THE DARWIN PAPERS
 ANCIENT MAN
VOLUME 1                                                                                                                                                              NUMBER 10 

The Darwin Papers may be freely
copied and distributed for non profit use
provided acknowledgement is made
for material written by the author.
The Darwin Papers © 2000 James M. Foard
© 2004 James Foard

Read about the ancient Greek Lucretius'
theory on the origin of modern man HERE

Read about radiometric dating HERE

From The Nebulous Hypothesis: A Study of the
Philosophical and Historical Implications of
Darwinian Theory © 1996 James Foard 

Preface: The following is an account of a popular twentienth century creation myth, known as the theory of evolution, which primitive academics once believed in during what has become known as the Age of Darwin, a very dark era in human history characterised by genocidal warfare, social and political upheaval and moral corruption that spanned the late nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The aged man ascended the platform and straightened his robe. The large audience sat in a hushed silence as the sound of a subdued cough from the back of the lecture hall echoed across the room. A series of pictures were displayed along the walls on both sides of the auditorium, beginning with depictions of small, cat-like creatures crawling through a dense forest, and proceeding on through illustrations of monkeys hanging by their tails in trees, then on to illustrations of dirty, disheveled, club-wielding ape-men, wandering through a desolate plain clothed in coats of animal skins while volcanoes belched out smoke and ash in the distance. The final portrait showed a clean shaven man wearing a Roman toga and holding a scroll in one hand.

A large marble bust of Charles Darwin near the front of the tabernacle had flowers placed in front of it. Next to the flowers was a brass bowl filled with burning incense. A painting of Freud was prominently displayed on the wall opposite with a yellow halo around his head.

The man opened up a large book on the podium in front of him and addressed the assembly in solemn tones. "Now let us all stand for a moment of silent meditation before the reading of the word."

The congregation stood and ceremoniously bowed their heads with the speaker as he silently chanted a mantra to himself: "Millions of years, millions of years, natural selection, millions of years.".

After a brief moment the speaker raised his eyes and spoke. "Before the age of Darwin men wandered about in ignorance and darkness, but now that the theory of evolution has been revealed to us, thanks be to him, we no longer need to believe in superstition and dogma."

"Yes, thanks be to Darwin," murmured the congregation in response.

The man continued. "These are the words of truth, that prove that rational man does not need a primitive creation myth based on belief in some "God" who created everything in order to understand our origin. Instead of ignorance and religion we have the theory of evolution! Now I shall read to you from the words of the truth!"

The audience waited in rapt attention as the man put on a pair of glasses and looked down at the book in front of him. Then he began to read aloud from the book.

"IN THE BEGINNING WAS BIG BANG. And Big-Bang produced Chaos. And Chaos produced Orderliness, all by random chance processes, from whence came the earth with all it's wonders, and the heavens, with the sun and the moon and the stars and the planets, with their motion. And the earth brought forth from herself protoplasm, and protoplasm brought forth protozoa, and protozoa begat metazoa, and metazoa begat fish, and fish begat amphibians, and from the amphibians came the reptiles, and dinosaurs, and the reptiles brought forth the mammals, and from the mammals came the tree shrew, he is the father of all the primates. And from the unknown common ancestor came the monkeys, and the apes, and the ape-men, and man. And from man, through selective breeding shall come Superman, and ye shall be as gods!"

"And we shall be as gods!" responded the glassy-eyed audience.

Beside the podium a series of fossil skulls were placed along a railing. The speaker passed his hand over one and reverently intoned the sacred word: "Evolution." The audience repeated in unison, "Evolution." He lifted up another skull and said, "Natural selection," (the revised missals have mutations substituted for natural selection and punctuated equilibrium instead of gradual modification), and the audience responded, "Natural Selection."

The speaker held up his hands to the ceiling and cried out in fanatic fervor, "Chance and random processes!" and the congregation clamored, "Chance and random processes!"

Suddenly a lone voice interrupted the service.

"Excuse me sir, but there has never been a documented transitional form that could possibly substantiate evolution, and the chance that the earth and all it's living systems could ever come about without the action of an intelligent Designer is mathematically impossible."

The audience froze in horrified silence as the speaker turned his gaze at the brazen interloper. His face a mask of righteous indignation, the professor (for that was the title of the priest's position) thundered back at the student, "Who dares to question the words of Darwin?"

The students turned to see a mild mannered young man wearing spectacles standing near the back of the room. "I'm sorry to interrupt sir, but in the interest of truth-"

"TRUTH!" The words erupted from the professors mouth and one could almost see the windows vibrate. "What do you know of truth?"

