Hominids and Man

The man from Piltdown

The man from Piltdown (usually, as in this case, to fossils considered in the human line, was given the name of the place where they were found), constituted one of the most important human fossil discoveries. It was found in a gravel pit in Sussex, in England, in 1912, and was generally used as convincing evidence of the evolution of man in pro-evolutionist texts. The Encyclopedia Britannica, the most authoritative in the English language, he considered it the second most important, among the fossils that demonstrated the evolution of man. Of evolutionist artists, starting with a handful of bones, they created their models and designs for museums and textbooks. After many years it turned out that the Piltdown man was nothing more than a premeditated hoax! The jaw was that of an ape and the skull that of a modern man, despite the fact that expert reports claimed he was such a primitive being that it was doubted he could speak. Both the jaw and the teeth had been altered to look ancient. One of the small bones in the nose probably came from another part of the body of a small animal.

While on the one hand it does not demonstrate evolution, the man from Piltdown demonstrates the difficulty, if not the impossibility of accurately reconstructing men who no longer live. Some scientists, from the beginning, they were skeptical about the Piltdown man, as has also happened for other human fossils. However, it was forty years later that it was finally discredited. Today the statues of the Piltdown man have been removed from museums and the drawings representing him from books, although the damage caused by it […] still exists in the life of many. E’ regrettable that we are no longer cautious in teaching schoolchildren, as facts, things that famous scientists consider dubious.

The man from Nebraska

Another fossil that had been hailed as an ancestor of mankind was the man from Nebraska, also called by its more high-sounding scientific name Hesperopithecus. It was, practically, of nothing but a tooth, but that was all that was needed for experts to build the whole man who, naturally, it looked exactly like an evolutionist dreamed of. Currently perhaps it would continue to […] (teach and disseminate the theories built and confirmed on that) discovery (if it was not understood) that it was a pig's tooth and not a man (2).

These examples serve to warn us against the great possibility of errors in the interpretation of the evidence provided by the fossils, when you have a preconceived idea with which you want to make everything fit.

The size of the skull and the size and shape of the other bones are used to determine the degree of evolution. But it should be remembered that even among living people today there is a great difference. The bones of the current pygmy or the Australian aboriginal compared to those of a basketball player show a great difference and, if placed in the right order, they could serve to demonstrate either evolution or degeneration for those who did not know that these people lived in the same era. To show a diversity towards modern man it is really necessary to compare fossil bones with those of modern man more specifically similar and not with the average man.

Dating

Proving the age of fossil man involves a number of other difficulties, one of which is constituted by the fact that it is customary to bury the dead instead of leaving them in the strata in which they lived and walked. This habit could make a huge difference if the region they lived in had suffered erosion, since it would be enough to dig a little to place the dead in layers formed many years earlier. Another difficulty is that fossils do not form normally, if no pressure has occurred, usually under water. Under ordinary conditions, bodies decompose. And to make the problem more complicated, the skeletons are not usually found together, but in pieces scattered here and there.

To the difficulties mentioned above is added that constituted by dating, generally very uncertain, as it is based on the hope that the evolution it tries to prove is true. It is a question of establishing the age of fossils by means of the age of the layers that contain them, which is usually in turn determined by the age of the contained fossil samples. The difficulty of dating human fossils is even more evident since for the Pleistocene period, in which, according to evolutionists, man developed, there is little evidence of the evolution of other life forms and therefore there is a lack of guiding fossils. An attempt is made to set a date for this period by means of climate change, and its duration would be established on the basis of ice ages. The number of postulated ice ages for America varies from one to five, but the most commonly indicated is four. Complete agreement is still missing and the evidence gathered in other parts of the world does not contribute much to support the idea of ​​four ice ages. For example «new fundamental studies carried out by A.I. Popov radically change the known facts about the ice age in Western Siberia. The dominant observable phenomenon of the Quaternary was a vast invasion of the sea and not an ice age " .

Evidence tends to make you think, according to these authors, that many of what were considered evidence of an ice age were nothing more than seaborne ice. If instead of there being four distinct ice ages, glacial erosion only occurred during one period, the Pleistocene period would be drastically shortened.

