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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, (cont.)
b) REAL DISCOVERIES SUPPORT DESIGNED CREATION WHEN PROPERLY INVESTIGATED, (cont.)
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 101-112]:
"The Wadjak skulls, found before Dubois discovered Pithecanthropus [Java Man], are truly those of modern man, morphologically speaking. Whereas Pithecanthropus had a cranial capacity of 1000 cc, the Wadjak skulls have cranial capacities of 1550 cc and 1650 cc respectively. Although Dubois called them Homo Wadjakensis, there has never been any doubt that they belong to the same species as modern humans and should be classed as Homo sapiens.
The Wadjak skulls were found in 1888 and 1890. Dubois brought them back from Java in 1895 and kept them sequestered in his home in Haarlem, Holland. He made no public announcement about these fossils until May 1920, thirty years after they were found. The motivation then for Dubois's revelation of his Wadjak discoveries was that Stuart A. Smith published a monograph on Talgai Man, claiming that he had discovered the first 'proto-Australian.' Dubois's massive ego could not let that claim go unchallenged. He unveiled the Wadjak skulls and said that he had discovered the first 'proto-Australian' years before Smith did...
[Theunissen, 176, and Keith, 2:440]
..If Dubois had revealed the Wadjak fossils at the time he revealed Pithecanthropus, his beloved Pithecanthropus would never have been accepted as the missing link.... There is evidence that Wadjak was approximately the same age as Pithecanthropus, so to sell Pithecanthropus,, Dubois had to hide Wadjak...
...To preserve the uniqueness of Pithecanthropus as the missing link, Dubois had to make sure that no fossils of more modern morphology could be assigned to the same stratigraphic level or given the same date. He did this by
(1) changing the assignment of the Kedoenig Broeboes jawbone from Homo to Pithecanthropus, while at the same time withholding any description or illustration of it so one could challenge his assignment, and
(2) hiding Wadjak for thirty years so that no one would know he had found such fossils until Pithecanthropus had been thoroughly established in the human thought stream as our evolutionary ancestor...
...Among the fossil fauna at Wadjak was a species of tapir, Tapirus indicus. A tapir is a hoofed mammal that looks like a pig but is considered to be more closely related to the rhinoceros...
...A 1951 article by American Museum of Natural History anthropologist Dirk Albert Hooijer, in which he writes: 'Tapirus indicus, supposedly extinct in Java since the Middle Pleistocene, proved to be represented in the Dubois collection from the Wadjak site, central Java, which is late - if not post - Pleistocene in age.'
[Dirk Albert Hooijer, 'The Geological Age of Pithecanthropus, Meganthropus, and Gigantopithecus,' American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 9, N. S. No. 3 (September 1951): 275]:
...Hooijer clearly states that Wadjak is late or post-Pleistocene - that is, about 10,000 y.a. Yet, a species of tapir that became extinct in the Middle Pleistocene was found by Dubois among the fossil fauna. Now we understand why Dubois hid the Wadjak fossils rather than reveal them and try to explain away Tapirus indicus. Fossil forms that are known to have become extinct, or believed to be extinct, within a specific time frame can be important indicators in dating fossil assemblages.
A question comes to mind. If Tapirus indicus was found in the Wadjak faunal assemblage, and if this species of tapir is believed to have become extinct in the Middle Pleistocene, why couldn't Wadjak be Middle Pleistocene? In spite of Dubois's original claim that Pithecanthropus was of Pliocene age, it is now universally placed in the Middle Pleistocene. That would mean that the big-brained Wadjak skulls and smaller-brained Pithecanthropus skullcap could be approximately the same age.... ...Wadjak and Pithecanthropus, both in the Middle Pleistocene, would not fit the evolutionary scenario well at all; in fact, it would be evidence against it. We certainly understand now why Dubois hid the Wadjak skulls for thirty years."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 140-142]:
"Of the seventy-seven localities where Homo erectus fossils have been found, more than half (forty-two) of these sites have also yielded stone tools. At eleven of the Homo erectus sites there is evidence of the controlled use of fire... ...Three... ...Homo erectus sites show evidence of burial, one of a cremation, one of the use of red ochre, and another of the use of bone chipping tools...
One of the most popular myths of human evolution is that stone tools testify to the increasing mental and conceptual abilities of humans as they evolved... ...The fallacy of the evolutionary archeologist was to equate simple with primitive...
[However] ..Almost every basic style of tool has been found with almost every category of human fossil material...
...On these 'primitive' Oldowan tools Lawrence Robbins (Michigan State University) commented: 'It is interesting that these oldest of technological items were among the most successful inventions for they continued to be manufactured throughout the entire Stone Age.'
[Lawrence H. Robbins, 'Archeology in the Turkana District, Kenya,' Science 176 (28 April 1972): 360]
...If these Oldowan tools were so successful and efficient that they were used throughout the entire [so called] Stone Age... ...if they were the best tools for certain jobs, and if they are still the best tools for certain jobs in some parts of the world today, is it intellectually honest for evolutionists to refer to them as primitive and use them as evidence for the evolution of the human brain?
One of the most common Acheulean tools is the hand ax, which in the past has been almost exclusively identified with Homo erectus. So complete was this identification with Homo erectus that if hand axes were found at a habitation site, it was called a Homo erectus site even though no Homo erectus fossils were found there to so identify it. Now it is known that Acheulean tools, including hand axes, have also been found with Homo sapiens fossils. Furthermore, many Asian Homo erectus fossils are found with tools considered to be more primitive than those of the Acheulean Culture. (In Asia, it is now believed, bamboo tools were used more extensively than stone tools, which could account for stone tools being less frequent and more 'primitive' there).
The Acheulean hand ax, however, was truly used worldwide. It is found from northern Europe to southern Africa, and from the Mediterranean to India and Indonesia....
...In shape it resembles a giant almond, pointed at one end and round on the other. The pointed end is thinner, the rounded end thicker, but overall it is rather flat like the almond... ...Experiments led... ...to conclude that the hand ax was actually a flying projectile weapon, thrown discus style and used in the hunting of large game...
[Eileen M. O'Brien, 'What Was the Acheulean Hand Ax?' Natural History (July 1984): 20-23]
...hand axes... ...are found in great numbers in places that used to be streams, rivers, or lakes. It would be logical for bands of ancient humans to attack animals when they came to water... ...axes that were overthrown and landed in the water usually would not be recovered, which could explain why we find them in those places today...
Also significant is that the Acheulean hand ax first appears in the archeological record at about the same as evidences of large animal kills - hippopotamus, elephant, and Dinotherium (an extinct elephant-like animal with large tusks in the lower jaw).
6) HOMO HABILIS: EITHER COMPLETELY ANIMAL OR COMPLETELY HUMAN
a) 'NUTCRACKER MAN' = A PRIMATE
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 157-158]:
"One day in 1959... ...at a certain spot [in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, Mary Leakey] ...saw teeth sticking out of the ground. Excavation revealed a large cranium having some resemblance to the South African robust australopithecines.
The stone tools found in association with the fossil led Louis to believe that this individual was a tool maker. And to Louis, tool making meant just one thing: man! Believing that they had found the first tool maker, Louis named the fossil, Zinjanthropus, 'East Africa Man.' The ridiculously large molars indicated that the individual probably lived on nuts and berries, and so it became affectionately known as 'Nutcracker Man.'
Some of us suspect that Louis knew all along that 'Zinj' was just a variant of a robust australopithecine. But the financial support Louis desperately needed to continue his work does not come from the discovery of fossil primates. It comes from finding human ancestors. The long financial association the Leakeys had with the National Geographic Society began at this time. Telling of the discovery of 'Zinj' in National Geographic, Louis began his report: 'The teeth were projecting from the rock face, smooth and shining, and quite obviously human.'...
[Louis S. B. Leakey, 'Finding the World's Earliest Man,' National Geographic, September 1960; 421]
Included in the article was an artist's painting of what 'Zinj' might have looked like. It was quite a piece of work. Whereas our eyes are about midway between our chin and the top of our head, there was hardly any head at all showing above 'Zinj's' eyes. He had virtually no brain. But the skill of the National Geographic artists was such that the portrait was almost believable..."
b) COMPLETELY HUMAN 'HOMO HABILIS' DISCOVERIES
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 158-164]:
"It was not long before the Leakeys began to find the remains of another type of fossil individual [after they had discovered 'Nutcracker Man'. This type was a far better candidate for human ancestry. Louis began to realize that 'Zinj' ['Nutcracker Man'] really was just a super-robust australopithecine [i.e., nonhuman], and it is now known as Australopithecus boisei. What Louis claimed was 'obviously human' turned out to be obviously nonhuman...