"Well, sir, it says in the Bible that we should find only forms of life that come from other like forms of life, and that they do not all come from a common ancestor but were created suddenly and separately by God, and that is what we do find in the fossil record and among living species-"

"The Bible?" There was another moment of horrified silence among the students, (for that is what the congregation was called), and the professor shouted, "How dare you try to mix religion with pure science! You mean that you believe in that old Book of superstition and lies and try to challenge the revealed doctrine of evolution? Heretic! Get out of my classroom with your Bible and your fantasies!"

The other students, not willing to appear ignorant nor in complicity with the student, joined in with the professor. "Bible Thumper!" "Creationist!" "Narrow-minded bigoted fanatic!" came the shouts from the body of students, along with groans, giggles and sighs of disgust and frustration at the poor man's foolishness, and he was driven out of the assembly. But a few noble souls followed him out to question him more concerning his doctrine.

We are now in  the final stretch of man's unknown evolutionary ancestry, the Pleistocene, encompassing the last million years. This is where we have modern humans appearing. In other words, we are moving out of the realm of the non-existent "ape-men"and are discussing cultural anthropology, the supposed development of primitive man into modern man and the growth of civilization, and the evidence that we are looking for of man's development would be actual sites of human occupation. ⁽¹⁾

At this point evolutionists are no longer searching exclusively for biological and physiological changes for evidence of evolution in their story of man, now cultural evidence from early human settlements is also sought to show that ancient societies were more primitive than those of modern societies.

The point that should not be lost in all of this is that the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man have been shown to be as human as the rest of us in recent studies-although they lived in primitive circumstances and survived an ice-age or two, they provide no evidence of any type of genuine human evolution.

John A.J. Gowlett, lecturer at the Department of Archeology at the University of Khartoum, an expert in radiometric dating techniques, gives us some information on the methods that archaeologists us to determine the age of sites of early human occupation: "In the last 20-30 years dating of all archaeological periods has been revolutionized. Methods provided by physics have produced an absolute framework (in which dates are expressed in calender years), rather than a relative one (in which phases are placed in sequence to one another). For the later Pliocene and the Pleistocene, the main periods of human evolution, several different dating methods interlock to provide the framework, which can often be extended by one method when another is not applicable."

"The single most important absolute dating method for early periods is potassium-argon . . By a series of fortunate links, the time-scale derived from potassium-argon can be connected with events in the oceans. Over millions of years, the earth's magnetic field has varied and the position of the magnetic poles has wandered. At times, they have even "flipped" so that the north magnetic pole has moved to the south geographic pole and vice versa. . . .In one or two areas in the world, such as Hawaii lavas have welled up so continuously that they can be dated by potassium-argon at many successive intervals so yielding the sequence of the ancient magnetic directions. In this way a basic record of magnetic events can be built up with potassium-argon providing the time-scale. As the same magnetic sequence is recognizable in cores taken from the ocean floors, these can be automatically dated to great advantage . . . These cores add to our knowledge of the Pleistocene in a very important way because they provide a continuous climatic record." ⁽²⁾

This method is supposed to show the mean time-period when certain bones found in association with lava-flows still belonged to their living hosts. This might sound persuasive were it not for one small fact: Potassium-argon is the same technique that Leakey and the others used when they were uncertain if the fossils they had found were 1.5 million years old or merely 700,000 years old (See previous chapter). This is a difference of roughly eight hundred thousand years in human history (evolutionary timeframes). 

Paul S. Taylor (not an evolutionist) has written of the disasterous potential for wildly innacurate results when using potassium-argon radiometric dating, "Age estimates which are obviously wrong or contradictory are sometimes produced. For example, new rock in the form of hardened lava flows produced estimated ages as great as 3 billion to 10.5 billion years, when they were actually less than 200 hundred years old."! ⁽³⁾

Gowlett also wrote that for most of the Pleistocene era this method is useless: "The middle part of the Pleistocene (c.700,000-125,000 years) is notoriously difficult to date . . .It would be quite natural to think that the closer we come to the present day, the easier it is to date finds, but this is not always so . . . As well as being limited to dating volcanic material, potassium-argon can only be used reliably on rocks over a certain age, since radiogenic argon forms very slowly, and sufficient must have formed to be measurable . . .there are few satisfactory ones younger than .5 million years. Palaeomagnetism too becomes less useful as an aid in dating, because for the last 700,000 years polarity has been normal (as today), except for one or two brief excursions . . . The well known radiocarbon dating method will never be effective on material more than 100,000 years old, because carbon-14 decays quite rapidly. This means that there is a dating gap of almost half a million years which scientists and archaeologists are working to bridge." (Gowlett, pp.86)

The period from 50,000 years ago to 200,000 years ago is also shrouded in mystery.
Pfeiffer wrote: "This period, which lasted more than 150,000 years, is almost a blank as far as the remains of man are concerned." ⁽⁴⁾

Thus throughout nearly the entire period of the Pleistocene, there are no reliable methods of obtaining  accurate dates for human occupation on this planet. Again, the evolutionary story is plagued by large gaps in their story, with no evidence at all of human evolution.

