FUNNY STORIES ABOUT YOUR ANCESTORS
Dolphin ribs and donkey skulls! Here is more of the ridiculous efforts of evolutionists to tell you who your ancestors are! Evolutionary theory is a myth. God created everything; the evidence clearly points to it. Nothing else can explain the mountain of evidence. This is science vs. evolution—a Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia, brought to you by Creation Science Facts.
CONTENTS: Funny Stories about Your Ancestors
The Fall of Java Man: This was the "proof" offered at the Scopes Trial
The Rib of a Dolphin: Who is being ribbed?
Alligator Femur and Horse Toe: It gets worse all the time
*Pilbeam Says No Real Evidence: None at all, says this fossil expert
*Leakey says It Is all a Question Mark: Apparently misery loves company
Faulty Dating Methods: A totally unreliable technique for dating ancient bones
A Donkey Bone: Are we supposed to believe such confused people?
Conclusion: A fictionalized "science"
This material is excerpted from the book, ANCIENT MAN. An asterisk ( * ) by a name indicates that person is not known to be a creationist. Of over 4,000 quotations in the books this Encyclopedia is based on, only 164 statements are by creationists. You will have a better understanding of the following statements by scientists if you will also read the web page, Ancient Man.
THE FALL OF JAVA MAN
This was the "proof" offered at the Scopes Trial.
At the Scopes Trial in 1925, the awesome-sounding Hesperopithecus haroldcookii was presented as evidence in favor of evolution. This was Java Man; and, as the world looked on with bated breath, the news of the finding of two or three of his bones was triumphantly proclaimed in Dayton, Tennessee, as a great proof of evolution. In Ancient Man, we learned that Java Man later turned out to be just another fake.
THE RIB OF A DOLPHIN
Who is being ribbed?
Another "ancient man" was discovered more recently. *Tim White exposed it as a hoax in 1983, and it was reported by an associate (*I. Anderson, "Humanoid Collarbone Exposed as Dolphin's Rib," in New Scientist, April 28, 1983, p. 199).
A dolphin's rib was called a "human collarbone"! Afterward, laughing at the obvious foolishness of it all, someone said it should be named "Flipperpithecus"!
ALLIGATOR FEMUR AND HORSE TOE
It gets worse all the time.
White accused a fellow anthropologist of a fraud equal to that of Java Man and Piltdown Man. His conclusive evidence: The bone in question was not properly curved and the nutrient foramen, a tiny opening, opened the wrong way. White said this: "The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominoid, that any scrap of bone becomes a hominoid bone." *Allan Walker, quoted in the same article, said that skilled anthropologists have erroneously described the femur of an alligator and the toe of a horse as clavicles (collarbones)!
(As you may recall, "hominoid" is the name for the mythical half-man / half-ape that evolutionists have for decades been searching for, without success.) It is a sad state of affairs when the only evidence that something exists is the theory it is found in.
*PILBEAM SAYS NO REAL EVIDENCE
None at all, says this fossil expert.
*David Pilbeam, of the Boston Museum, was a lifetime expert in the field of paleoanthropology (the study of fossil man). In an article written for Human Nature magazine in June 1978, entitled, "Rearranging our Family Tree," he reported that discoveries since 1976 had changed his view of human origins and man's early ancestors. Pilbeam ranked so high in the field, that he was the advisor to the government of Kenya in regard to the establishment of an international institute of the study of human origins. It is Kenya that, for decades, has been the center of hominoid research, because of the efforts of *Richard Leakey and his mother, *Dr. Mary Leakey. They have tried to dig ancient half-man / half-ape bones out of the ground. The Leakeys have their headquarters in Nairobi.
In later articles, such as the one in Annual Reviews of Anthropology, *Pilbeam has amplified on his changed position. In the 1970s, while working in Kenya and personally examining the skimpy bone fragments of "ancient man," he was forced to the conclusion there was no real evidence of any kind—anywhere—of man's supposed ape ancestors!
*LEAKEY SAYS IT IS ALL A QUESTION MARK
Apparently misery loves company.
