuttle talk about the existence of 'one other hominid' in East Africa, one whose identity is totally unknown? Why not ascribe those footprints to humans? Tuttle is honest enough to give us the reason: 'If the G footprints were not known to be so old, we would readily conclude that they were made by a member of our genus, Homo...
[Russell H. Tuttle, 'The Pitted Pattern of Laetoli Feet,' Natural History, March 1990; p. 64]
The real problem - the only problem - is that to ascribe those fossil footprints to Homo does not fit the evolutionary scenario timewise According to the theory of evolution, those footprints are too old to have been made by true humans. It is a classic case of interpreting facts according to a preconceived philosophical bias.
Interpreting the Laetoli footprints is not a question of scholarship; it is a question of logic and the basic rules of evidence. We know what the human foot looks like. There is no evidence that any other creature, past or present, had a foot exactly like the human foot. We also know what human footprints look like... ...we have very positive identification: the human foot and the Laetoli footprints. On the other hand is the total absence of the kind of information needed to make any identification of those prints with australopithecines. Juries deal with that kind of problem continually. The human mind deals with that kind of logic every day. Were it not for the darkness evolution casts upon the human mind, there would be no question at all as to which category those Laetoli footprints should be assigned.
The fossil at the bottom of the anatomically modern Homo sapiens-like chart is an old friend, Kanapoi KP 271.... ...William Howells had the same problem with that fossil that Russell Tuttle has with the Laetoli footprints. According to evolution, that elbow bone is just too old to be human...
'The humeral fragment from Kanapoi, with a date of about 4.4 million, could not be distinguished from Homo sapiens morphologically or by multivariate analysis by Patterson and myself in 1967 (or by much more searching analysis by others since then). We suggested that it might represent Australopithecus because at that time allocation to Homo seemed preposterous, although it would be the correct one without the time element.'
[William Howells, 'Homo erectus in human descent: ideas and problems,' Homo erectus: Papers in Honor of Davidson Black, Becky A. Sigmon and Jerome S. Cybulski, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 79-80]"
[Dr. Don Patton, op. cit., tape #3]:
"Summary for the evidence for Cro-Magnon. His brain was even larger Neandertal's, averaging about 1700 cc's. And he averaged 6'6" in height. Now he's supposed to have lived 50 to 100,000 years ago...
We look at the picture here of 1470 that was discovered by Richard Leakey several years ago. And we not that he appears to be very 'modern'... and that's his description. That's true, we're told, because they're virtually no brow ridges... Of course, that's an arbitrary conclusion... But this [fossil] is very modern in appearance. But the thing that distinguishes this individual [fossil] is that, according to Richard Leakey... he lived almost 3 million years ago. Now, there's been a great deal of controversy about the dating process. And there've been over 40 efforts to date the layer above... [where 1470 was found] so that they can avoid the problem and revise... [the time] downward [so coincide with what they believe - evolution].
But this statement appeared in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, Richard said, " 'Either we toss out this skull [1470] or we toss out our theories of early man', asserts anthropologist Richard Leakey of this 2.8 million-year-old fossil, which he has tentatively identified as belonging to our own genus. 'It simply fits no previous models of human beginnings,' The author, son of famed anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey, believes that the skull's surprisingly large braincase 'leaves in ruins the notion that all early fossils can be arranged in an orderly sequence of evolutionary change.'" [NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, June 1973, p. 819]
Now, Time-Life has convinced a great many people that you can arrange [fossils into] this orderly sequence of evolutionary change. But [1470] ruins it and the reason is because you have the modern man, according to Leakey, that's older than these things that are supposed to have led to him. And now then that he's found a modern looking skull that's older than those things that're supposed to have led to man, others are beginning to come out of the woodwork and acknowledge [that] this is what they thought all along.
For example... a statement that's quoted by Lewin in his book BONES OF CONTENTION:
Lewis Leakey says, 'In 1933 I published on a small fragment of jaw...
[He goes on to say [that that] was a member of the genus Homo - that's us...]
..we call Homo Kanamensis, and I said categorically this is not a near-man or ape, this is a true member of the genus Homo. There were stone tools with it too. The age was somewhere around 2.5 to 3 million years....
[He says [that] the age was 2.5 to 3 million years, and of course that wouldn't be accepted. Here's a modern man 2 to 3 million years ago? Well, you say, 'Neandertal was only... one hundred thousand... years old. You've got Homo Erectus... half a million years old. But here's modern man that's almost three million... And so Lewis Leakey tells us that]
...It was promptly put on the shelf by my colleagues, except for two of them. The rest said it must be placed in a 'suspense account.' Now, 36 years later, we have proved I was right.'
[BONES OF CONTENTION, p. 156]
That is, his son, Lewis did, when he [came] up with 1470. You've got modern looking skull [which was dated by evolutionist and determined by them to have existed] some 2 to 3 million ago - older than those things that are supposed to have led to man... [Compare quotations from Dr. Patton's notes:
'Leakey further describes the whole shape of the brain case [1470] as remarkably reminiscent of modern man, lacking the heavy and protruding eyebrow ridges and thick bone characteristics of Homo erectus.' [SCIENCE NEWS, 102, (4/3/72) p. 324]
And then to make it even worse, Mary Leakey gets into the picture and finds some very modern looking human footprints - human as she called them... In fact Mary Leakey said... in Time Magazine, '...They belonged to the genus Homo (or true man), rather than to man-apes (like Australopithicus, who was once thought to be the forerunner of man but is now regarded as a possible evolutionary dead end). ...they were 3.35 million to 3.75 million years old...''' ...they would, in Mary Leakey's words, be people '''not unlike ourselves,''' ...'
[TIME, Nov. 10, 1975, p. 93]
'In sum, the 3.5-million-year-old footprint trails at Laetoli sight G resemble those of habitually unshod modern humans... ...If the G footprints were not known to be so old, we would readily conclude that they were made by a member of our genus...
...In any case we should shelve the loose assumption that the Laetoli footprints were made by Lucy's kind...'
[Russel H. Tuttle, Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Affiliate Scientist, Primate Research Center, Emory University, NATURAL HISTORY, 3/90, p. 64]
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 36-39]:
"In 1908, a rather complete skeleton of a Neandertal-type individual was found buried ritualistically in the floor of a small cave near the village of La Chapell-aux-Saints, France...
Although there was evidence that the vertebrae were severely deformed because of arthritis and rickets, Boule [paleontologist who reconstructed the remains] ignored the pathological evidence. He claimed that the spine lacked the curves that enable modern humans to walk erect. He placed the head in an unbalanced position of the neck, thrust far forward, so that the individual probably would have sprained his neck had he looked at the sky.
Boule also decided that this man could not extend his legs fully, but walked with a bent-knee gait. He made the foot only slightly arched, resting on its outer edge, with toes pointing in. Hence the man would have walked like an ape, pigeon-toed. Boule formed a wide separation between the big toe and the other toes, making the big toe like an opposable thumb - such as monkeys and apes have. Under these conditions, if Neandertal Man walked at all, he would have looked like a shuffling hunchback. His center of gravity was located so far forward of his center of support that he probably would have fallen flat on his face.
Using casts of the inside of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skull, Boule felt that the brain of Neandertal, although larger than the average brain size of modern man (1620 vs. 1450 cc), resembled the brain of the great apes in organization. Boule concluded that Neandertal was closer to apes than humans in brainpower, had only a trace of a psychic nature, and had only the most rudimentary language ability - possibly not much more than a series of grunts.