The words of Frederick Johnson, who wrote with Willard Libby, the highest recognized authority on radiocarbon dating, defend carbon dating against criticism from supporters of other methods and also highlight the precariousness of dating in this period:

In geology, some, but not all the criticisms about the dates obtained by radiocarbon, are based on inferences regarding the behavior of a currently non-existent ice sheet. There is no way to prove or deny the hypotheses about the speed with which the ice has advanced or retreated, the degree of accuracy of the attempt to calculate past years by counting the layers formed at the bottom of old lakes or the significance of changes in vegetation .

He concludes that it is "absurd" to criticize carbon-obtained dates on the basis of this type of evidence. The confusion that results in the dating of a period in which man is supposed to be evolving is highlighted in the discussion presented in the British Encyclopedia about the last ice age: «It is noted that radiocarbon dating only allocates half of the time allowed by the most ancient evaluations… Conservative geologists believe that research on ice ages should be pursued to obtain more and more extensive information.. In the meantime, the stratigraphy work must be respected, carefully documented work and research " . This means that for now we will follow the oldest dates instead of those obtained by radiocarbon which would reduce the time by half.. But as we shall see, there is compelling evidence that the dates obtained by radiocarbon are themselves too old.

The fossils, that evolutionists have considered human or belonging to the evolutionary line of man, have been a source of extreme confusion for years. The tendency of each of the discoverers was to regard their discovery as something unique, of a completely different kind from that of the others, sometimes jealously rescuing it from the unfavorable gaze of fellow scientists.

E’ nevertheless, a fourfold classification of the alleged links between man and the lower animals emerged which has become the classic explanation of human evolution. Despite this, the story of the search for a connection between humans and animals is the story of a continuous process of discovering and discarding one presupposed link after another, when fossils of men who lived before the intermediates are discovered. This is displacing the search for an intermediate form to increasingly older layers. We will show later that there is some evidence in the fossils that allows us to predict the continuation of this process up to the older layers. Meanwhile, you have to read what follows realizing that all the connecting links of this classic classification system have already been discarded. In 1972 when Richard Leakey found the skull 1740, which we will mention later, he declared that this completely eliminated the classic explanation of human evolution and that he had nothing to put in its place. Apparently, not even anyone else has been able to replace him, because the texts are still presenting the old disproved system of human evolution. So let's examine this system starting with the oldest ring.

L’Australopiteco

These are gorilla-like animals, at least as regards the bony crest sometimes found at the top of the skull and the size of the brain. However, the teeth are somewhat similar to those of humans. Furthermore, it is likely that these beings walked upright. Little else is known about them, since the fossils found are few and fragmentary. The best known fossils belonging to this group are Zinjanthrope and Homo habilis, found in Africa by Dr. Leakey.

The most complete of these findings by Leakey is a skull that, at the time of its discovery it was crushed into more than four hundred pieces found by sifting tons of earth among which they were scattered. It took over a year to put the pieces together, and a colleague from Leakey said it was like reconstituting a crushed egg from a truck .

Despite the shape of such pieces, not only has the skull been reconstructed in order to meet the requirements of evolution, but illustrations of his full bearded appearance were presented. While, usually, reconstructions of this kind are carried out with great caution and warning of their limitations, unfortunately they are often used by others to "sell" evolution to schoolchildren, without the benefit of the reservations and warnings expressed in this regard.

Conventional dating methods traced Zinjanthrope to more than six hundred thousand years ago. The potassium and argon method, at one million and seven hundred thousand years.

Most of the authorities, today he claims that modern man did not develop from Australopithecus, but that instead both come from some other still unknown animal.

II Pitecantropo O prehistory

The second group is that of the Pythecanthrope which is believed to have intermediate characteristics between the Australopithecus family and us and which would have lived half a million years ago.

Among the most important fossils of this group is the Sinanthropus, also known under the name of Peking Man, since these fossils were found in China, near Beijing. These leftovers consisted mostly of teeth, jaws and parts of fourteen skulls that allegedly had been smashed in order to eat the brains that, for each skull, it constituted a quantity of meat that ranged from cm3 915 ai 1225. Along with these fossils there was evidence of the use of fire and tools. All of these fossils have apparently been lost in an attempt to get them out of China during World War II.

The other well-known representative of this group is the Java man, of which there is a skullcap and a femur. It was first found by Eugène Dubois together with other ordinary human skulls of which he did not mention for thirty years, until the Java man was commonly accepted. Parts of four other skulls were later found, some teeth and fragments of mandibles and femurs. The femurs would have been identical to those of modern man. This attributes to the Java man, an important position in evolution, as some describe the head of the Pythecanthrope as similar to that of an ape. however, as normal human skulls were also found, there is always the possibility that the legs accompanied the human skulls and not the Java man, since everything was found in the gravel deposited on the bank of a river. If they both lived in the same age, thus the importance of the Java man from the evolutionary point of view would be excluded. As for the teeth, however, they would resemble human ones in many respects, but they would differ in others.

