Chapter 13a:
Ancient Man
Why there is no Evidence Humans Evolved from Anything
Here are more items found in California:
"[In California was found] A mortar for grinding gold ore at a depth of 300 feet [914 dm] in a mining tunnel; a mortar and pestle weighing 30 pounds [13.6 kg], beads, perforated stones; a 40-pound [18 kg] oval granite dish. One human skull was found at a depth of 130 feet [396 dm] under five beds of lava and tufa separated by layers of gravel. Evidently man came before the lava flows, and deep canyons have been cut by rivers since the lava flows.
"An amazing number of stone relics have been found among the bones of the camel, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, horse, and other animals. The findings are almost always in gold-bearing rock or gravel."—Creation Research Society Quarterly, June 1974, p. 23.
An elaborately carved rock and other worked stones, weighing up to 800 pounds [362.8 kg], were found hundreds of feet below the surface and reported in a California newspaper (* Frank Edwards, Strange World, 1964).
MAN-MADE MARKINGS ON PETRIFIED WOOD—Scientists believe that petrified wood is millions of years old. The Petrified Forest in Arizona contains some of the largest examples of such materials. Man-made pre-mineralization markings have been found on specimens of petrified wood in various localities.
1 - Shaped Wood in India. Several years ago, small pieces of hand-worked petrified wood were found in India. The wood clearly was shaped prior to fossilization, and was later reported in a journal on anthropology (*Anthropos, 1963-64; 1969, 921-40).
2 - Cut Wood in Lombardy. Several petrified pieces of wood were found in Lombardy, Italy. Prior to mineralization, these pieces had been hacked by a cutting instrument. The wood was dated to the Pliocene Epoch, which is considered to be prior to the appearance of man (*Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute, 13:343).
MAN-MADE MARKINGS ON BONES—Bones of animals have been found with man-made markings on them, and are thought by scientists to have predated mankind in the localities in which they were recovered,
1 - Cuttings on Rhinoceros Bone. The fossilized bone of a rhinoceros had man-made cutting marks on it. The bone was found at a site near Paris, and no rhinoceros has lived in Europe throughout recorded history.
2 - Formed Rhinoceros Horn. A sharp tool was apparently used on a rhinoceros horn that was found in Ireland (*Robert F. Heizer, Man’s Discovery of His Past, 1962).
3 - Notched Dinosaur Bones. This discovery came as a distinct surprise to the paleontologists: Two saurian [dinosaur] bones were found, both with distinctly scored markings at regular intervals. The cuts appeared as if made by knives of some sort. Since the bones came from a Jurassic deposit, it was decided that the markings could not have been made by human beings (*Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute, 23:211-3).
In summary of the above finds: (1) All historical dates only go back several thousand years and indicate a young age for mankind. (2) Because of the locations where they have been found, human fossil remains, tracks, and man-made objects, show that "prehistoric eras and epochs" are not very old after all.
THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAN—(*#14/15 The Human Brain*) The mind of man is an unanswerable hurdle to the concept of evolution. The theory teaches that natural selection, plus help from random mutations, made cross-species changes in plants and animals—and produced life forms adapted to survive in their environment. But the human brain does not fit into evolutionary theory. Man’s mind is far too advanced for his survival needs!
This was a crucial issue and basic to *Darwin’s theory: No creature could have much more ability than the other creatures around it; and the "struggle for existence" and the "survival of the fittest" could not produce evolutionary change. In the case of man’s brain, *Darwin assumed that Europeans were highly intelligent because they had competed against third-world natives who, *Darwin thought, only had intelligence slightly above that of apes. But *Wallace had lived with natives in primitive tropical lands—and had discovered their minds to be as advanced as those of Europeans; their knowledge was different, but not their mental faculties. Therefore, all mankind had intelligence far in advance of any animal in the world, and Darwinian theory was hopelessly wrong.
"Wallace, Charles Darwin’s ‘junior partner’ in discovering natural selection, had a disturbing problem: He did not believe their theory could account for the evolution of the human brain.
"In the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin had concluded that natural selection makes an animal only as perfect as it needs to be for survival in its environment. But it struck Wallace that the human brain seemed to be a much better piece of equipment than our ancestors really needed.
"After all, he reasoned, humans living as simple tribal hunter-gatherers would not need much more intelligence than gorillas. If all they had to do was gather plants and eggs and kill a few small creatures for a living, why develop a brain capable, not merely of speech, but also of composing symphonies and doing higher mathematics?
"Neverthess, Wallace’s problem remains unsolved; the emergence of the human mind is still a mystery."—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 457.
In marked contrast with the remarkable intelligence of man, which is so far above any other living creature in our world, is the fact that the apes, which according to Darwin man descended from, have such poor minds that they hardly know how to devise tool-using by themselves! After discussing tool-using birds and animals, *MacRoberts explains that the reason the apes are thought to be so intelligent is because people assume they are.
"If Leakey had seen the Galapagos finch prying and stabbing hidden grubs with cactus spines, or watched California woodpeckers chisel trees into collective ‘granaries’ for storing acorns, would he say we would have to change the definition of man—or birds?
"No, because primatologists are like doting parents. Anything ‘their’ monkeys or apes do is remarkably clever, because they expect them to be bright. And anything other animals do is ‘just instinct,’ because they’re supposed to be far removed from man."—*Michael MacRoberts, quoted in R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 438.
THE LANGUAGES OF MAN—(*#16/1 Where Languages Lead Us*) Just as the human eye is amazing, so human speech is utterly astounding. How could mankind gain the ability to speak, when all other creatures can only utter a few sounds? *Chomsky of MIT, the world’s foremost linguist, said this:
"Human langauge appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world."—*Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (1972), p. 67.
A leading evolutionist spokesman added this comment:
"Human language is absolutely distinct from any system of communication in other animals. That is made most clear by comparison with animal utterances, which most nearly resemble human speech and are most often called ‘speech.’ Non-human vocables are, in effect, interjections. They reflect the individual’s physical or, more frequently, emotional state. They do not, as true language does, name, discuss, abstract, or symbolize."—*George Gaylord Simpson, "The Biological Nature of Man," in Science, April 22, 1966, p. 476.
"Experiments with chimpanzees who ‘talk’ in sign language show that they can signal for things and get them, but ‘they don’t describe. They don’t argue . . They have no value system. They don’t make moral decisions . . They don’t know they’re going to die . . We must never judge animals as if they were just badly brought-up human beings."—*Sir John Eccles, "Photons, Philosophy, and Eccles," in Washington Post, March 15, 1981, p. F-1.