The stone tools found in the same cave confirmed to Boule this primitive condition. Boule wrote:
'...the uniformity, simplicity and rudeness of his stone implements, and the probable absence of all traces of any pre-occupation of an aesthetic or of a moral kind, are quite in agreement with the brutish appearance of this energetic and clumsy body, of the heavy-jawed skull, which itself still declares the predominance of functions of a purely vegetative or bestial kind over the functions of the mind...'
[Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, Neanderthal Man (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Company, 1975), 33]
...This twisted view of the Neandertalers dominated the world for forty-four years until William L. Straus (Johns Hopkins Medical College) and A. J. E. Cave (St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, London) published their paper in 1957 on the re-examination of the Neandertals. Attending an anatomy conference in Paris in 1955, Straus and Cave decided to take a look at the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton. They immediately recognized that there were some very serious problems with the reconstruction. Their study revealed that the Neandertals, when healthy, stood erect and walked normally as modern humans do. Exit Homo neanderthalensis. Enter Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
Thanks to Boule, the Neandertalers have had a bad reputation from the start, one they did not deserve. It is now admitted that their differences from modern humans are rather superficial. Their low, wide cranium and brow ridges caused people to think of them as 'savage,' even though there is nothing in the anatomy of a person to indicate his morality, behavior, or degree of culture. Since the average cranial capacity of the Neandertalers is almost 200 cc higher than the average for modern humans, that should have helped their image. But thanks to Boule's prejudice, it did not...
..Not only did it take forty-four years for the original mistakes regarding Neandertal to be corrected, it took the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, one of the great natural history museums of the world, another twenty years to correct their own Neandertal display....
..It was not until the mid 1970s that the Field Museum removed their old display of the apish Neandertals and replaced it with the tall, erect Neandertals that are there today. What did they do with the old display? Did they throw it on the trash heap where it belonged? No. They moved the old display to the second floor and placed it right next to the huge Brontosaurus (Apatosaurus) dinosaur skeleton where more people than ever - especially children - would see it. They labeled it 'An alternate view of Neandertal.' It was not an alternate view. It was a wrong view."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 61-77]:
"Because of the richness of the Neandertal fossil record, we do have a general idea of what they looked like. There is a distinct Neandertal morphology: (1) large cranial capacity, the average being larger than the average for modern humans, (2) skull shape low, broad, and elongated, (3) rear of the skull rather pointed, with a bun, (4) large, heavy browridges, (5) low forehead, (6) large, long faces with the center of the face jutting forward, (7) weak, rounded chin, and (8) postcranial skeleton rugged with bones very thick.
The typical Neandertal does differ somewhat from the typical modern human. However, the two also overlap. In fact. there should never have been a question about Neandertal's taxonomic status. When the first Neandertal was discovered, even 'Darwin's bulldog,' Thomas Huxley, recognized that Neandertal was fully human and not an evolutionary ancestor. Donald Johanson, in his book Lucy's Child writes:
'From a collection of modern human skulls Huxley was able to select a series with features leading 'by insensible gradations' from an average modern specimen to the Neandertal skull. In other words, it wasn't qualitatively different from present-day Homo sapiens.'
[Donald Johanson and James Shreeve, Lucy's Child (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1989), p.498]:
Although Neandertals are often presented as being inferior to modern humans, Neandertal authority Erik Trinkaus (University of New Mexico) writes:
'Detailed comparisons of Neanderthal skeletal remains with those of modern humans have shown that there is nothing in Neanderthal anatomy that conclusively indicates locomotor, manipulative, intellectual, or linguistic abilities inferior to those of modern humans.'
[Erik Trinkaus, 'Hard Times Among the Neanderthals,' Natural History 87:10 (December 1978): 58. See also R. L. Holloway, 'The Neandertal Brain: What Was Primitive' (abstract), American Journal of Physical Anthropology Supplement 12 (1991): 94]
The evidence indicates that the Neandertals were people of incredible power and strength - far superior to all but the most avid body builders of today. Trinkaus continues:
'One of the most characteristic features of the Neanderthals is the exaggerated massiveness of their trunk and limb bones. All of the preserved bones suggest a strength seldom attained by modern humans. Furthermore, not only is this robustness present among the adult males, as one might expect, but it is also evident in the adult females, adolescents, and even children.'
[Trinkaus, 58]
Neanderthal was far more powerful than modern humans. Whereas archeologists can experimentally duplicate the wear pattern on tools such as were used by people from the [so called] Upper Paleolithic... ...the wear patterns on Neanderthal's tools cannot be duplicated. We do not have the strength to do it. Neanderthal's skeleton reflects a supremely powerful musculature.'
..For many years, evolutionists claimed that the smaller brains of our ancestors meant inferior mental ability, something we now know is not necessarily true. Therefore, it is rather humorous to see evolutionists argue that the larger brains of our Neandertal ancestors also indicate inferior mental ability...
..Diamond holds to the view that about 35,000 years ago modern people from Africa invaded Europe (the Out of Africa theory of the origin of modern humans). These people, represented by the Cro-Magnon (pronounced 'man yon') fossils found in Europe, possessed innovation. In a few thousand years the Neandertals were gone. The 'Great Leap Forward' had taken place and the foundation for all of the culture and technology we know today was laid. While recognizing the physical prowess of the Neandertals, Diamond suggests that in various ways the Cro-Magnon people caused the extinction of the Neandertals, because, in the long run, brains always win over brawn. Geist, however, sees it the other way around. 'It was probably only after the Neanderthal's extinction that modern people could colonize the land they once roamed over, for they must have been fighters of stunning abilities, for whom [so called Upper Paleolithic] people were no match.'
[Geist, 36]
For Diamond, the key that made that Great Leap Forward possible was language; Neandertal [it is falsely claimed] did not have language, and Cro-Magnon did. Although Geist does not address the matter of language capability for the Neanderthals, his scenario is impossible without it.
However, the fossil evidence now favors Neandertal language capability. At the very time Diamond's article appeared suggesting that the Neandertals lacked speech, Nature published a report regarding a Neandertal skeleton discovered at Kebara Cave, Mount Carmel, Israel, The report was of the hyoid bone of the Neandertal individual known as Kebara 2. The hyoid is a small bone lying at the base of the tongue and connected to the larynx by eleven small muscles important in speech. Since the hyoid bone of Kebara 2 is almost identical in size and shape to that of modern populations, the inference is that this part of human anatomy has shown great stability over time. The report continues:
''A related inference would be that the associated larynx beneath the hyoid has scarcely changed in position, form, relationships or size during [what they presupppose as] the past 60,000 years of human evolution. If indeed this inference is warranted, the morphological basis for human speech capability appears to have been fully developed during the Middle Paleolithic, contrary to the views of some researchers.'
[B. Arensburg, A. M. Tillier, B. Vandermeersch, H. Duday, L. A. Schepartz, and Y. Rak, 'A Middle Palaeolithic human hyoid bone,' Nature 338 (27 April 1989); 759-60]
This conclusion is what creationists would expect, since we believe that Neandertal was a card-carrying member of the human family, a descendant of Adam, and probably a part of the post-Flood population...
...Ever since Darwin, evolutionists have sought to discover the path by which humans arose from their alleged primate ancestors. This of course, remains the crucial issue in human evolution. In recent years, a second matter has attracted major attention: the path by which our own species, Homo sapiens, arose from our alleged more primitive human ancestors. Squarely in the middle of this second issue sets 'Neandertal Problem.'
The Neandertal problem is primarily the evolutionists' problem. Simply put, evolutionists don't know where Neandertal came from or where he went. His beginnings... ...are as much a mystery as is his alleged rapid disappearance...
