ARTISTS TO THE AID OF EVOLUTION
Lacking any scientific evidence for their theories, evolutionists have used fraud, coercion, and lawsuits. They have also used artwork. 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: Artists to the Aid of Evolution
No One Really Knows What They Looked Like: Old bones do not provide enough information
Imaginative Paintings: It takes lots of supposing to do the job
Experts Know the Artwork Is Wrong: But the man on the street is not told that fact
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.
Are not the paintings drawn by artists of half-man / half-ape creatures enough proof! Surely, they ought to know, for they ought to be able to tell from the bones. This is the story of how artists are helping to "prove" evolution to the public.
Over the decades, a number of outstanding artists have offered their abilities to the service of proving evolutionary theory. Looking at some old bones, they have imagined what dinosaurs and many other extinct creatures might have looked like. The finished artwork has been presented to the public as another "scientific fact." In regard to ancient man, these artists have excelled in painting portraits of imaginary half-apes / half-men who never really existed.
NO ONE REALLY KNOWS WHAT THEY LOOKED LIKE
Old bones do not provide enough information.
In reality, neither scientists nor artists are able to tell from an examination of a few scattered and partly missing bones what their owner once looked like. Even if all the bones were there, the experts would be unable to tell what the eyes, ears, nose, and lips looked like. Such things as skin color, hair color, general skin texture, the presence or absence of a beard,—all of these things and more would not be identifiable.
But, just now, we will let the experts speak:
"Bones say nothing about the fleshy parts of the nose, lips, or ears. Artists must create something between an ape and a human being; the older the specimen is said to be, the more ape-like they make it."—*B. Rensberger, "Ancestors: A Family Album," Science Digest 89:34-43 (1981).&127
*Hooton tells us that anthropologists should not be doing this:
"No anthropologist is justified in reconstructing the entire skeleton of an unfamiliar type of fossil man from parts of the skullcap, one or two teeth, and perhaps a few oddments of mandible [jaw bone] and long bones . . Inferences concerning the missing parts are very precarious, unless more complete skeletons of other individuals of the same type are available to support the reconstruction."—*Earnest Albert Hooton, Apes, Man and Morons (1970), p. 115.
There is really not enough evidence on which to base artistic conclusions:
"When a scientist finds a single bone or tooth which supposedly dates back a few hundred thousand years, on what basis of measurement can he draw a picture of the whole creature? When the first fossil bones were discovered many years ago, there were no other bones with which to compare them, no other measurement by which to judge them, so the first drawings of ancient men were the products of imagination. The men who drew the first pictures imagined man as rather ape-like in appearance, so they drew him with the facial features of a creature sort of halfway between a man and an ape. They gave him a slightly crouching stance, a long face with huge jaws, and a look of doubtful intelligence. This picture has stayed with us down through the years."—David D. Riegle, Creation or Evolution? (1971), pp. 47- 48.
The public ought to be warned of these efforts of evolutionary advocates to provide evidence—which is no evidence—in support of their theory:
"Put not your faith in reconstructions. Some anatomists model reconstructions of fossil skulls by building up the soft parts of the head and face upon a skull cast and thus produce a bust purporting to represent the appearance of the fossil man in life. When, however, we recall the fragmentary condition of most of the skulls, the faces usually being missing, we can readily see that even the reconstruction of the facial skeleton leaves room for a good deal of doubt as to details. To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can, with equal facility, model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public."—*Earnest Albert Hooton, Up from the Apes (1946), p. 329.
IMAGINATIVE PAINTINGS
It takes lots of supposing to do the job.
Imagination takes the place of actual characteristics.
"The flesh and hair on such reconstructions have to be filled in by resorting to the imagination. Skin color; the color, form, and distribution of the hair; the form of the features; and the aspect of the face—of these characters we know absolutely nothing for any prehistoric men."—*James C. King, The Biology of Race (1971), pp. 135, 151.
Imagination takes the place of evidence.
"The vast majority of artists' conceptions are based more on imagination than on evidence . . Artists must create something between an ape and a human being; the older the specimen is said to be, the more ape-like they make it."—*"Anthro Art," Science Digest, April 1981, p. 41.
No one really know what they looked like.
"No one can be sure just what any extinct hominoid looked like."—*Donald C. Johanson and *Maitland A. Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (1981), p. 286.
There is not enough evidence to remove it from the land of fantasy.
"[There is not] enough evidence from fossil material to take theorizing out of the realms of fantasy."—*New Scientist, August 3, 1972, p. 259 [book review of Bjorn Kurten's Not from the Apes: Man's Origins and Evolution].
We can hardly differentiate between skulls of different races today, and the few ancient remains found have even less distinctive factors.
"Now it is probable that there are no racial types in which the skull characters are more distinctive than Negroes and Eskimos; and yet experts fail to agree, when faced with single skulls, whose claims to these types are in question. If a decision proves so difficult in such cases, it will be realized how much more difficult, or even impossible, it will be to identify by reference to limited skeletal remains, minor racial groups with less distinctive characters."—*W.E. le Gros Clark, The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution (1964), p. 54.
The ineffable stupidity of saying we know when we do not know.
"Just as we are slowly learning that primitive men are not necessarily savages, so we must learn to realize that the early men of the Ice Age were neither brute beasts nor semi-apes nor cretins. Hence the ineffable stupidity of all attempts to reconstruct the Neanderthal or even the Peking Man—exaggeratedly hirsute [hairy] plaster figures of bestial mien [face] glower savagely at us in museums all over the world their features usually chocolate-brown in color, their hair wild and unkempt, their jaws prognathous [jaws that project beyond the upper portion of the face], and their foreheads receding—and this despite the fact that we have absolutely no idea what color Paleolithic man's skin was or how his hair grew and virtually no idea of his physiognomy. The American authority, T.D. Stewart, rightly pointed out in 1948 the impossibility of reconstructing hair, eyes, nose, lips or facial expression. The probabilities are that the expression of early man was not less benign than our own,' he wrote."—*Ivar Lissner, Man, God, and Magic (1961), p. 304.
EXPERTS ADMIT THE ARTWORK IS WRONG
But the man in the street is not told that fact.
Every drawing is wrong.
"Every single book on anthropology, every article on the evolution of man, every drawing of man's family tree will have to be junked. They are apparently wrong."—*Joel N. Shurkin, "He's Shaking Mankind's Family Tree," Boston Globe, December 4, 1973, p. 1.
*Thomas Huxley's drawings illustrate the pretense of later pictorial attempts: Apes do not stand erect and man does not stand partly erect, so Huxley gave them both the same stance.
"But Huxley placed more emphasis on similarities in his illustrations than dissimilarities, because he wanted to show that the organization of the human skeleton is, in principle, that of an anthropoid. Therefore he depicted the great apes in an `erect' position but man in not a completely erect one."—*F. Weindenreich, Apes, Giants, and Men (1946), pp. 6- 7.
Skewed and twisted descriptions stand in place of solid evidence.
"In the great majority of cases the descriptions of the specimens that have been provided by their discoverers have been so turned as to indicate that the fossils in question have some special place or significance in the line of direct human descent, as opposed to that of the family of apes. It is . . unlikely that they could all enjoy this distinction.
"In the case of primate evolution the inferences are sometimes very insecurely based because of inadequacies of the evidence."—*Julian Huxley, Editor, Evolution as a Process (1958), pp. 300-302.
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Forward to the next topic in this series:
ANTHROPOLOGY CLASS DISCUSSION: A student fills some gaps in his professor's thinking.