*Lancaster and others spent long periods studying the chattering of monkeys and trying to relate it to human language, but without success.
"The more that is known about it, the less these systems seem to help in the understanding of human language."—*J.B. Lancaster, The Origin of Man (1965).
Human language buffaloes the scientists. There is no way it can fit into evolutionary theories. Language marks an unbridgeable gulf between man and all other life forms on our planet.
"The use of language is very closely associated with the superior thinking ability of humans. In his ability to communicate man differs even more from other animals than he does in his learning or thinking . . We know absolutely nothing about the early stages in the development of language."—*Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture (1955), pp. 8-9.
Human language is astounding. As far back as we go, it has always been totally developed! Yet all available data informs us that writing did not begin until after 2500 B.C.!
Earlier in his life, the author studied three ancient languages as well as several contemporary ones, and he was surprised to find that ancient ones were much more complicated than modern ones!
In ancient times, some races would alternately write backward and forward: one line from left to right, and the next line from right to left, etc. Boustrophon, the Greeks called it; "as the ox turns with the plow," all the while using no paragraphs, and not even spaces between word and sentences! The result was very complicated reading, to say the least.
Here is how the Greeks would write the above paragraph about 1700 years ago. They obviously had smarter brains back then:
INANCIENTTIMESSOMERACESWOULD
ALTERNATELYWRITEBACKWARDAND
FORWARDONALINEFROMLEFTTORIGHT
ANDTHENEXTLINEFROMRIGHTTOLEFTETC
BOUSTROPHONTHEGREEKSCALLEDITAS
THEOXTURNSWITHTHEPLOWALLTHE
WHILEUSINGNOPARAGRAPHSANDNOT
EVENSPACESBETWEENWORDSAND
SENTENCESTHERESULTWAS VERY
COMPLICATEDREADINGTOSAYTHELEAST
Here is how they wrote about it in Boustrophon, about 2500 years ago, when they were even smarter!
INANCIENTTIMESSOMERACESWOULD
DNADRAWKCABETIRWYLETANRETLA
FORWARDONALINEFROMLEFTTORIGHT
CTETFELOTTHGIRMORFENILTXENEHTDNA
BOUSTROPHONTHEGREEKSCALLEDITAS
EHTLLAWOLPEHTHTIWSNRUTXOEHT
WHILEUSINGNOPARAGRAPHSANDNOT
DNASDROWNEEWTEBSECAPSNEVE
SENTENCESTHERESULTWAS VERY
TSAELEHTYASOTGNIDAERDETACILPMOC
In the above paragraph, the first line went from left to right, and the second from right to left.
The far more complicated pattern of ancient languages indicates that people back then had better mental capacities than we do today! Although having better minds, they lacked our written records. It was only the invention of paper and printing that placed us at an advantage.
"The so-called ‘primitive languages’ can throw no light on language origins since most of them are actually more complicated in grammar than the tongues spoken by civilized people."—*Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture (1955), p. 477.
The very earliest languages were more highly complex than any language we have today. If you question this, take a college course in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. When words joined, one letter connecting them would be changed. ("It is like this," ancient Greek became: "ITISLIKETHIS." In earlier Sanskrit, it would be written, "ITQSNIKEYHIS." When those words were placed with other words, the connecting letters would become still different!
In our own day there are no "primitive languages" either.
"There are no primitive languages, declares Dr. Mason, who is a specialist on American languages. The idea that ‘savages’ speak in a series of grunts, and are unable to express many ‘civilized’ concepts, is very wrong. In fact, many of the languages of non-literate peoples are far more complex than modern European ones, Dr. Mason said . . Evolution in language, Dr. Mason has found, is just the opposite of biological evolution. Languages have evolved from the complex to the simple."—*Science News Letter, September 3, 1955, p. 148.
It is the studied belief of the present writer that we can estimate the mental powers of ancient peoples, compared to our own, by comparing our written languages with theirs.
"Many ‘primitive’ languages . . are often a great deal more complex and more efficient than the languages of the so-called higher civilizations."—*Ashley Montague, Man: His First Million Years, p. 116.
"No group of human beings today, even those living in a stone-age culture, speak what could be conceived of as a primitive language. Furthermore, no known language in all of history was in any sense primitive. Elgin remarks, ‘The most ancient languages for which we have written texts—Sanskrit, for example—are often far more intricate and complicated in their grammatical forms than many contemporary languages.’ "—Les Bruce, Jr., "On the Origin of Language," in Up with Creation (1978), p. 264. [Bruce was completing his doctorate in linguistics when he wrote this article.]
There is a world of significance in the fact that ancient languages were always more complicated than those now spoken by mankind. This clearly points us to the fact that ancient men were more intelligent than those living on earth today.
"Many other attempts have been made to determine the evolutionary origin of language, and all have failed . . Even the peoples with least complex cultures have highly sophisticated languages, with complex grammar and large vocabularies, capable of naming and discussing anything that occurs in the sphere occupied by their speakers . . The oldest language that can reasonably be reconstructed is already modern, sophisticated, complete from an evolutionary point of view."—*George Gaylord Simpson, "Biological Nature of Man," Science, April 1966, p. 477.
*Simpson, former professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at Harvard, has been one of the leading evolutionary spokesmen of the mid-20th century. Acknowledging the vast gulf that separates animal communication from human languages, he admits that the most ancient human languages were the most complex.
"Yet it is incredible that the first language could have been the most complex."—*George Gaylord Simpson, Biology and Man (1969), p. 116.
"The evolution of language, at least within the historical period, is a story of progressive simplification."—*Albert C. Baugh, History of the English Language, 2nd Edition (1957), p. 10.
In spite of what the evolutionists claim, there is no evidence anywhere of evolution! It is not to be found in plants, in fish, in birds, in animals, in man, in fossils, nor in the languages of mankind.
Languages not only reveal that the most ancient of our ancestors were more intelligent than we are today, but they also clarify where the first people lived after the Flood. In great waves, the families of man moved outward from Anatolia (eastern Turkey) and northern Babylonia (northern Iraq) into all the world. And linguists today can trace the path.
MONKEY TALK—(*#18/3 Primate behavior studies*) A lot of work has been expended by evolutionists studying apes in Africa and in cages in Europe and America. They had hoped to find instances of great intelligence in them, showing that they are almost like us. But all such efforts have been doomed to failure.