As far as carbon-14, few dates over 10,000 years old are reliable, and almost none over 40,000 years old are used at all. Thus much of what the evolutionists are filling in for the story of man's existence during the Pleistocene is simply more storytelling, none of it is based on actual facts. 

Often these stories spun by evolutionists don't agree with each other. Dr. Dennis Stanford, director of Paleo-Indian research at the Smithsonian Institution said, "A site that's passionately believed in by one archaeologist may be sincerely distrusted by another . . . Carbon-14 dates may be suspect, especially if made on fossilized bone or on material that might have been contaminated by other substances. " ⁽⁵⁾

Another way evolutionists attempt to date bones is by using the method of racemization. After death the left handed amino acids found in all living systems begin to evenly disperse into left and right handed molecules, and this varies with temperature, thus a comparison of the molecular data supposedly yields the climatic epoch when the fossilized bones were deposited.

In view of the general extremes of temperature at different sites within only a few miles of each other, i.e. Death Valley and Mount Whitney in California, the tendency for fossils to be moved around by natural forces to different areas with totally differing climates, the divergence of climatic extremes in the very same area in different seasons, and the amount of speculation on what the temperature was in any specific time period, this all sounds very suspect.

One method for dating that has been given high marks by some is uranium dating. Gowlett wrote:
"The most precise of the methods which contribute towards filling the dating gap is uranium series dating [didn't he just say that about potassium-argon?], although it can only be applied in certain circumstances." (Gowlett, pp.86)

Uranium, the parent element that breaks down into thorium and protractinium, is soluble in water, but it's two daughter elements are not, thus the ratio of uranium and the daughter elements in corals, stalagmites, and stalactites, that form under aqueous conditions, should show roughly when the organism that formed the coral died or when the stalagmites began forming.

This is in fact not always a good and reliable method, because of the element of contamination of the parent and daughter elements, as well as the assumption of the original amount of daughter elements before the process of breakdown began. This is similar to looking at a candle that has been burning, and all that is left is a small stub. Even if you knew the rate the wax melted at, unless you knew the original length of the candle when it was lit last, you could not tell how long it had been burning, and this is not taking into account fluctuations caused by drafts, various widths of the wick at differing points of the candle, etc.

Frederic B. Jueneman has given us this ghastly prognostication on radiometric dating:
"There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radiodecay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences."
(Frederic B. Jueneman, FAIC, 'Secular catastrophism'. Industrial Research and Development, June 1982, pp.21)

Gowlett discusses a fossil find dated by all three of these last methods, and not only did none of them agree with each other, but they gave dates that were as far off in their calculations as 60,000 years! He wrote: "As some of these calculated ages are over 40,000 years, they have been received with considerable skepticism. The Sunnyvale skeleton, estimated at 70,000 years by racemization, has more recently been dated at 8-9,000 years by uranium series, and 3,500-5,000 years by the radiocarbon-accelerator at Tucson, and Arizona." (Gowlett, pp.142)

Since none of the radiometric dating processes are reliable, the only other method used for ascertaining dates in the Pleistocene are remnants of human societies. Let us examine one method that is used in this period to date sites, the old method discussed in the last chapter of examining objects used by early man to help him accomplish his daily tasks: Stone tools. ⁽⁶⁾

Gowlett wrote: "When a concentration of archeological material, such as stone tools, is found mixed up with other stones and bones, it seems logical to regard this as evidence of a site and to imagine that, through excavating it, we can begin to 'read' the signs of human activity. Unfortunately, the record is often less simple than it seems . . . All the sediments which cover and preserve a site were emplaced by water, or wind, which may have disturbed the remains . . Paleontologists . . . naturally ask: 'how do we know that erosion and water-flow have not brought stones and bones together artificially when originally they were quite separate . . . How can we tell if a torrent of water has moved finds on a site?"

Good question. Here is his answer: "A sensible approach is to experiment by placing objects along the sites of modern streams where they will be disturbed by the water. When stone tools are swept along, larger and smaller pieces tend to separate."

This amazing method does not actually tell us whether or not the bones and stones were brought together naturally or by human intervention, but it does give us an interesting look into the mind of an evolutionist. According to the strict scientific methods used by evolutionists, by simply placing some pebbles into a stream you can find out what the site must have originally looked like after several hundred thousand years of exposure to rain, wind, other animals and every conceivable type of erosion. How after such an incredibly long length of time the larger and smaller pieces could have lain roughly in the same spot is not explained through this mysterious type of augery. This amazing experiment with pebbles is also supposed to tell us whether or not erosion and the forces of nature moved them about, and then redeposited them together with other bones and rocks, or whether or not it involved a human factor placing the pebbles together.