[On the other hand] ...These newer fossils consisted of cranial fragments, hand bones, and foot bones. The foot bones seemed to indicate bipedality. The hand bones seemed to indicate manual dexterity. The associated stone tools, formerly attributed to 'Zinj,' were now ascribed to these newer individuals.
In 1964, Louis Leakey, Phillop Tobias (University of Witwatersrand and John Napier (University of London) announced in Nature a new human ancestor: Homo habilis... [Louis S. B. Leakey, Phillip V.Tobias, and John R. Napier, 'A New Species of the Genus Homo from Olduvai Gorge,' Nature 202 (4 April 1964): 7-9]
...Since some of those fossils were found in Bed I, they were also dated at 1.8 m.y.a. From the start, those fossils were the subject of intense controversy. Some felt they were just a mixture of australopithecine and Homo erectus fossils, and, hence, did not constitute a new taxon. Even those who were sympathetic to the new category recognized that the fossils were a mixture of juvenile and adult material, and juvenile material is difficult to evaluate.
However, a philosophical problem was also at the center of the controversy. At that time, the accepted scenario for human evolution went from Australopithecus africanus (including Taung) to Homo erectus and then on to homo sapiens. Many evolutionists felt that there was not 'room' between africanus and erectus for another species, nor was there need for one. But Louis was marching to the tune of a different drummer. Louis believed in 'old Homo.' Louis did not believe that humans had evolved from the australopithecines, at least not from the ones that had been discovered thus far. He believed that the transition from primates to humans took place much farther back in time. In Louis's evolutionary scheme, there was not only room for a new taxon, there was a desperate need for one. In fact, Louis felt that he had discovered the true ancestor of modern humans.
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...
..However, the turning point toward acceptance of Homo habilis into the hominid family [by evolutionists] came in 1972 when Louis's son Richard, working at a site on Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana) in northern Kenya, found the famous fossil skull and leg bones known as KNM-ER 1470 and 1481...
...Shocking about the fossil was its large cranial size (about 800 cc) and its very modern morphology, which includes high doming and thin cranial walls. The skull was so different from what evolution theory would predict that Richard Leakey said: 'Either we toss out this skull or we toss out our theories of early man. It simply fits no previous models of human beginnings.
[Richard E. Leakey, 'Skull 1470,' National Geographic, June 1973, 819]:
...In reporting the new fossil discovery, Science News wrote:
'Leakey further describes the whole shape of the brain case as remarkably reminiscent of modern man, lacking the heavy and protruding eyebrow ridges and thick bone characteristics of Homo erectus...
[Science News 102 (18 November 1972): 324]
...In his Nature report, Richard Leakey stated: 'The 1470 cranium is quite distinctive from H. erectus...'
[Richard E. F. Leakey, 'Evidence for an Advanced Plio-Pleistocene Hominid from East Rudolf, Kenya,' Nature 242 (April 1973); 450]:
...In fact, comparisons show that skull 1470 is more modern than any of the Homo erectus fossils - even the Kow Swamp material, which is only about 10,000 years old.
On the other hand, skull 1470 obviously is not an australopithecine, although some, such as Alan Walker, have suggested that it might be. Its cranial capacity is far beyond even the largest known australopithecine. What is disconcerting to evolutionists is that 1470's cranial capacity is well within the range of modern humans. That 1470 is not a unique specimen is shown by the fact that other fossils of the same age have been found with close affinities to 1470. KNM-ER 1590 consists of dental and cranial fragments. Although this cranium is from an immature individual, it is large as 1470. Hence, in adulthood it would have been even larger. KNM-ER 1802, a mandible, may also belong to this group.
Not only does skull 1470 qualify for true human status based on cranial shape, size, and cranial wall thickness, there is also evidence on the inside of the skull of a Broca's area, the part of the brain that controls the muscles for producing articulate speech in humans.
'The two foremost American experts on human brain evolution - Dean Falk of the State University of New York at Albany and Ralph Holloway of Columbia University - usually disagree, but even they agree that Broca's area is present in a skull from East Turkana known as 1470. Philip [sic] Tobias, ...renowned brain expert from South Africa, concurs. ...So, if having the brains to speak is the issue, apparently Homo has had it from the beginning.'
[AnthroQuest: The Leakey Foundation News, No. 43 (Spring 1991): 13]
...There is no question that bias intervened in the reconstruction of skull 1470. The face was given the larger slant off of the perpendicular to make it look more like a transitional form between primates and humans, especially when at the time of its reconstruction it was thought to be 2.9 million years old.
Bias is also obvious in the way famed artist Jay Matternes put 'flesh' on the bones of skull 1470, as seen in the June 1973 issue of National Geographic. Matternes shows the possessor of skull 1470 to be a young black woman who looks very human except that she has an apelike nose. Human noses are composed of cartilage which normally does not fossilize, and the nose is missing on 1470. It is obvious that the purpose in giving the reconstructed skull 1470 woman an apelike nose was to make her look as 'primitive' as possible. The decision of what kind of nose to give her was an entirely subjective one made by Matternes or his advisers. With a human nose, none would question the full humanity of that woman in National Geographic...
......Although there was no compelling reason why skulls 1470 and 1590 could not have been ascribed to some form of Homo sapiens (based on their morphology), they were grouped with the much smaller Homo habilis material from Olduvai Gorge...
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 164-166]:
"...There were, however, always some thoughtful evolutionists who were troubled by Homo habilis. Four problems with the taxon were obvious:
(1) the reversal problem, going from gracile habilis to robust erectus and then back to gracile sapiens;
(2) the juvenile nature of some of the postcranial material upon which the bipedality and the toolmaking ability of the taxon had been largely based;
(3) the disparity of cranial volumes, with 1470 and 1590 being within the human range, while others, such as 1805, 1813, and O.H. 24, are far too small to be considered human; and
(4) the fact that the postcranial material had not been found in direct association with the cranial material. Thus, evolutionists exhibited a deep faith that all of this material actually belonged in the same category.
The problem of Homo habilis now appears to be solved. In 1986, Tim White, working with Don Johanson and others at Olduvai Gorge, discovered a partial adult skeleton that has been designated Olduvai Hominid 62 and dated at about 1.8 m.y.a...
[Donald C. Johanson, Fidelis T. Masao, Gerald G. Eck, Tim D. J. White, Robert C. Walter, William H. Kimbel, Berhane Asfaw, Paul Manega, Prosper Ndessokia, and Gen. Suwa, 'New partial skeleton of homo habilis from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania,' Nature 327 (21 May 1987); 205-9]
...The cranium and teeth of O.H. 62 are very similar to the smaller Homo habilis skulls, 1805, 1813, and O.H. 24 and thus are properly classified with them. However, it was the first time that postcranial material had been found in unquestioned association with a Homo habilis skull. The surprise was that the body of this Homo habilis adult was not large, as Homo habilis was supposed to be. It was actually smaller than Lucy - just a bit more than three feet tall. Thus, we have strong evidence that the category known as Homo habilis is not a legitimate taxon but is composed of a mixture of material from at least two separate taxa - one large and one small. This new discovery also seems to remove the taxon Homo habilis as a legitimate transition between afarensis (or africanus) and Homo erectus...
Evidence that Homo habilis was made up of two distinct forms - a larger human form and a smaller nonhuman form - had been presented even before this discovery. Based on her work on endocranial casts of two Homo habilis fossils, 1470 and 1805, Dean Falk wrote:
'The evidence presented...shows that KNM-ER 1805 (basal view) is similar to that from an African pongid [ape], whereas the endocast of KNM-ER 1470 is shaped like that of a modern human.'
[Dean Falk, 'Cerebral Cortices of East African Early Hominids,' Science 221 (9 September 1983): 1073]
...There is no compelling reason why the large Homo habilis material (skulls 1470 and 1590) cannot be classified as Homo sapiens based upon their morphology. While it is impossible to prove the association of skull 1470 with the leg bones, KNM-ER 1481, the probability is high that they both belong to the same type of individual... ...they are virtually indistinguishable from modern human leg bones.
