Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
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a . “... existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution [based on skulls and teeth] are unlikely to be reliable.” Mark Collard and Bernard Wood, “How Reliable Are Human Phylogenetic Hypotheses?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 97, 25 April 2000, p. 5003.
u In 1995, nine anthropologists announced their discovery of early representatives of Homo habilis and Homo ergaster in China. [See Huang Wanpo et al., “Early Homo and Associated Artifacts from Asia,” Nature, Vol. 378, 16 November 1995, pp. 275–278.] Fourteen years later the same journal published a retraction. The discovery was of a “mystery ape.” [See Russell L. Ciochon, “The Mystery Ape of Pleistocene Asia,” Nature, Vol. 459, 18 June 2009, pp. 910–911.]
How many more mystery apes are there, and do they explain other so-called “ape-men”?
u “We have all seen the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh [tidy, but sheer nonsense]. Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates. ... almost every time someone claims to have found a new species of hominin, someone else refutes it. The species is said to be either a member of Homo sapiens, but pathological, or an ape.” Henry Gee, “Craniums with Clout,” Nature, Vol. 478, 6 October 2011, p. 34.
b . “Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether.” Henry Gee, “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131.
c . Lord Zuckerman candidly stated that if special creation did not occur, then no scientist could deny that man evolved from some apelike creature “without leaving any fossil traces of the steps of the transformation.” Solly Zuckerman (former Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government and Honorary Secretary of the Zoological Society of London), Beyond the Ivory Tower (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970), p. 64.
u Bowden, pp. 56–246.
u Duane T. Gish, Battle for Creation, Vol. 2, editor Henry M. Morris (San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers, 1976), pp. 193–200, 298–305.
d . Speaking of Piltdown man, Lewin admits a common human problem even scientists have:
How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones—the cranial fragments—and “see” a clear simian signature in them; and “see” in an ape’s jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity? The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientists’ expectations and their effects on the interpretation of data. Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 61.
u At least eleven people have been accused of being the perpetrator of the famous Piltdown hoax. These included Charles Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
The hoaxer may have been Martin A. C. Hinton, who had a reputation as a practical joker and worked in the British Museum (Natural History) when Piltdown man was discovered. In the mid-1970s, an old trunk, marked with Hinton’s initials, was found in the museum’s attic. The trunk contained bones stained and carved in the same detailed way as the Piltdown bones. [For details, see Henry Gee, “Box of Bones ‘Clinches’ Identity of Piltdown Palaeontology Hoaxer,” Nature, Vol. 381, 23 May 1996, pp. 261–262.]
e . Allen L. Hammond, “Tales of an Elusive Ancestor,” Science 83, November 1983, pp. 37, 43.
f . Adrienne L. Zihlman and J. Lowenstein, “False Start of the Human Parade,” Natural History, Vol. 88, August–September 1979, pp. 86–91.
g . Hammond, p. 43.
u “The dethroning of Ramapithecus—from putative [supposed] first human in 1961 to extinct relative of the orangutan in 1982—is one of the most fascinating, and bitter, sagas in the search for human origins.” Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 86.
h . “A single small water-worn tooth, 10.5 mm by 11 mm in crown diameter, signalizes the arrival of a member of the family of anthropoid Primates in North America in Middle Pliocene time.” Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Hesperopithecus, the First Anthropoid Primate Found in America,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 8, 15 August 1922, p. 245.
i . Java man consisted of two bones found about 39 feet apart: a skull cap and femur (thighbone). Rudolf Virchow, the famous German pathologist, believed that the femur was from a gibbon. By concurring, Dubois supported his own non-Darwinian theory of evolution—a theory too complex and strange to discuss here.
Whether the bones were from a large-brained gibbon, a hominid, another animal, or two completely different animals is not the only issue. This episode shows how easily the person, who knew the bones best, could shift his interpretation from Java “man” to Java “gibbon.” When evidence is so fragmentary, many interpretations are possible.
u “Pithecanthropus [Java man] was not a man, but a gigantic genus allied to the Gibbons, superior to its near relatives on account of its exceedingly large brain volume, and distinguished at the same time by its erect attitude.” Eugene Dubois, “On the Fossil Human Skulls Recently Discovered in Java and Pithecanthropus Erectus,” Man, Vol. 37, January 1937, p. 4.