However, the Neandertal problem is only secondarily the question of Neandertal's pedigree out of an assumed Homo erectus stock and his [so called] apparent disappearance at the beginning of the [so-called] Upper Paleolithic Age. The major problem is Neandertal's relationship to two contemporary populations, one seemingly more modern in morphology and the other more archaic than he, all living at the same time...
..The morphological spectrum... is the type of genetic variation in the human family which the creation model would predict. Hence, the creation model seems to explain this data better than does the evolution model...
..Anatomically modern human fossils were found at a site known as Qafzeh in Israel. Originally, the date for this site was thought to be about... ...the same as some Neandertal sites in the Near East. This could be about the time that the Neandertals disappeared and anatomically modern humans appeared in Europe. However, recent thermoluminescence dating of the Qafzeh site gave the amazing date of 90,000 y.a.[*] This date not only would imply the very early appearance of modern humans in the Near East, but it also would imply a 60,000 year period [*] when Neandertals and modern humans lived together without any genetic exchange or hybridization.
[H. Valladas, J. L. Reyss, J. L. Joron, G. Valladas, O. Bar-Yosef, and B. Vandermeersch, 'Thermoluminescence dating of Mousterian '''Proto-Cro-Magnon''' remains from Israel and the origin of modern man,' Nature 331 (18 February 1988): 614-16.
*Note that none of these thermoluminescence dates can be considered as accurate due to false presuppositions; but they nevertheless serve to indicate that Neandertal was a contemporary with modern man]
...Molecular genetics, hiding behind the respect we all have for the science of genetics and the objectivity of that science, is highly infused with subjective evolutionary assumptions. In this field, the commitment to evolution is so complete that Wilson and Cann understand 'objective evidence' as '...evidence that has not been defined, at the outset, by any particular evolutionary model.'
[Allan C. Wilson and Rebecca L. Cann, 'The Recent African Genesis of Humans,' Scientific American (April 1992): 68. Emphasis added]
The DNA study of African Eve, as well as other aspects of molecular genetics, is based on mutations in the DNA nucleotides. Perhaps we could be forgiven for asking the question, 'When an evolutionist looks at human DNA nucleotides, how does he know which ones are the result of [so called] mutations and which ones have remained unchanged? Obviously, to answer that question he must know what the original or ancient sequences were. Since only God is omniscient, how does the evolutionist get the information about those sequences that he believes existed millions of years ago? He uses as his guide the DNA of the chimpanzee.
[Marcia Barinaga, 'Choosing a Human Family Tree,' Science 255 (7 February 1992): 687]
In other words, the studies that seek to prove that human DNA evolved from chimp DNA start with the assumption that chimp DNA represents the original condition (or close to it) from which human DNA diverged. That is circularity with a vengeance.
It is also necessary for the evolutionist to determine the rate of mutational changes in the DNA if these mutational changes are to be used as a 'molecular clock.' Since there is nothing in the nuclear DNA or the mtDNA molecules to indicate how often they mutate, we might also ask how the evolutionist calibrates his 'molecular clock.' Sarich, one of the pioneers of the molecular clock concept, began by calculating the mutation rates of various species '...whose divergence [evolution] could be reliably dated from fossils.'
[Wilson and Cann, 68]
...He then applied that calibration to the chimpanzee-human split, dating that split at from five to seven million years ago. Using Sarich's mutation calibrations, Wilson and Cann applied them to their mtDNA studies, comparing '...the ratio of mitochondrial DNA divergence among humans to that between humans and chimpanzees.'
[Wilson and Cann, 72]
By this method they arrived at a date of approximately 200,000 years ago for African Eve. Hence, an evolutionary time scale obtained from an evolutionary interpretation of fossils was superimposed upon the DNA molecules. Once again, the circularity is obvious. The alleged evidence for evolution from the DNA molecules is not an independent confirmation of evolution but is instead based upon an evolutionary interpretation of fossils as its starting point...
..Since anatomically modern humans existed in Africa and elsewhere well before the Neandertals, 'The Neandertal Problem' is still very much an unresolved problem in contemporary paleoanthropology...
..It is almost universally accepted [by evolutionists] that the Neandertals became extinct - for whatever reason - between 30,000 and 35,000 y.a. (The Neandertal remains from Saint-C?saire, France, dated [by evolutionists] at 36,300 y.a., are considered to be the most recent Neandertals.).
[N. Mercier, H. Valladas, J.-L. Joron,
J.-L. Reyss, F. Leveque, and B. Vandermeersch, 'Thermoluminescence dating of the late Neanderthal remains from Saint- Cesaire,' Nature 351 (27 June 1991); 737-39]
...This terminus ad quem is very rigidly maintained even though most of the Neandertal remains are poorly dated. The reasons for distancing modern humans from the Neandertals are philosophical. Since the Neandertal problem is still unsolved, the evolutionist must keep his options open. If he eventually decides that the best solution is to derive modern humans from a Neandertal stock, he must allow enough time for that to happen. Even 30,000 years or so is not enough time for the two evolutionary mechanisms - mutation and natural selection - to work their transforming magic.
However, there is evidence that the Neandertals persisted long after their alleged demise. The Neandertal skull known as Amud I from Upper Galilee, Israel, was found as a burial just below the top of layer BI. If Amud I was buried into layer BI, it follows that he cannot be older than Layer BI but could be younger. The radiocarbon date for Upper BI is 5,710 y.a. Michael Day (British Museum - Natural History) states: 'These dates are believed to be too 'young' as the result of contamination by younger carbon.'
[Michael H. Day, Guide to Fossil Man, fourth edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 128-29]
..Day gives no evidence that young carbon was present. It is understood by evolutionists that if a radiocarbon date is too young to fit the evolutionary scenario, that is proof enough that the sample was contaminated, since a 'good' date would unquestionably fit the scheme...
..Some of the Shanidar, Iraq, Neandertal material from Layers C and D give radiocarbon dates as low as 26,500 y.a., and the Neandertal Banolas mandible, found near Gerona, Spain, gave a radiocarbon date of 17,600 y. a. After recording this date, obtained by the U.C.L.A. radiocarbon laboratory, Radiocarbon Journal made the following comment:
'Comment: for a Neanderthal, present date is too recent. The possibility of more modern travertine contaminating older travertine to yield a more recent composite date, or the relocation of an ancient mandible into travertine is open.'
[Ranier Berger and W. F. Libby, Radiocarbon Journal, vol. 8 (1966): 480]
Possibilities are given for the too recent date, but no physical evidence is cited to indicate that these possibilities are valid. The arbitrary assertion that the date is too recent for a Neandertal apparently settles the matter.
If there is any there is any legitimacy to these recent dates for Neandertal, it could mean that Neandertal, like his smaller edition known as Homo erectus, persisted until quite recently. That would be additional evidence that the differences between Neandertal and anatomically modern humans had nothing to do with the evolutionary process. For evolutionists, the Neandertal problem remains unsolved...
...Whether the Neandertals were in the main line of human descent, or whether they were a side branch that led to extinction, the evolutionist believes that the somewhat different Neandertal morphology was the result of the evolutionary process. The two evolutionary mechanisms are mutation and natural selection; mutations supply the raw material, (new information) upon which natural selection can work. Special Creation and evolution are thus mutually exclusive. If God by Special Creation supplied the genetic information which accounts of the existence of humans, then evolution is not necessary. If random mutations are able to supply new information upon which natural selection works to produce humans out of a nonhuman stock, then the concept of Special Creation is not necessary.