The small Homo habilis material, including KNM-ER 1805, 1813, O.H. 24, and O.H. 62, does not belong in the genus Homo and should never have been so classified. This material is best described as being australopithecine - variants of (or companion species to) africanus or afarensis."
7) AUSTRALOPITHECINES: EXTINCT PRIMATES
[Lubenow, op. cit., p. 166]:
"The australopithecines are simply extinct primates. The fact that true humans appeared in the fossil record before the australopithecines and lived as contemporaries with the australopithecines throughout all of australopithecine history reveals that the australopithecines had nothing to do with human origins. Australopithecine authority Charles Oxnard (University of Western Australia) concludes: 'The genus Homo may, in fact, be so ancient as to parallel entirely the genus Australopithecus, thus denying the latter a direct place in the human lineage...
[Charles E. Oxnard, 'The place of the australopithecines in human evolution: grounds for doubt?' Nature 258 (4 December 1975): 389]
...The australopithecines do not appear in the fossil record at the relevant time. They are far too late. Further more, although brain organization is more important than brain size alone, the significant gap between the cranial capacities of the largest australopithecine and the smallest human, fossil or living, has not been bridged. There is not a smooth transition from nonhuman to human fossils in this regard.
The evidence for australopithecine bipedality is controversial. While there is strong evidence that australopithecine locomotion was significantly different from that of humans or other primates, the issue is irrelevant. Bipedality does not prove a human relationship. The birds are bipedal, but no one suggests that they are closely related to humans. Evolutionists make much of the alleged australopithecine bipedality because to make a case for human evolution they must demonstrate the origin of bipedality from a primate stock. Unfortunately, the australopithecine 'evidence' comes far too late in the fossil record. As shown by the Laetoli footprints... ...when the australopithecines first appear in the fossil record, true humans were already walking."
[Dr. Don R. Patton, op. cit., tape #3]:
"Australopithecus... represented in this manner in TimeLife's book THE MISSING LINK. This ill-clad creature is the star of the show and would gain first notoriety through the efforts of Richard Leakey in Africa [and] made widely known by National Geographic... where he found the Nutcracker Man...
Another famous finder of Australopithecine material is Donald Johanson. He found Lucy... What is not mentioned in [his] book about Lucy is the fact that [the] bottom portion [of the skeleton fossil] - the knee and the leg bone which is [what] defines her as the ancestor of humans was not found with the rest of the skeleton. That knee bone and leg bone was found some three miles away, and according to Johanson, some fifty meters lower in strata. But he put them together, and so you've got some ape bones connected with knees bones and leg bones, really small, but [which were] supposed to have walked upright... Many would deny all of the implications of that. Many would say [that Lucy] is much more like the pygmy chimpanzee today which does walk somewhat upright, but certainly not human-like... What is left out [of most of the Australopithecine material], especially regarding the Leakeys' effort, is [that] they don't think at all, and never did [think] that this led to man or has anything to do with man. Notice the point that is acknowledged by Lewin, the Editor of Research News in SCIENCE magazine. He says, 'Richard and his parents, Louis and Mary, have held to a view of human origins for nearly half a century now that the line of true man, the line of Homo - large brain, toolmaking and so on - has a separate ancestry that goes back millions and millions of years. And the ape-man, Australopithecus, has nothing to do with human ancestry.'
[ROGER LEWIN, Editor, Research News, SCIENCE, BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987. p. 18]
Now, you won't find that in your biology textbooks, or Earth Science or Anthropology textbooks in undergraduate work.... There are many other authorities who agree with [Lewin], saying that this star of the show Australopithecus had nothing to do with the lineage [of man] even though they are devout evolutionists. Charles Oxnard is no lightweight in the field of anthropology. He's Dean of the Graduate School, and Professor of Biology and Anatomy at the University of Southern California. He's writing in THE AMERICAN BIOLOGY TEACHER when he says, 'Conventional wisdom...
[And that's what's reported in the textbooks]
...is that the australopithecine fragments are generally rather similar to humans... ...the new studies point to different conclusions.
[Now the new studies he refers to he calls multivariate analysis. He ridicules the idea of most of those who've studied the fossil material of ancient man. They pick it up, look at it and fly by the seat of their britches, he says, and say, 'Ah, this looks like that or it looks like that.' And they presume that it belongs in this lineage or that one. He said the preconceptions shape those ideas and determine what they see. He goes at it much more scientifically with his multivariate analysis. He makes as many as a thousand measurements of the same bone comparing the measurements at the same place on other bones. Then he runs it through the computer and is able to say definitively - quantitatively - just how similar it is and how dissimilar it is. And referring to this kind of a study, he says:]
...The new investigations suggest that the fossil fragments are usually uniquely different from any living form: when they do have similarities with living species, they are as often as not reminiscent of the orangutan, ...these results imply that the various australopithecines are really not all that much like humans. ...may well have been bipeds... ...but if so, it was not in the human manner. They may also have been quite capable climbers as much at home in the trees as on the ground....'
[CHARLES E. OXNARD, Dean of Graduate School, Professor of Biology & Anatomy, USC, THE AMERICAN BIOLOGY TEACHER, Vol. 41, May 1979, pp. 273-4]
Others agree with [Oxnard] like Lord Solly Zuckerman, who is perhaps the leading anthropologist in Europe. In his book BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER [p. 78], he makes a very strong statement. He says, 'The australopithecine skull is in fact so overwhelmingly simian as opposed to human... that the contrary proposition could be equated to an assertion that black is white.'
[This is] a very strong statement, by one of the leading authorities in the world, that says, '[that the australopithecine skull] is much more like the ape than like [the] human and you just can't say otherwise.' He points out, 'Well, yes, they were somewhat upright, but upright like modern apes - they were knucklewalkers.' And [he] proves it through his studies...
...When we look at the various apes that are alive today we find some that have teeth just like.... [the australopithecine fossil], for example, the baboon in Ethiopia which 100% ape. [It's] a seed eater and it has the parabolic shape rather than the 'U' shaped dental arcade. It doesn't have the large canine [teeth]... It has teeth almost exactly like the australopithecine. And it is an ape - 100 %. And so that doesn't prove that [australopithecine] is in the lineage of man any more than it proves [that] these baboons are...
We can sum up the evidence for australopithecus this way:
He had a brain that was the size of an ape, about 400 to 700 c.c. compared to 1400 to... over 2000 [for] modern man... [So] the brain was the size of an [ape's]...
He looked like an ape... his face was large compared to the small brain case.
He walked like apes today - a knuckle walker - according to the multivariate analysis.
And he had teeth like the baboon [of Ethiopia] which is 100% ape....
[So] he was an ape that has now become extinct..."
[Compare quotations from Dr. Patton's notes:
"Dr. Leakey bases his repudiation of Darwin on the results of his long search in East Africa for the remains of the original man. The generally accepted post-Darwin view is that man developed from the baboon 3 to 5 million years ago. But Leakey has found no evidence of a spurt in development at that time.'
[CHICAGO AMERICAN, 1/25, 1967]
'His Lordship's [Lord Solly Zuckerman's] scorn for the level of competence he sees displayed by paleoanthropologists is legendary, exceeded only by the force of his dismissal of the australopithecines as having anything at all to do with human evolution.
'''They are just bloody apes''', he is reputed to have observed on examining the australopithecine remains in South Africa. ...Zuckerman had become extremely powerful in British science, being an adviser to the government up to the highest level.
...while at Oxford and then Birmingham universities, he had vigorously pursued a metrical and statistical approach to studying the anatomy of fossil hominids.. ...it was on this basis that he underpinned his lifelong rejection of the australopithecines as human ancestors.'
[Roger Lewin, BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987, p. 164-5]
'Zihlman compares the pygmy chimpanzee to '''Lucy,''' one of the oldest hominid fossils known, and finds the similarities striking. They are almost identical in body size, in stature and in brain size... These commonalities, Zihlman argues, indicate that pygmy chimps ;use their limbs in much the same way Lucy did...
[Sdrienne I. Zihlman, U. C. Santa Crux, SCIENCE NEWS, Vol. 123, Feb. 5, 1983, p. 89]
'The australopithecines are rapidly shrinking back to the status of peculiarly specialized apes...'