Dennis Stanford wrote of the problems in using stone tools to date Paleo-Indians in the ancient Americas, a mere ten to twenty thousand years ago by evolutionists time-clocks: ⁽⁷⁾ "Often there's doubt whether an artifact was found in clear association with the plant or animal remains used for dating it; slumping soils or the burrows of digging animals can hopelessly jumble a site's stratigraphy. We even face questions of whether a stone or bone artifact is actually the work of man, or whether it's a 'geofact'-a rock chipped by natural process, a bone shaped by an animals gnawing."

In determining how a tool was used evolutionists have analyzed the "micro-wear" caused by the blunting of the edges of the tools as they were applied to hard surfaces. Gowlett wrote "The technique of refitting (establishing the probable site of ancient occupation and reconstructing the activities that occurred there) is most effective when linked with 'microwear studies'. These are enormously helpful and make it possible to determine the purpose to which the tools were put."(Gowlett, pp.51)

While this may indeed determine that a particular piece of flint was used for chopping vegetables by some prehistoric fry-cook, it does not in any way indicate the age of the site. Gowlett later wrote of this method, "Unfortunately, on very early sites (pre-nine thousand yrs.), lava and quartz are unsuitable for this method because of their coarse grain; chemical changes to the rock may also destroy signs of use."(Gowlett, pp.51)

Micro-wear analysis is further discredited by Gowlett: "None of the evidence explains what was actually happening, and it is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of studying the Old Stone Age, that archaeologists can so rarely determine the precise nature of what was taken place.One reason for this difficulty in interpretation is that microwear studies (of edge damage to the tools), which might otherwise provide an answer, are not possible on sites with coarse-grained or weathered lava tools."( Gowlett, pp.68)

We also have the quote from the last chapter by Leaky on the unreliability of using stone tools to date human settlements. At one site where an abundance of hand-axes was discovered, Gowlett came up with a truly novel explanation of how they came to be lumped together on one spot. He surmised that after the hand axes were fashioned, sharpened, and put to good use, the "Homo erectus was too dull-witted to realize that the old tools could be reused . . ."(Gowlett, pp.68.)

Interesting. Poor Homo erectus; too dumb to realize that he could re-use the tools he had just made.

I have a pet hamster named Patches with a remarkably good memory. He loves to dig around in the woodshavings of his cage and rearrange his bedding. He has various odds and ends buried in the sawdust: grapes and pieces of carrot that he fetches at his own convenience to feast upon during the late night hours, and he knows where every piece is, and probably has a good idea of how long they have lain there as well. He is also potty trained. We bought him a little hamster litter box for his cage that he faithfully uses. He has a plastic rolling ball that we place him in and secure the top to, and he knows every room in our apartment and every nook and cranny where he can roll to. He has a circular path that he follows in the living room: around the easy chair, past the television, between the coffee table and the couch, and then back around the easy chair again. He follows this little race track again and again while I sit and enjoy television.

I am not claiming that little Patches is any hamster genius, but I think that I can safely state that he is definitely more intelligent than Homo erectus was, at least by Gowlett's assessment.

One of the problems with using methods of cultural anthropology in an evolutionary setting, is that primitive hunter gatherer societies have always existed alongside more advanced cultures, they still exist today, and are not in the least bit less human than those who live in the most advanced of cultures. Missionaries have gone into the regions of New Guinea and into remote areas of South America where they have found cultures living in what could be termed nearly a stone-age society and there is no indication that these people are any less developed spiritually, mentally, emotionally, or physically than other races of men.

John Pfeiffer reported that in 1966 there were still 30,000 hunter-gatherers living around the world, among them the Eskimos of Alaska and Greenland, the Akuri in Surinam, the Pygmies in the Congo, the Aborigines in Australia, the Kalahari Bushmen in South Africa and Botswana, the Ruc in Thailand, the Bihar in Central India, the Andeman Islanders on Andeman Island, the Bantu and Koroka in Angola, and the Ariangulo, the Boni, and Sanye of Tanzania. ⁽¹²⁾

We have discussed Homo erectus in the previous chapter, the first was  Java Man, Eugene Dubois' giant "gibbon"(?)(evolutionists are confused as to what exactly Dubois meant when he compared Homo erectus to a Gibbon, see Foley's comments in Chapter Nine).

Java Man turned out to be made up out of a human leg bone and part of an ape skull.

