Creation Facts of Life (24 page)
Neanderthals from the Palestine area do not show the more stooped and massive features. The brain volume of Neanderthals is slightly
larger
than the average brain volume of people today, and brain casts show the Broca's area involved in the complex speech that so distinctively sets mankind apart from apes. Neanderthal peoples had a well-developed culture, art, and religion. Nowadays, many evolutionists agree completely with creationists: Neanderthals were just plain people, no more different from people living today than one living group is different from another. What were the "cave men"? Just people who lived in caves. (And at today's housing prices, that may once again be a good idea!)
There was a secular museum in Germany where the curator dressed the wax model of a Neanderthal Man in a business suit and tie. His reason? He said it was time to quit deceiving the public. Neanderthals were just plain people. Indeed, scientists now classify Neanderthals as
Homo sapiens,
the same scientific name given to you and me.
Tragically, Neanderthals have not been the only people once considered subhuman "missing links." In an article reprinted in
Natural History
as part of an issue on the history of evolutionary thought, there's a short but very sad article by Henry Fairfield Osborn.
93
Osborn says that a hypothetical unbiased zoologist from Mars would classify people into several distinct genera and many species. Thus, said Osborn, Negroes would be classified as a separate species, not yet evolved to full human stature. "The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro," wrote Osborn as a so-called fact of evolution, "is similar to that of the 11-year-old youth of the species
Homo sapiens
[which, for Osborn, meant Caucasians only]." Osborn was a leading evolutionist of the 1920s, and it is easy to see how his kind of evolutionary thinking (rejected by modern evolutionists) helped to pave the way for Hitler's Nazi racism in the 1930s and 1940s. Hitler's racism fed further on the false sciences of eugenics and "craniometry."
94
The Australian Aborigines were also once treated as subhuman evolutionary links, and were classified as Australian animals by Germany's leading evolutionist, Ernst Haeckel. The natives of Tasmania were deliberately slaughtered by settlers who justified themselves by saying it was okay to kill wild dogs as farm pests, so why not other non-humans? As her dying wish, the last surviving Tasmanian, Truganini, asked that she be buried with her "people," not embalmed as a museum specimen. She died, was embalmed, and preserved as an evolutionary link. Warning: Few Christians stood against this horror, perhaps because many churches had already accepted evolution into their thinking. Christians standing on the Bible would have known there's only one race, the human race, and we're all parts of it (Acts 17:26).
In 1912, speculation about man's ancestry shifted to Piltdown Man, dignified by the scientific name
Eoanthropus dawsoni.
Almost everyone knows that Piltdown Man turned out to be a deliberate hoax, but Piltdown Man wasn't shown to be a hoax until the 1950s. For over 40 years, the subtle message of the textbooks was clear: You can believe in creation if you want to, but the facts are all on the side of evolution.
The facts,
in this case, turned out to be a bit of ape jaw and human skull stained to make them look older.
One mystery is who perpetrated the Piltdown hoax, but the real mystery is
why did anyone believe it?
It was
not
a particularly clever hoax. When people looked at the teeth with the right hypothesis in mind, "the evidences of artificial abrasion [filing] immediately sprang to the eye. Indeed, so obvious did they seem that it may well be asked — how was it that they had escaped notice before?"
95
The age-stain was better done, but the imported mammalian fossils and hand-crafted tools were again obvious frauds. People
wanted
to believe in evolution, so they were able to see what they
wanted to believe
(a "people problem" that can only be solved by honestly looking at alternate sides of an issue).
Sometimes people ask me how virtually all the evolutionists in the world could be so wrong about such an important issue as human origins. Answer: it wouldn't be the first time. Science is a human endeavor, and human beings make mistakes. Evolution goes far beyond the limits of science, and is even more easily influenced by human bias. I can understand that both intellectually and personally since I once accepted the evolutionary bias and its view of the evidence.
The "human factor" in the study of human origins is apparent in the multiple and varied interpretations of Java and Peking Man
("Homo erectus")
recounted in a very readable, yet thoroughly documented, book by Marvin Lubenow,
Bones of Contention.