[Matt Cartmill, Duke; David Pilbeam, Harvard; Glynn Isaac, Harvard; AMERICAN SCIENTIST, (July-August 1986), p. 419]
8) RAMAPITHECUS: COMPLETELY APE
[Dr. Don R. Patton, op. cit., tape #3]:
"Consider the statement made by Robert B. Eckhardt of Penn State University... He was the one who first nominated Ramapithecus as the ancestor of man - the first in the rung leading to man. He and his cousins Oreopithecus, Limnopithecus, Kenyapithecus the Miocene Apes - have now been demoted, as he acknowledges in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN [Vol. 226, p. 101]:
'...There would appear to be little evidence to suggest that several different hominoid species are represented among the Old World dryopithecine fossils...
[In other words, they're all one species]
...(Ramapithecus, Oreopithecus, Limnopithecus, Kenyapithecus). They themselves nevertheless seem to have been apes - morphologically, ecologically, and behaviorally.'
In other words, their shape, the area where they live, what they did, the way they behaved - all of that is just like apes - that's what they are.
Likewise Roger Lewin sums up the situation today regarding these Miocene Apes. He says, 'The dethroning of Ramapithecus - from putative first human in 1961 to extinct relative of the orangutan in 1982 - is one of the most fascinating, and bitter, sagas in the search for human origins.'
[ROGER LEWIN, Editor, Research News, SCIENCE, BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987, p. 86]
So we eliminate the bottom rung [of the evolutionists' proposed ladder of the descendants of modern man]
c) FALSIFIED DISCOVERIES EXPOSE EVOLUTIONISTS AS DEVIOUS
Theodore H. Epp states in the booklet "TRUE SCIENCE AGREES WITH SCRIPTURE" published by The Good News Broadcasting Association, Inc., Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965, pp. 18-22:
"The 'discovery' of the Piltdown Man and the reconstruction that followed involved a bit of mystery. Mr. Charles Dawson, who was credited with the 'find,' did not make his information public until 1912. Apparently, he claimed to have picked up the first fragments of bone in 1909 or 1910 in a gravel pit, and some others in 1911. He took the bones to Dr. A. Smith Woodward of the British Museum. They employed some laborers to sift carefully the gravel in the gravel pit. Their efforts yielded a piece of jawbone, another sliver of bone from a skull, and a canine tooth. These fragments were so small that a sleight of hand artist could have concealed them in the palm of one hand. Nevertheless, it was from this that the scientists 'reconstructed' the Piltdown Man and told the world that a new genus had been found.
Every effort was exerted to make a reconstruction along ape lines. For example, the skull was carefully made with a brain pan capacity of 1070 c.c. This was midway between the capacity of an ape skull which is 600c.c. and a human skull which Woodward and Dawson decided would be approximately 1500 c.c.
The first exposure came when Professor Arthur Keith, curator of the Museum of the Royal college of Surgeons, London, demonstrated that the Piltdown skull capacity had been severely underrated. He showed it was closer to 1500 c.c. Professor Keith was a believer in evolution but he wanted facts, not misrepresentations.
The reconstructors had also done something with the placing of the teeth that did not pass scientific investigation. They put the one canine tooth on the right side of the lower jaw and at an angle to conform to that of an ape's tooth. In two successive years, 1914 and 1915, two American professors pointed out that the lower canine was not a lower tooth at all, neither was it a right tooth, but a left and upper tooth.
Before this however, in 1913, Professor Gerrit S. Miller of the United States National Museum objected to the classing together of the jaw, teeth and cranium. The professor, who was well versed in his subject and had a goodly supply of anthropoid and human bones for comparison, said, 'The jaw and tooth belong to a fossil chimpanzee.'
Remember, these disclosures all took place within three to four years of the 'discovery' of the Piltdown Man, yet scientists paraded this reconstructed hoax before children and adults alike for the next 40 years. They used this as evidence of man's evolution from the lower animals. Then, when they could no longer hide the fact, they tried to pass off the loss of this 'link' as a very minor matter, something that in no wise reacted against evolution."
William P. Hoar states, (The New American, Nov 16, 1992, 'Evolution as Religion,' pp. 32-33):
"The Guardian Weekly ....put it this way in 1978: 'In the last decade, ...geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them.'...........
....There are even intriguing suspicions - expressed by some prominent evolutionists - that Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist Teilhard deChardin was culpably involved in the long-standing Piltdown Man hoax. Johnson recounts a supposed ancestor of homo sapiens found under Piltdown Commons in Sussex during 1908-1915, and not exposed as a hoax until 1953:
The pressure to find confirmation [of a missing link] was so great that it led to one spectacular fraud, Piltdown Man - which British Museum officials jealously protected from unfriendly inspection, allowing it to perform forty years of useful service in molding public opinion........."
[Marvin L. Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 41-44]:
"The Piltdown fossils were discovered between 1908 and 1915. It was not until 1953, thirty-eight to forty-five years later, that Kenneth Oakely, Joseph Weiner, and Wilfred LeGros Clark discovered that Piltdown Man was a fraud. The British Museum then issued a statement to that effect...
There is the possibility that the skull itself was legitimately found in the pit. Radiocarbon dating determined it to be from 520 to 720 years old. Piltdown Common had been used as a mass grave during the great plague of A.D. 1348-9. The skull bones were quite thick, a characteristic of more ancient fossils, and the skull had been treated with potassium bichromate by Dawson to harden and preserve it. This was a common practice for the treatment of fossils at that time.
The other bones and stone tools had undoubtedly been planted in the pit and had been treated to match the dark brown color of the skull. The lower jaw was that of a juvenile female orangutan. The place where the jaw would articulate with the skull had been broken off to hide the fact that it did not fit the skull. The teeth of the mandible were filed down to match the teeth of the upper jaw, and the canine tooth had been filed down to make it look heavily worn.
It was only in 1982 that both the mandible and the canine tooth were determined conclusively, by collagen reactions, to be those of an orangutan...
[Jerold Lowenstein, Theya Molleson, and Sherwood Washburn, 'Piltdown Jaw Confirmed as Orang,' Nature 299 (23 September 1982): 294]
It seems likely that whoever put the canine tooth in the pot knew that the mandible was also that of an orangutan. Orangs are found today only in Borneo and Sumatra.
Some of the mammalian bones probably came from other areas of England, but the mastodon molar is thought to have come from Tunisia and the hippopotamus molar from the Island of Malta. Some of the flints in the pit may also have come from Tunisia. It is obvious that whoever perpetrated the hoax either had traveled extensively or had access to some exotic fossil and archeological collections...
Piltdown should have been uncovered long before it was. Like Boule's reconstruction of the Neandertal skeleton from La Chapelle-aux-Saints, there were elements about it that were quite obvious. The file marks on the orangutan teeth of the lower jaw were clearly visible. The molars were misaligned and filed at two different angles. The canine tooth had been filed down so far that the pulp cavity had been exposed and then plugged. If science were really self-correcting, the Piltdown fraud should have been discovered soon after it was committed, rather than thirty-eight to forty-five years later...
...When the Piltdown fossils were brought to the British Museum, plaster casts were made of them for display to the public. However, museums seldom indicate that the fossils on display are replicas, and most people thought that they were seeing the real thing. Yet, while people thought that they were seeing actual fossils of their evolutionary ancestors, they were looking at fakes. But more than just looking at fakes, they were looking at fakes of fakes...
[Theodore H. Epp, op. cit., pp. 18-22]:
"There is a case of an earlier find (1886) in which the reconstruction was called the Spy Man because the bones were discovered in Spy, Belgium. These bones did not all belong to the same skeleton, but were parts of two skeletons. These were pieced together by scientists to resemble the kind of creature they wanted to depict. Professor C. R. Knight said of the Spy Man, 'His lowering face accentuates his squat ferocity... and his chin, where is it? That deep and heavy jaw and gorilla like [characteristics]...' The significant thing about this is that there was neither face nor head, neither chin nor jaw. There was no skull found. The reconstruction was a sheer fabrication."
A later discovery in Java, long after Dubois' original Java Man which was finally determined to not even be human was labeled as "Homo Erectus' - a missing link:
[Theodore H. Epp, op. cit., pp. 18-22]:
"A bone was discovered in Java in 1926 and claimed to be a new skull of the Pithecanthropus Erectus type. This was hailed as another link in the evolutionary chain. It had to be abandoned, however, after it was found that the so-called skull was an elephant's knee bone."