*MacRoberts, an evolutionist researcher, deplores the fact that the great apes are so stupid:
" ‘Given their hands and huge brains, it’s amazing apes and monkeys don’t do a lot more tool-using. They’re incredibly stupid.’ "—*Michael MacRoberts, quoted in R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 438.
Since we have been discussing human language, let us digress for a moment to ape language. It has been widely reported that apes can use symbolic language, and therefore have a very high level of intelligence. This is supposed to be another "proof" that they are our ancestors.
Without taking time to detail the matter, it has been found that what really happens is that the apes do what they think their trainers want them to do, so they will receive treats! It is said that the humans are unconsciously communicating "symbolically," and that the animal gives the desired response which will bring the food reward.
*B.F. Skinner found that even tiny-brained pigeons can use "symbolic communication" just as well as apes! (For much more on this, see Duane Gish, "Can Apes Learn Language?" in Evolution: the Challenge of the Fossil Record, 1985, pp. 209-212; John W. Klotz, "Animal Speech," in Studies in Creation, 1985, pp. 154-157.)
*Herbert S. Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University, spent five years teaching a chimp named "Nim" to talk. But Terrace later wrote that he had decided that Nim was only doing that which pleased his keepers, and that much of it was just chance arrangements which had been misinterpreted as "verbal" intelligence.
"[By the end of the five years, in 1978] it was thought that Nim understood 300 signs, could produce 125 of them and had put thousands of ‘sentences’ together . . In 1979, Terrace wrote a book, Nim, in which he disavowed his previous results."—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 328.
*Noam Chomsky, professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been considered to be one of the world’s leading linguists. He worked for years with apes, trying to teach them language.
"There is no reason to suppose that the ‘gaps’ [between human language and animal sounds] are bridgeable. There is no more of a basis for assuming an evolutionary development of ‘higher’ from ‘lower’ stages, in this case, than there is for assuming an evolutionary development from breathing to walking."—*Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (1972), p. 68.
"Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world."—*Op. cit., p. 67.
The thinking, reasoning power of the mind is located in the "gray matter," which is the cerebral cortex—the surface area of the frontal lobes. There is a certain small area in the frontal lobe called ‘Broca’s convolution,’ which appears to be the speech center in man. Monkeys and apes do not have this area at all.
"The most remarkable change in brain form, passing up the scale from monkey to man, is the comparative enlargement of the frontal and anterior lobes, and there can be little doubt that this enlargement is associated with man’s supremacy in the intellectual sphere."—*1955 Annual Report, Smithsonian Institute, p. 436.
*George Gaylord Simpson is a well-known defender of evolutionism, but he said this:
"Human language is absolutely distinct from any system of communication in other animals. It is still possible, but it is unlikely, that we will ever know just when and how our ancestors began to speak."—*George Gaylord Simpson, "The Biological Nature of Man," in Science, April 22, 1966, pp. 476-477.
(Two of the next sections in this chapter, Ancient Cultures and As Far Back as We Can Go, parallel material in the section, Evidence from Civilization, to be found near the end of chapter 4 of this book, Age of the Earth. We refer you to that material for additional information.)
ANCIENT CULTURES—Scientists frequently note that the races and languages of man indicate that mankind appears to have migrated from a central point, located somewhere in the Near East or Asia Minor. This would agree with the conditions following the Flood, and the fact that the ark came to rest in eastern Turkey (see Genesis 8-9).
As the races moved outward, there would first be a brief interval which scientists call "the stone age," and then would begin pottery, agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy, towns, writing, etc. (But, in later centuries, some isolated cultures retrograded backward.)
The earliest pottery is found in the Near East; the earliest domestication of plants and animals is found there also. The earliest working in metals, the earliest towns and cities, and the earliest writing are also found there.
For additional information on this, see the following: Pottery: *Cyril Smith, "Materials and the Development of Civilization and Science," in Science, May 14, 1965, p. 908. Plants: *Hans Helbaek, "Domestication of Food Plants in the World," in Science, August 14, 1959, p. 365. Animal husbandry: *H. Cambel and *R.J. Braidwood, "An Early Farming Village in Turkey," in Scientific American, March 1970, p. 52. Metallurgy: *Cyril Smith op. cit., p. 910. Cities: *R.M. Adams, "The Origin of Cities," in Scientific American, September 1960, p. 154; Writing: *Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture, p. 110.
The earliest date in China goes back only to 2250 B.C., and in the Pacific Islands to around the turn of B.C. to A.D. (Much more information on the oldest dates of mankind will be found in chapter 4, Age of the Earth.)
Evolutionists tell us that 500,000 to 150,000 years ago, man developed a "modern brain." Then why did he wait until 5,000 years ago to begin using it?
Evolutionists tell us that man first originated in central Africa (because of ape bones they have found there, as discussed earlier in this chapter). Then why did all the earliest human cultural activities begin in the Near East—instead of central Africa?
Although attempts have been made to use recovered stone tools and other stone technology as a means of determining dates, it is now known that dates cannot be obtained from them.
"In archaeology it is now realized, despite long resistance, that dating and classification by means of technical typology, for example stone tools, is no longer possible in many cases."—*D.A. Bowen, Quarterly Geology (1978), p. 193.
THE EARLIEST DOMESTIC CROPS AND ANIMALS—Evidence of the earliest crops and domesticated animals is always in the Near East, generally in the plains below eastern Turkey where the Ararat Mountains are located.
Using carbon-14 dating (which tends to date too high), the earliest wheat cultivation originated in Palestine or Turkey about 7000 B.C. Very soon afterward, maize and other plants (including beans and lima beans) were cultivated in Central America and Peru. The earliest barley was in the Near East about 7000 B.C. The oldest corn dates back to 5200 B.C. in Mexico.
The first-known dogs and sheep from about the same time are found in the Near East. Sheep were domesticated very early, and are found in Iran dating back to 6700 B.C. At about the same date in Jericho, goats appeared. The first domesticated dogs appear in the Near East at about 6000 B.C. By the way, no evidence of evolution of dogs or any other animal in this listing has been found. The earliest pigs were kept in Iran by 7000 B.C. The first cats were kept, as now, primarily to protect against rodents, and date back to 3000 B.C., in Egypt, and 2000 B.C. in India.