Another specimen of Homo erectus was Peking Man, dubbed Sinanthropus, Homo erectus Pekinensis, discovered in 1927 at some limestone cliffs near Choukoutien, China. The circumstances surrounding his discovery sound remarkably like that of the first Homo erectus. He was found by Davidson Black, a Canadian anatomy professor working at Peking Union Medical College. Black was convinced, like Dubois, ahead of time that man had originated in Asia, and he bent his tireless energy into proving his idea. In April of 1927 he began digging, with the help of the Chinese government, and in less than a year he was to strike solid bone, more or less.

Anthropologists Thomas W. Mckern and his wife Sharon describe the unearthing of the very first Sinanthropus, Peking Man, only the second Homo erectus ever found after Dubois' gibbon:

"Within six months his (Black's) field director had unearthed a massive molar tooth. It was both huge and primitive, but undeniably human in form- so human, in fact, that Black did not hesitate to use it to create a special new hominid genus. He called this new form of man-represented by but a single molar -Sinanthropus pekinensis ('China Man from Peking')." ⁽¹³⁾

When Dubois heard of the discovery, he roundly condemned it as nothing much more than a degenerate Neanderthal that had wandered into China. Three more collections of skull fragments of Homo erectus were found in Java somewhat later by German paleontologist G.H.R. von Koenigswald, who was seemingly canvassing the entire Island of Java in a desperate attempt to find a fossil of some kind, any kind, that might substantiate Dubois original claim that Java man was a real "early man" instead of his later opinion that it was a gibbon.
He was paying the local natives a dime a piece for each fossil skull they might come up with. Unfortunately, this plan backfired. When they came across a skull they would break it up into smaller fragments in order to collect more dimes from this generous white man. Undeterred by the native's chicanery, Von Koenigswald was able to piece the fragments back together, and rushed a photograph of a reconstructed skull to Dubois to obtain his congratulations.

Dubois promptly declared the skull a fake.

While von Koenigswald had been scrambling around the island of Java, work at Choukoutien in China continued unabated. Unfortunately, due to his ceaseless persistence in searching for more remains of Peking Man while ignoring increasing symptoms of chest pains, Black died of a heart attack, partly brought on by exhaustion, in 1934. His successor at the site was German born Franz Weidenreich, former Professor of Anthropology at the University of Frankfurt and Anatomy Professor at the University of Chicago. In a cave at the sight where the earlier Homo erectus was found, they discovered three skeletons that were estimated to be 20,000 to 30,000 years old, and according to Weidenreich they were the remains of an Eskimo, a Melanesian [people who inhabit the Melanesian islands], and a European!

The McKerns soberly report this, but then they ask the obvious question, "How could Weidenreich account for the presence of an Eskimo, a Melanesian, and a European together in a prehistoric Chinese cave?" ⁽¹⁴⁾ 

We cannot view any of the Sinanthropus fossils in any of our museums today. In 1941 every single specimen of Peking Man disappeared, lost in transit at Chinwangton Harbor, China, on the very same day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Since that irretrievable loss though, in 1955 three jaws and a skull bone at Ternifine, Algeria, in North Africa, were found underneath the clay floor of an ancient pond, and wouldn't you know it, they have been named Homo erectus mauritanicus.

Dubois must have been spinning in his grave.

The Mckerns sum up what is known of Homo erectus: "Where did erectus come from? Where did he go? How did he make his way, on foot, to such far points of the globe? These are questions for which we have no answers ." ⁽¹⁵⁾

R hodesia man was another missing link with a troubled history, but this had nothing to do  with forged evidence. Discovered at a zinc mine at Broken Hill, Zambia, he was thought to be an evolved, man-like descendant of the gorilla, and thousands of years old, even older than neanderthal man.

There were doubts though. Herbert Wendt describes the main reason for them: "And two very odd holes in the side of the skull caused the experts even greater perplexity. In the view of Professor Mair of Berlin they looked like the entry and exit holes of a modern bullet." (From Ape to Adam, Herbert Wendt, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. Indianapolis &New York, 1972, pp.155.)

The different theories of why humans lack the heavy coat that other primates have covering their bodies is interestingly dealt with by Elaine Morgan in her book, The Scars Of Evolution. She went into a Harvard bookstore to find out what was currently being taught on the subject. She found two textbooks there on Anthropology, one of which did not mention the subject of human hair at all, while the other one had three words to say on the topic of human hairlessness, which was, that compared with the other apes, "humans 'have less hair.'" ⁽¹⁶⁾

Morgan mentioned a few of the various explanations that experts in the field have proposed as to why we do not have hairy coats, among which were sex, hunting, neoteny, noonday foraging, allometry, and water (" 'In the water, fur provides poor insulation and becomes atrophied.'" V.E. Sokolov: Mammal Skin). ⁽¹⁷⁾

She reported that, for lack of a better explanation, some experts claimed that we have just as much hair as any ape, only our hairs were shorter. Morgan wrote that this kind of evasive nonsense "was an insult to the meanest intelligence, yet it was regularly uttered by professors and parroted by undergraduates." ⁽¹⁸⁾

Even though she is apparently no creationist (yet), her book is scholarly, informative, highly entertaining, and deals honestly and humorously with some of the hijinx going on in the educational world where our brightest scholars are getting their training.