For years, *Richard Leakey has tried to prove that man's half-ape ancestors were the Australopithecines of East Africa. But of these bones, Pilbeam said, "There is no way of knowing whether they are the ancestors to anything or not."
Shortly afterward, Richard Leakey himself summed up the problem on a Walter Cronkite Universe program, when he said that if he were to draw a family tree for man, he would just draw a large question mark. And he added that, not only was the fossil evidence far too scanty for any real certainty about anything related to man's evolutionary origins, but there was little likelihood that we were ever going to know it.
FAULTY DATING METHOD
A totally unreliable technique for dating ancient bones.
It should be mentioned that it has been the use of the notoriously unreliable potassium-argon dating technique that has enabled Leakey and others to come up with these immensely ancient dates for bones which are probably only a few hundred years old.
"It was the early use of the potassium-argon technique, in 1961, to date the lowest level at Olduvai Gorge, in Tanzania, that radically lengthened that known time span of hominoid evolution and ignited the explosion of knowledge about early man."—*Kenneth F. Weaver, "The Search for Our Ancestors" in National Geographic Magazine, November 1985, p. 589.
(For information on potassium dating, see Dating of Time in Evolution.)
More recently, *William Fix, another expert in the field of early man, wrote a scathing book, The Bone Peddlers, in which he examined in detail the subject of paleoanthropology, and showed that, not only do the anthropologists themselves doubt the validity of the "bone" evidence, but research and new discoveries have eliminated each of man's supposed ape-like ancestors from his family tree.
"The fossil record pertaining to man is still so sparsely known that those who insist on positive declarations can do nothing more than jump from one hazardous surmise to another and hope that the next dramatic discovery does not make them utter fools . . Clearly, some people refuse to learn from this. As we have seen, there are numerous scientists and popularizers today who have temerity to tell us that there is `no doubt' how man originated. If only they had the evidence . .
"I have gone to some trouble to show that there are formidable objections to all the subhuman and near-human species that have been proposed as ancestors."—*William R. Fix, The Bone Peddlers (1984), pp. 150-153.
A DONKEY BONE
Are we supposed to believe such confused people?
On May 14, 1984, the *Daily Telegraph, an Australian newspaper, carried the story of the latest hoax: "ASS TAKEN FOR MAN" was the headline.
A skull found in Spain and promoted as the oldest example of man in Eurasia, was later identified as that of a young donkey!
A three-day scientific symposium had been scheduled, so that the experts could examine and discuss the bone which had already been named, Orce Man, for the southern Spanish town near which it had been found. The French caused problems, however. Scientists from Paris showed that Orce Man was a skull fragment of a four-month-old donkey. The embarrassed Spanish officials sent out 500 letters canceling the symposium.
CONCLUSION
A fictionalized "science."
"In view of many paleoanthropologists, the story of human evolution has been fictionalized to suit needs other than scientific rigor."—*B. Rensberger, "Facing the Past," in Science, October 1981, Vol. 81, pp. 41, 49.
"Compared to other sciences, the mythic element is greatest in paleoanthropology. Hypotheses and stories of human evolution frequently arise unprompted by data and contain a large measure of general preconceptions, and the data which do exist are often insufficient to falsify or even substantiate them. Many interpretations are possible. These books all provide new alternatives, some refining the subject with new information; all, in varying degrees, supplant the old myths with new ones."—*W. Hill, "Book Review," in American Scientist (1984), Vol. 72, pp. 188-189.
"The unscientific and doctrinaire character of this whole field of study is well-epitomized. So much glamor still attaches to the theme of the missing link, and to man's relationships with the animal world, that it may always be difficult to exercise from the comparative study of primates, living and fossil. The kind of myths which the unaided eye is able to conjure out of wishful thinking."—*S. Zuckerman, Beyond the Ivory Tower, (1970), p. 64.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
To the next topic in this series:
THE GLEN ROSE AND ANTELOPE SPRINGS TRACKS: Footprints from the past which haunt evolutionists.