The earliest remains of cattle come from Greece and date to about 6500 B.C. The earliest in Mesopotamia are dated to 4500 B.C. The humped cattle of India first appeared in Mesopotamia about 3000 B.C. Domesticated cattle were in Egypt by 3700 B.C. Indian water buffaloes were in Ur before 2500 B.C. and shortly after in northwest India.
The donkey was in Egypt by 3000 B.C. The horse is thought to have been first domesticated in Mesopotamia about 3000 B.C. The onager (type of donkey) drew chariots at Ur in 2500 B.C. The common donkey was used as a beast of burden in Egypt about 3000 B.C. The earliest camels appear to go back to 2000 B.C. for the one humped dromedary, and 1500 B.C. for the two humped Bactrian camel.
One expert (a confirmed evolutionist) says the earliest mention of the donkey as a domesticated animal is found in Genesis 22:3 (F.E. Zeuner, A History of Domestic Animals, 1963). The earliest use of the elephant as a beast of transport comes from India about 2500 B.C.
The pigeon and goose were domesticated by 7000 B.C., and the duck about the same time; all these first appeared in the Mesopotamia area. By 2000 B.C., they were in India. Pelicans were kept for their eggs in Egypt by 1400 B.C. Egyptians also had cormorants for fishing, and quails were first known in Egypt also.
The earliest domesticated animals in the Americas were late in coming. The alpaca and llama date back to 2550 B.C. in Peru.
"The dates, like 7000 B.C. given by Harlan and others for this near-eastern outburst of agriculture, probably collapse down to something like 3400 B.C. when the vagaries of the C-14 dating method are taken into account."—George Howe and Walter Lammerts, "Biogeography from a Creationist Perspective: II. The Origin and Distribution of Cultivated Plants," in Creation Research Society Quarterly, p. 8. [The Harland reference is as follows: J.R. Harland, "The Plants and Animals that Nourish Man," in Scientific American, 235(3):89-97; especially note pp. 94-95.]
What is the total picture from all the above? (1) With hardly any exception, the first domesticated plants and animals—and all types of them, whether domesticated or not domesticated, first appear in the Near East. (2) The earliest dates for those plants and animals by which mankind survives only go back to 7000 B.C. When those carbon-14 dates are corrected, they become 3000 B.C. dates. (For more information on carbon 14 and radiodating, see chapter 6, Inaccurate Dating Methods.)
What about the million years earlier, when man was supposed to have lived on planet earth? No mention, no history, nothing.
EVIDENCE FROM ANCIENT BRITAIN—An engineering professor at Oxford University wrote an unusual book in 1967, in which he described the advanced intelligence, learning, and skills of ancient peoples in what are now England and Scotland. Because of the large stone structures they built, he called them "megalithic peoples."
Over a period of 40 years, Some 600 megalithic sites were surveyed, which he dated to 2000-1600 B.C.; so he decided that Megalithic Man was an expert engineer, metrologist [expert in measuring], astronomer, geometrician, and boatbuilder.
"It is remarkable that 1000 years before the earliest mathematicians of classical Greece, people in these [British] islands not only had a practical knowledge of geometry and were capable of setting out elaborate geometrical designs, but could also set out ellipses based on Pythagorean triangles.
"We need not be surprised to find that their calendar was a highly developed arrangement involving an exact knowledge of the length of the year, or that they had set up many stations for observing the eighteen-year cycle of the revolution of the lunar nodes."—*A. Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain (1967), p. 3.
"A civilization which could carry a unit of length from one end of Britain to the other . . with an accuracy of 0.1 percent, and could call for the erection of 5,000 to 10,000 megaliths, must have made demands of its engineers . . [and] methods of obtaining time from the stars must have been well understood. To obtain time from the stars the date must be known, and this came from the sun at the calendar sites."—*Op. cit., p. 2.
"Megalithic man was a competent engineer. Witness how he could set out large projects to an accuracy approaching 1 in 100, and how he could transport and erect blocks of stone weighing up to 50 tons [45 mt]. He used the 3, 4, 5 right-angle extensively. He also knew the 5, 12, 13 right-angle triangle, the 8, 15, 17, and the 12, 35, 37 . . These triangles were used in a peculiar geometry, in which he constructed rings, set out in stone, of various shapes: circular, egg-shaped, elliptical, etc."—*Op. cit., p. 9.
These ancient peoples of Britain understood levers, fulcrums, foundations, sheerlegs, slings, and ropes. They knew how to make and use highly accurate measuring rods. Just as modern surveyors do, on sloping ground they only made horizontal measurements. They could "range in" a straight line between mutually invisible points.
They built and sailed excellent boats. They understood currents, tides, and movements of the moon. They were able to predict which full or new moon would precede an eclipse of the moon or sun.
It is becoming clear that similar technical knowledge was widespread in the ancient world, and found among the Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Incas, and Aztecs. Very likely, this was knowledge received, through Noah, from the peoples who lived before the Flood.
Keep in mind that these Britons were already using this high-tech knowledge by 2000 B.C. The date of the Flood was only about 350 years before that time.
AS FAR BACK AS WE CAN GO—(*#15/9*) As far back as we can go, mankind has been just as intelligent—or more so—than men are today.
"Contrary to popular belief, man has long since ceased to evolve. Present day man, the human being that we are, does not differ essentially from the human being who lived 100,000 years ago . .
"If, by some miracle, it were possible to fetch a new-born child of that past age into our own time, and to bring him up as one of ours, he would become a man exactly like us."—*Science World, February 1, 1961, p. 5.
"Most of what is popularly regarded as evolution of man is social, not biological, evolution. Almost none of the human social evolution has been biological evolution."—*Encyclopedia Americana, 1956 edition, Vol. 10, pp. 613.
"Schoolboys of the little Sumerian county seat of Shadippur about 2000 B.C. had a ‘textbook’ with the solution of Euclid’s classic triangle problem seventeen centuries before Euclid . .
"Clay ‘textbooks’ of the schoolboys of Shadippur contain an encyclopedic outline of the scientific knowledge of their time, which will necessitate a sharp revision of the history of the development of science and, accordingly of the story of the development of the human mind . .
"It suggests that mathematics reached a stage of development about 2000 years B.C. that archaeologists and historians of science had never imagined possible."—*New York Times, January 8, 1950, pp. 1, 28.
Man’s brain capacity and his IQ have not increased down through the centuries. The ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and dwellers in the Mesopotamian and Indus Valleys of 5,000 years ago, were as intelligent as our generation. Indeed, certain facts which we have mentioned earlier indicate that they were decidedly more intelligent! Remember that they worked at a severe handicap, not having our paper and presses.