Evolutionists aren't sure just why we humans lost our hairy coats (I submit that we never had them) but one of their theories is that as humans began to walk upright, we did not retain as much body heat as when we were on all fours in a crouched position and near to the ground, thus we did not need to sweat as much and so lost our hair in the process, although this would only explain how we lost our hair on our chest, not our back, which has always been fully exposed to the elements. Apes do not walk with their backs to the ground and are quite thoroughly covered front and back with a fine coat of hair. Using this kind of reasoning, the giraffe should have a hairless neck as well.

Luckily for us, the mystery of why humans lost their hair has finally been solved by two scientists in Great Britain. Humans evolved from hairy primates to avoid insects:

Another well known missing link is "Heidelberg Man." Howells wrote: "Heidelberg's discovery is yet another story of relentless search and an implacable conviction." ⁽¹⁹⁾

What did Heidelberg man consist of? Dr. Otto Schoetensack, of the University of Heidelberg found "a big human jaw" in a clay pit in Germany. ⁽²⁰⁾

A jaw.

Howells wrote, "It is easy to perceive how badly we need more fossils; for example, we cannot relate Heidelberg man to any later Europeans until we find some skull parts to add to his solitary jaw."
(Scientific American, Homo Erectus, November, 1966)

Howells went on to state: "The only other European fossil approaching the Heidelberg Jaw in antiquity is the occipital bone recently found at Vertesszollos. This piece of skull . . . may have belonged to the same general kind of man as the Heidelberg Jaw."

The "Mountain Ape of Mount Bamboli," Oreopithecus bamboli, also known as "The Abominable Coal Man" was one of the more sensational candidates for mans' ancestor. First discovered in a lime pit in the Italian province of Grosseto in 1872 by French paleontologist Paul Gervais, other remains have been found since in coal beds of central Italy. 

This creature had a long lived history in the evolutionist pantheon and underwent various revisions in his paleological status as he was declared to have been at different times an ancestor to the gorilla, a chimp, and a primitive man. At first all that was found of him were the remains of a lower jaw. Not much was thought of that until 1949 when Johannes Hurzeler, a paleontologist from Basle studied the remains and decided that they represented another "missing link" between man and ape. He was also proclaimed to be about 10 million years old. The problem with this interpretation was that it put him much farther back in time than the supposedly more primitive human ancestors living only 3-5 million [evolutionary] years ago.

In 1959 a complete skeleton was found of Oreopithecus near the same spot of the original discovery. Nothing much has since been heard of him since then, presumably he has been retired into paleological oblivion along with the rest of the discarded cast of failed ancestors of man. Summing up his history in evolutionary circles, paleontologist David Pilbeam wrote: "Oreopithecus has had quite a checkered history and has been described as monkey, ape, hominid and even pig!" ⁽²¹⁾

Among other missing links, one notable who enjoyed a brief glimpse of fossil fame was Colorado Man. We don't hear much about him anymore either. He turned out to have been built up from the tooth of a horse, which speaks volumes for that part of a horses anatomy that he made of those who were trying to pawn him off as a human ancestor.

It would be profitable here to review the methods from the last chapter that were adopted by the notorious Haeckel, Darwin's colleague and one of the co-discoverers of Homo erectus, Pithecanthropus, when he developed his early phylogenic history of the human race, according to evolutionist theory.

Elwyn Simons wrote: "Haeckel drew up a theoretical [imaginary] ancestral line for man. The line began among some postulated [supposed] extinct apes of the Miocene epoch and reached Homo sapiens by way of an imagined group of "ape men"(Pithecanthropi) and a group of more advanced but still speechless early men (Alali) whom he visualized as the worldwide stock from which modern men had evolved . . . A creature combining these various presapient attributes took form in the pooled imagination of Haeckel and his compatriots August Schleicher and Gabriel Max. Max produced a family portrait, and the still-to-be-discovered ancestor was given the respectable Linnaean name Pithecanthropus allus." ⁽²²⁾

Howells said that Haeckel was "rescued from retroactive embarrassment" by Dubois discovery of Java Man, designated Homo erectus, which we discussed earlier, and who was later repudiated by his own discoverer, and was seen to have been made up in some Frankenstein manner from parts of a human femur bone and orangutang teeth.

Significantly, Homo erectus, Java Man, is still used in textbooks as an ancestor in man's lineage.

