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 Fossil Man

How do we confront the claims of those scientists who state that the remains of pre-historic men have been found? The Neanderthal man was for many years considered one of man’s ancestors. Evolutionists suggested that he lived some 80,000 years ago -- the dating depends upon which book one reads. Recently it was discovered that Neanderthal is really not much different from modern man. Because the first Neanderthal skeleton found had a curvature of the spine, scientists were certain that the skeleton with a curved spine was good evidence that man did not always walk upright. Then the found skeletons of Neanderthal which stood perfectly upright. Subsequently the first skeletons with curvature of the spine were re-examined and found to have suffered from a form of arthritis. In essence, we located an early ancestor with an arthritic problem.

Study the skull of the first Neanderthal. Byron Nelson took the side view and compared it to a painting of the Revolutionary War hero LaFayette. He found that one can put his features on the skull without any difficulty at all. A Neanderthal skull can be make to look very modern or very primitive depending on how the reconstruction is made. If skull capacity means anything, the Neanderthal man has a capacity larger than modern man, about 1600 cc. Modern man has somewhere between 1200 and 1500 cc. If brain capacity means anything, Neanderthal man would be more intelligent than modern man. Brain capacity may not be the whole answer, but Neanderthal has been identified as very similar to modern man.

The Peking Man has an interesting story. Records and accounts of several men such as Boule and even Chardin, avowed evolutionists who were on the scene in China, state that they never found any fossil men there. They merely found skulls of macaques and gibbons and a few perfectly human skulls. Then the personnel changed on the dig itself, and the third or fourth leader started making extraordinary proposals for the skulls found. A major problem exists today: none of these skulls is available. Drawings and casts of the skulls exist, but the actual skulls were supposedly lost during World War II. Frankly, we are entitled to doubt "scientific" claims when the evidence is missing and the story has progressively improved through the accounts of the individuals who headed up the various excavations.

Java Man, Pithecanthropus Erectus, was found by a man named Dubois. Pictures in the museums and reconstruction’s of the complete body, including all of the hairs of his head, suggest that the specimen must have been quite intact. One never gets the impression that excavators found only a piece of a skull cap, a femur, and a thigh bone! Dubois reported thirty years after the original disclosures that the skull cap of the Java Man was nothing more than the skull cap of a silver gibbon. He also admitted to finding human skulls 15-20 feet away, but he his these in his basement because he did not understand their full significance. Yet Java Man is still presented in textbooks as one of our ancestors in a long, long line of evolutionary development.

You are probably aware of Piltdown Man, which has a perfect skull cap of a man and an ape-like jaw bone. Unfortunately, they do not match. One is fossilized, one is not. One has been fossilized for a length of time, whereas on is modern. The teeth of the ape have filed down to make them look human in appearance. For some thirty years this was reported as the greatest proof for evolution. The original skull was not accessible, but casts and drawings were placed in many museums. Some time late, determining that the skulls should be carefully re-examined, scientists applied fluorine and other tests. Skull pieces were shown to have different ages. The Piltdown Man in reality was composed of the jay bone of an ape and the skull cap of a man. This hoax, presented in all of the textbooks, was decisively unmasked by Kenneth Oakley and published in magazines and scientific journals. Scientists claim that with new modern dating methods such a mistake could never be made again.

An individual found a tooth in a Nebraska field, He mailed this particular tooth back east to some scientists who were fascinated with such an amazing find. here, they felt, was proof of early man on the North American continent. This was their first evidence, so they published an article concerning the significance of the find. The London Daily Illustrated News displayed a full-page spread on Nebraska Man -- Hesperopithecus Harold Cookii -- Harold Cook’s "Ape of the West." They reconstructed this creature from his tooth, exhibiting his exact shape, even to the extreme brow ridges and the broad shoulders. More significant was the fact that they reconstructed not only his from, but that of his wife as well. So here are Mr. and Mrs. Hesperopithecus, reconstructed from a tooth. Back in Nebraska they were able to find the entire jaw bone. Then they fit the tooth into the jaw bone -- and to their horror, the jaw bone was that of a pig. Well, men will make mistakes; such is scientific frailty.

Zinjanthropus is reconstructed from 400 fragments of skull, the largest of which is the size of a silver dollar. One who views a good picture of the skull usually wonders what it could be, for doesn’t really look like any type of skull. Yet it is said to be from one of our ancestors. An interesting corollary to the problem is the lava flow immediately under the bed in which Zinjanthropus is found. Under Zinjanthropus Leaky found Homo Habilis, supposedly a more modern man. Evolutionists explain that this bed is overturned, and thus the Zinjanthropus is indeed one of our ancestors -- some one and three-quarter millions of years old. The lava flow underneath, when dated by potassium-argon, gives a lesser age of 1.3 million years. Problems are involved in the dating of lava flows by potassium-argon. Recently a lava flow formed in 1801 in Hawaii was dated by the potassium-argon method and found to have an age of 230 million years. Since the lava flow took place in modern times, one wonders about the accuracy of this dating system. Certainly there is strong evidence against the acceptance of the potassium-argon dates given to Zinjanthropus. We will never know three things about Zinjanthropus from looking at the pieces of skull. One, we will never rally know what his fleshy parts looked like. Two, we will never know if he had the capacity to think. Three, we will never know if he had the capacity to speak. These are the three criteria for man. In fact, if Zinjanthropus were living today, we might find him caged in a zoo with a special name for him and other supposed ancestors of man. Or we may find him a type of man which has become extinct before our time; we will never know for sure by merely looking at the bones.

Ramapithecus was built around a few fragments, some of which are teeth. Scientists say the teeth are humanoid, human-like. But there is a baboon living in Ethiopia today which has the same teeth as Ramapithecus. How can we decide whether the teeth rally belong ton ancestor or to one of these baboons?