"There is evidence that Homo sapiens has not altered markedly for hundreds of thousands of years."—*Scientific American, November 1950.
There is no evidence anywhere of the evolution of the human mind.
EGYPTIAN DATING—Egyptian dating is considered by archaeologists to be the key to dating the historical remains of mankind in ancient times.
This topic is of such major importance that it deserves special attention. In spite of its significance, most of us have never heard much about it, much less the erroneous assumptions on which it is based.
(We had planned, in Chapter 21, Archaeological Dating, to briefly discuss this. But, due to a lack of space, we had to omit nearly all of the chapter. However, all the data is in our website.)
The next few paragraphs will reveal the importance of that chapter:
Here are three interesting facts: (1) Evolutionists declare that men have been alive on our planet for over a million years. (2) The earliest historical events date back only a few thousand years. These come from actual historical records. (3) The most ancient historical dates known to mankind come from ancient Egypt.
There appears to have been a studied effort to push those Egyptian dates back as far as possible, in order to help lengthen out the historical timespan of mankind. Highly conjectural assumptions have been made as the basis of this Egyptian dating system.
Although the resulting earlier placement of the earliest Egyptian dates to a point further back in history only involves at the most a few centuries, yet it has the effect of negating a majority of the chronologies given in that most accurate of ancient books: the Bible.
Those displaced archeological dates have had the effect of nullifying the value of important archeological discoveries, as they relate to Biblical events.
A USELESS SEARCH—(*#17/2* How to Identify Human Bones) 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 by *Clarence Darrow in the small courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, as a great proof of evolution. Earlier in this chapter, we learned that Java Man later turned out to be just another fake. (Much more information on this court trial, which so heavily influenced forthcoming legislative actions all across America, will be found on our website in chapter 30, The Scopes Trial.)
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, "Homanid Collarbone Exposed as Dolphin’s Rib," in New Scientist, April 28, 1983, p. 199).
DOLPHIN’S RIB—A dolphin’s rib was called a "human collar-bone"! Afterward, laughing at the obvious foolishness of it all, someone said it should be named "Flipperpithecus"!
*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, a University of California anthropologist, said this: "The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone" (*Timothy White, quoted in New Scientist, April 28, 1983, p. 199). 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 we have already noted, "hominid" is the name for the mythical half-man/half-ape that evolutionists have, for decades been searching for,—yet without success. It is a sad state of affairs when the only evidence that something exists is the theory it is found in.
ARTISTS TO THE AID OF EVOLUTION—(*#11/7 Artists to the Aid of Evolution*) Are not the paintings drawn by artists of half-men/half-ape creatures enough proof that we have an ape ancestry! Surely, they ought to know, for they ought to be able to tell from the bones.
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 though it were 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.
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 apelike they make it."—*B. Rensberger, "Ancestors: A Family Album," Science Digest, 89:34-43 (1981).
*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, Men and Morons (1970), p. 115.
There is really not enough evidence on which to base artistic conclusions. 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.
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. They are paid to produce something halfway between an ape and a human being."—*"AnthroArt," Science Digest, April 1981, p. 41.
*Johanson, a leading expert at trying to locate ancient hominids in Africa, declares that no one really knows what they looked like.
"No one can be sure just what any extinct hominid looked like."—*Donald C. Johanson and *Maitland A. Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (1981), p. 286.
It is all a land of fantasy.
"[There is not] enough evidence from fossil material to take our 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].
PILBEAM CHANGES HIS MIND—*David Pilbeam of the Boston Museum was a lifetime expert in the field of paleoanthropology (the study of fossils). In an article written for Human Nature magazine in June 1978, entitled, "Rearranging our Family Tree," he reported that discoveries since 1976 had radically changed his view of human origins and man’s early ancestors. Pilbeam ranked so high in the field, that he was the adviser to the government of Kenya in regard to the establishment of an international institute for the study of human origins. Kenya has for decades been the center of hominid research, because of the efforts of *Richard Leakey and his mother, *Dr. Mary Leakey 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," *Pilbeam was forced to the conclusion there was no real evidence of any kind—anywhere—of man’s supposed ape ancestors!
LEAKEY ADMITS THE TRUTH—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. That is an astounding admission, considering that it comes from the leading hominid hunter of the last half of the 20th century. At that time, *Leakey gave up looking for old bones, and began championing animal conservation in Kenya.
DATED BY POTASSIUM-ARGON—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. See chapter 6, Inaccurate Dating Methods.
"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 the known time span of hominid evolution and ignited the explosion of knowledge about early man."—*F. Weaver, "The Search for Our Ancestors" in National Geographic Magazine, November 1985, p. 589.
NO HOMINIDS AT ALL—There are no half-ape ancestors! None have been found. No fossils exist. There are no old bones!
More recently, *William R. 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. He 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 apelike 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 Fix, The Bone Peddlers (1984), pp. 150-153.
ORCE MAN—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!
The bone had been found in the Andalusia region of Spain; and 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 where 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.
THE SEARCH FOR GLORY—Fame and long-term financial support awaits the man who finds a few scraps of bones and declares that they belong to our half-ape ancestors. We have found in this chapter that this has happened over and over again. Yet in every instance, either the find is later falsified or the finder later renounces his efforts as useless.
"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 the whole of this 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 exorcise [remove] from the comparative study of Primates, living and fossil, the kind of myths which the unaided eye is able to conjure out of a well of wishful thinking."—*S. Zuckerman, Beyond the Ivory Tower (1970), p. 64.
THE STORY OF PILTDOWN MAN—(*#6/7 Piltdown Man / #10 The Story of Piltdown Man [more complete than here]*) Whether some like it or not, the story of the Piltdown hoax will ever stand as a great epoch in the history of evolutionary presentations. Other evolutionary frauds have repeatedly been perpetrated and later uncovered. But the Piltdown hoax was the most shaking of the exposés. This is because, when it finally occurred, Piltdown Man had been proclaimed as the grand proof that man evolved from apes.
Here is a masterful story of "skull duggery:" The story of Piltdown Man:
*Charles Dawson, a Sussex lawyer, was walking along a farm road close to Piltdown Common, Retching (Sussex), England one day, when he "noticed that the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district." Upon inquiry, he said he was "astonished" to learn that they had been dug from a gravel bed on a farm. He determined that he must go find where this "strange gravel" came from, although no one else in the community had ever considered the gravel strange.
