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Early Man

We often become overly concerned about men with primitive appearance. The Bible say mankind began with a perfect pair. Diet and environment created people that looked different from other people. Rather than beginning with primitive man and working up to the complex man of today, we are saying that man was more complex, more perfect, in the past. Man has degenerated as time has gone on.

Some anthropologists believe that the civilization cannot be older than 6000 years. If primitive man is older than that, how did he suddenly develop a civilization? Even primitive tribes normally have highly sophisticated cultures. Cultural anthropologists ignore this and, finding a primitive arrowhead or bone, try to determine what the man was like. Life and its activities cannot be reconstructed from a bone or an implement.

In 1971 a man’s skeleton was found in Cretaceous strata in Utah. The findings of the skeleton would tend to disprove the dating of the Cretaceous period at 100 million years ago. However, since the skeleton was pushed over by a bulldozer, it cannot be absolutely determined whether it was washed into the strata, dropped into a cave, or existed at the alleged time the strata was deposited. As creationists we try to take an honest approach to these matters: we are not going to say we have proved our point in this matter without substantial evidence. The evolutionist, however, in many areas has glossed over the evidence. Even when showing the discrepancies, he continues to make claims to support his thesis. A careful reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species will demonstrate the abundance of "Let us suppose," "if we assume," "let us pretend," "if." Phrases such as these are used some 187 times in one chapter, and toward the end of the book Darwin implies that if we have followed him this far, it is not very difficult to go one step further and assume the next step. In essence, what have we gained? A lot of assumptions.

In his book Implications of Evolution, G.A. Kerkut, as an evolutionist, asserts that "to change a present day reptile into a mammal, though of great interest, would not show the way in which the mammals did arise." Thus it would not prove that reptiles turned into mammals because no one was there in the past to see it, and so, unfortunately, this cannot be affirmed. Kerkut reports that evolution is based on seven assumptions -- all of them unproved and unverifiable. He concludes his work (and this is an evolutionist writing, a professor of biochemistry), "The evidence that supports the general theory of evolution, amoeba to man, is not sufficiently strong enough to consider it as anything more than a working hypothesis." It is not even good enough to be a theory! Kerkut does not believe in creation, but he has demonstrated to the world that evolution is not proved. When we come to the origin of man, we will have to rid ourselves of some of these preconceived ideas.

Claude Levi Strauss, a leading evolutionary anthropologist, finds no evidence that man is any less intelligent in one area of the world than in another. In the most primitive cultures man’s intelligence is equal. There is no evidence of the evolution of man’s mind. So-called primitive tribes living in remote areas have complex languages and cultures. After they quit pioneering, settle down, and build their cultures, then perhaps they think about God. Only they do not remember the God of the Bible who told them about the Flood; they do not remember the God of Noah. But they know there is a God and thus begin to set up a religion because they see other people establishing religions. Accounts of the past have been handed down by word of mouth. Eventually someone decides to write down all these accounts and tradition. Instead of having an account of the Flood, they come up with the Gilgamesh epic or a Babylonian epic. These have some truth in them but have been perverted by time. The farther away people get from the original center of civilization, the more tendency to create variants. We find, however, in all of the ancient tribes, very strong cultural behavior. They are really not primitive; we just consider them so because we compare them to our standards.

Anthropologists repeatedly point to the findings of skull representing primitive man -- with the shape of the skull reflecting its age. They seem to forget the effects of the environment and diet upon the shape of the human skull. Feed a child a diet in which he has to chew a great deal and the shape of the skull is formed accordingly. Feed another child all soft foods and the skull is again formed quite differently. Deficiencies in vitamins and minerals likewise cause changes in the shape of the bones and skull. It is a mistaken idea to assume that the uglier the skull looks, the more primitive it is. The shape of the skulls considered in this writing have the look of primitives with ridges and extensions of the brow, but these could be accounted for on the basis of dietary deficiency as well as effects of the environment.

Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal remains found in Europe in the area of the culture cradle have a larger brain capacity than modern man. Like modern man, their skull capacity is larger than those in more remote areas. However, brain capacity does not seem to mean much in classifying skulls, although we do have averages which we consider for man. There seems to be evidence that the brain capacity of man in the past was larger. At a distance from the European cultural center one finds smaller skulls, ones that look more primitive. Yet one can find each of these ancient types in individuals living today. These skull are simply nothing more than degenerate forms of Adam and Eve and of Noah, scattered from this cultural center in the last 4300 years.