The evolutionist improperly introduces other mechanisms into the alleged evolutionary process, such as the founder principle, geographic isolation, and genetic recombination. While these are legitimate processes, they are not evolutionary processes. They do not create unique new genetic information. Nor do these processes discriminate between Special Creation and evolution. They would apply in either case. The evolutionist smuggles these nonevolutionary mechanisms into the evolutionary process even though they have nothing to do with evolution. These processes do account for variation, but they cannot produce evolutionary changes that result in increased complexity; that would demand the creation of entirely new genetic information.
It is impossible for the evolutionist to demonstrate that the Neandertal morphology was the result of mutation and natural selection. That is only a dogmatic assertion that is part of his belief system...
...Over the years the scientific literature has suggested a number of conditions - geographical, environmental, pathological, cultural, and dietary - that could produce a Neandertal-like morphology. Richard Klein writes:
'The forward placement of Neanderthal jaws and the large size of the incisors probably reflect habitual use of the anterior dentition as a tool, perhaps mostly as a clamp or vise. Such para- or nonmasticatory use for gripping is implied by the high frequency of enamel chipping and microfractures on Neanderthal incisors, by nondietary microscopic striations on incisor crowns, and by the peculiar, rounded wear seen on the incisors of elderly individuals. Similar, though less extensive damage occurs on the teeth of Eskimos, who also tend to use their anterior jaws extensively as clamps.
Biomechanically, the forces exerted by persistent, habitual, nonmasticatory use of the front teeth could account in whole or in part for such well-known Neanderthal features as the long face, the well-developed supraorbital torus, and even the long, low shape of the cranium. Massive anterior dental loading could further explain the unique Neanderthal occipitodmastoid region which perhaps provided the insertions for muscles that stabilized the mandible and head during dental clamping.'
[Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 281-82]
...In two paragraphs, Klein has given a plausible nonevolutionary explanation for most of the unique features of Neandertal morphology. Just as the hands of a blacksmith develop calluses as a result of the unique wear and stress they are subjected to, so the facial and skull morphology of the Neandertals could be the result of the unique stresses their jaws and teeth were subjected to when used as tools. Klein also states: 'The long, low shape of the Neanderthal cranium with its typically large occipital bun probably reflects relatively slow postnatal brain relative to cranial vault growth.'
[Klein, 279]
In a statement cited earlier in this chapter, Geist also gave a plausible nonevolutionary explanation for the unique Neandertal skull morphology based on his prowess as a hunter:
'If great strength, agility, and precision and speed of bodily movements were required for such a hunting technique, those parts of the brain controlling motor functions in the hunter had to be greatly developed. Neanderthal possessed a massive cerebellum and motor cortex compared to modern humans. This pulled the brain case rearward, creating an occiput that reached farther rearward than in modern humans, explaining, in part, the large, long, low brain case and bun-shaped occiput of the Neanderthals.'
[Geist, 34]
Klein also recognized the effect geographic isolation could have on the development of the Neandertals when he wrote that 'some of the European mid-Quaternary fossils clearly anticipate the Neanderthals, while like-aged African and Asian ones do not. Clearly, the implication is that the Neanderthals were an indigenous European development.'
[Klein, 283]
Health factors can be reflected in the skeleton, especially a vitamin D deficiency resulting in rickets. J. Lawrence Angel (Smithsonian Institution) writes: 'Pelvis and skull base tend to flatten if protein or Vitamin D in diet is inadequate.'
[J. Lawrence Angel, 'History and Development of Paleopathology,' American Journal of Physical Anthropology 56:4 (December 1981): 512]
This was the diagnosis of Rudolf Virchow, 'the father of pathology,' when he examined the rather flattened skull of the first Neandertal discovery. He was overruled by those who favored an evolutionary interpretation. In 1970, Francis Ivanhoe published in Nature an article entitled, 'Was Virchow Right about Neandertal?'
[Francis Ivanhoe, 'Was Virchow Right about Neandertal?' Nature 229 (5 February 1971): 409]
...He presented a strong case based on diagnostic evidence that the Neandertals were really modern humans who suffered from rickets."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 150-156]
"When the first fossil human was discovered (the original Neandertal) several competent medical authorities stated that the peculiar apish shape of the bones was caused by rickets. In 1872, Rudolf Virchow published a carefully argued and factual diagnosis that the original Neandertal individual had been a normal human who suffered from rickets in childhood and arthritis in adulthood. Virchow's diagnosis has never been refuted.... He was personally familiar with the original Neandertal fossils and expertly acquainted with the disease of rickets...
[Ref: Francis Ivanhoe, 'Was Virchow Right about Neandertal?' Nature 227 (8 August 1970): 578]
Virchow was well acquainted with rickets because rickets was particularly common in the industrial parts of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same industrial pollution that darkened the barks of the trees in England which in turn caused the ratios in the peppered moth population to change from light to dark (falsely claimed by evolutionists as an illustration of evolution in action)...
[See L. Harrison Matthews, 'Introduction,' The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1971), xi]
...also obscured the sunlight in these industrial areas. The result was that many children, especially those having inferior diets, suffered from rickets."
[D. R. Brothwell, Digging Up Bones, 3rd ed., revised (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 163]
..The relationship between a sunless climate and a high incidence of rickets was well known by medical authorities in Virchow's time. However, a vitamin D deficiency as the cause of rickets was not identified until after World War I. Because rickets is clinically most active in humans between the ages of six and twenty-four months, vitamin E is now added to milk in most western countries. The result is that rickets is virtually unknown today in the United States. However, a friend of mine, born in a poor section of Boston in 1913, recalls rickets as being a rather common disease during his childhood years.
..A more recent identification of fossil humans and rickets was made by Francis Ivanhoe in a paper in Nature. Ivanhoe said that '...every Neandertal child skull studied so far shows signs compatible with severe rickets.'
[Francis Ivanhoe, 'Was Virchow Right about Neandertal?' Nature 227 (8 August 1970): 578]
..These include the child remains from Engis (Belgium), La Ferrassie (France), Gibraltar, Pech de l'Aze (France), La Quina (France), Starosel'e (U.S.S.R.), and Subalyuk (Hungary). Less extreme cases are seen in the child remains from Teshik-Tash (U.S.S.R.), Shanidar (Iraq), and Egbert (Lebanon). The rickets skull morphology, seen in these children, has carried over into the adult Neandertals and other fossil humans. The gross bowing of the long bones of the body, so typical of is seen in both Neandertal children and adults...
..rickets gives to the skull and to the long bones of the body the superficial apish cast the evolutionists were expecting to find in the 'missing link.'...
...There is no excuse for ignoring the large body of evidence of rickets as the more probable explanation for the morphology of many fossil humans. Rickets could also explain why fossil populations existed simultaneously who had different morphologies because of different diets and climate conditions...
..Still another possible explanation of the Neandertal morphology is disease, especially syphilis. D. J. M. Wright (Guy's Hospital Medical School, London) observed that 'In societies with poor nutrition, rickets and congenital syphilis frequently occur together. The distinction between the two is extremely difficult without modern biochemical, seriological, and radiographic aids.' "
[D. J. M. Wright, 'Syphilis and Neanderthal Man,' Nature 229 (5 February 1971): 409]
...Based upon his examination of the Neandertal collection at the British Museum, Wright found a number of features in the Neandertal's morphology compatible with congenital syphilis. These conditions are seen in both adult and child skulls. Wright specifically mentioned the original Neandertal skullcap as well as the Gibralter II, Starosel?, and Pech de l'Aze Neandertal remains.