Relating the incident later in December 1912, *Dawson said that that walk on the road took place "several years ago." This would put it in 1909 or 1910. It is believed that none other than *Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the imaginative inventor of the Sherlock Holmes detective mystery stories and a confirmed atheist, was involved along with *Dawson, in initially developing the idea for this fraudulent placement and later "discovery" of bones.
"Shortly afterwards," Charles Dawson visited the gravel pit (located about halfway between Uckfield and Haywards Heath, interestly enough, only a few miles from the mansion where Charles Darwin lived most of his life) and found two men digging gravel. He asked them if they had found any "bones or other fossils," and they told him No. He said that he then urged them to watch for such things, for they might find some in the future.
Not long after, he "just happened" to walk by the gravel pit again one morning—and was met by an excited workman who said that he found part of a skull in the gravel just after arriving at work! Describing it afterward, Dawson said that "it was a small portion of unusually thick parietal bone that looked as if it might be human and 300,000 years old." That was a lot to figure out at a glance.
Mr. Dawson made immediate search, but could find nothing else in the gravel pit. It was not until "some years later," in the autumn of 1911, on another visit to the spot, that Dawson found another and larger piece of bone. This time it was part of the frontal region of a skull, and included a portion of the ridge extending over the left eyebrow. He just happened to walk over to the gravel pit that day—and there it was, lying there with part of it exposed to the surface!
A short time thereafter, he just happened to have *Dr. Arthur Smith Woodward, head of the Department of Geology at the British Museum of Natural History, with him on the day he found the all-important jawbone at the gravel pit. As Woodward looked on,—Dawson dug down and there it was!
This "magnificent discovery" came at just the right time. Both *Charles Darwin and *Thomas Huxley had died; and, although "fossil human bones" had been dug up in various places in far countries, such as the Neanderthal, none of them were of much use to the cause. They were all clearly human.
What was needed was a half-million-year-old half-ape/half-human appearing skull and jawbone. And where better a place to find such old bones than in perpetually damp England, where even bones half a century old normally have already turned back to dust.
Woodward was an avid paleontologist, and had written many papers on fossil fish. Dawson and Woodward had many long talks together over those bones.
Then *Arthur Keith, an anatomist, was called in. Keith was one of the most highly respected scientists in England. Author of several classic works, he had all the credentials of respectability: a doctorate in medicine, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Fellow of the Royal Society, President of the Royal Anthropological Institute, plus membership in the Anatomical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
There was more talk. Then *Grafton Elliot Smith, a renowned brain specialist, was brought into the circle. Thus was gathered together a team of scientists that was one of the most respected in the British Isles. —And the subject of their penetrating conversations: some bones that were not all there.
The lower jaw was too big for a human skull but, significantly, the upper jaw was entirely missing, and with it part of the lower jaw—and the important lower canine teeth. Also missing were the mating parts for the jaw hinge. That which was missing was exactly that which would have shown (1) whether or not the lower jaw, which was apelike, was from a human or an ape, and (2) whether the lower jaw fitted with the upper skull bones, which were obviously human.
The skull itself consisted only of several pieces. This meant that the size of the braincase could not be determined. The pieces might fit a larger braincase or a small one; there was no way of knowing. Keith, although an ardent evolutionist like the others, was more open to evidence, and theorized 1,500 cubic centimeters for the volume of the braincase; whereas Woodward thought it was only 1,070 (midway between an ape [600 cc.] and a human [averaging 1,800 cc.]). Keith’s estimate, which was slightly larger than some modern men, was made on the basis of the larger jaw. But his estimate angered the other men. Such an estimate would ruin a lot of planning and work. Then *Teilhard de Chardin, an ardent evolutionist, although a Jesuit priest at a nearby seminary, found an apelike canine tooth in that gravel pit. Keith relented at this, and the men agreed on a brain capacity of 1,200 cc.
With this miserly collection of a few bone fragments, the scientists "reconstructed" the entire head of what they proudly proclaimed to be "Piltdown Man." Here at last, they triumphantly declared, was the "long-awaited missing link."
Since Latin names are always supposed to prove something, they named it Eoanthropus Dawsoni, which stands for "Dawson’s Dawn Man." That name made everything sound scientific.
On December 16, 1912, the discovery was officially announced at the Geological Society. The press went wild. Here was a sensation that would sell newspapers. Many people accepted it; many others did not.
On August 29, 1913, Teilhard stayed overnight with Dawson and then went with him the next day to the Piltdown pit. And there it was! Another of the two missing canine teeth! It was right there, not far under the gravel in the pit. Imagine that: just setting there, beautifully preserved for 300,000 years, washed by stream water and dampened by ages of British fog, preserved as nicely as though this were the Egyptian desert—waiting for Dawson and Teilhard to find it.
This was the crucial third piece of evidence and was duly reported at the 1913 meeting of the Geological Society.
Along with that tooth was found a Stegodon (elephant) tooth. That was helpful; for it provided evidence that the bones must indeed be very, very ancient.
More recently, scientists have analyzed that particular Stegodon tooth—and found it to contain a remarkably high level of radioactivity (from an ancient inflow of 0.1 percent uranium oxide into it). The radioactive level of the tooth was far too high for the British Isles, but equal to what one would find in Stegodon teeth being recovered at that time in the dry climate of lchkeul, Tunisia. It just so happened that, from 1906 to 1908, Teilhard, an avid fossil collector for many years, had lived in North Africa and was known to have stayed for a time at Ichkeul near Bizerta in North Tunisia, a site where Stegodon fossils are plentiful.
But not all were satisfied. Some scientists argued that the jaw and skull did not belong to the same individual. It was also observed that the few skull pieces could be arranged in a number of shapes and sizes to match any desired braincase and head shape that might be desired.
In reality, that is exactly what had been done. The parts had been carefully selected with consummate skill to provide only certain evidence while omitting certain other facts. The objective was to afterward reconstruct the head along ape lines; for the nearer the "reconstruction" could be pushed toward the brute beast, the more convincing it would appear as "scientific evidence" of evolution.
The objections offered were tossed aside and given little attention in scientific societies, and even less in the public press. Human bones do not sell as many papers as do human-ape bones.
The actual bones were placed in the British Museum, and plaster casts of the half-man/half-ape "reconstruction" were sent to museums all over the world.