[Theodore H. Epp, op. cit., pp. 18-22]:
"There was also the case of a tooth found in Nebraska in 1922 which was accepted as evidence of man's antiquity and descent from the brute. A few years later the entire skeleton of the creature was found and the tooth was identified as belonging to an extinct species of pig."
[Dr. Don Patton, op. cit., tape #3]:
"Dr. Harry Farifield Osborne... went to Nebraska... [and based on a fossil tooth which] Dr. Harold Cook found... announced to the world... that America had its missing link... Well, he made the mistake of allowing the experts to look carefully at the originals, unlike Dubois with his originals. And they decided eventually that this was an extinct pig. In fact, the next year they found a complete jaw with teeth intact. And it was very obviously an extinct... pig...."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 49-52]:
In 1924, Professor Raymond Dart, anatomist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, acquired a skull that had come from a lime works at Taung...
...It was the skull and endocranial cast of an extinct primate child which dart named Australopithecus africanus...
By 1960, it would have been difficult to find any public-school book that touched on human origins that did not have in it a picture of the Taung skull...
Until Lucy was discovered in late 1974, Taung, the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus, was considered out oldest direct evolutionary ancestor....
..Taung was generally considered to be between two and three million years old...
..In 1973, South African geologist T. C. Partridge dropped a bomb. His investigations revealed that the cave from which the Taung skull had come could not have formed prior to 0.87 m.y.a... [million years ago]...
That meant that the Taung skull could be at most only three-quarters of a million years old.
Since it could take up to a million years for the hominids to evolve from one species to another, to go all the way from australopithecines to modern humans in only three-quarters of a million years was out of the question. Further, true humans were already on the scene in Africa at 0.75 m.y.a. [according to the established evolutionary time table]. Karl W. Butzer (University of Chicago) clearly saw the problem when he wrote:
'If the Taung specimen is indeed no older than the youngest robust australopithecines of the Transvaal, then such a late, local survival of the gracile [a term used to describe the africanus fossils] lineage would seem to pose new evolutionary ... problems.'
[Karl W. Butzer, 'Paleoecology of South African Australopithecines: Taung Revisited,' Current Anthropology 15:4 (December 1974): 382]
Anatomist Phillop V. Tobias (then at University of Witwatersrand) pointed to the real problem: '...the fact remains that less than one million years is a discrepant age for a supposed gracile australopithecine in the gradually emerging picture of African hominid evolution.'
[Butzer, op. cit., 411]
Here was a problem which if allowed to persist could jeopardize the concept of human evolution. It was time for the evolutionist to wave his magic wand. A. J. B. Humphreys wrote:
'One point that needs investigation at the outset, however, is the question of the identification of the Taung skull as Australopithecus africanus. The possibility that the Taung skull might represent Homo habilis or a more advanced creature than A. africanus... certainly deserves some consideration in view of this younger date.'
[Butzer, op. cit., p. 404]
Phillip Tobias suggested another way the wand might be waved: '...because its brain and its dental characters would exclude it from H. erectus, it must seriously be considered whether the Taung child is not a late surviving member of A. robustus or A. cf. robustus.' [More advanced hominid, but not in the human lineage - which is said to eventually become extinct without evolving]
[Phillip V. Tobias, 'Implications of the New Age Estimates of the Early South African Hominids,' Nature 246 (9 November 1973): 82]
Tobias then made this amazing confession: 'Although nearly 50 yr have elapsed since its discovery, it is true to say that the Taung skull has never yet been fully analyzed and described.'
[Tobias, op. cit. p. 82]
...for fifty years the public was told that Taung was our evolutionary ancestor...
..Now we are told that the appropriate analysis and description of the fossil have never been done. In spite of that fact, without further study... ... the suggestion was made that perhaps Taung was closer to humans (habilis) or not in the human lineage at all (robusuts).
..When Johanson and Tim White revised the hominid family tree in 1979, afarensis (including Lucy) replaced africanus (including Taung) as our direct nonhuman evolutionary ancestor. The dating of Taung thus became a non issue. The africanus forms were moved to the australopithecine branch of the family tree, becoming the link between Lucy and the robust australopithecines. [which are presupposed as extinct and not in line with humanity]
This comfortable arrangement [to dismiss all africanus remains as insignificant by declaring them without evidence to be in an extinct evolutionary line & not in the line of humanity] was severely jolted by the discovery in 1985 of the famous 'black skull....' KNM-WT 17000...
[A. Walker, R. E. Leakey, J. M. Harris, and F. H. Brown, '2.5-Myr Australopithecus boisei from west of Lake Turkana, Kenya,' Nature 322 (7 August 1986); 517-22]
......Australopithecine phylogeny is now in disarray. Dated at 2.5 m.y.a., the 'blackskull' seems to have more in common with Lucy and the robust australopithecines. Africanus became the odd man out. Many evolutionists are now moving africanus (including Taung) back into the human line, between Lucy and Homo habilis...
Because Taung has been slipped back into the human lineage, Tobias has withdrawn his suggestion that Taung might be a robust australopithecine. However, the full analysis and description of the Taung skull still has not been published, and the dating problem raised by Partridge continues to be ignored."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 52-58]
One of the most flagrant cases of wand waving to deflect evidence that could be most embarrassing to the idea of human evolution involves a fossil found at Kanapoi, southwest of Lake Rudofg (Turkana) in northern Kenya. This fossil, known as KP 271, is the lower end of a left upper arm bone (distal end of the humerus). It was found in 1965 by Bryan Patterson (Harvard University), and is in an excellent state of preservation. The most recent dating of the fossil [by evolutionists' false methods] gives it an age of 4.5 m.y.a...
[Bryan Patterson, Anna K. Behrensmeyer, and William D. Sill, 'Geology and Fauna of a New Pliocene Locality in North-western Kenya,' Nature 226 (6 June 1970): 918-21]
..It thus becomes virtually the oldest hominid fossil ever found - older than Lucy and all of the australopithecines...
..Patterson and W. W. Howells used the method of computer discriminate analysis. they compared KP 271 with the distal ends of the humeri of a modern human, a chimpanzee, and the only other similar fossil they had at the time Australopithecus (Paranthropus) robustus, from Kromdraai, South Africa. Seven different measurements were fed into the computer from each of the four samples. Patterson and Howells published the results of their study in Science , 7 April 1967. 'In these diagnostic measurements, Kanapoi Hominoid 1 [the original name given to the fossil] is strikingly close to the means of the human sample.'
[Bryan Patterson and W. W. Howells, 'Hominid Humeral Fragment from Early Pleistocene of Northwestern Kenya,' Science 156 (7 April 1967): 65]
After stating that their computer analysis revealed the Kanapoi humerus to be strikingly close to modern humans (they were not comparing it to ancient humans but to modern humans) they made the rather shocking conclusion that KP 271 'may prove to be Australopithecus.[instead]'
[Patterson and Howells, op. cit., p. 66]
...Further computer analysis of many more measurements revealed even more dramatically the similarity of KP 271 to modern humans. Henry M. McHenry (University of California, Davis) wrote: 'the results show that the Kanapoi specimen, which is 4 to 4.5 million years old, is indistinguishable from modern Homo sapiens...'
[Henry M. McHenry, 'Fossils and the Mosaic Nature of Human Evolution,' Science 190 (31 October 1975): 428]
Regarding KP 271, Pilbeam states:
'Multivariate statistical analysis of the humeral fragment aligns it unequivocally with man rather than with the chimpanzee, the hominoid most similar to man in this anatomical region. Professors Bryan Patterson and F. Clark Howell [sic], the describers of this fragment, believe that it represents A. africanus rather than A. robustus.'
[David Pilbeam, The Evolution of Man (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1970), 151. The describer is W. W. Howells, not F. Clark Howell]
...Let me review what we have said thus far. We are dealing with the oldest respectable hominid fossil ever found up to the present time...
The fossil represents a part of the anatomy where it is relatively easy to discriminate between humans and the other primates, both living and fossil. The appropriate diagnostic tools have been used to evaluate the fossil. The results show unequivocally (to use Pilbeam's term) that the fossil is indistinguishable from modern humans, not just fossil humans. Yet, in their original report Patterson and Howells go against their own empirical evidence and suggest that the fossil represents Australopithecus africanus. Why?