To suggest that all of the above factors contributed to the Neandertal morphology would be a case of overkill. However, it is well within reason to suggest that one of them or several in combination are responsible for the group of individuals known collectively as Neandertals. Obviously, to perform controlled experiments on humans today to determine which factors would produce the skeletal features of the Neandertals would be both immoral and impossible. But in contrast to the lack of rigorous scientific evidence that mutation and natural selection could produce these effects, there is a sizable body of scientific data that suggests one or more of the above-mentioned factors would constitute a reasonable and nonevolutionary explanation for the Neandertal morphology."
[Dr. Don Patton, op. cit., tape #3]:
"[The Neanderthal fossils] were assumed to be the missing link... and when that assumption was made then restorations were made to suit that assumption... [which are] presently in many museums and many textbooks. But [they are] not... the [correct]
representation of the Neanderthoid skull. We look, for example, at the modern restoration[s] that was made by Coons, an evolutionary anthropologist - two different restorations of the same skull.... One looks like he might belong on Mad Magazine's cover.... [The other] looks very philosophical - might be a representation of Socrates... And we recall Hooton's statement that you can model on the Neanderthoid's skull the features of a philosopher or the ligaments of a chimpanzee. Two very contrasting views, one rather intelligent... and more human than the one... represented... in most of the textbooks. We see the unscientific natures that Hooten warned us about...
Time-Life which is rapidly evolutionary in their philosophy, made this... statement about the... evidence for Neandertal and by the way there are hundreds of skeletons of Neandertal... But they say, 'a Neanderthaler is a model of evolutionary refinement...
[Now you see their presumption: 'It's evolution.]
Put him in a Brooks Brothers suit and send him down to the supermarket for some groceries and he might pass completely unnoticed. He might run a little shorter than the clerk serving him but he would not necessarily be the shortest man in the place. He might be heavier-featured, squattier and more muscular than most, but again he might be no more so than the porter handling the beer cases back in the stock room.'
[EVOLUTION, Time-Life Nature Library]
I think we see some indications of racism in his description. And that was typical of the early evolutionists... [many of who were prejudiced against blacks]...
We see that there is great variety in the world today [as] there was in the fossil record... [Many humans] are very different in appearance. Some of them you might assume would be unintelligent but that is not the case... We see variety, that's what illustrated in the Neanderthoid skull.
We can summarize the evidence for him this way. Arthritis did cause a stoop in some... He is classed as 'modern' by most anthropologists today. He is indistinguishable in a modern suit from modern man. Howells of Harvard said [that Neanderthal's] brain was larger than ours. Whereas the average European [brain is] 1400 cc, Neandertal averaged about 1600 cc..."
3) RHODESIAN MAN & THE REST OF SO-CALLED ARCHAIC HOMO SAPIENS
"A relatively NEW CATEGORY has been established by paleoanthropologists: archaic Homo sapiens. This category includes a minimum of forty-none fossil individuals who do not fit into either the Neandertal or the [Homo] erectus categories. The reasons are that (1) they have a somewhat different skull morphology from the Neandertals, (2) many of this group are dated much earlier than the 'classic' Neandertals, although more than half of them are Neandertal contemporaries, and (3) they have a cranial capacity that is too large for them to be classified as Homo erectus.
In the past, members of this group have been given various names, such as anti-neandertals, pre-neandertals, Neandertaloids, or African Neandertals. Some people have suggested that the entire category be given the scientific name Homo sapiens rhodesiensis, after the best-known fossil in this category, Rhodesian Man...
...In the most general sense, the archaic Homo sapiens category can be described as follows: (1) a low, sloping skull with a cranial capacity of from approximately 1100 to 1300 cc, (2) very heavy ridges over the eyes, especially true in Rhodesian Man, (3) the rear of the skull more rounded and lacking the Neandertal 'bun,' (4) large, long faces with jaws that jut forward, and (5) postcranial (body) bones that are essentially either indistinguishable from modern humans or very different from modern humans, depending upon which paleoanthropologist is doing the describing.
In reality, the taxon 'archaic Homo sapiens' is a taxon of convenience. A hetergeneous assortment of fossils was dumped into this category because the fossils did not fit elsewhere. By making a taxon of this assortment, evolutionists attempted to give it the appearance of a transitional group between Homo erectus and Neandertal or between Homo erectus and anatomically modern Homo sapiens. However, the dating of these fossils by evolutionists themselves reveals that this is not a true picture. These fossils date from the most recent ones at 5000 y.a. all the way back to the oldest ones at 700,000 y.a. on the evolution time scale... This chronological spread reveals that these fossil individuals were not part of an evolutionary sequence but were instead contemporaries of Homo erectus, Neandertal, and anatomically modern Homo sapiens. The dating and morphology of this category help to falsify the concept of human evolution and serve to demonstrate the wide degree of skeletal and cranial diversity that is found in the human family.
4) PITHECANTHROPUS ERECTUS = HOMO ERECTUS = JAVA MAN & PEKING MAN
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 86-92]:
"THE STORY OF THE GROUP OF FOSSILS called Homo erectus by evolutionists begins with Java Man....
...They called him the ape-man and told us that he was our evolutionary ancestor. The artist's drawings of that beetle-browed, jaw-jutting fellow were quite convincing. In fact, the vast majority of people who believe in human evolution were probably first sold on it by this convincing salesman. Not only is he the best-known human fossil, he is one of the only human fossils most people know.
The story has been told many times. Before the turn of the century, a Dutch anatomist, Eugene Dubois, went to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in search of the 'missing link' between apes and humans. In 1891, along the bank of the Solo River in Java, he found a skullcap that seemed to him to have a combination of human and ape features. A year later, about fifty feet away, he found a thigh bone (femur), very human in appearance, that he assumed belonged with the skullcap. Dubois named his 'transitional form,' which is now dated by evolutionists at about half a million years, Pithecanthropus erectus. However, to the general public he will always be known affectionately as Java Man.
Because Java Man was found so long ago, and because another like him (Peking Man) was not found until 1929, and because he was made to fit the evolutionary picture so beautifully, Java Man is virtually synonymous in the popular mind with human evolution...
Pithecos is the Greek word for 'ape,' Anthropos is the Greek word for 'man.' Erectus means 'erect.' Hence, the name means erect ape-man...
Dubois claimed that the skullcap and the femur came from a rock stratum known as the Trinil layer, named after a nearby village in central Java. He believed that these rocks were below what is known as the Pleistocene-Pliocene (Tertiary) boundary. Dubois was convinced that 'real' humans evolved later in the Middle Pleistocene. Hence, his dating of Java Man was quite appropriate for a missing link. However, his interpretation was not exactly straightforward, as the man who later found other Java men, G. H. R. vonKoenigswald, tells us:
'When Dubois issued his first description of the fossil Javanese fauna he designated it Pleistocene. But no sooner had he discovered his Pithecanthropus than the fauna had suddenly to become Tertiary. He did everything in his power to diminish the Pleistocene character of the fauna...
...The criterion was no longer to be the fauna as a whole, but only his Pithecanthropus. Such a primitive form belonged to the Tertiary!.....'
[G. H. R. vonKoenigswald, Meeting Prehistoric Man, Michael Bullock, trans. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), 38-39]
...Dubois had gone to the Dutch East Indies as an army doctor and was then given permission to search for fossils. To help him in his work, Dubois was assigned two corporals from the engineering corps, who acted as supervisors, and fifty forced laborers.
Dubois was usually at his headquarters, but he made periodic visits on horseback to the digging sites. He also maintained written contact with the engineers about the progress of the work. When fossils were found, they were sent to Dubois for preparation and provisional identification. Dubois himself did not uncover any of the important fossils ascribed to him, and he never saw any of them in situ (except Wadjak II). He was entirely dependent on his two engineers to determine the position of the fossils in the deposits - engineers who knew even less about geology than he did...