By August 1913, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science discussed the Piltdown bones, another molar tooth and two nasal bones "had been found" in that same gravel pit. It was marvelous how many pieces of bone kept coming up close to the surface in that gravel pit!
Here we have bones well-preserved after 300,000 years in that damp gravel; whereas all the other millions of upon millions of bones of animals and men who had lived and died in that area during that supposed timespan were not to be found. Just that one set of skull pieces, jawbone, and teeth, and that was it. And they were carefully broken, with certain parts missing.
And everything was so close to the surface. According to strata theory, they should have been far below the surface.
But wait a minute! Where does gravel come from? It is washed in from stream beds. We thought the perpetual dryness of Egyptian sands was needed to preserve bones. But streambeds flowing in perpetually damp England did just as well in preserving 300,000-year-old bones! Well, back to the story.
In their final reconstruction of the bones, the men put their solitary canine tooth on the right side of the lower jaw at an angle suggestive of an ape. That helped the cause!
It does not take much to fool people, and the reconstructionists worked with care and forethought. With a human skull and an ape skull jaw before them as they worked, they shaped the plaster to produce an "apeman."
*Captain St. Barbe and *Major Marriott were two amateur paleontologists from Sussex who later reported that, on separate occasions, they had surprised Dawson in his office staining bones. Because of this, they suspected that his Piltdown bone finds were nothing more than fakes. Paleontologists know that the way to make bones look ancient is to stain them a darker color. Yet few would listen to the two men.
In 1915, Dawson sent Woodward a postcard announcing that he had found more fossils in a different gravel pit somewhere in the Piltdown area. No one has ever been told the location of that pit, however. But these new cranial bones, although even more fragmentary than the first ones, were with all due ceremony published by Woodward as "Piltdown II" finds in 1916, shortly after the death of Dawson.
Then came four other revelations:
(1) *W.K. Gregory, in 1914, and *G.S. Miller, in 1915, announced in scientific journals that the "right lower" canine tooth—was in reality a left upper tooth!
Scientists were not able to properly identify the only canine tooth in their possession; yet they were very definite in solemnly announcing that the Piltdown gravel was "in the main composed of Pliocene drift, probably reconstructed in the Pleistocene epoch." They had less dexterity with teeth in hand than with their specific dates millions of years in the past.
(2) Another complaint came from *Alex Hardlicka who, in Smithsonian Report for 1913, declared that the jaw and the canine tooth belonged to a chimpanzee.
(3) A dental anatomist examined the teeth in 1916, and duly reported that they had been filed. The file marks were quite obvious to see. But Keith and Woodward chose to ignore the report. They had good reason to ignore it.
(4) ln 1921, *Sir Ray Lankester, maintained that the skull and jaw never belonged to the same creature. His conclusion was confirmed by David Waterston of the University of London, King’s College.
But NOT ONE of the above four revelations ever reached the public press in any appreciable amount. A whole generation grew up with "Piltdown Man" as their purported ancestor. Textbooks, exhibits, displays, encyclopedias—all spread the good news that we came from apes after all.
Oil paintings of the discoverers were executed. The bones were named after Dawson, and the other men (Keith, Woodward, and Grafton) were knighted by British royalty for their part in the great discovery.
As for the bones of Piltdown Man, too many people were finding fault with them, so they were carefully placed under lock and key in the British Museum. Even such authorities as *Louis Leakey were permitted to examine nothing better than plaster casts of the bones. Only the originals could reveal the fraud, not casts of them.
As recently as 1946, the Encyclopedia Britannica (Vol. 14, p. 763) stated authoritatively, "Amongst British authorities there is agreement that the skull and jaw are parts of the same individual."
Decades of deception passed, and then the whole thing blew apart.
In 1953, *Kenneth Oakley (a British Museum geologist), in collaboration with Joseph Weiner (an Oxford University anthropologist) and *Le Gros Clark (professor of anatomy at Oxford) somehow managed to get their hands on those original bones! (How they accomplished that was remarkable.)
A new method for determining the relative age of bones by their fluorine content had been recently developed. This fluorine test revealed the bones to be quite recent.
Additional examination revealed that the bones of Piltdown Man had been carefully stained with bichromate in order to make them appear aged.
Drillings into the bone produced shavings, but should have produced powder if the bones had been ancient, but powder was not produced. Then that canine tooth was brought out—and found to have been filed, stained brown with potassium bichromate, and then packed with grains of sand. No wonder it took so long before the discovery could be announced; a lot of work had to first be done on those bones and teeth.
*Sir Solly Zuckerman, an expert in the field, later commented that the person or persons who perpetrated this deliberate and unscrupulous hoax, knew more about ape bones than did the scientists at the British Museum.
The fluorine test is a method of determining whether several bones were buried at the same time or at different times. This is done by measuring the amount of fluorine they have absorbed from ground water. It cannot give ages in years, but is a high-tech method of establishing ages of bones relative to each other.
"His [Oakley’s] radioactive fluorine test proved the skull fragments were many thousands of years older than the jaw. They could not be from the same individual unless, as one scientist put it, ‘the man died but his jaw lingered on for a few thousand years.’ "—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 363.
In 1955, Weiner, chief detective in the case, later published a book about the hoax, The Piltdown Forgery. He considered Dawson to have been the one who initiated the fake.
"Every important piece proved a forgery. Piltdown Man was a fraud from start to finish!"—*Alden P. Armagnac, "The Piltdown Hoax," Reader’s Digest, October 1956, p. 182.
Another good source is *William L. Straus, Jr., "The Great Piltdown Hoax," Science, February 26, 1954. Also of interest is *Robert Silverberg, Scientists and Scoundrels: A Book of Hoaxes (1965).
The House of Commons was so disturbed by the announcement of the fraud, that it came close to passing a measure declaring "that the House has no confidence in the Trustees of the British Museum . . because of the tardiness of their discovery that the skull of the Piltdown man is a partial fake."
"A member of the British Parliament proposed a vote of ‘no confidence’ in the scientific leadership of the British Museum. The motion failed to carry when another M.P. [member of Parliament] reminded his colleagues that politicians had ‘enough skeletons in their own closets.’ "—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 364.
Adding to the embarrassment of a government and nation, three years before the exposé the National Nature Conservancy had spent a sizeable amount of taxpayers’ money in transforming the area in and around that pit into the Piltdown Gravel Pit National Monument.
So that is the story of another exercise in evolutionary futility, the story of Piltdown Man.