In reporting these "facts" about the Pythecanthropus and Australopithecus, I tried to be as objective as possible and to present the current thinking of the majority. But the authorities in this field disagree with each other and also about their own previous claims, and about the opinions about evolution, is about the brain volume, the use of fire and the tools of men or animals to which the fossils belong, or others who inhabited the cave many years later, etc. All that can really be said, then, is that the Pythecanthropus and Australopithecus once lived but are now extinct. As will also be said in the part concerning comparative anatomy, interpretations depend on the basic opinions of those who interpret. If they think that similarity must necessarily show derivation, they come to a conclusion. If, on the other hand, they think that the similarity of design indicates the creation by the same creator, they arrive at a different conclusion.

E’ It is possible that God created Homo erectus as it was.

Another possible explanation is that it was produced by mutations, that operating in their usual direction in normal people gave rise to a degenerate race.

A fascinating but not so probable variation is that of the evolutionist Dr.. Geoffrey Bourne, a well-known primatoloeist who believes that it is the ape that developed from man! Since for a long time Homo erectus was considered by evolutionists to be a link between man and ape and now it seems that man lived long before Homo erectus, dr. Bourne thinks the first Homo erectus, it developed from man and then the monkey from Homo erectus! Although Dr.. Bourne did not convince many that the ape developed in this way from man, the fact that a highly educated and eminent scientist believes that the proof should be interpreted in the very opposite way to that normally employed by other evolutionists, shows how weak the evidence in favor of human evolution is in fact.

Neanderthal man

Even with regard to Neanderthal man, the misunderstandings were just as great as in the case of the Piltdown deception. Regarding this, the Encyclopedia Britannica says: «The popular conception, according to which these individuals had an awkward posture and slouching gait with bent knees, it seems to be largely due to the misinterpretation of certain characteristics of the knee bones of one of the Neanderthal skeletons discovered in the early twentieth century " .

For a hundred years, Neanderthals have been used to teach evolution. The fossil material at our disposal is far more abundant for Neanderthals than for the other groups we have already examined. Most of it has been available to us for years; some of these fossils from before that used for evolutionary interpretation, but only in recent years, with the discovery that modern men existed long before those of Neanderthals, we begin to stop using him as a link in the evolution of man! How museums had to get rid of the statues of the Piltdown man, now they are changing those of Neanderthals. I quote an excerpt from an article in the "Portland Oregonian" from the beginning of 1971, about the changing of Neanderthal statues at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. It is titled: "Slow progress of Neanderthal man" (in an era when you can reach the moon in a couple of days, slow is certainly the term to use!).

"The idea that we had of Neanderthal man was that of a poor hairy fool and so bent that his fingers dragged on the ground, while the sunken eyes peered out from under massive eyebrows for flesh.

In the first place - Cole said- Neanderthal man stood upright like us. The head was erect, well placed on the spine, otherwise he would have lost his balance.

He had a good brain volume and there was no sort of muscular hump that went from the shoulders to the neck, as it appeared instead in the old image to be replaced ".

Since much of the reasoning in favor of evolution is based on the smaller brain volume of the Pythecanthropus and Australopithecus, it is interesting to note that the average brain volume of Neanderthals is greater than about cm3 100 compared to the average of today's man which is cm3 1350 . E’ It is also interesting to observe how unimportant the issue of brain volume becomes when we deal with brain volumes larger than those of today's man instead of smaller ones. About that reasoning, the well-known anthropologist M. F. Ashley Montague writes:

"Compared to modern man, Neanderthal man is distinguished by a much less flattened forehead than it appears, as the appearance is accentuated by the presence of very developed eyebrow arches… Despite the fact that the conclusions relating to intelligence deduced from the shape of the head have long been proven unfounded, there are, however, some scholars who, forget about this fact, they assert that Neanderthals must not have been very intelligent, for he had somewhat more prominent eyebrows than theirs. The fact remains that, within a certain range of variations, born it volume, nor the shape, nor is the size of the brain of hominids in any way linked to intelligence. Individuals whose brain did not exceed cm3 750 they proved to be perfectly normal in intelligence. E’ I notice that people with a low forehead are mentally neither better nor worse than those who have a high one…» .