“Thus the evidence given by those five new thigh bones of the morphological and functional distinctness of Pithecanthropus erectus furnishes proof, at the same time, of its close affinity with the gibbon group of anthropoid apes.” Ibid., p. 5.
u “The success of Darwinism was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity ... A striking example, which has only recently come to light, is the alteration of the Piltdown skull so that it could be used as evidence for the descent of man from the apes; but even before this a similar instance of tinkering with evidence was finally revealed by the discoverer of Pithecanthropus [Java man], who admitted, many years after his sensational report, that he had found in the same deposits bones that are definitely human.” W. R. Thompson, p. 17.
W. R. Thompson, in his “Introduction to The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, refers to Dubois’ discovery in November 1890 of part of a lower jaw containing the stump of a tooth. This was found at Kedung-Brubus (also spelled Kedeong Broboes), 25 miles east of his find of Java “man” at Trinil, eleven months later. Dubois was confident it was a human jaw of Tertiary age. [See Herbert Wendt, In Search of Adam (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishers, 1955), pp. 293–294.] Dubois’ claims of finding “the missing link” would probably have been ignored if he had mentioned this jaw. Similar, but less convincing, charges have been made against Dubois concerning his finding of obvious human skulls at Wadjak, 60 miles from Trinil.
u C. L. Brace and Ashley Montagu, Human Evolution, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977), p. 204.
u Bowden, pp. 138–142, 144–148.
u Hitching, pp. 208–209.
u Patrick O’Connell, Science of Today and the Problems of Genesis, 2nd edition (Roseburg, Oregon: self-published, 1969), pp. 139–142.
j . Ibid., pp. 108–138.
u Bowden, pp. 90–137.
u Marcellin Boule and Henri V. Vallois, Fossil Men (New York: The Dryden Press, 1957), p. 145.
k . “[The reanalysis of Narmada Man] puts another nail in the coffin of Homo erectus as a viable taxon.” Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, as quoted in “Homo Erectus Never Existed?” Geotimes, October 1992, p. 11.
l . “One researcher began her talk with a call for ‘a moment of silence for the death of H. heidelbergensis.’ Michael Balter, “RIP for a Key Homo Species? Science, Vol. 345, 11 July 2014, p. 129.
m . Donald C. Johanson et al., “New Partial Skeleton of Homo Habilis from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania,” Nature, Vol. 327, 21 May 1987, pp. 205–209.
n . “We present a revised definition, based on verifiable criteria, for Homo and conclude that two species, Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, do not belong in the [Homo] genus.” Bernard Wood and Mark Collard, “The Human Genus,” Science, Vol. 284, 2 April 1999, p. 65.
o . Dr. Charles Oxnard and Sir Solly Zuckerman, referred to below, were leaders in the development of a powerful multivariate analysis technique. A computer simultaneously performs millions of comparisons on hundreds of corresponding dimensions of the bones of living apes, humans, and australopithecines. Their verdict, that the australopithecines are not intermediate between man and living apes, is quite different from the more subjective and less-analytical visual techniques of most anthropologists. To my knowledge, this technique has not been applied to the most famous australopithecine, commonly known as “Lucy.”
u “... the only positive fact we have about the Australopithecine brain is that it was no bigger than the brain of a gorilla. The claims that are made about the human character of the Australopithecine face and jaws are no more convincing than those made about the size of its brain. The Australopithecine skull is in fact so overwhelmingly simian as opposed to human that the contrary proposition could be equated to an assertion that black is white.” Zuckerman, p. 78.
u “Let us now return to our original problem: the Australopithecine fossils. I shall not burden you with details of each and every study that we have made, but ... the conventional wisdom is that the Australopithecine fragments are generally rather similar to humans and when different deviate somewhat towards the condition in the African apes, the new studies point to different conclusions. The new investigations suggest that the fossil fragments are usually uniquely different from any living form ...” Charles E. Oxnard (Dean of the Graduate School, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and from 1973 to 1978 a Dean at the University of Chicago), “Human Fossils: New Views of Old Bones,” The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 41, May 1979, p. 273.
u Charles E. Oxnard, “The Place of the Australopithecines in Human Evolution: Grounds for Doubt?” Nature, Vol. 258, 4 December 1975, pp. 389–395.
u “For my own part, the anatomical basis for the claim that the Australopithecines walked and ran upright like man is so much more flimsy than the evidence which points to the conclusion that their gait was some variant of what one sees in subhuman Primates, that it remains unacceptable.” Zuckerman, p. 93.
