A: Man is different from all the rest of animal creation. Darwin’s contemporaries, the scientists Sir Richard Owen, Alfred Russel Wallace, Georges Cuvier, and the Duke of Argyll, held man as a separate phenomenon, distinct from the animal kingdom, a difference in kind, not just degree. Even Darwin’s most avid American supporter, Asa Gray, believed in the special creation of man as against the natural evolution of plants and animals.
POE: Well, that was the nineteenth century; we now know that we are just another kind of animal—different in degree only. It is a matter of critical mass. By careful study, Darwin even found “a mind of some kind” in worms.
A: I wonder why evolutionists are so ready to humanize animals and worms, and at the same time, dehumanize man!
POE: Simply because the rudiments of all our mental faculties can be seen at work in the animal kingdom. Japanese monkeys carry sweet potatoes to the stream and wash them.
A: Hey, raccoons wash their food religiously. Does that mean raccoons are on their way to becoming human?
POE: But chimps can make tools to perform certain tasks and also use stones to crack nuts.
A: So what: Otters use rocks to open clams; beavers cut sticks to make dams.
POE: Yeah, but chimps will sharpen a branch with their teeth, wield it like a spear, and stab their prey. They also dig for bulbs.
A: Can they change a lightbulb?
POE: No, but they can thread a needle and roller skate! Besides, primates also have a form of communication. Chimps, our closest living relatives, have sign language, many gestures to communicate, and a wide range of vocalizations used in the wild. The great apes even show an incipient degree of conceptual thinking. Romanticism aside, man is, quite plainly, an improved animal.
A: A cultured ape? As I see it, this idea springs from powerful nineteenth-century racialism, which took the Andamanese, for example, as “very little above animals.”7 Evolutionists rarely quote Darwin’s comparison of orangutan behavior with that of “naked wild savages,” or Huxley’s equally racist references, such as “the thoughtless brains of a savage.”8 Is there any valid evidence at all that human beings evolved from apes?
POE: Plenty. They are our closest cousins in the animal kingdom.
CHIMPS AND CHUMPS
A: Well, I am not aware of any fossils that link apes to the australopiths ca. 6 million years ago. Every hominid ever found was a primitive man and not an advanced ape. Are we improved chimps or just scientific chumps? Did we really evolve from a tree shrew? (See figure 8.3.)
POE: It is perfectly obvious that man’s anatomy is on the same plan as other primates. The chimpanzee’s short arms and structural details of the skull quite nearly approach man’s.
Noses and Spines
The black African and the native Australian (the latter once considered the most archaic of living races), in their platyrrhine nose, are actually the diametrical opposite of that found in the apes. “The nose of Neanderthal Man, far from resembling that of anthropoid apes, differs from it much more than does that of living Man.”*108 Australopithecus, the protoman, judging from Au. africanus (STS-14), had six lumbar vertebrae—longer than in modern humans: “This is certainly at odds with the evolutionary pressure leading to the shortening of the lumbar spine of the apes.”†109
Figure 8.3. Tree shrew seen placed in this chart as a progenitor of ape and man.
POE: More than 98 percent of the human genome is shared with chimps.
A: And we share 99 percent genes with mice! Although gibbons, of all the apes, are genetically farthest from man, they are the most bipedal of the apes! “It might not be correct,” cautioned Jeffrey Schwartz in Sudden Origins, “to try to sort out the evolutionary relationships of organisms on the basis of overall genetic similarity.”
Similar genes mastermind the development of wildly different creatures.
JERRY FODOR AND MASSIMO PIATTELLI-PALMARINI, WHAT DARWIN GOT WRONG
More than 80 percent of all the proteins shared by chimps and humans differ in at least one amino acid. There is a gross difference between human and chimp chromosomes.9 Even so, maybe the apes were the Creator’s prototype for Asu man, a permutation of the same idea. “Even the Creator may use a good device more than once.”10
POE: Only evolution and descent can throw light on the many homo-logs:*110 The chimp’s lower humerus, for example, is very similar to the human’s.
