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| Chapter 8 - Fossil Man? Separating People from Apes |
1. Do fossils of prehistoric man-like creatures prove the evolution of apes to ape-like men to modern man? |
Answer: Most of
our alleged fossil ancestors were merely animals having no connection with the human race.
Some of the fossils which are true human remains completely contradict the theory of human
evolution. Several famous fossil finds were frauds upon the scientific world and the
public. If human evolution from ape to primitive cave man to modern man had really occurred, the fossils should have been found in that order from the lower to the higher rock strata or layers. That is, the more ape-like fossils should be found in rocks dated as older, and the fossils more similar to modern man should be found in the rocks dated younger. Contrary to what is presented in the the textbooks, newspapers and television, this is not always so. The actual picture is not so simple. |
2. Have true human fossils been found in the wrong strata to support the evolution theory? |
Answer: Yes, but for the most part fossil finds not fitting the theory are ignored or explained away. Fossil remains the same or essentially the same as modern man which were found buried very deep or in strata dated very old have been ignored and are no longer reported to the public. Examples are the Calaveras, Castenedolo, and Olmo skulls. British anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith in his book, The Antiquity of Man, described these and other like fossil-man finds in detail and stated that they would have been readily accepted by scientists if it were not for the fact that these fossils, because of their locations in the strata, contradicted the accepted theory of human evolution.1 |
3. Are there cases of fraud in the history of fossil man finds? |
Answer: The Piltdown fossil found in England in 1912 was shown in 1953 to be a cleverly contrived hoax.2 The greater part of the scientific world had accepted the fraud for forty years. |
4. Have the various fossil candidates for a place in our human ancestry stood the test of time? |
Answer: One by
one, various fossil man finds have flashed across the front pages of the newspapers and
been the subject of many scientific studies and reports, only to be at last either
discredited or just forgotten, replaced by newer finds which also eventually fade away. In
1981 British scientist John Reader commented on this Hollywood character of some of our
former alleged ancestors: Not many (if any) [fossil hominids] have held the stage for long; by now laymen could be forgiven for regarding each new arrival as no less ephemeral than the weather forecast. ...We already know that the fuss attached to some revealed more of human nature than of human origins; eventually we will know the truth about them all.3 |
5. Were the Neanderthal people really crude, hunched over, bestial creatures that evolved into modern man? |
Answer: For
many decades most anthropologists were completely wrong. Neanderthal has now been found to
have been an intelligent human being who walked perfectly upright, not a stupid,
hunched-over half-ape-half-man. Human remains were discovered in 1856 in Germany in a cave in the Neander Valley, which was the source of the name, Neanderthal.4 A Neanderthal skeleton found in 1908 was the model for textbook drawings and museum displays of Neanderthal men and family groups used for decades afterwards. These illustrations portrayed them with bestial features, bull necks, hunched-over posture, and knees which could not be straightened. In 1956 respected evolutionary scientists reexamined the bones and concluded that they were of an elderly man who suffered from severe skeletal malformation resulting from rickets and arthritis. They determined that Neanderthals walked as upright as we do and that, dressed in modern clothes, they would probably draw no special attention among the crowds in the New York subway.5 Other evidence shows that the Neanderthals were intelligent, skillful, artistic people who believed in life after death. They were true men, Homo sapiens. We would speculate that the Neanderthals were a branch of Adam's race which through the effects of environment and other factors suffered changes in the shape of their skulls, a character of the human body which is actually somewhat plastic. In fact, a number of the man fossils may represent peoples which had suffered degeneration as the result of sin, crude pioneer living conditions, and inbreeding in small frontier population groups after the Flood. |
6. What became of Java Man? |
Answer: Java Man, also called Pithecanthropus erectus or, more recently, Homo erectus, discovered in 1891, apparently represents a case either of fraud or misinterpretation, or both. The finder, Eugene Dubois, admitted some thirty years later that he had found in 1889 at Wadjak, Java, a true human skull of very large brain capacity. It was located in a layer of sediment not necessarily younger than that in which the bones of Pithecanthropus were found. Some authorities always considered that the Pithecanthropus skull belonged to an animal, and in 1936 Dubois himself concluded that the creature was actually a giant gibbon.6,7 |
7. What happened to Peking Man? |
Answer: The Peking Man or Sinanthropus fossils are now classified with Homo erectus. The fossils reportedly found in 1928 and succeeding years were never permitted to leave China. Only plaster casts and models were exported. A jumble of conflicting reports were published over a period of a decade after the initial report. When carefully compared, these reports show that Peking Man was an animal, probably a large monkey or baboon, not a man. Moreover, true human skulls were found in the same huge ash pit. Two outside authorities were permitted to examine the bones and the discovery site. Abbe Breuil described the massive lime burning pits in which the bones were found and also raised serious questions about the theory that the Sinanthropus fossils were ancestral to humans. Later Marcellin Boule, international authority on fossil skulls, made a careful study of the bones and the site and published his conclusion that Sinanthropus was an animal that was eaten by the true men who had manufactured lime at the site. There is much appearance of fraud in the history of the Peking fossils. Funding for the project was obtained from the Rockefeller interests by Teilhard de Chardin, who was also implicated in the Piltdown fraud.8 |
8. Are the fossils called Homo erectus human? |
Answer: There
is divided opinion among Christians on this question. Pekin Man, Java Man and other
fossils found in Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia have been classified as Homo erectus.