u “His Lordship’s [Sir Solly Zuckerman’s] scorn for the level of competence he sees displayed by paleoanthropologists is legendary, exceeded only by the force of his dismissal of the australopithecines as having anything at all to do with human evolution. ‘They are just bloody apes,’ he is reputed to have observed on examining the australopithecine remains in South Africa.” Lewin, Bones of Contention, pp. 164–165.
u “This Australopithecine material suggests a form of locomotion that was not entirely upright nor bipedal. The Rudolf Australopithecines, in fact, may have been close to the ‘knuckle-walker’ condition, not unlike the extant African apes.” Richard E. F. Leakey, “Further Evidence of Lower Pleistocene Hominids from East Rudolf, North Kenya,” Nature, Vol. 231, 28 May 1971, p. 245.
p . “Among the fossil hominids, the australopithecines show great-ape-like proportions [based on CAT scans of their inner ears] and H. erectus shows modern-human-like proportions.” Fred Spoor et al., “Implications of Early Hominid Labyrinthine Morphology for Evolution of Human Bipedal Locomotion,” Nature, Vol. 369, 23 June 1994, p. 646. [Many H. erectus bones are probably those of H. sapiens.]
q . “The closest parallel today to the pattern of dental development of [australopithecines] is not in people but in chimpanzees.” Bruce Bower, “Evolution’s Youth Movement,” Science News, Vol. 159, 2 June 2001, p. 347.
r . William L. Jungers, “Lucy’s Limbs: Skeletal Allometry and Locomotion in Australopithecus Afarensis,” Nature, Vol. 297, 24 June 1982, pp. 676–678.
u Jeremy Cherfas, “Trees Have Made Man Upright,” New Scientist, Vol. 93, 20 January 1983, pp. 172–178.
u Jack T. Stern Jr. and Randall L. Susman, “The Locomotor Anatomy of Australopithecus Afarensis,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 60, March 1983, pp. 279–317.
s . Adrienne Zihlman, “Pigmy Chimps, People, and the Pundits,” New Scientist, Vol. 104, 15 November 1984, pp. 39–40.
t . Zeresenay Alemseged et al., “A Juvenile Early Hominin Skeleton from Dikika, Ethiopia,” Nature, Vol. 443, 21 September 2006, pp. 296–301.
u . “At present we have no grounds for thinking that there was anything distinctively human about australopithecine ecology and behavior. ... [T]hey were surprisingly apelike in skull form, premolar dentition, limb proportions, and morphology of some joint surfaces, and they may still have been spending a significant amount of time in the trees.” Matt Cartmill et al., “One Hundred Years of Paleoanthropology,” American Scientist, Vol. 74, July–August 1986, p. 417.
u “The proportions calculated for africanus turned out to be amazingly close to those of a chimpanzee, with big arms and small legs. ... ‘One might say we are kicking Lucy out of the family tree,’ says Berger.” James Shreeve, “New Skeleton Gives Path from Trees to Ground an Odd Turn,” Science, Vol. 272, 3 May 1996, p. 654.
u “There is indeed, no question which the Australopithecine skull resembles when placed side by side with specimens of human and living ape skulls. It is the ape—so much so that only detailed and close scrutiny can reveal any differences between them.” Solly Zuckerman, “Correlation of Change in the Evolution of Higher Primates,” Evolution as a Process, editors Julian Huxley, A. C. Hardy, and E. B. Ford (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1954), p. 307.
“We can safely conclude from the fossil hominoid material now available that in the history of the globe there have been many more species of great ape than just the three which exist today.” Ibid., pp. 348–349.
v . Francis Ivanhoe, “Was Virchow Right About Neanderthal?” Nature, Vol. 227, 8 August 1970, pp. 577–578.
u William L. Straus Jr. and A. J. E. Cave, “Pathology and the Posture of Neanderthal Man,” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 32, December, 1957, pp. 348–363.
u Bruce M. Rothschild and Pierre L. Thillaud, “Oldest Bone Disease,” Nature, Vol. 349, 24 January 1991, p. 288.
w . Jack Cuozzo, Buried Alive: The Startling Truth about Neanderthal Man (Green Forest, Arkansas: Master Books, 1998).
u Jack Cuozzo, “Early Orthodontic Intervention: A View from Prehistory,” The Journal of the New Jersey Dental Association, Vol. 58, No. 4, Autumn 1987, pp. 33–40.
x . Boyce Rensberger, “Facing the Past,” Science 81, October 1981, p. 49.