Howells summarized the current situation in the evolutionary taxonomy of human ancestors quite succinctly, and at least honestly:"Above all, the nature of the line leading to living man-Homo sapiens in the Linnaean sense-remains a matter of pure theory." ⁽²³⁾

Geneticist and world renowned Berkeley scientist Rebecca Cann stated: "Dioramas in a natural history museum can be counted on to show some primitive ape-human (Australopithecus) emerging into some early species of our own genus Homo. Then Homo erectus evolves into Homo sapiens, along with mortgages, star wars, and ice cream. Such schemes imply a genetic continuity in space and time that contains more fantasy than Spiderman's best escapades." ⁽²⁴⁾

Thus to recap our excursion: No "ape-men" have shown up, no sub-humans, no evolutionary transitional links between man and some distant hairy ancestor. All that we have so far are hoaxes, apes, pigs, crocodile bones, horse teeth, and modern men. There has been nothing that would validate the theory of evolution from ape to Homo sapiens, mankind. Of the rest of the cast in this improbable fantasy, we have seen earlier in this chapter that Neanderthals were merely another race of human beings, and Cro-Magnon man is now classified as 100% Homo sapiens, and both had brain capacities larger than the average modern man's. So men are men, and apes are apes, and never the twain shall meet.

Ian Tattersall, head of the Anthropology Department at the American Museum of Natural History and former Curator in Charge of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution there, has given us a revealing glimpse on the evolutionary schemes drawn up by paleontologists, evolutionists, anthropologists, and their like. He wrote: "If you add ancestry and descent to your cladogram [pictorial representation of species similar in appearance], you get what's called an 'evolutionary tree'[speculative imaginary story of how these creatures might have evolved from one another or from a hypothetical common ancestor]. Johanson and White's hypothesis about Australopithecus afarensis was a formulation of this kind. But since it's not actually possible to prove ancestry, trees are not only more complex statements than the cladogram you started with; they're also not testable. And because you can derive a number of different trees from a single cladogram, this obviously leaves the door open for endless argument. Yet more complex than the tree is the 'scenario.' . . . the average scenario is a highly complex mishmash in which considerations of relationship, ancestry, time, ecology, adaption, and a host of other things, are all inextricably intertwined, tending to feed back into each other. When your out there selling such complicated narratives, normal scientific testability just isn't an issue; how many of your colleagues or others buy your story depends principally on how convincing or forceful a storyteller you are-and on how willing your audience is to believe the kind of thing you are saying." ⁽²⁵⁾

This is a far different picture than the one we get lightly air-brushed in High School and College texts and from the cultural media experts who present the theory of evolution to an unwitting public as though it is a settled fact and that we have all of the details as to how it occured, when they truly have no validation for it at all. Evolution is assumed to have occurred so we are presented with statements in nature documentaries and text books such as "evolution has produced the remarkably well adapted red-whiskered swamp turkey's ability to blend in with it's environment," without providing any facts to show how it actually happened through any imagined evolutionary process or truly explaining the method by which it was supposed to have taken place. It's all made up out of the imagination of the evolutionist!

These statements that we hear such as "The elephant evolved their large ears over thousands of years", etc. are made as statements of faith by the evolutionists; they never present us with any actual evidence for their claims. They tell us that this is how it happened and we are meant to simply take their word for it. This is not science, this is dogma, and we have seen from previous chapters that their specious tales do not bear up to the truth under the light of genuine scrutiny, which is why they are so desparate to keep any criticism of the theory of evolution out of the classroom and the museum displays. The multitudes of transitional forms, which we should literally be stumbling over every time we look into the fossil record, are not to be found!
It is the evolutionists who are afraid of having an open forum, where their ideas would be shown to be hopelessly flawed. The truth is, elephants show up as elephants from the very first time they are found in the fossil record and they have always remained elephants, they have not evolved from some other kind of animal and they have never changed into anything other than their created kind; the same is true of bears, ants, lizards, tomatoes, bananas, pine trees, lettuce, horses, guinea pigs and all other kinds of living organisms, which totally contradicts the evolutionary story. There are instances of variations within these specific kinds, however there are no instances of any specific kind turning into another specific kind. Even Darwin's much heralded finches in the Galapagos Islands remained finches to this day; this was no evidence for the origin of a species; it merely showed variation within a specific created kind. There was never any evidence that they ever came from anything besides finches, or that they had evolved into anything other than finches. This pathetic piece of claptrap is about the only evidence the evolutionists have ever really presented, and it only proves that finches beget more finches.