[Bert Theunissen, Eugene Dubois and the Ape-Man from Java (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 44, 68]
...(Brodrick questions that Java Man came from the Trinil beds, suggesting that they came from higher up in the rock layers, which would make them more recent in age.)...
[Alan Houghton Brodrick, Early Man (London: Hutchinson's Scientific and Technical Publications, 1948), p. 85]
..By today's standards, these fossils would have been disqualified. Yet, they became for many years the primary evidence for human evolution...
..When the skullcap and the thighbone were discovered, Dubois spread the word officially and widely. He gave a rather detailed preliminary description of the fossils themselves, but he gave only the briefest account of the locality and the geological circumstances surrounding the discovery. His dating of Pithecanthropus was based on the mammalian fossils found with Pithecanthropus, but his proof consisted of only sketchy tidbits of information. It wasn't until late 1895, after he had returned from Java, that he displayed the first profile drawing and maps of the excavation site...
Up until 1900, Dubois had been very active in promoting Java Man as the missing link and had allowed full access to the fossils. After 1900, he withdrew completely from the public debate for twenty years, published very little about the fossils, and refused to allow anyone to see them. The reason usually given for this behavior is that Dubois wanted Java Man to be accepted as the missing link. Because of the initial controversy over his interpretation, he retaliated by refusing access to the fossils....
...It was not until 1924, thirty-three years after the skullcap had been discovered, that Dubois published a definitive paper on it. Two years later he published a major paper on the thigh bone...
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 96-99]
"Many anthropologists at the turn of the century also noted the remarkable similarity in shape between the Java Man skullcap and the Neandertal skulls, which would indicate that Java Man and the Neandertals, although differing in size, represented the same race of humans. Up until his return from Java, Dubois had ignored the Neandertal remains because he felt they were pathologtical. With the discovery of more Neandertal material, Dubois was forced to reconsider them, and even he admitted the close resemblance between his own Java Man and the Neandertals.
One of Dubois's earliest papers on Java Man was presented in 1895 in Dublin shortly after his return from Java. It was entitled, 'On Pithecanthropus erectus: a Transitional Form Between Man and the Apes.' In it Dubois emphasized what was to be his theme for the rest of his life: Java Man was not a human being, nor was he an ape; he was a true intermediate or transitional form possessing features of both humans and apes.
Sir Arthur Keith, the famed Cambridge University anatomist, was asked to comment on Dubois's paper. He replied that the chief question to be settled was whether or not the skullcap was human. In answering that question to be settled was whether or not the skull cap was human. In answering that question, one had to determine the criterion of a human skull versus an ape skull. To his mind there were two basic differences: first, the very large cranial capacity of human skulls as compared to ape skulls, and second, the large muscular ridges and processes, connected with the chewing apparatus, which ape skulls have compared to human skulls. On both points Keith declared that the Java Man skullcap was distinctly human....
[Ref. Robert F. Heizer, ed., Man's Discovery of His Past (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1962), 138]
...The cranial capacity of the anthropoid apes never exceeds 600 cc and averages about 500 cc. On the other hand, the cranial capacity of Dubois's Java Man was estimated at 1000 cc, which is well within the range of humans living today.
Sir William Turner, also responding to Dubois's paper, said that since the Java Man thigh bone had a pathological growth on it, possibly the skullcap was pathological also. He pointed out that in the Edinburgh University Museum is the cast of a microcephalic woman with a frontal flattening very much like that off Java Man...
[Ref. Heizer, op. cit., pp. 135-136]
...The main question about the skullcap of Java Man was, 'Is it human?' However, there was no question about the nature of the thigh bone, found a year after the skullcap and fifty feet from it. From the time of its discovery, virtually every authority except Dubois felt that it was indistinguishable from the modern human femur. The great question on the femur was, 'Did it belong with the skullcap?' It seemed far too modern in morphology to be associated with the rather archaic shape of the skullcap.
It was here that Dubois's weakness in geology and the shortcomings of his methodology put him on the defensive. He did none of the actual digging, nor was mapping done at the time of excavation. All quadrant maps and diagrams were made after the fact. In Dubois's first report of his find to Dutch authorities in August 1892, he stated that the femur was located ten meters from the place where the skullcap had been found a year earlier. In early September he changed this figure to twelve meters. His official report later that same month, and his official publication on Pithecanthropus, mentions fifteen meters. In a much later 1930 publication, he again mentions twelve meters.
[Theunissen, 68,77]
One of the most amazing facets of the Java Man saga is this "In all the years of the twentieth century, the skullcap and the femur together have been presented to the public as Java Man. Yet, the association of the skullcap with the femur has always been questioned by the most respected anatomists from the time of their discovery until today.
In 1938, Franz Weidenreich described several femoral fragments of Peking Man. (Both Peking Man and Java Man were quite similar, the Peking Man femora differed from the Java Man femur in the very places where the Java Man femur was similar to modern humans. Since the association of the Peking Man skulls and femora was undisputed, Weidenreich concluded that the Java Man femur was not a true Homo erectus femur but was instead a modern one.
[Theunissen, 158]
...The most recent assessment of the Java Man femur comes to the same conclusion. Michael Day and T. I. Molleson compared the Java Man femur, the Peking femora, and the femur known as Olduvai Hominid 28 (OH-28) found by Louis Leakey in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, in unquestioned association with other Homo erectus material. They state that OH-28 and the Peking Man femora, although truly human, are much more similar to each other than either is to the Java femur. Their conclusion is that OH-28 and Peking Man represent a Homo erectus anatomy, whereas the Java femur is more modern.
[Michael H. Day and T. I. Molleson, 'The Trinil Femora,' Michael H. Day, ed., Human Evolution, vol. XI, symposia of the Society for the Study of Human Biology (London: Taylor and Francis, Ltd., 1973), 127-154]
Here, then, is the problem faced by evolutionist paleoanthropology. If the Java skullcap and femur actually belong together, then it is difficult to maintain a species difference between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. The distinction would be an artificial one, and it would compromise these fossils as evidence for human evolution. If, on the other hand, the skullcap belongs to Homo erectus, and the femur belongs to Homo sapiens, it shows that these two forms likely lived together as contemporaries. It likewise removes these fossils as evidence for human evolution, because fluorine analysis indicates that the fossils are both the same age...
[G. H. R. vonKoenigswald, Meeting Prehistoric Man, Micheal Bullock trans., (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), 34]
...Recent suggestions are that the femur came from a much younger stratigraphic horizon than did the skullcap...
[Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 185]
...But this naive attempt at time separation - one hundred years after the fact - reveals the awkwardness evolutionists feel regarding these fossils. This suggestion comes not from the physical evidence at the scene but from a transparent attempt to salvage Java Man as evidence for human evolution.
The Java Man skullcap and femur are evidence that the distinction between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens is an artificial one, that these two forms are both truly human, and that they lived as contemporaries. The differences attributed to evolution are instead evidence of the wide genetic variation found in the human family.
For the rest of his life Dubois maintained that the skullcap and the femur belonged together and the Pithecanthropus was unique. When fossils similar to his Java Man were found, Dubois rejected the evidence out of hand. He labored hard to find tiny areas where his fossil differed from anything else that had been found so as to defend the uniqueness of his discovery."