A: I find it curious that evolution, a science that loves to find minute anatomical differences, indulges wholeheartedly in gross similarities when it comes to comparison of man and ape. Man and ape are analogous, not homologous. Homologs, to the German school of Naturphilosophen, were simply archetypes/leitmotifs in the Creator’s inventory; in which case, similars might just as reasonably be attributed to an efficient, parsimonious Creator as to a common ancestor. Even Professor Mayr, after giving Darwin credit for solving the question of homology (from a common ancestor), demurred: “Homology cannot be proven; it is always inferred.” Other authorities see the human pelvis as so distinct from that of the apes that it is impossible to derive them from a common ancestral stock.
POE: Yet the human and orangutan shoulder is strikingly similar. Same holds for orang brain, whose convolutions are numerous, and the frontal lobe (seat of intellect) is more prominent than in any other anthropoid ape.
A: But not because of a genetic link.11 If a common ancestor split into Homo on the one hand and today’s apes on the other ca 6 mya, why do apes have much more genetic variation than we do?
POE: I view the pongid as prologue to man, prefiguring him in shape and form. Do you deny the similarity?
Resemblance does not always imply descent.
MARCELLIN BOULE, FOSSIL MEN
A: These homologous organs may have very different histories. Resemblance does not guarantee an actual relationship, just as Joe Blow in Kalamazoo may be a dead ringer for John Doe in Oshkosh—without any relationship whatsoever. It is entirely gratuitous to assume that similarities between species indicate a common ancestor. At best, pongids are similar—same basic blueprint—but unrelated to australopiths, just as whales (mammals) are similar but unrelated to fish, and sharks (fish) look similar to but share no genetic heritage with porpoises (mammals).
American vultures look a lot like Old World vultures, even though the former are related to storks and the latter to hawks. Falcons may behave like other birds of prey, but are genetically unrelated to them. Conversely, some birds that look very different, such as hummingbirds and nightjars or songbirds and parrots, are more closely related.
POE: We are still looking for that common ancestor—a hominoid type like Ramapithecus, Kenyapithecus, Proconsul—who gave rise to the australopiths.
A: Weren’t those beasties ruled out as ancestors, recognized as a false alarm back in 1979? Nothing more than anthropoid apes? Ramapithecus, last time I checked, was too old to be a hominid forerunner. Any comparison of Ardi or Australopithecus to apes is superficial, for Homo features are dominant even in the earliest men: cranial height, shape of occiput, poise of head on vertebral column, structure of pelvis and limb, face and teeth.
POE: Darwin believed our common ancestor was “furnished with a tail” and our coccyx is what’s left. With that understanding began our attempts to link man and simian homologously, phylogenetically. As an example, the region of a macaque’s brain that controls jaw movements is a direct homolog of Broca’s area, which controls human speech; these findings contradict the theory that speech evolved (from novel neural structures) specific to humans.
There is nothing unique about human evolution.
CHRISTOPHER WILLS, DARWINIAN TOURIST
Indeed, we may well have found a missing link in thick-skulled archaic hominids; and no doubt the eyebrow torus, the “awning,” of the anthropoid ape persisted in H. erectus and Neanderthal man.
A: So why is the gorilla’s cranial wall thinner than modern man’s? The Miocene apes also had a fairly thin skull and no browridge. Proconsul l
acked the bony torus: his forehead was smooth. And in many monkeys we find the same shaped browridge as in modern man. In fact, if the heavy brow is supposed to be more apelike, I wonder why H. erectus brow is larger than that of austrolopith, his predecessor. Don’t tell me it’s more specialized.
