What About Origins? (CreationPoints)
Page 22
Osborn’s views were fully supported and promoted by eminent anatomist and anthropologist Professor Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, who was Professor of Anatomy at University College, London. A drawing of Nebraska Man by the artist Amedee Forestier subsequently appeared in the Illustrated London News on 24 June 1922. This illustration showed a club-wielding half-ape/half-human Nebraska Man with his wife crouching by his side in exotic prehistoric surroundings, complete with primitive horses and camels nearby. It is truly amazing how a single tooth can give such inspiration to an artist!
In spring 1925, however, a team from the American Museum of Natural History went to the site where Harold Cook had found the fossil tooth and there they found other fossilized remains. They were then able to establish that the creature from which the original tooth had come was an extinct peccary—a kind of pig. The news made the front page of the New York Times and the story was picked up by The Times in London. In 1927, the idea that Nebraska Man was a half-ape/half-human creature was retracted in an article in Science, leaving evolutionists with no evidence for the existence of half-ape/half-human creatures in the USA.12
Mistakes that were made in the Neanderthal reconstructions and the claims for Nebraska Man, together with the Piltdown Fraud, should make us wary of accepting any drawing or model as a true representation of what so-called ape-people looked like. We have seen that such reconstructions are no more than figments of the imaginations of the artists who drew or reconstructed them. You might think that it was because of ignorance that errors were made in the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that such errors would not be repeated in our more sophisticated age. But you would be very wrong. We will now look at a fraud and a number of mistakes that were made towards the end of the twentieth century and even at the beginning of this century.
Recent mistakes and frauds
In 1971, the National Geographic Society reported the discovery of the Tasaday Tribe, a tribe of people living in caves deep in the rainforest on the remote island of Mindanao, 600 miles south-east of Manila in the Philippines.13 Naked members of this tribe using stone tools were photographed by a National Geographic photographer and, as a result, it was believed that here was a Stone Age tribe living in the Space Age! In 1987, a film crew from British Central Television paid a return visit to the Tasaday Tribe and the result was broadcast the following year.14 This broadcast showed men and women who were easily recognized from the original media coverage living in ordinary huts, raising normal crops, and wearing tatty T-shirts and frayed jeans. This was not because they had been exposed too often to Western civilization or because members of the TV crew had given them some ‘trendy clothing’, but rather because they had taken part in a hoax! They had never lived in caves, but every time visitors came, they left their huts, took off their clothes and played elaborate charades in the caves. Their Stone Age tools turned out to be pebbles that they had picked out of the stream. They had done all this for money that had been promised them by government officials—but the money never materialized. The anthropologists who originally studied these people had only seen what their preconceived evolutionary ideas had wanted them to see.
In the 1980s there were a couple of examples of evolutionists being deceived by their own preconceived ideas. One concerned the mistaken identification of a dolphin’s rib that was thought to be the collar-bone of some half-ape/half-human creature.15 The other was a skull fragment that had been found in the Andalusia region of Spain. This skull fragment was heralded as being from the oldest example of a human in Eurasia and was given the name ‘Orce Man’ after the name of the town near to where it had been found. The skull was subsequently shown to be from a four-month-old donkey!16
In the 1990s, mistakes were still being made. Towards the end of September 1994, newspaper and TV news headlines declared that the missing link between apes and humans had been discovered. These headlines were based on a paper published in the prestigious journal Nature by Professor Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley.17 The paper reported that the fossilized remains of this creature had been found by White and his colleagues in the region known as Middle Awash, which lies each side of the Awash River in the Afar Depression in Ethiopia. When the fossilized remains were looked at carefully, however, it was shown that they came from seventeen individuals. In the cases of thirteen, all that had been found was some teeth. Another individual was represented by a piece of a lower jaw, and another by the base of a skull. In the other two cases, one individual was represented by a right humerus, and the other by a left humerus, radius and ulna. Apart from a piece of a lower jaw, a fragment of a cranium and four arm-bones, no other bones were found—no vertebrae, no ribs, no shoulder blades, no hips, no legs, no feet-bones and no hand-bones. On the basis of what had been found, it was impossible to determine whether this creature walked upright, like a human, or on its four limbs, like a chimpanzee. However, Australopithecus ramidus, as the creature was called, was heralded as the immediate descendant of the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.
A year later, however, Australopithecus ramidus was quietly assigned to a new genus and given the name Ardipithecus ramidus.18 This creature is now thought to be the ancestor of the australopithecines, which are extinct apes. This announcement was not heralded by any of the news media. This means that what is in people’s minds is that, in 1994, the ape–human link was found, whereas evolutionists are now saying that an ape–ape link was found! No wonder people are confused about what has been found when the news media propagate the discovery of what is supposed to be the ape–human link but then fail to mention when this creature is shown not to be such a link. What is left in people’s minds is that the evolutionists have proved over and over again that humans have evolved from ape-like ancestors, when in fact this is manifestly untrue.