[Lubenow, op. cit., p. 87]:
...My conclusions on Dubois and Java Man are as follows:
(1) Java Man is not our evolutionary ancestor but is a true member of the human family, a post-Flood descendant of Adam, and a smaller version of Neandertal;
(2) Dubois seriously misinterpreted the Java Man fossils, and there was abundant evidence available to him at that time that he had misinterpreted them;
(3) the evolutionists' dating of Java Man at half a million years is highly suspect;
(4) more modern-looking humans - possibly including Wadjak Man - were living as contemporaries of Java Man; and
(5) Java Man was eventually accepted as our evolutionary ancestor in spite of the evidence because he could be interpreted to promote evolution...."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 114-119]:
"A Munich zoologist, Professor Emil Selenka, saw clearly that the solution to the problem of Pithecanthropus ['Java Man'] was not continued discussion but further exploration... ...He was in the process of organizing such an expedition when he died. His wife successfully completed the project, which became known as the Selenka-Trinil Expedition of 1907-08...
...Besides Selenka and Blanckenhorn, seventeen other specialists were involved in the study of the forty-three large crates of fossils that were returned to Germany. These specialists produced an excellent scientific report of 342 pages, edited by Selenka and Blanckenhorn, published in 1911, and entitled Die Pithecanthropus-Schichen auf Java. Few, unfortunately, have ever heard of it. The report has suffered the fate decreed for all evidence that is contrary to evolution: consignment to the lower reaches of oblivion...
The field of paleoanthropology has had more than its share of scandals and sloppy scholarship. In contrast, the manner in which Frau Selenka organized and executed her expedition and published its results, Keith said, 'commands our unstinted praise.' The thoroughness and scientific integrity of the expedition are exceeded only by the obscurity into which it has fallen. Although the purpose of the expedition was to confirm Dubois's findings, its results actually contradicted his claims...
Extensive mining and digging operations were required, as the fossil-bearing layer of the Trinil formation was under thirty-five feet of volcanic sediment. More than 10,000 cubic meters of material were removed in the search for more remains of Pithecanthropus. But, Pithecanthropus was not to be found.
What they did find was more significant than what they did not find. Three of the specialists, Dr. E. Carthaus, Frau H. Martin-Icke, and Dr. J. Schuster, concluded that Dubois had seriously overestimated the age of the stratum in which Pithecanthropus was found. Paleontologist Martin-Icke reported that 87 percent of the gastropods found in it were of modern forms, and botanist Schuster testified that the flora was not too dissimilar from that of today. This would indicate a rather recent age for Pithecanthropus, and that alone would eliminate him as the missing link.
In the very same stratum in which Pithecanthropus was found, Dr. Carthaus discovered splinters of bones and tusks, foundations of hearths, and pieces of wood charcoal. As a geologist, he felt that the Pithecanthropus stratum was rather recent, and that modern humans and Pithecanthropus (Java Man) had lived at the same time. This was another blow to the missing link status of Pithecanthropus.
The most striking discovery was by Dr. Walkhoff, an anthropologist. In the dry bed of a tributary of the Solo River, about two miles from Dubois's famous discovery, he discovered the crown of a human molar. The dentine within the enamel cap had been replaced by a fossilized organic matrix. Although the tooth belonged to a relatively modern human, Walkhoff concluded that its condition indicated an even greater age than the age assigned to Pithecantrhopus. The tooth is known as the Sonde fossil.
All of the members of the Selenka-Trinil Expedition were evolutionists. The purpose of the expedition was to confirm Dubois's findings of fossil evidence for human evolution. However, Frau Selenka, the leader of this exemplary expedition, concluded that modern humans and Pithecanthropus both had lived at the same time and that Pithecanthropus played not part in human evolution. This is the same conclusion that would have been reached had Dubois revealed Wadjak at the time he paraded Pithecanthropus before the public. As it was, the Wakjak skulls were still sequestered beneath the floorboards of Dubois's home. It would be another ten years after the release of the Selenka-Trinil Expedition report before the Wadjak skulls would see the light of day.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of the report was its description of the violent volcanic eruptions from nearby Mount Lawu-Kukusan and subsequent flooding that took place in that part of Java every thirty years or so. The geologic activity was so intense that the report concluded that the volcanic Trinil sediments which contained Pithecanthropus were far too young to yield any information on human origins. Native traditions tell of the Solo River actually having changed its course in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, which could mean that the Trinil beds were only about 500 years old, not the 500,000 years old believed today. Because volcanic matter is heavily mineralized, the report states that the degree of fossilization of Pithecanthropus was the result of the chemical nature of the volcanic not the result of vast age. The summary chapter of the report was written by Dr. Max Blanckenhorn. In it he apologized to the reader because what they had hoped would be a corroboration of Dubois's findings seemed more like a debunking of Dubois's work. He used the German word for 'fruitless' to describe their failure to substantiate Dubois's claim that the famous Java Man he had discovered was our evolutionary ancestor.
It did not occur to Blanckenhorn that their work was not fruitless but had produced very positive results. It showed that humans have wide morphological variation, something that anthropologists have only recently come to appreciate. It is possible that the variation in early humans could have exceeded what it is today. Although the Selenka Expedition is universally considered to have failed in its primary purpose, in true scientific terms it was a resounding success. Had the wide variation in the human family been appreciated at that time, many of the later mistakes in anthropology could have been avoided.
In light of the expedition's findings, it is interesting to see how evolutionists have handled the Selenka report. With one exception, the newer works on paleoanthropology ignore the Selenka report completely. About half of the books written between 1945 and 1975 mention the expedition or the report, but do so in such a way that it would be impossible for the English reading researcher to discover what the Selenka report actually said. It is an amazing conspiracy of silence...
I have written at length on the background and details of Dubois and his Java Man. I have done so to show that one of the conclusions of this book - that Homo erectus was not our evolutionary ancestor but lived as a contemporary of more modern humans is not original with me. The evidence has existed for one hundred years. Dubois himself had three warnings of it: (1) The Trinil femur and skullcap evidenced wide morphological diversity in a single contemporaneous population. Dubois rejected that evidence. (2) Wadjak and Pithecanthropus demonstrated the possibility that humans having wide morphological diversity had loved together. Dubois retaliated diversity had lived together. Dubois retaliated by hiding Wadjak for thirty years. (3) The Selenka Expedition confirmed that humans with wide morphological diversity had lived together in recent times. Dubois responded by claiming that the Selenka findings were fraudulent."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 127-133]:
Java Man (PITHECANTHROPUS I) was the first of at least 222 similar fossil individuals that have been discovered to date. It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of this group of fossils known collectively as Homo erectus. For the evolutionist, Homo erectus is the major category bridging the gap between the australopithecines (which everyone recognizes as nonhuman) and the archaic Homo sapiens and Neandertal fossils (which everyone recognizes as truly human)...
Surprisingly, Homo erectus furnishes us with powerful evidence that falsifies the concept of human evolution. Three questions are crucial. First, is Homo erectus morphologically distinct enough to warrant its being classified as a species separate from Homo sapiens? The evidence clearly says no. By every legitimate standard applicable, the fossil and cultural evidence indicate that it should be included in the Homo sapiens taxon.
Second, are the Homo erectus fossils found in the relevant time frame so as to serve as a legitimate transitional form? The clear answer from the fossil record is again no... ...Homo erectus individuals have lived side by side with other categories of true humans for the past two million years ?according to evolutionist chronology). This fact eliminates the possibility that Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens. That this two-million-year contemporaneousness has been largely camouflaged is a tribute to the skill of evolutionist writers.
The third question is whether or not there are adequate nonevolutionary explanations for Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens, and Neandertal morphology. The answer is Yes..
When people become aware of the massive misrepresentation of the dates for the Homo erectus material, they act perplexed. But the factual evidence is so clear that it cannot successfully be challenged. The perplexity usually gives way to the question, Why do evolutionists do this? The answer is obvious. If the date range of all the fossils having a Homo erectus morphology were commonly published on a chart... ...it would be clear that human evolution has not taken place.