Further study strengthened the fact that KP 271 should be ascribed to modern humans. Yet, every textbook or journal article from 1967 to the present time that mentions the Kanapoi fossil calls it Australopithecus africanus. Why? We might assume that because so much fossil material has been discovered in East Africa since 1965, the appropriate africanus fossil has been discovered which confirmed the original evaluation of Patterson and Howells. As far as I have been able to determine, that is not the case.
Why, then, the universal insistence that this fossil is africanus and not Homo sapiens? Howells, writing in 1981, fourteen years after the fossil was first ascribed to africanus, gives us the reason:
'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 Austalopithecus because at that time allocation to Homo seemed preposterous, although it would be the correct one without the time element.'
[Howells, op. cit., pp. 79-80]
It is obvious that looks isn't everything. Even though KP 271 is shaped exactly like Homo sapiens, the time element is wrong. What determines that? The concept of human evolution. The concept of human evolution decrees that it it impossible for true humans to have lived before the australopithecines - even though the fossil evidence would suggest otherwise - because humans are supposed to have evolved from the australopithecines.
According to the basic principles of the philosophy of science, a theory must be falsifiable if it is a legitimate scientific theory. How could the theory of evolution be falsified? Supposedly if fossils are found that are woefully out of order from what evolution would predict. Many such fossils have been found. KP 271 is just one of them.... ...However, evolutionists ignore the morphology of fossils that do not fall into the proper evolutionary time period. They wave their magic wand to change the taxon of these fossils. Thus, it is impossible to falsify the concept of human evolution. It is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. "That evolutionists resort to this manipulation of the evidence is a 'confession' on their part that the fossil evidence does not conform to evolutionary theory. It also reveals that the concept of human evolution is a philosophy, not science.
To the evolutionist there is but one primary fact in the universe: evolution. Everything else is just data. The value of this data does not depend upon its intrinsic quality but upon whether or not it supports evolution and its time scale. Good data is that which supports evolution. Bad data is that which does not fit evolution, and it is to be discarded. It is time to ask the paleontological community, 'At what point does philosophical bias in the interpretation of the human fossil material become intellectual dishonesty? The interpretation of KP 271 from Kanapoi justifies that question...
Evolution implies a naturalistic, mechanistic origin of things. That the oldest human fossil ever found - skimpy as it is - reveals that man was virtually the same 4.5 million years ago (on the evolutionist time scale) as he is today suggests that humans appeared on the scene suddenly and without evolutionary ancestors. Prior to 4.5 m.y.a. the hominid fossil record is a virtual blank for ten million years. This supports the idea that humans were created by a supreme being.
We are continually told how bad it is to mix religious implications with science. We don't mix them. Those implications are already there. Evolutionists act as if creationists have been trafficking in something very dark and sinister. How many young minds have we led astray by telling them that there is a Creator?
Just for the fun of it, let's grant the evolutionist his point. Let's assume that there is something very bad about telling a student that the oldest human fossil ever discovered supports Special Creation. As bad as that might be, I can think of something even worse. That would be to tell a student that the oldest human fossil ever discovered supports evolution. Because that would be a lie."
7) THE FALSIFIED SKULL SIZE ARGUMENT
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 82-83]:
"In seeking to establish the concept of human evolution, the evolutionist leans heavily on skull morphology and, to a lesser degree in recent years, on skull size. Both are spurious arguments and prove nothing. Typical of the charts and illustrations used by evolutionists is a display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It is titled 'Increasing Brain Size' and shows an increase in brain sizes as follows:
Increasing Brain Size
Homo sapiens 1450cc
Neanderthal 1625cc
Pithecanthropus [Homo erectus] 914cc
Australopithecinae 650cc
Gorilla 543cc
Chimpanzee 400cc
Gibbon 97cc
The obvious question is, 'What is the purpose of this display?' or, 'What does this display say?' The obvious answer, since it is a part of the museum's display on 'The Evolution of Man,' is to show that the hominid brain has enlarged by evolution over time.
However, no evolutionist in the world - past or present - believes that it happened in the way the chart implies it did. No evolutionist believes that evolution went from gibbon to chimpanzee to gorilla to the australopithecines to Homo erectus to Neandertal and then to modern humans. How many times have I been in the classroom or the lecture hall and heard the speaker attempt to allay the fears of the uninitiated by assuring them that evolutionists do not believe that we came from monkeys or apes.
They assure us that we came from some transitional form that was the ancestor of both humans and living primates. (The fact that that transitional form - if it ever existed - would readily be called an ape by anyone who saw it was admitted by the famous evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson.) The museum display is an absurd mixing of past and present forms having no relationship to what evolutionists themselves teach. It is a cheap form of propaganda, Madison Avenue style, to convince the uninformed public of the 'truth' of evolution.
Although that chart was still in the American Museum as of 1991, that type of illustration is not seen as much in recent years. We now know that relative brain size means very little. The relationship between brain size and body size must be factored in, and the crucial element is not brain size but brain organization. A large gorilla brain is no closer to the human condition than is a small gorilla brain. The human brain varies in size from about 700 cc to about 2200 cc with no differences inability or intelligence. That variation, more than a factor of three, is an incredible difference in size variation but indicates no difference in quality. Those brain-size charts are meaningless. Yet, the idea of increasing brain size has been injected into the human thought-stream so effectively by evolutionists that most nonspecialists still think of it as significant evidence for evolution. those charts look so impressive that some evolutionists cannot resist the temptation to continue to use them. The fact that the archaic Homo sapiens fossils.... ....had a brain size intermediate between Homo erectus and Neandertal has no significance. The fossil record, as seen by the charts in this book, shows that these individuals lived side by side with fossil individuals in other categories as members of the human family."
8) THE FALSIFIED SKULL MORPHOLOGY ARGUMENT
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 84-85]:
"Rhodesian Man was so named because he was found in 1921 in what was then known as Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.....
....Because the browridges on this fossil skull are more pronounced than those found on any other human fossil, no human fossil appears to be more 'primitive,' 'savage,' or 'apelike' than does Rhodesian Man. Yet, his brain size of 1280 cc is so large that the fossil demands to be classified as Homo sapiens. We need to be constantly reminded that there is nothing in the contours of the skull of an individual that gives clues as to his degree of civilization, culture, or morality.
An indication that Rhodesian Man is not a unique individual is seen by the fact that the Saldanha, South Africa, skull (known also as the Hopefield or Elandsfontein skull) has almost the same 'savage' morphology. Although this fossil is considered to be older than Rhodesian Man, there is no question that it also is truly human.
Rhodesian Man had been dated at about 40,000 y.a. Richard Klein gives the newer date as between 200,000 and 400,000 y.a.
[Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 226-231]
..Yet, there is reason to believe that the fossil is actually quite recent in age. The original 1921 report in Nature, telling of its discovery, says: 'The skull is in a remarkably fresh state of preservation, the bone having merely lost its animal matter and not ;having been in the least mineralized.'
[Arthur Smith Woodward, 'A New Cave Man from Rhodesia, South Africa,' Nature 108 (17 November 1921): 371]
...It is difficult to understand why a fossil buried for 200,000 to 400,000 years (or even 40,000 years) would have no mineralization whatsoever. That fact suggests that the fossil could be quite recent in age, in spite of its 'savage' appearance.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this fossil is that it was found about sixty feet underground at the far end of a shaft in a lead and zinc mine.
[Michael H. Day, Guide to Fossil Man, 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 267]
...The skull was found with the remains of two or possibly three other individuals. The maxilla (upper jaw) of one of those other individuals is considerably more modern in morphology than is Rhodesian Man, indicating a large degree of genetic variation within this small group. the associated postcranial bones are all very modern in appearance.
Found under other circumstances, Rhodesian Man, with his low cranial doming and very heavy browridges, could serve as an excellent illustration of an evolutionary transitional form between apes and humans. the original Nature report states: 'Its large and heavy face is even more simian [apelike] in appearance than that of Neanderthal man...'
[Woodward, 371]
...Yet, this individual was either mining lead and zinc himself or was in the mine shaft at a time when lead and zinc were being mined by other humans. This smacks of a rather high degree of civilization and technology.
It is amusing that many evolutionists, when reporting on the details of Rhodesian Man, say that he was found in a cave. Technically, I suppose, they are right. A mine shaft is just a cave, of sorts, in the same way that diamonds and emeralds are just pebbles. One wonders if this is a crude attempt to minimize the technical abilities of ancient Humans. The Book of Genesis clearly confirms the advanced culture and technology of the ancients, specifically mentioning metallurgy in Genesis 4:22 and music in Genesis 4:21.
