So-called, Ape Men

Dr. Neville Thomas Jones, Ph.D.

Despite the fact that, "the entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table" (New Scientist, 26.03.1981, p. 802), and is not much bigger now, we are still obliged to carefully analyse the claims of fossil-hunters like the Leakeys, who have worked at Lake Rudolph, in Kenya, for many, many years. This whole area of 'science', however, has had an extremely dubious history, being far more concerned with what everyone 'knows' ('wishes', would be a better word) to be our origins.

For anyone requiring a detailed treatment of this subject, I strongly recommend either

• Bones of Contention. A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils, Marvin L. Lubenow, Baker Books, Michigan, 2004.
• Any of the books by Prof. Roberto Fondi (for example, Since Darwin: A Critique of Evolutionism).

Books simply borrowed from the library are unlikely to offer much in the way of information, only bias and dogma. Consider, for example, the words of Professor Scott Todd, of the Biology Department at Kansas State University, who, writing in Nature, volume 401, page 423, says, "Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic." Hmmm, a very scientific approach, Professor!

Piltdown Man

In a small gravel pit in East Sussex, southern England, mainly during the year of 1912, Charles Dawson, Arthur Woodward, and the founder of the so-called "New Age Movement," Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, created Eoanthropus dawsoni, or Piltdown Man.

What a 'discovery' this was! A startling collection of bones and artefacts, consisting of a 520- to 720-year-old human skull, the lower jaw of a juvenile female orang-utan (with teeth that had been filed down to 'match' those in the skull), a piece of an elephant molar, fragments of mastodon, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, beaver and deer, some crude bits of flint, and a section of the femur bone of an elephant which had been shaped into the form of a cricket bat (you may think I'm joking, but things get even better). This cricket bat was regarded as some form of hitherto unknown primitive tool (the English cricket team still appear to regard it thus).

The jaw bone had its two ends broken off, such that you couldn't see that it would not attach to the skull. Might this have been a trifle suspicious? Now don't be silly.

Some of the bones and 'tools' had been treated in order to resemble the dark brown colour of the skull. "The file marks on the orang-utan teeth of the lower jaw were clearly visible. The molars were misaligned and filed at two different angles. The canine tooth had been filed down so far that the pulp cavity had been exposed and then plugged." - Dr. Marvin Lubenow (Bones Of Contention, Baker Books, 1992).

A few paleoanthropologists were initially unconvinced and suggested that what was really needed was the canine tooth. So, lo and behold, in the eighth month of 1913, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin just happened to be sitting on a pile of gravel at the pit, just happened to look down, and just happened to spot, lying right between his feet (!), the necessary canine tooth that would 'prove' Piltdown Man.

My, my, how splendid. And, as if this wasn't bad enough, similar goings-on occurred at another gravel pit in 1915, though Dawson never revealed the location of this other pit, except that it was "down the road" from the first one.

Mainstream evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology welcomed Piltdown Man with open arms as our 'evolutionary ancestor' and certainly seemed to relish telling everyone that, if they didn't believe it, they were an idiot (remind you of someone - such as the highly vocal professor for the "Public Understanding of Science" at Oxford University, perhaps?).

Why did no one notice the obvious tell-tale signs? Well, the primary reason was because most researchers never even saw the data that they were supposedly researching. The bones were locked securely away, not just from the public, but from the scientific community, too. All that they were given to study consisted of crude plaster casts of the originals!

Only in 1953, forty years after Piltdown Mk I miraculously finds his tooth, is the fraud 'discovered', and only then because Piltdown Man was no longer in vogue as far as the organic evolution community was concerned.

We all know now that "Piltdown Man" was a hoax, and not a very elaborate one at that, yet for forty years the evolutionists proudly paraded him as "the missing link." How well, people were told at the time, he was proved by scientific experimentation and observation. Dissenting voices were subjected to ridicule, so often the only effective weapon in the evolutionist's arsenal.

Nowadays, of course, it's just not cricket for Creation scientists to even bring up his name. However, it is estimated that five hundred Ph.D. theses were written, based upon nothing more than analyses of the plaster casts that had been made available to them. Assuming a 20% failure and/or dropout rate, that means four hundred people received a doctorate for studying a plaster cast. What conclusions do you think that they would have to have drawn from their plaster cast in order to be awarded a Ph.D.? And where would most of these people have then taken up teaching and research posts? Universities, museums, science correspondants, government advisors, education chiefs, etc., where they would excert considerable influence during the forty year period of the reign of this "missing link, "Eoanthropus dawsoni," in Britain and abroad. Like the spreading of cancerous cells throughtout an already ill body.