On the far end of the Homo erectus time continuum, Homo erectus... ....overlaps the entire Homo habilis population... Thus the almost universally accepted view that Homo habilis evolved into Homo erectus becomes impossible... ...For habilis to evolve into erectus, habilis must precede erectus in time. Furthermore, after habilis has evolved into erectus, habilis must be eliminated by death, because erectus is supposedly the better fit of the two in the intense competition for limited resources... ...The fossil record also shows that Homo erectus lived alongside the group known as archaic Homo sapiens... ...and that Homo erectus lived alongside a more modern form of Homo sapiens....
When a creationist emphasizes that according to evolution... descendants ...can't be living as contemporaries with their ancestors, the evolutionist declares in a rather surprised tone, 'Why, that's like saying that a parent has to die just because a child is born!'... [However] In evolution, one species (or a portion of it) allegedly turns into a second, better-adapted species through mutation and natural selection. However, in the context of human reproduction, I do not turn into my children; I continue on as a totally independent entity.
Furthermore, in evolution, a certain portion of a species turns into a more advanced species because that portion of the species allegedly possesses certain favorable mutations which the rest of the species does not possess. Thus the newer, more advanced group comes into direct competition with the older unchanged group and eventually eliminates it through death. The older group is not able to compete successfully for the limited resources available. This competition and eventual death of the less fit is indispensable to the evolutionary process. However, in the human reproductive process, I do not compete with my child. I devote all of my resources to the survival of my child - not to his death. The analogy used by evolutionists is without logic, and the problem of contemporaneousness remains.
Terms like Homo erectus and Homo habilis are convenient terms to use in reference to groups of fossil material. But it is obvious that when evolutionists give dates for Homo erectus that do not fit the fossil material, or when they say that Homo habilis evolved into Homo erectus, contrary to what the fossil material shows, they are using those terms in a manipulative manner without regard for the fossil material in those categories...
While evolutionists have not yet developed a formal definition for Homo erectus, a suite of characteristics is generally accepted:
1. Skull low, broad, and elongated
2. Cranial capacity 750 - 1250cc
3. Median sagittal ridge
4. Supraorbital ridges
5. Postorbital constriction
6. Receding frontal contour
7. Occipital bun or torus
8. Nuchal area extended for muscle attachment
9. Cranial wall unusually thick overall
10. Brain case narrower than the zygomatic arch
11. Heavy facial architecture
12. Alveolar (macilla) prognathism
13. Large jaw wide ramus
14. Nochin (mentum)
15. Teeth generally large
16. Poat-cranial bones heavy and thick.
Where there is material for comparison, the Kow Swamp fossils, as well as the other robust Australian fossils, fit the above description well - allowing for reasonable genetic variation. They qualify as Homo erectus, as the evolutionist uses the term.
The evolutionists' attempt to explain the Kow Swamp fossils (and others) by caling them the result of an isolated population that was removed from the evolutionary mainstream also fails. While most of these robust fossils were found in southeast Australia, the Cossack skull was found on the west coast of Australia, two thousand miles away, and the Java Solo people were found three thousand miles away. We are dealing with a continent-wide phenomenon. Furthermore, the Cossack skull has a maximum age of 6500 y.a., but a minimum age of just a few hundred years.
[L. Freedman and M. Lofgren, 'Human Skeletal Remains from Cossack, Western Australia,' Journal of Human Evolution 8 (1979): 285]
Thus, it is possible that Homo erectus, whom the evolutionist claims is our evolutionary ancestor, walked the earth just a few hundred years ago....."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 138-143]:
"Modern humans have a cranial capacity range from about 700 cubic centimeters all the way up to about 2200 cc...
[Stephen Molnar, Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), 57]
...This range - a factor of three - is an amazing spread and is most unusual in the biological world. It is recognized that this spread has virtually nothing to do with intelligence, because human intelligence is more dependent on how the brain is organized than on sheer brain size alone.
The cranial capacity of Homo erectus goes from about 700 cc (Java Modjokerto infant) to about 1200 cc (the largest Peking Man skull). The Neandertal cranial capacity begins at about 1250 cc (Saccopastore I, Italy) and goes to about 1740 cc (Amud I, Israel), with a few Neandertals possibly going a bit higher. If the archaic Homo sapiens fossils are factored in, they would fit in at the transition, with cranial capacities of about 1100 cc to about 1300 cc....
Homo erectus and the Neandertals are very similar in cranial morphology. In the question period following a lecture by Neandertal authority Erik Trinkaus, I asked him, "other than brain size, what are the differences in cranial morphology between Homo erectus and Neandertal?' His reply was, 'virtually none.'
[Public lecture on the Neandertals by Erik Trinkaus, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, December 3, 1984]
[Dr. Don Patton, op. cit., tape #3]:
"The representatives of Homo Erectus were among the earliest representatives of [so called] missing links in the study of fossil man...
We can summarize... Homo Erectus... with the two representatives: Peking Man and Java Man. The Java Man, basically is two pieces, the cranium and the leg bone. Are they related? They were not found together. Many say they shouldn't be. The casts that were sent around the world and from which the restorations were made were falsified according to Hrdlicka, of the Smithsonian Institution...
[Compare a quotation from Dr. Patton's notes by Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution, Re: Java Man from SCIENCE NEWS, Aug. 17, 1923]:
'None of the published illustrations or casts now in various institutions is accurate.]
..The originals were locked up for 40 years. Nobody got to look at the originals.... Dubois, before he died, finally changed his mind and said [that] this was just a giant
..though the original is still in all of the textbooks... [represented as a missing link] gibbon....
On the other hand, the Peking Man first was found [as] a new genus on the basis of one tooth... and later a hundred individuals were found in a fruit jar....
...the Peking skull... restoration [was based on fragments of 100 separate individuals - all of which were lost]. They were given to Ruth Moore, she says in a fruit jar... Later [she] said [that] they were remains of 100 individuals that were found and then given to here in a fruit jar [all together]... Also, it wasn't revealed initially that there was a modern skull found in the same set of caves, Dragon Bone Hill... near Peking... Many would suggest [considering the evidence, especially the curious number of small skull fragments] that they were hunting this apelike creature that was 'restored'...[from so many pieces]. All of the craniums were chrushed in the back. There was no post cranial material... the rest of the skeleton was not there - just the skulls. And all of them had the back bashed in, like somebody had removed the brains [which is a delicacy in China]...
And later a hundred individuals were found in a fruit jar. The discoverer was [also involved in the Piltdown hoax. And then all of this 'evidence' in the fruit jar was mysteriously lost. We have none of it today]... [So] That's 90% of what you have for Homo Erectus."
[Compare other quotations from Dr. Patton's notes:
'How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones - the cranial fragments - and 'see' a clear simian signature in them; and 'see' in an ape's jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity? The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientists' expectations and their effects on the interpretation of data... ...It is, in fact, a common fantasy, promulgated mostly by the scientific profession itself, that in the search for objective truth, data dictate conclusions. If this were the case, then each scientist faced withthe same data would necessarily reach the same conclusion. But as we've seen earlier and will see again and again, frequently this does not happen. Data are just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions.'
[Roger Lewin, Editor of Research News, SCIENCE, BONES OF CONTENTION, pp. 61, 68]
'Java Man went into Dubois' locker for a time. But Peking Man seems to have gone into Davy Jones' locker, and for good. He disappeared, one of the first casualties of the war in the Pacific, half a million years after he had died the first time.' [William Howels, Harvard, MANKIND IN THE MAKING, p. 165]