This author has long been under the impression that Homo erectus was not human and,
therefore, was not a son of Adam. However, Marvin L. Lubenow, in his recent and most
thorough examination of the fossil evidence, concludes that Homo erectus was in fact Homo
sapiens.9 His evidence for this conclusion
includes the following:
On the other hand, the form of H. erectus skulls, and jaws and teeth are in some respects strikingly different and more gross than that of modern man. In addition, the tools found near H. erectus fossils are not plentiful and do not necessarily pertain to the H. erectus fossils. In any event, H. erectus fossils do not support H. erectus as an ancestor of modern man. The reason for this is that H. erectus fossils have been found scattered in sedimentary strata that the evolutionists date all the way from 2 million to only 6000 years old. Thus they were contemporaneous with and cannot be considered as ancestors of Homo sapiens. They may have been a degenerate branch of mankind. Marvin Lubenow concludes that, "In actuality, the human fossil evidence falsifies the concept of human evolution."10 |
9. Is the fossil genus, Australopithecus, man's ancestor? |
Answer: Over
the past fifty years various fossil species assigned to the genus, Australopithecus, have
successively dominated the competition for places in man's supposed ancestry. The
currently popular sequence is from Australopithecus afarensis to Homo habilis to Homo
erectus to Homo sapiens. Prof. S.J. Gould of Harvard University has pointed out, however
that there are substantial fossil gaps between these types.11
Therefore, the alleged evolutionary inheritance cannot be proved. In addition, only Homo
sapiens fossils can be firmly related to evidence of culture and tools. Richard Leakey published evidence in 1971 indicating that the Australopithecines were "knucklewalkers" not unlike the living African apes which are long-armed, short-legged knucklewalkers.12 In 1975 a quantitative computerized comparison of the bones of modern apes, Australopithecines and man placed the three kinds of creatures in three separated groups. The results showed that they represent different kinds of locomotion.13 The most famous candidate for our ancestor in the early 1980s was the fossil "Lucy," found by Donald Johanson and called Australopithecus afarensis after the Afar region of East Africa. In just a few years Lucy suffered severe criticism, however. The supposed evidences for upright walk and other affinities to man have come under attack.14 Professors R. Susman and J. Stern of the State University of New York at Stony Brook commented that Lucy not only spent a lot of time in trees but that she probably also nested in the trees and lived a lot like other monkeys.15 And Dr. Johanson himself said, "There is little evidence that Australopithecines made or used tools."16 |
10. Was Homo habilis really a tool-using creature, as its name implies? |
Answer: As it turns out, there is no persuasive evidence the the Homo habilis fossils are the remains of a creature that used tools. |
11. What does genetic variation between people groups indicate about the origin of the human race? |
Answer: The limited number of different forms (called alleles) of particular genes established now among the human population suggests that the human race may have expanded from a very small population only thousands, not millions of years ago. The geographic variations of human genes indicate that the human race radiated from the Middle East.17 Both of these conclusions are in agreement with the biblical record of creation and a catastrophic flood thousands of years ago, followed by the radiation of Noah's descendants from the region of eastern Turkey. |
12. What about the "African Eve" theory of the origin of the human race? |
Answer: A more recent genetic study of the DNA of genes found in mitochondria of various racial groups was reported to have shown that the human race originated in Africa.18 It was said that an "African Eve" was the progenitor of the race. However, re-examination of the research showed that this conclusion was arrived at through erroneous use of a computer program.19 The "African Eve" theory has now been placed on the back burner. |
13. Have not archaeologists found that human culture evolved through successive stages from cave dwellers to nomadic hunters to farm village dwellers and, finally, to builders of great city-states? |
Answer:
Actually, no. The evidence from archaeology shows the sudden appearance of the advanced
Sumerian civilization without signs of its slow evolution upward from cave men. The
observed facts really fit what the Bible says. Archaeologists have discovered little or no evidence of historical roots for the first great civilization in Sumeria.20 When the Sumerian people appeared in the Mesopotamian River Valley, they brought with them metallurgy, art, and the potter's wheel, as well as writing, religion and government, all in a highly developed state. Archaeologist C. Leonard Wooley estimated at least a thousand years of cultural development before this point in their history, but where this happened he does not know. Thus, evidence for the slow evolution of civilization is lacking, but the facts do fit the biblical record. In Genesis 4 we are told of the early development of cities and of technology and art*metallurgy, domesticated animals, and musical instruments. Genesis 6-9 tells of a family of eight people who survived the judgment of the global flood and who must have preserved much knowledge of the former culture and technology. Thus as the race became reestablished in the post-flood world and population began to swell, civilizations could flower rapidly without long evolutionary growth. Archaeology supports this biblical model for the origin of ancient civilizations. |