But mistakes continue to be made—even in the twenty-first century. As we shall see in the next section, the most famous australopithecine that has been found was discovered in 1974 and was given the name ‘Lucy’. In 2006, the fossil remains of a juvenile australopithecine were found in Ethiopia, and this juvenile has been called ‘Lucy’s Baby’, although she is not the daughter of Lucy and the evidence suggests that she probably lived before Lucy did. When the discovery of Lucy’s Baby was first reported, however, once again the mainstream media served up their usual hype and propaganda in support of the evolutionary theory of the origin of humans. For example, writing about this find in the National Geographic News on 20 September 2006, staff writer James Owen declared that the skeleton belonged to the ‘primitive human species Australopithecus aferensis’.19 We will look at the different species within the australopithecines in the next section, but to say that the australopithecines were human is a complete distortion of the truth, for the australopithecines are nothing more than extinct apes.
It is interesting to find out exactly what the anthropologists had found. The original paper published in Nature about ‘Lucy’s Baby’ stated that the fossil bones had been collected by six different people over a period of three years20—something not mentioned on the BBC website, which gave the impression that an almost-complete skeleton had been found together in one place: ‘The find consists of the whole skull, the entire torso and important parts of the upper and lower limbs. CT scans reveal unerupted teeth still in the jaw, a detail that makes scientists think the individual may have been about three years old when she died.’21
We can rightly conclude, however, that the skull did in fact come from a juvenile australopithecine. This was confirmed by a study of the semicircular canals that showed that they are ape-like in orientation—that is, they are not adapted for upright walking. This shows that the skull came from a creature that was more like a chimpanzee than a human. Furthermore, the bones of the only complete finger of Lucy’s Baby are curved like those of a chimpanzee, and this further strengthens the argument that this creature was ape-like from the waist up and appears to be more akin to a chimpanzee than to a human.
Unfortunately, not a great deal can be deduced from the pelvis or lower extremities, as much of them is missing.
After extensive consideration of all the findings of Lucy’s Baby, anatomist Dr Brad Harrub has concluded,
The media proved once again that they are less concerned with the truth than with eagerly supporting the humanistic and atheistic views espoused by Neo-Darwinians. An unbiased analysis of the anatomy of this creature clearly demonstrates that greater care should be given when reporting to the public. To assign this creature as a ‘missing link’ or ‘Lucy’s Baby’ is misleading, when the evidence points more towards this creature being simply an ape (probably chimpanzee) … The semicircular canals demonstrate this creature was not a biped, and the remaining anatomical findings argue strongly that the latest ‘missing link’ is still missing.22
The reconstruction of this ‘precious little bundle’, as George Washington University anthropologist Bernard Wood called her,23 seemed to have been yet another case of mistaken identity.
The final case of mistaken identity we will look at here is a very recent one. In 1995, Dr Russell Ciochon, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa, together with his colleagues, found in the Longgupo cave in Sichuan Province, China, a fragment of a fossilized jaw with two teeth attached to it. They believed that this fossil belonged to an early human ancestor. At the time it was considered to be the oldest human fossil in Asia. Later finds have, however, shown that Professor Ciochon’s conclusion—that this fossil jaw and teeth were from a human—was wrong. To his credit, Professor Ciochon has now changed his mind and has reclassified it as an ape fossil. Professor Ciochon has been very public about his change of mind and wrote an essay which was published in Nature in June 2009.24
As we have seen, it sometimes takes dozens of years before a fraud or mistake is exposed, and this is only accepted if the exposure is done by an evolutionist. Any questions that are raised by creationists about the authenticity or interpretation of any fossil are immediately dismissed by evolutionists. Who knows what interpretations of fossil remains that are currently accepted as bona fide will be exposed as fraudulent or just simply mistaken in the next twenty or so years? Who knows whether what we now accept as a perfect reconstruction of a creature will be found to be seriously in error as more fossils are found in the future?
This is something we need to bear in mind whenever there is a news item about the finding of yet another missing link. We must not be perplexed by such claims. In time, most likely the claims will be declared as just more mistakes, or as misidentified apes or misidentified humans. In my opinion, a sceptical approach to the findings and reconstructions of so-called half-ape/half-human creatures does not go amiss.
Australopithecines—fossil apes
What anthropologists believe about the evolution of humans is based on their preconceived ideas. As we have already seen, Charles Darwin, for example, believed that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors in Africa. We have seen that he argued that the closest living relatives of modern humans—the chimpanzee and the gorilla—were both confined to Africa, and so it was probable that the common ancestor of modern humans was also likely to have lived in Africa. Such a conclusion was based on the premise that chimpanzees and gorillas are our closest living relatives. What is the evidence, if any, for this? We have seen that the evidence is simply an assumption: it is assumed that, because humans, chimpanzees and gorillas have similar body parts, they have a common ancestry. This assumption should be recognized as such. It is interesting to look at what has happened in the evolutionists’ quest for the origin of humans because of this and similar assumptions.