Java Man

Otherwise known as, Pithecanthropus I, Java Man consisted of a skullcap and thigh bone that were found twelve months and fifty feet apart, in different strata, and whose association are still questioned to this day!

A good example of the exaggerated and misleading claims that abound on the Internet regarding evolution is: "[Eugene] Dobois' fossils were the first hominid remains to be recognized as material proof for human evolution. His findings helped give shape to the rising science of paleoanthropology."

Dobois actually rummaged around in Java for a while and returned with what he claimed was (yes, you've guessed it) the missing link. It was nicknamed "Java Man" and later given the more dignified name of "Homo erectus." However, research conducted at the Berkeley Geochronology Center shows that "Java Man" was a modern-day human with no "ancestral relationship" to any other creature (Newsweek and Macleans Magazine, 23.12.1996).

However, "anyone who disagreed with [Eugene Dubois'] interpretation of Java Man was [Eugene Dubois'] personal enemy" (von Koenigswald, Meeting Prehistoric Man, p.32).

Lucy

This consists of 40% of a three-foot-tall australopithecine ape skeleton.

KP 271 (the 'Kanapoi elbow fossil')

The distal humerus fossil known as KP 271 was unearthed at Kanapoi in north-western Kenya by Prof. Bryan Patterson of Harvard University in 1965.

KP 271, which is in an excellent state of preservation, is one of the oldest hominid fossils of all, older than the australopithecines (including Lucy), but its morphology is most definitely that of a modern human. KP 271 is therefore evidence for Creation. To say that the find supports the idea of organic evolution would be a lie.

KNM-ER 1470 and KNM-ER 1481

These two fossils were found by Richard Leakey.

Dropping the 'KNM-ER' (which just stands for Kenya National Museum, followed by the location of the find - East Rudolph) and using only the catalogue or acquisition number, then 1470 consisted of several hundred pieces of a skull, which was discovered beneath volcanic strata known as KBS Tuff. The KBS Tuff had been radiometrically dated (K-Ar) at 2.6 million-years-old, hence Richard Leakey dated the 1470 skull at 2.9 million-years-old. The skull had no nose and had a cranial capacity of approximately 800 cc, putting it well within the range of so-called 'modern humans'. After reconstruction, 1470 was drawn in the 06.1973 issue of National Geographic as a young black woman with the nose of an ape! Now, it is unusual for a human nose, being made of cartilage, to fossilize, so the missing nose, the cranial volume and the overall morphology tended to indicate that this was a 'modern human'. But never mind all that evidence stuff, we'll just stick on an ape's nose to 'prove' our belief. There's just one problem (for the evolutionist, that is), the supposed age of the fossil.

The original date deduced for the KBS Tuff was 212-230 million years (Fitch and Miller, Nature, 18.04.1970). This would put 1470 in with the dinosaurs. Oh dear, we can't have that. A little fudging was therefore required and eventually we get an age of 2.61 million years for the strata, which Richard Leakey described as "securely dated" (Nature, 13.04.1973, page 447). However, two months later, writing in National Geographic, Richard Leakey states that, "Either we toss out this skull or we toss out our theories of early man."

It appeared that their "correct" "corrected" age needed some further "correction." I won't bore you with the details, suffice it to say that, based on nothing more than assumptions on the evolution of pigs (!), one million years was wiped off the age of KBS Tuff (and thus 1470) at a stroke.

I have been accused in the past of attempting to "discredit the sciences." However, I do not need to "discredit the sciences" when this type of pretend "science" does a more than adequate job of discrediting itself.

Peking Man

Teilhard de Chardin also had a 'hand' in this one.

Basically, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a confused fellow who attempted to reconcile the idea of organic evolution with some sort of creator (just what sort, I haven't been able to determine). In his bungled attempts and obvious fraudulent activity (see "Piltdown Man," above), it is evident from a scientific point of view that he had never even heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, let alone understood what it meant. His writings were simply stupid, extremely incoherent ramblings (see, for example, his most "famous" work, The Human Phenomenon, in which he makes statements such as, "Deeper than the common act in which it expresses itself, more important than the common power of action from which it emerges by a sort of self-birth, lies reality itself, constituted by the living reunion of reflective particles"). The late, Professor Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard (a very major authority to all evolutionists) asserted that Teilhard de Chardin's nonsensical mysticism was "incompatible with science." This is a bit of an understatement, though perhaps the only quote from Professor Gould that I would agree with.