14. Isn't modern man much more intelligent than ancient man? |
Answer: There
is no evidence for the evolution of human intelligence. Since man is a cultural being,
modern men have the benefit of the knowledge discovered by earlier generations, but not a
higher level of intelligence. This was the view of the noted French social anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss.21 The ancient peoples were highly intelligent, accomplishing marvelous feats of architectural design and engineering without the help of the refined instruments and massive power machinery available today. Lacking mass-produced books, and having no computerized data banks, they had to make much greater use of their memories than do moderns. If it were possible to interview the ancients, we might perceive that human intelligence has actually degenerated. On the other hand, modern man has available more knowledge than the ancient peoples and possesses more advanced technology, because man is a cultural being. Each successive generation stands upon the shoulders, so to speak, of former generations, benefiting from their labors and scholarship. Man is the only cultural being, for he alone can bind time, preserving present advances for the future and drawing upon past accomplishments for the present. |
15. Isn't the idea of Eve's being created from Adam's rib pretty weird? |
Answer: The
creation of Eve from Adam's side is not really so wild scientifically as some people
think. This teaching of the Bible agrees with the modern science of genetics. Few people realize that, as Dr. Robert Koontz pointed out, the Genesis account of the creation of woman from man accords with the modern knowledge of genetics which was unknown to Moses.22 In humans sex is determined by the two sex chromosomes. The female has in each body cell two X chromosomes, whereas the male has an X and a Y. Thus, if the female had been created first, it would not have been possible to create the first man from genetic material entirely related to the woman. This is because God in making Adam would have had to create Y chromosomes, for Eve had no Y chromosomes in her cells. As a consequence the resulting race would have been a hybrid race. But because man was created first, woman and man could be completely related to each other. Eve was the first clone! This unity of the race in Adam is theologically very important, for we all sinned in Adam and fell with him in his first transgression. The Redeemer of the fallen race, Jesus Christ, receiving human nature by a miraculous conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary, became in a sense -- and we say it reverently -- a hybrid being, the God-Man. And all those who believe in Him are united with and in Him and receive a new nature, becoming the children of God by a spiritual rebirth. (See Romans 5 & 6 and I Corinthians 15.) |
16. But where did Adam and Eve's sons, Cain and Seth, get their wives? |
Answer: They
married their sisters in order to begin the expansion of the human race. We are told in Genesis 5:4 that after the birth of Seth, Adam begot sons and daughters. So the answer to the question is that Cain married one of his sisters. But some will complain, that's not safe, is it? Is not close intermarriage dangerous because of possible genetic problems? Yes, it is now, when all humans carry in their chromosomes a "genetic load" of bad mutations. In the early generations of the race few bad mutations had accumulated in the human gene pool, so close intermarriage was not genetically dangerous. In the beginning history of the race close intermarriage was necessary. But when the race had multiplied sufficiently, close intermarriage was forbidden by God. |
17. Does human nature provide evidence for the existence of the Creator God of the Bible? |
Answer: The essential attributes of personal human nature are intellect, affections (i.e., our feelings of love, fear, compassion, etc.), moral capacity, and will. The human body is composed of the material atoms found in the dust of the earth, just as the Bible teaches. But is there any scientific evidence that atoms or molecules have any of the four attributes of human nature listed above, or evidence that chemical reactions can give these attributes to dust? No such evidence exists. There is no reason to believe that non-living matter thinks, has emotions, has any sense of moral responsibility, or exercises will. Nor is there evidence that chemical reactions can create an organism that does. Personal nature, therefore, must have come from a higher personal spiritual Source, not from an impersonal material source. This conclusion from the scientific evidence is just what the Bible teaches. And we are not being at all "unscientific" if we believe that we were created in the image of the infinite-personal Spirit, God the Creator. |
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