In spite of the obvious lesson to be learned from the Rhodesian and Saldanha skulls, evolutionists continue to base much of their evidence for human evolution on the alleged primitive-to-advanced contours of fossil skulls. Creationists maintain that in light of the evidence of the wide genetic diversity in the human family, skull contour is an inadequate basis determining relationships. Evolution's illegitimate children, the archaic Homo sapiens fossils, give eloquent testimony to that fact."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 139-140]:
"An evolutionist would claim that in an evolutionary continuum we would expect to have a number of fossils 'on the line,' since the transition points of the various species are arbitrary because of the nature of the evolutionary process... If evolution were true, that would be the case. However, there is another, more satisfying way in which to interpret the data: a morphological continuum that includes just one species of humans, called Homo sapiens.... ...The fact that the data can be explained in at least two ways shows that the evolutionist is far from proving his case. That he never considers the other arrangement shows that he is far from impartial.
There is a way, however, by which we can discriminate between the two possible explanations of the data and thereby determine which is the more likely to be correct. That is to place all of the relevant fossil material on a time chart according to the probable dates for each of the fossil individuals and to evaluate the results as to whether the evidence favors an evolutionary or a morphological continuum. When this is done, as it is done in this book, the evidence is strongly in favor of a morphological continuum, both horizontally across species and vertically over time. The horizontal continuum shows that anatomically modern Homo sapiens, Neandertal, archaic Homo sapiens, and Homo erectus all lived as contemporaries over extended periods of time. "The vertical continuum shows that as far back as the human fossil record goes the human body has remained substantially the same and has not evolved from something else."
[Lubenow, op. cit., pp. 178-183]:
"The Big Picture
Up to this point, we have been painting with a broad brush. We have been concerned with the big picture. The facts of the big picture are that first, fossils that are indistinguishable from modern humans can be traced all the way back to 4.5 m.y.a., according to the evolution time scale. That suggests that true humans were on the scene before the australopithecines appear in the fossil record.
Second, Homo erectus demonstrates a morphological consistency throughout its two-million-year history. The fossil record does not show erectus evolving from something else or evolving into something else.
Third, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, Neandertal, archaic Homo sapiens, and Homo erectus all lived as contemporaries at one time or another. None of them evolved from a more robust to a more gracile condition. In fact, in some cases (Neandertal and archaic Homo sapiens) the more robust fossils are the more recent fossils in their respective categories.
Fourth, all of the fossils ascribed to the Homo habilis category are contemporary with Homo erectus. Thus, Homo habilis not only did not evolve into Homo erectus, it could not have evolved into Homo erectus.
Fifty, there are no fossils of Australopithicus or of any other primate stock in the proper time period to serve as evolutionary ancestors to humans. As far as we can tell from the fossil record, when humans first appear in the fossil record they are already human. It is this abrupt appearance of our ancestors in morphologically human form that makes the human fossil record compatible with the concept of Special Creation. This fact is evident even when the fossils are arranged according to the evolutionist's dates for the fossils, the results do not support human evolution. The results, in fact, are so contradictory to human evolution that they effectively falsify the theory. This, then, is the big picture.
The Local Picture
There is a second approach to the human fossil record. We could call it the local picture. It involves situations where different types of fossils are found at the same place geographically and at the same level stratigraphically. According to their morphology they should be placed in two different evolutionary categories. Since this approach is totally independent of the dating methods, it acts as a control. It confirms what we said previously about the lack of evidence for evolution in the human fossil record. If two different types of fossil humans are found at the same place and at the same level, it falsifies human evolution. The date of the geologic stratum in which they are found does not matter. The date is irrelevant, ant method is time-independent.
A chart in this chapter shows specific cases where fossils belonging in two different evolutionary taxa are found in the same place and at the same level. Although the chronological arrangement on this chart is unnecessary, it is done to show that local contemporaneousness exists throughout the entire alleged history of human evolution. It is independent confirmation of all that we have said thus far."
7) MICROBIOLOGY IS IRREDUCIBLY COMPLEX AND DEMANDS AN INTELLIGENT CREATOR
Every door science opens reveals ten as yet unopened doors. While knowledge of the universe is expanding exponentially, the unknown expands even faster, like receding images in a hall of mirrors. Scientific discoveries overwhelmingly necessitate a power and wisdom, without beginning or end and infinitely beyond human comprehension, which alone could have brought all into existence.
Even such a determined proponent of evolution as Richard Dawkins confesses that living things "give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."
(1) He even admits that the nucleus of every cell (the smallest living unit, of which there are trillions in the human body) contains "a digitally coded database larger, in information content, than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together."
(2) Just the mathematical odds of getting millions of letters lined up in the right order by chance is off the possibility chart.
For life, something even more amazing is involved than chance aligning billions of chemical molecules in the right order. Dawkins refers to a digitally coded database! This is recent terminology never imagined by Darwin. Not only must the DNA molecules be put together correctly, but they must, like letters, express information in a language providing instructions to be followed.
Each person at the moment of conception begins as a single cell. How does that cell know what to do to construct a body composed of trillions of individual cells of different kinds and different functions? Most school children know the answer: imprinted in that original cell are instructions for the construction and operation of the human body - instructions which will be followed unerringly. DNA replicates this blueprint onto every cell produced. And every cell, amazingly, will know which part of those directions it is to follow.
Today's school child also knows that DNA has an incredible capacity for storing information. The information contained in DNA the size of a pinhead would fill a stack of books 500 times as high as the distance from earth to the moon! It would take tens of thousands of desktop computers to store and process that amount of data.
The world's fastest supercomputer is now being completed. It is called "Blue Gene" and will perform one quadrillion (1 with 15 zeros after it) calculations per second! It is being built to map the three billion chemical letters in the human genome, equal to a 100,000-page run-on sentence of operating instructions for a human being. All put together by chance?
Blue Gene's first task will be to figure out how the body makes just one protein molecule. To solve that problem it will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for a full year! Yet the body, following the instructions imprinted in DNA, creates a protein molecule in a fraction of a second. Were the instructions which this computer will take a year to understand arrived at by random processes? All this for just one protein molecule! "The probability of the required order in a single basic protein molecule arising purely from chance is estimated at one chance in 1 followed by 43 zeros. Since thousands of complex protein molecules are required to build a simple cell, probability moves outside the realm of possibility."
(3) It takes many different kinds of enzymes (made of protein) to decode/translate the genetic information encoded into DNA – and the enzymes are independently encoded to do this. So it would do no good for evolution (even if it could) to imprint genetic information on DNA; at the same time it would have to independently encode the enzymes to translate it. DNA and the enzymes to decode it could not "evolve" over a period of time. All must be in perfect working order from the start. At the molecular level evolution is a bad joke! Years ago the conundrum was, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Now it's "Which came first, protein or DNA?" It takes protein to construct DNA, but it takes DNA to make protein. Obviously, both were created at once; neither could have evolved.
But the lesson of DNA points far beyond the statistical impossibility of it all somehow falling together through random processes over great time. The three billion chemical letters express information in a language which must be read to be usable! A language necessarily involves ideas framed within grammatical rules and can be created and expressed only by intelligence. This moves us beyond statistics and matter into another realm, involving issues - and issues cannot be comprehended by tissues.
Language expresses thoughts - and thoughts are not physical! They may be articulated in physical form, such as sounds or words and sentences on a page or the coded chemical letters in DNA. Obviously, however, the thoughts being conveyed by the language are independent of the material upon which they are expressed. A sentence may be written on paper, wood, sand, a computer chip, or audio tape, but none of these originated the message. It must have an intelligent, nonphysical source independent of the physical means of storage or communication. The fact that life is created and functions by language originating from an intelligent, nonphysical source forever finishes evolution. There is no way that chemicals could put together intelligent thoughts in a language that contains the instructions for constructing and operating even a single cell, much less the trillions of cells in the human body!
We are driven by science and logic to admit that life in any form can have its source only in a God who is independent of the material universe. That there cannot be more than one source is proved by the uniformity and universality of the language. DNA, of course, does not understand the information encoded into it. It is a mechanism built and programmed by the Originator of the encoded language to follow His instructions automatically. And the most complex mechanism built by DNA is the human brain. More advanced than any computer yet built by man, it contains some 100 billion nerve cells connected by 240 miles of nerve fibers involving 100 trillion connections.