In the later part of the nineteenth century, the famous German naturalist and evolutionist Professor Ernst Haeckel was so convinced that ape-people existed that he commissioned a drawing of such a creature, even though there was no tangible evidence that such a creature had ever existed. He even named this hypothetical creature Pithecanthropus alanthus, which means ‘ape-man without speech’. Haeckel believed that, because our nearest living relative is the orang-utan, humans must have evolved from their ape-like ancestors in South-East Asia, where orang-utans are found. Indoctrinated by the preconceived ideas of Haeckel, who was his former professor, a young Dutch doctor, Eugène Dubois, went to the Far East in 1887, determined to find this hypothetical half-ape/half-human creature.
Eventually Dubois was convinced that he had found what he was looking for at Trinil on the island of Java. There he found a couple of molar teeth, the broken cap of a skull, a human leg-bone and several leg-bone fragments. Dubois named his find Pithecanthropus erectus (‘upright ape-man’) and Professor Haeckel commissioned the construction of a life-size model of this upright ape-man so that ‘Java Man’ (as he was commonly called) could be exhibited in museums throughout Europe. What Dubois had not told anyone is that he had found the bones and teeth in separate places and there was no reason to believe that they had come from the same individual. The only reason why he believed that they had come from the same individual was because he was convinced that he would find a half-ape/half-human creature in the Far East and he made sure that he appeared to have done so, irrespective of what he had actually found.
We saw above that mistakes have been unintentionally made when fossil bones and teeth have been used to reconstruct the individual from whom the bones and teeth have come. We would do well, however, to remember G. K. Chesterton’s words when we look at such reconstructions. Writing about Java Man (remember that Java Man was reconstructed from just a couple of molar teeth, the broken cap of a skull, a human leg-bone and several leg-bone fragments), Chesterton wrote,
People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium.25
When the first edition of this book, What About Origins?, was published in the mid-1970s, it was fairly easy to summarize and criticize evolutionists’ views of the origin of humans. Basically, they believed that the australopithecines evolved into Homo habilis (the habilines), then into Homo erectus, and then into the various members of the Homo sapiens family. It was easy to show that this proposed origin of humans was simply not true. Some thirty years later, the proposed evolutionary family tree is still very similar but is more complicated, because it now contains a lot more species and is full of side branches and dead ends. It would take a whole book just to deal with this proposed family tree in detail. I intend, therefore, to give here only the briefest outline and criticism of this family tree.
Australopithecus (meaning ‘southern ape’) is the name given to a number of different fossils found mostly in East Africa. Many species of australopithecines are known to have existed in the past and they all have strange-sounding names. These names, however, can often tell us where the fossilized remains were first found—for example, Australopithecus afarensis tells us that this australopithecine was found in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Sometimes, however, the name will reflect a particular characteristic of the australopithecine: Australopithecus robustus, for example, tells us that this australopithecine was robust—strong and sturdy. The australopithecines have a number of species, including Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus garhi, Australopithecus aethiopicus, Australopithecus robustus, and Australopithecus boisei.
The australopithecines were about 1.2 to 1.5 metres tall, with the male being up to 50 per cent larger than the female. Although evolutionists maintain that the australopithecines were bipedal—that is, upright-walking—the evidence suggests that their mode of locomotion was unique and was probably more similar to that of the orang-utan than to that of any other living cr
eature. Their brains were small and ape-like, with an average capacity of about 450 cc in the gracile varieties (e.g. Australopithecus africanus) and about 600 cc in the robust ones (e.g. Australopithecus robustus). The australopithecines therefore had brains that were less than half the size of those of modern humans, who have an average brain size of 1350 cc. As already mentioned, the name Australopithecus actually means ‘southern ape’, and this reflects exactly what the australopithecines were—apes. These apes are now extinct and have no ancestral relationship either to humans or to any other extinct or living ape.
Before we leave the australopithecines, we must meet the most famous of them all—Lucy. Lucy was the name given to some bones from an Australopithecus afarensis—she was named after the Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the song that her discoverers were playing on their cassette recorder when they were looking at the bones on the evening of their discovery in 1974. She was discovered near Hadar in the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia by Professor Don Johanson and his colleagues. Only about 40 per cent of the skeleton was found but from this, Johanson estimated her height at just over one metre and her brain size as 380 to 450 cc. Other specimens of Australopithecus afarensis have been found, and anthropologists maintain that Lucy and her fellow creatures walked upright just as humans do, although they were essentially ape-like from the neck up. Reconstructions of Lucy show her as an upright-walking creature with a smallish, powerful, human-like body and an ape-like head. It must be remembered, however, that such reconstructions are imaginative rather than factual.