The epochs that are now assigned to Neanderthal fossils vary from 30.000 al 60.000 to.C. But sometimes they still feel given up to 150.000 to.C. first attributed to them. The fossils that are believed to be the most ancient prove to be those most similar to modern man , showing that he developed from us and not vice versa. Neanderthal man simply proves that man has a terrible tendency to force evidence to coincide with his theories. One wonders how many other evidence given by fossils in favor of evolution would be dropped if more were known about them, or if what we already know was not interpreted on the basis of evolutionary assumptions.

To sum up, then, the teaching that man would evolve from Neanderthal man who walked bent over and was stupid, it was based on the imagination of evolutionists and on a fossil that had a bone disease. This was a far more serious mistake than that of the Piltdown man, as there were many Neanderthal skeletons that showed everyone else walking upright like us.

L'Homo sapiens (modern man)

Cro-Magnon man would be the author of the famous cave paintings that date back to a period that goes gives 34.000 a 10.000 years BC. These paintings show an execution equal to that of modern artists. Particularly famous are the paintings found in Lascaux, in France, and which would date back to 30.000 years BC, but that the radiocarbon dating method places around the eighth millennium BC. As this does not accord with the theory of the great antiquity of these paintings, these dates are rejected, on the pretext that they simply show that the cave was still inhabited at that time . However, it is not explained why later 20.000 years of exposure to the smoke of the fires lit by cavemen (from whose coals the dates come) those paintings could still appear alive and in good condition.

E’ Interestingly, the Cro-Magnon man's brain had a capacity of cm3 1550-1750, that is cm3 200-400 superior to that of modern man .

The Swanscombe Skull, found in 1935 it was considered by evolutionists to be one of the oldest normal human fossils. "Measured evaluations based on geological considerations give an antiquity of no less than 100.000 years, or, according to the potassium-argon test, probably at least 200.000 years!» . The Steinheim skull is another fossil believed to belong to the same period as the Swanscombe skull.

The evidence that before the Neanderthal era there were normal men should have shown evolutionists that these did not come from Neanderthal man, but it was not so. This fact shows what the confusion exists about human fossils.

In 1965 the man of Hungary was found in Vértesszöllös, fossil of particular importance since it is believed that the epochs of the various layers of that area are well defined . At the time when its dating was established, the man of Hungary was classified as a Pythecanthrope, because it agreed with the age of 400.000 years assigned to him . Subsequent examinations of the fossils showed instead that they were examples of Homo sapiens . Since one of our current species existed almost at the time of the Pythecanthrope, this made our evolution from him almost impossible and that from the other candidate, Australopithecus, very difficult.

The discovery of the skull 1740, occurred by Richard Leaky in 1972, seems to have eliminated even more definitively from the line of our possible ancestors both Homo erectus and Australopithecus. The skull 1740 it was found in layers that are supposed to have formed millions of years before Homo erectus and simultaneously with Australopithecus, but it is essentially human in form. The brain mass (it is reported to have been of 800 cm3) it was quite small to ascertain whether it was a human or an extinct animal. Anyway if it didn't belong to a human being, proof, confirmed by later discoveries, indicates that the owner of the skull 1740 he was more like man than the ape-men from whom, commonly, we have been taught we have evolved. One of these later discoveries consists of human footprints found in 1979 that, according to Mary Leakey, establish the fact that 3.600.000 years ago man walked upright like us.

Many authoritative people would agree with Leakey's statement that the skull 1740 it rejects all that was previously believed about human evolution and that it is not clear what should be put in its place.
However, this does not constitute a serious blow to evolution as it might seem, since many serious evolutionists had already eliminated these as possible possibilities and being left out of something reasonable to rely on, had entrenched themselves behind the illusory "common ancestor". Since the characteristic of the common ancestor seems to be that of not leaving fossils, it is even more difficult to prove that we are not his descendants. There are even some who suggest that our ancestor is a tooth called Ramopithecus of which almost nothing is known.

***

(1) Taken from Tommaso Heinze, Creation vs. evolution handbook, Ed. Biblical Center Naples, 1973, cap. 1. (2) Duane Gish, interview with Panorama, 2.2.1981. Duane Gishil, biochemist who collaborated among other things in the research of the Nobel laureate Vincent Du Vigneaud on the synthesis of hormones.