Some nineteenth-century Europeans believed in direct continuity from ape to man: An 1824 visitor to India spoke of “wild tribes which the native names liken to the Orang-Utang, and my own knowledge certainly bears them out . . . the individual I saw might as well pass for an Orang-Utang as a man.” A like-minded contemporary thought “the pendulous abdomen of the lower races . . . shows an approximation to the ape, as do also the want of calves, the flatness of the thighs, the pointed form of the buttocks, and the leanness of the upper arm.” The first Europeans in Australia called the Aborigines “tailless chimpanzees.” Even today the Semang Negritos, say the (haughty) Malaysians, are descended from siamang (monkey). In India, too, there is talk of dwarf tribes (Negritos) who descended from the monkey god Hanuman. In Africa, the S-shaped spine of the Akkas (who have long arms and short legs) inspired some to posit a link between man and ape. Darwin himself thought the Alacaluf Indians of Tierra del Fuego could hardly “boast of human reason.”*111 Indeed, all these popular etymologies of the nineteenth century are just one step removed from today’s misguided search for a common ancestor linking apes and man.
[They are] looking and hunting for that which was forefather to both man and monkey. What sort of beast they expect to find I cannot imagine.
JAMES CHURCHWARD, THE CHILDREN OF MU
PONGIDS AND PUNDITS
POE: Of course, we are not from apes as such, but we share a common ancestor with them. There is a difference. Ramapithecus of India—say, 12 to 30 mya—was one candidate for that common ancestor: its molars, canines, and jaw had a decidedly human cast; the curved dental arcade made him look quite human.
A: But molecular dating asserts that nothing hominid could have existed more than 7 mya. Anyway, new evidence, as you well know, overturned these Ramapithecus hopefuls. They weighed no more than thirty pounds; the mandible was finally judged not manlike. It turned out to be some sort of primitive orangutan.
POE: These fossil anthropoids, in Hooton’s time, were called dryopithecines; they were spread over a wide zone of the Old World and probably evolved into the ancestors of today’s apes on the one hand and to several varieties of early man on the other. That apes and humans share a common ancestor is now undoubted fact. Each new fossil tells us more about the continuity of the lines leading from hominoid types to the races of man.
A: Yes, yes, there are always candidates, but why no trace of their descendants until the time of Ardi or Asu man? Why the gap? It was the same with Ramapithecus: there was that yawning gap—millions of years—between that “common ancestor” and any of his supposed human descendants.
POE: Still, Africa’s Lucy and Ardi are close in appearance to that common ancestor—who, I’m sure, will turn up sooner or later. Be patient. The pongids had to have split from the human lineage between ten and five million years ago. Molecular anthropology supports this very nicely: the ancestor of man, according to twenty-first-century genetics, was something rather apelike, something from which both chimp and gorilla also descended. But after the chimpanzee and human lineages diverged, both underwent substantial evolutionary change. It was not until the early 1990s that Australopithecus’s predecessor Ardi, a million years older than Lucy, was discovered, yielding a total of forty individuals. Don’t you think a few more decades will suffice to hand us Ardi’s predecessor?
A: No, I don’t. I’ll tell you why: Because Ardipithecus was true Asu man, and he had no predecessor. He was the first of his kind with all the earmarks—albeit roughhewn—of the Homo lineage.
POE: Well, there were two kinds, two different species: Ardi ramidus 4.4 mya (early Pliocene) and Ardi kadabba 5.6 mya (late Miocene). All right, Ardi had manlike canines, but its jaw was apelike, and the female weighed 110 pounds; she was larger than Lucy.
A: Well, there you go: Lucy was younger and mixed with gracilizing Ihin genes, but Ardi (older) was pure Asu—first man ever—with no gracile features, and the female, at 110 pounds, was a far cry from 30-pound Ramapithecus.
POE: But so apelike, with a chimp-size brain (350 cc) and prognathism—a fruit eater.
A: Precisely the description of Asu man.
POE: But showing an improvement on the anthropoid: Ar. ramidus upper canines were less sharp than chimps. Thinner tooth enamel, too, reflecting a diet rich in easy-to-chew fruits and vegetables. It was a fantastic mosaic of ape and human traits—the foot, with its human toes, but lacking arches and with big toe splayed out; the pelvis is also a mixture of human and ape. Isn’t that proof enough of descent from anthropoid ape?
A: I don’t think so. Ardi’s hand was humanlike. And while chimp feet are made for grasping trees and branches, Ardi’s feet were actually better suited for walking.