Here are a few more instances that throw a monkey wrench into the traditional evolutionist time frame and views. In 1938 Dr. Wilbur Burroughs, head of the geology department of Berea College, Kentucky, found human footprints in rock that has been estimated to be 250 million years old. The prints were examined by infrared photography and photomicrographs which revealed no signs of artificial carving. Also, the sediment had signs of sand imbedded into the print when it was made, thus removing any doubt as to the authenticity of the tracks. (Brad Steiger, Mysteries of Time and Space, pp. 6-7, Englewood cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974.)

Three moccasin prints were found by the mouth of the Little Cheyenne River, South Dakota, in a hard, shiny rock-face of magnesium limestone estimated to be roughly 100 million years old on a hill covered with boulders. The imprint of the ball and heel of the foot indicate that the person was running. (William R. Corliss, Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts, pp.649).

The print of a leather shoe was found in Triassic limestone, dated to be 180-225 million years old, in Fisher Canyon Nevada in 1927. The leather was stitched in a very fine thread ( Steiger, pp.18). In 1968 a trilobite crushed by a human sandal print was found at Antelope Springs, Utah, by William J. Meister. Trilobites supposedly became extinct 300-600 million years ago.

The print was found inside of a rock that Meister had split open with his geologists hammer. Afterward, Dr. Clifford Burdick, a geologist from Tucson, Arizona, examined the site and found a childs' footprint embedded in a bed of shale. Two other geologists and a paleontologist examined the impression. The print had to have been made when the shale was in a soft, viscous condition, something that geologists stated had not occurred for millions of years. The laminations of the material conformed to the impression of the foot, thus dispelling any probability of artificial carving. (Bible-science Newsletter, August-September 1969).

Having seen the odd and the unusual ways that evolutionists construct their theories for the origin of man, let us see of perhaps there is a different story for man's origin and history. Was it possible that from the very beginning man had a very high intellect, and could early civilizations bear witness to the fact that man did not come from some grunting, sweaty, hairy forest creature, but had a noble genesis that afterward was corrupted by human sinfulness and separation from the God who made him?

We will look into this possibility in the next issue of The Darwin Papers.

1. There are basically only two different ideas on the history of man: either you take the evolutionary hypothesis that man descended from an animal or else you accept the idea that man was created uniquely by God and that God has a purpose for mankind, that His hand has been at work guiding human activity, (albeit a fallen humankind subject to ideas and impulses all too often contrary to the will of God, as well as oftentimes influenced by the enemy of all that is good and true, hence slaughter, disease, war, etc.) throughout history.

These two different ideas have always co-existed and been opposed to each other down through the ages, and although modern evolutionists try to posture themselves as the pioneers of ground breaking new facts (theories) on how man gradually developed from a primitive condition to a more advanced one, even with all of the tremendous amount of money spent on researching the supposed evolutionary, primitive ancestry of man, with the lucrative grants to anthropology departments in numerous universities throughout the world, with the paleontology expeditions that forage every year for more clues to man's ancient past, it is amazing that their ideas have not advanced one wit from the evolutionary ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

There is nothing novel at all in anything that they are saying, nothing original, all of their basic theories were widely discussed among the philosophers of the Greeks, the Romans, and many other cultures. Apart from God's unique revelation to the Hebrews, only a few pagan nations kept the purity of their original revelation of God's creation of the world.

One common example should suffice. Lucretius was a Roman philosopher of the first century B.C. His ideas sound as though they could have been taken from any current book on evolution, complete with the customary attack on religion and the insistence that life had begun as a purely natural process. He even anticipated Darwin's idea of the survival of the fittest. He was well acquainted with the theories of the Greek evolutionists, Empedocles, Democritus, Anaxagoras, etc. etc.

All of the stock theories of the trade were expressed in his work, On the Nature of Things, over two thousand years ago, which was remarkably similar to what Darwin attempted to do with his Origin of Species, i.e. to replace faith in a divine creation with a purely naturalistic interpretation of the sequence of events that led up to the formation of living systems. Lucretius began with this lofty preamble: "For I will essay to discourse to you of the most high system of heaven and the gods and will open up the first beginnings of things, out of which nature gives birth to all things . . .and into which nature likewise dissolves them back after their destruction."(Lucretius,On the Nature of Things, Book One, Page one)

Lucretius then gave a tribute paid to the philosopher Epicurus, to whom he was apparently indebted to for his ideas, and here we find an astonishing similarity between this tribute to Epicurus and the laudatory accolades given to Charles Darwin by the present day evolutionists cited at the beginning of Chapter One. The parallels are striking, beginning notably with the denouncing of religion for much of man's ignorance and misery, common then as now with evolutionists: "When human life to view foully prostrate upon earth crushed down under the weight of religion, who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect lowering upon mortals, a man of Greece (Epicurus) ventured first to lift up his mortal face and first to withstand her to her face." (Ibid)