THE APE WOMEN—In the 1960s, *Louis Leakey, desperately searching half-human/half-ape bones, without really finding any, decided that he needed some "ape women,"—who would dedicate the rest of their lives to watching great apes in the jungle and making notes on their human-like behavior. This, *Leakey thought, would help prove that we descended from them! With this in mind, he recruited *Jane Goodall to live with chimpanzees near Lake Tanganyika in Africa; *Diane Fossey to watch mountain gorillas in Zaire; and *Birute Galdikas to sit next to orangutans in Indonesia.
During subsequent decades, the three women made thousands of notes, with none of them useful to the cause of evolution. It was discovered that the great apes have less sense than many birds and small mammals. The ape wrinkles its nose, scratches it back, and picks a tick out of its fur and eats it. That is about it.
One of the "ape women," *Diane Fossey, went insane in the process. She gradually retrograded toward her beloved gorillas. She became withdrawn, irritable, and vicious. Gradually, she became more and more furious toward people around her, until on the evening of December 28, 1985, someone beat her to death.
"In her final years at Karisoke, her personality had deteriorated; she had isolated herself from researchers and students, spending weeks locked in her cabin. She had become resentful, suspicious of others and downright cruel to her staff. Those who were at Karisoke during her last years seem to agree that she was probably not killed by a village poacher, but by someone close to her, who had felt the full fury of her unjustifiable rages and merciless personal attacks. Though she remained on the mountain, she had descended into madness. She was buried in the gorilla cemetery in her camp, next to the remains of her beloved Digit [one of her favorite gorillas]."—*R. Milner, Enclyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 171.
EVOLUTION COULD NOT DO THIS
Swiftlets are small birds that live in southwestern Asia and Australia. They make their nests far back in dark caves. These birds have small eyes and the caves are pitch black. With fast wings, such as swallows have, the swiftlet flies at high speed into its cave. Rapidly it flies directly to one tiny nest among hundreds. As soon as the bird enters the cave, it begins making a series of high-pitched clicks. The little bird has the ability to vary the frequency of the sounds and, as it approaches the wall, it increases the number of clicks per second until they are emitted at about 20 per second. The time required for the clicks to bounce off the wall and return reveals the distance to the wall. Scientists have tried to figure out why the clicks vary in frequency as the bird gets closer to the wall. They eventually discovered that the tiny bird—with a brain an eighth as large as your little finger—does this in order to hear the return echo! The problem is that the click must be so short and so exactly spaced apart, that its echo is heard by the ear of the bird—
before the next click is made. Otherwise the next click will drown the sound of the returning echo. By the way, how did the swiftlet identify its own nest by those clicks? There are hundreds of nests in the cave. Scientists try to solve such problems, but they are unable to do so. Somehow, evolutionary theory does not seem to be of any help.
The black-rumped petrel is 2 feet [6 dm] long with a wingspread of 4 feet [12 dm]. An ocean bird, has a nesting pattern that is totally unexplainable by any theory of evolution.
These petrels knows at nesting time to migrate from werever they are in the broad Pacific—to the Hawaiian islands. How they get there is a mystery. Arriving, they fly all the way up to the top of the extinct volcano, Haleakala, the highest mountain on the island of Maui. It is said to have the widest crater of any volcano in the world. They nest in that crater. The problem is that it is 10,000 feet [3,048 m] up! Their nests are built higher than any other ocean bird nest in the world.
The female lays only one egg, which is set on longer than is done by any other bird in the world: 55 days. It take 3 weeks just for the egg to form within the mother! This is because the yolk in the egg must be so rich. The baby will have to live, inside the egg, on that yolk for 55 days. The male sets on the egg for 2 weeks, while she is skimming the surface of the ocean, eating fish. Then she flies up and sets on the egg for the next two weeks, while the male goes down to the ocean to eat.
At that altitude, there is little oxygen and the air is very dry. This could injure the chick within the egg, since, like every bird egg, it absorbs oxygen and emits water through tiny holes in the shell. But this egg has fewer holes than any other bird eggs; in fact, just the right amount to let the water vapor out and no more. But, even though there are fewer holes, the oxygen still gets in—because it is a scientific fact that oxygen travels through eggshell faster at high altitudes, and gases come out faster also! So this egg was "designed in advance" for high altitudes—or all the baby petrels would have died before evolution invented that special egg shell. After the chick is hatched, because it grows so slowly, it is fed by its parents for 4 months! The parents have to travel long distances down the mountain, and then another distance out from the land into the ocean to get fish to feed it. However, they make a special, rich oil in their bodies which they also feed the chick. This provides it with a rich meal. Otherwise it could not receive enough nourishment since they do not arrive very often with food.
CHAPTER 13 - STUDY AND REVIEW QUESTIONS
ANCIENT MAN
GRADES 5 TO 12 ON A GRADUATED SCALE
1 - List several physical factors about man that are distinctly different than apes.
2 - Explain why, just because some earlier peoples lived under primitive conditions or in caves, they should be called "partly human."
3 - Give several reasons why Neanderthals were fully human.
4 - There are four odd facts about the finds of "hominid bones" which are suspicious. List them.
5 - Select one of the following and write a brief paragraph on it: (1) Cro-Magnon Man; (2) Rhodesian Man; (3) Taung African Man; (4) Nebraska Man.
6 - Select one of the following and write several paragraphs about it: (1) Java Man; (2) Piltdown Man; (3) Peking Man; (4) Australopithecines; (5) Lucy; (6) Nutcracker Man; (7) Skull 1470.
7 - Select one of the following and explain its significance in several paragraphs: (1) Guadeloupe Woman; (2) Calaveras Skull; (3) Moab Skeletons; (4) Leotoli tracks; (5) Glen Rose tracks; (6) Pulaxy branch; (7) Antelope Springs tracks; (8) other giant people; (9) Arizona tracks; (10) other human prints.
8 - Write on one of the following: (1) human remains in coal; (2) man-made remains in coal; (3) man-made objects in rock; (4) buried man-made objects; (5) man-made objects or markings on petrified wood or bones.
9 - How does each of the following show that ancient people were smarter than people today? (1) the mind of man; (2) the languages of man; (3) British megalithic people.
10 - How does each of the following disprove evolution? (1) ape communications; (2) ancient cultures; (3) location and dates of earliest domestic crops and animals.
11 - Briefly summarize 12 outstanding evidences indicating that evolutionary theory, in regard to the dating and origin of ancient man, is incorrect.