POE: Ardi was what we call a facultative biped—climbed trees but also walked upright, though inefficiently, like modern chimps and gibbons. Ardi’s lower hip was adapted to climbing, but upper hip (the ilium) was broad, which is to say, adapted for walking. Ardi’s adaptations did all the hard evolutionary work for her successor Lucy. No one was surprised that Ardi showed a mix of chimpanzee-like and human traits, for Ardi was a link—way closer to an ape than to an australopithecine.
A: Not according to Tim White, its discoverer, who thought it was not particularly chimpanzee-like according to overall morphology.
POE: OK, at best, Ardi shed some light on our last common ancestor—the source of both us and chimps. Ardi tells us a bit about what that creature looked like.
A: Pure assumption. A leap of faith. The details of the alleged pongid split are still a complete mystery. There’s a good reason they never found the missing link. There is no missing link.
Isn’t it curious that some zoologists with no ax to grind for primate evolution have found as many similarities between man and ape as between man and dog.
I’ve seen cocker spaniels who looked about as human as Zinj.
WILLIAM FIX, THE BONE PEDLARS
Figure 8.4. Dog and his man. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.
So why not argue our descent from dogs? After all, dogs, like humans, are the only mammals who are all in one species; dogs share 80 percent of their hemoglobin sequence with humans. And dogs are more like humans emotionally than any other animal—capable of shame, remorse, curiosity, enthusiasm, grief, hopefulness, jealousy, deceit, and even some sort of conscience. The love and devotion of a dog for its master, Darwin thought, represents a kind of rudimentary religious impulse! He also thought that the beginning of reason was demonstrated by sled dogs who diverge when they approach thin ice. In 1285 Marco Polo said that the Andaman people “are no better than wild beasts, and I assure you . . . [they] all have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in the face they are just like big mastiff dogs.”12
POE: You must be joking. There is hardly any morphological resemblance to dogs, whereas structural resemblance to the anthropoids virtually proves shared descent.
WE WHO WALK ON THE “HIND PAIR OF HANDS”
A: Ardi’s wrist could bend backward. Wholly unlike any known apes (who are knuckle-walkers), Ardi could walk on her palms.
POE: Nevertheless, paleontologists are closing in on the split. We’re in the ballpark. Ardi is the closest we’ve come to the first manlike thing that split off from the common ancestor. Only after the split did chimps evolve specializations—like knuckle walking and broad incisors. Many features of the australopiths are markedly different from both humans and apes alike; the australopiths are rather unique among hominids.
A: Excuse me for noting that Australopithecus was never proven to be a link to the higher apes, or to any apelike common ancestor whatsoever. His elbow and anklebone are human, not at all gorilla- or chimplike. His hand bones and jawbones are slender,
teeth quite modern.
POE: But Australopithecus had a decidedly simian look.
A: Sure, he was the first edition of man, a creature of the wild, but he was not an improved ape, dog, or pig—which he also resembles chemically, by the way: most xeno-transplants (for humans) are from pigs. So what, if apes and human beings have similar DNA. So do humans and bacteria.
POE: Perhaps you forget that man and all other vertebrate animals have been constructed on the same model. Nor can you deny that the Pliocene Asiatic apes present dentition in some respects approximate to the Hominidae. The real question then is whether these resemblances indicate an actual phylogenetic relation. We think it does.
A: Pongid dentition is different from man’s, for which reason Le Gros Clark postulated they must have diverged earlier than the Miocene. A fine ad hoc solution. South Africa’s Swartkrans australopith had a pattern of dental eruption the same as H. sapiens, which never occurs in Pongidae. There are fundamental differences between man and anthropoid, especially in the canines and lower premolars. The tooth patterns of early man, noted Dr. Weidenreich, “even in the most primitive forms, remained basically the same as those of the later phases.”13 Don’t you think the man-ape resemblance has been overplayed? Isn’t the ape basically the atheist’s substitute for God’s own creation—man?
POE: Let me refer you to Dr. Gould’s pertinent remark that the subject of evolution “doesn’t intersect” that of religion.
A: Let’s not beat around the bush: it comes down to atheist versus believer, not science versus religion or rational versus supernatural!
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 28