For all of its complexity, the brain no more originates or understands what it is doing than does DNA. The brain does not originate thoughts. If it did, we would have to do whatever our brains decided. On the contrary we (the real persons inside) do the thinking and deciding, and our brains take these nonphysical thoughts and translate them into physical actions through a connection between the spirit and body that science can't fathom.
Wilder Penfield, one of the world's leading neurosurgeons, describes the brain as a computer programmed by something independent of itself - the mind. Science cannot escape the fact that man himself, like his Creator, must be a nonmaterial being in order to originate the thoughts processed by the brain. But man did not originate thought itself. He did not create himself nor give himself the capacity to think.
[Behe, op. cit., pp. 89-96]:
"Is it possible that this ultra-complex system could have evolved according to Darwinian theory? ...
The observation of split genes [wherein similarities were observed in the genetic structures of different parts of biological systems] led to the hypothesis that perhaps new proteins could be made by shuffling the DNA fragments of genes that code for parts of old proteins - much as cards can be picked from several piles to give a new arrangement. To support the hypothesis, advocates point to similarities in the amino acid sequences and shapes of discrete portions (called domains) of different proteins.
The proteins of the blood coagulation cascade are often used as evidence for shuffling. Some regions of cascade proteins coded by separate gene pieces have similarities in their amino acid sequences with other regions of the same protein - that is, they are self-similar. Also, there are similarities between regions of different proteins of the cascade. For example proconvertin, Christmas factor Stuart factor, and prothrombin all have a roughly similar region of their amino acid sequences. Additionally, in all those proteins the sequence is modified by vitamin K. Furthermore, the regions are similar in sequence to other proteins (not involved with blood coagulation at all) that are also modified by vitamin K.
The Sequence similarities are there for all to see and cannot be disputed. By itself, however, the hypothesis of gene duplication and shuffling says nothing about how any particular protein or protein system was first produced - whether slowly or suddenly, or whether by natural selection or some other mechanism. Remember, a mousetrap spring might in some way resemble a clock spring, and a crowbar might resemble a mousetrap hammer, but the similarities say nothing about how a mousetrap is produced. In order to claim that system developed gradually by a Darwinian mechanism a person must show that the function of the system could 'have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications. [within an acceptable time frame]....
The explanation is seriously inadequate because no reasons are given for the appearance of the proteins, no attempt is made to calculate the probability of the proteins' appearance, and no attempt is made to estimate the new proteins' properties....
The first thing to notice is that no causative factors [in the evolutionary models proposed] are cited. Thus tissue factor 'appears,' fibrinogen 'is born,' antiplasmin 'arises,' TPA 'springs forth,' a cross-linking protein 'is unleased,' and so forth. What exactly, we might ask, is causing all this springing and unleashing?...
A step-by-step Darwinian scenario involving the undirected, random duplication and recombination of gene pieces [is in view]... But consider the enormous amount of luck needed to get the right gene pieces in the right places [at the right time]. Eukaryotic organisms have quite a few gene pieces, and apparently the process that switches them is random. So making a new blood-coagulation protein by shuffling is like picking a dozen sentences randomly from an encyclopedia in the hope of making a coherent paragraph....
[Furthermore, the Darwinian scenario typically] does not go to the trouble of calculating how many incorrect, inactive, useless 'variously shuffled domains' would have to be discarded before obtaining a protein with, say, TPA-like activity.
To illustrate the problem, let's do our own quick calculation. Consider that animals with blood-clotting cascades have roughly 10,000 genes, each of which is divided into an average of three pieces. This gives a total of about 30,000 gene pieces. TPA has four different types of domains. By 'variously shuffling,' the odds of getting those four domains together is 30,000 to the fourth power, which is approximately one-tenth to the eighteenth power. Now, if the Irish Sweepstakes had odds of winning of one-tenth to the eighteenth power, and if a million people played the lottery each year, it would take an average of about a thousand billion years before anyone (not just a particular person) won the lottery. A thousand billion years is roughly a hundred times the current estimate of the age of the universe.... The same problem of ultra-slim odds would trouble the appearance of prothrombin...fibrinogen...plasminogen, proaccelerin and each of the several proposed rearrangements of prothrombin.... Unfortunately, the universe doesn't have time to wait.
The second question to consider is the implicit assumption that a protein made from a duplicated gene would immediately have the new, necessary properties. Thus we are told [by the Darwinian model type] 'tissue factor appears as the result of the duplication of a gene for [another protein]. But tissue factor would certainly not appear as the result of the duplication - the other protein would. If a factory for making bicycles were duplicated it would make bicycles, not motorcycles; that's what is meant by the word duplication. A gene for a protein might be duplicated by a random mutation, but it does not just 'happen' to also have sophisticated new properties. Since a duplicated gene is simply a copy of the old gene, an explanation for the appearance of tissue factor must include the putative route it took to acquire a new function. This problem is discreetly avoided... [The Darwinian model] runs into the same problem in the production of prothrombin, a thrombin receptor, antithrombin, plasminogen, antiplasmin, proaccelerin, Stuart factor, proconvertin, Christmas factor, antihemophilic factor, and protein C - virtually every protein of the system!
The third problem in the blood-coagulation scenario is that it avoids the crucial issues of how much, how fast, when, and where. Nothing is said about the amount of clotting material initially available, the strength of the clot that would be formed by a primitive system, the length of time the clot would take to form once a cut occurred, what fluid pressure the clot would resist, how detrimental the formation of inappropriate clots would be, or a hundred other such questions. The absolute and relative values of these factors and others could make any particular hypothetical system either possible or (much more likely) wildly wrong. For example, if only a small amount of fibrinogen were available it would not cover a wound; if a primitive fibrin formed a random blob instead of a meshwork, it would be unlikely to stop blood flow. If the initial action of antithrombin were too fast, the initial action of thrombin too slow, or the original Stuart factor or Christmas factor or antihemophilic factor bound too loosely or too tightly (or if they bound to the inactive forms of their targets as well as the active forms), then the whole system would crash. At no step - not even one - does [any of the Darwinian models] give a model that includes numbers or quantities; without numbers, there is no science. When a merely verbal picture is painted of the development of such a complex system, there is absolutely no way to know if it would actually work. When such crucial questions are ignored we leave science...
Yet the objections raised so far are not the most serious. The most serious, and perhaps the most obvious, concerns irreducible complexity. I emphasize that natural selection, the engine of Darwinian evolution, only works if there is something to select - something that is useful right now, not in the future. [Suppose] for purposes of discussion [as might occur in a typical Darwinian model], no blood clotting appears until at least the third step. The formation of tissue factor at the first step is [thus] unexplained, since it would then be sitting around with nothing to do. In the next step (prothrombin popping up already endowed with the ability to bind tissue factor, which somehow activates it) the poor proto-prothrombin would also be twiddling its thumbs with nothing to do until, at last, a hypothetical thrombin receptor appears at the third step and fibrinogen falls from heaven at step four. Plasminogen appears in one step, but its activator (TPA) doesn't appear until two steps later. Stuart factor is introduced in one step, but whiles away its time doing nothing until its activator (proconvertin) appears in the next step and somehow tissue factor decides that this is the complex it wants to bind. Virtually every step of the suggested pathway faces similar problems.
Simple words like 'the activator doesn't appear until two steps later' may not seem impressive until you ponder the implications. Since two proteins - the proenzyme and its activator - are both required for one step in the pathway, then the odds of getting both the proteins together are roughly the square of the odds of getting one protein. We calculated the odds of getting TPA alone to be one-tenth to the eighteenth power; the odds of getting TPA and its activator together would be about one-tenth to the thirty-sixth power! That is a horrendously large number. Such an event would not be expected to happen even if the universe's ten-billion year life were compressed into a single second and relived every second for ten billion years. But the situation is actually much worse: if a protein appeared in one step with nothing to do, then mutation and natural selection would tend to eliminate it. Since it is doing nothing critical, its loss would not be detrimental, and production of the gene and protein would cost energy that other animals aren't spending. So producing the useless protein would, at least to some marginal degree, be detrimental. Darwin's mechanism of natural selection would actually hinder the formation of irreducibly complex systems such as the clotting cascade...
The bottom line is that clusters of proteins have to be inserted all at once into the cascade. This can be done only by... the guidance of an intelligent agent."