96
Joining Neanderthals, Blacks, Aborigines, and Piltdown Man as proposed witnesses for human evolution at the famous Scopes trial
97
in 1925 was Nebraska Man. Nebraska Man was dignified by the scientific name
Hesperopithecus haroldcookii,
but he was never known by anything but a tooth. By imagination, the tooth was put in a skull, the skull was put on a skeleton, and the skeleton was given flesh, hair, and a family! Figure 28 includes a picture of Nebraska Man redrawn from a London newspaper published during the year of the Scopes trial.
A.
Neanderthals
turned out to be just plain people, some of whom suffered from bone diseases. In proper attire, they would attract no particular attention today.
B.
Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni)
was a deliberate (but not very clever) hoax palmed off as "proof of evolution" to students for more than two generations. It turned out to be a bit of ape jaw and human skull artificially aged.
C.
Nebraska Man (Hesperopithecus)
was reconstructed, family and all, from a tooth — a tooth that later was found to belong to a pig!
Figure 28.
A few of the many discarded candidates for man's ancestor.
Two years later, Nebraska Man was back to being just a tooth. The tooth was found in the real skull, attached to the real skeleton. It turned out not to be the tooth of man's ape-like ancestor, but the tooth of a pig!
The Australian National Museum in Sydney apparently found a solution to the problem of evolutionary links still missing between apes and man. In June of 1993, we were greeted by a display describing five kinds of apes: lemurs, orangs, gorillas, chimps, and man. No need to look for links between apes and mankind if human beings are
still
apes! One display described nursing behavior in various apes, including people. Another showed that man and chimps are the only apes that murder their own kind. A third pictured love-making among people and other apes. The text mentioned that some apes were monogamous, others polygamous or promiscuous, and that some men were like gorillas, others like chimps, etc. It was a truly inspiring and edifying display! Most evolutionists, of course, would be just as disgusted by the displays as would anyone else with a respect for science (or for common sense).
Modern speculation on mankind's ancestry centers on a group of fossils called
Australopithecus.
In the public mind, these fossils are associated especially with the work in Africa of the Leakey family and of Donald Johanson and his famous specimen, "Lucy" (Figure 29).
 |
Figure 29. |
The name
Australopithecus
means "southern ape," and it seems that apes are just what they are. Johanson likes to point out that where he finds his australopithecine bones, he finds many of the regular African animals (rhinos, boas, hippos, monkeys, etc.), but never apes. Could it be that apes are exactly what he has been finding all along? Lucy's features are clearly ape-like — except that some claim Lucy and other australopithecines walked upright.
How crucial to the definition of man is relatively upright posture? Vincent Sarich, at the University of California in Berkeley, and Adrienne Zihlman say that if you want something that walks upright, consider the living pygmy chimpanzee or bonobo,
Pan paniscus.
This rain-forest chimpanzee is only slightly shorter than the average chimpanzee, but it spends a fair amount of time walking upright. (I've watched them in the San Diego Zoo.) Since all the other features of the australopithecines are so apelike, perhaps Johanson and the Leakeys have discovered the ancestor of the living pygmy chimpanzee!
Did the australopithecines indeed walk upright? In the
American Biology Teacher,
eminent anatomist Charles Oxnard
98
said:
In one sense you may think there is no problem. For most anthropologists are agreed that the gracile australopithecines …are on the main human lineage…. This is the view that is presented in almost all textbooks; I expect that it has been your teaching in the classroom; and it is widely broadcast in such publications as the "Time-Life Series" and the beautiful [television] story of "The Ascent of Man." However, anatomical features in some of these fossils provide a warning against a too-ready acceptance of this story….
As part of his warning, Oxnard reminds his readers of gross errors once made in the cases of Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man.
In a PBS TV program on Lucy,
99
Donald Johanson finally contradicted his earlier assertions and admitted that Lucy's pelvis never really fit with the idea that she walked upright — because the bones of the pelvis fit together too perfectly (something paleontologists usually desire!). So, he shows a scientist sawing up a replica of Lucy's pelvis and gluing the pieces back together — and then claims the sawed-and-glued pelvis shows Lucy did walk upright after all. I saw the TV program first while speaking on creation in New Zealand. A newsman there commented that Johanson's standard of evidence might be acceptable in America, but it was not acceptable in New Zealand!