In the previous chapter (Fossils and Strata), we examined the supposed evidences for the past evolution of plants and animals. In this chapter, we will view the imagined ancestry of human beings.

Following an introduction, this chapter is divided into two main sections: Hominids and Early Man.

The section on Hominids will deal with what is called prehistoric man, or what we might call "the man of evolution." In some respects it is an addition to the chapter on fossils, although it reads more like a sideshow as it tells about fakeries such as Piltdown Man, Java Man, Tuang Man, etc.

The concluding section, Early Man, will be about actual geologic or historical evidences of ancient peoples, and is about the "man of history." It is somewhat paralleled by information near the end of chapter 4, Age of the Earth.

The concept that we are just animals, only slightly removed from apes, means that there are no moral standards, no laws worth obeying, no future, and no hope. The realization of this terrible truth even penetrated the gloom of *Darwin’s mind at times.

1 - INTRODUCTION

As adults, we frequently hear reports of fossil remains of apelike humans that have been found. Each discovery has been hailed as a landmark proof of the theory of evolution. Scientists have given a name to these supposed half-man/half-ape remains; they call them hominids.

Is it really true that such skeletal remains have been found? Are we really related to apes? In this chapter, you will examine the evidence and find solid answers.

Gorilla and Man

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Modern man is said to have evolved until about 100,000 years ago—and then he stopped evolving! It is claimed that, since that time, man has switched over from "physical evolution" to "cultural and social evolution." This is an attempt to explain the fact that, in historical records, evolution has never been known among humans.

There is no evidence that evolution is now—or has ever—occurred among animals or plants either. Are they culturally evolving now also? In addition, it is strange that if man is essentially the same as he was a million years ago, then why did he only begin leaving writings, buildings, and artifacts during no more than the last few thousand years? Why does human history only go back less than 5,000 years?

Did man descend from the apes? Our DNA is different from that of each of the apes, monkeys, and all the rest. The number of vertebrae in our backbone is different from that in the apes. Our cranial (brain) capacity is totally different from the great apes.

Orangutans . . . . . . 275-500 cc.

Chimpanzees . . . . . 275-500 cc.

Gorillas . . . . . . . . . 340 -752 cc.

Man . . . . . . . . . . . .1100 -1700 cc.

Cranial capacity is, by itself, an important test of whether a skull is from a man or an ape.

Several differences between man and ape: (1) Birth weight as a percent of maternal weight is, in man, almost twice that of the great apes (5.5 vs. 2.4-4.1), but about the same or less than that found in monkeys (5-10) and in gibbons (7.5). (2) Order of eruption of teeth is the same in man and in the Old World monkeys, but it is different from that of the great apes. (3) Walking upright is quite different. Man and the gibbon walk habitually upright; the great apes do not. As with the other teachings of evolution, scientific facts are on the side of the Creationists; and the evolutionists, and their incredulous theories are outside the domain of scientific fact, discovery, and law. (4) The neck hinge is at the back on man, but at the front on the ape.

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The shape and arrangement of the teeth, for example, is quite different for apes and man:

Some of these peoples have lost a knowledge of agriculture and the making of weapons, tools, or houses. They only have a few crude stone and bamboo tools, and no weapons. They live under the trees in the open, and the men spend each day gathering worms, leaves, and fruit for the family to eat.

*Diodorus Siculus, writing about 60 B.C., told of people living along the shores of the Red Sea in caves. He describes many other barbarian tribes, some of them quite primitive. Thus we see that both advanced civilizations and more backward cave cultures lived at the same time. We have no reason to conclude that the less advanced peoples were ancestors of the more advanced ones.

Archaeologists tell us that, in some places in Palestine, people resembling the Neanderthal race lived in caves while not far away in Jericho people dwelt in well-built, beautifully decorated houses.

In 1856 workers blasted a cave in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. Inside they found limb bones, pelvis, ribs, and a skull cap. The bones were examined by both scientists and evolutionists; and, for a number of years, all agreed that these were normal human beings. Even that ardent evolutionist and defender of *Darwin, *Thomas H. Huxley, said they belonged to people and did not prove evolution. *Rudolph Virchow, a German anatomist, said the bones were those of modern men afflicted with rickets and arthritis. Many scientists today recognize that they had bowed legs due to rickets, caused by a lack of sunlight.

In 1886, two similar skulls were found at Spy, Belgium. In the early 1900s, a number of similar specimens were found in southern France. Over a hundred specimens are now in collections.

A French paleontologist named *Marcellin Boule said they belonged to apelike creatures, but he was severely criticized for this even by other evolutionists who said this fossil was just modern man (Homo sapiens), deformed by arthritis.

A most excellent, detailed analysis of how rickets and arthritis caused the features, peculiar to Neanderthals, was written by Ivanhoe in a 1970 issue of the scientific journal, Nature. The article is entitled, "Was Virchow Right About Neanderthal?"

Neanderthal features include a somewhat larger brow ridge (the supra orbital torus), but it is known that arthritis can make this more prominent. Virchow noted that the thighbone (femur) was curved, a condition common to rickets. Lack of Vitamin D causes osteomalacia and rickets, producing a subtle facial change by increasing the size of the eye cavity (orbit), especially vertically.

*D.J.M. Wright, in 1973, showed that congenital syphilis could also have caused the kind of bone deformities found in Neanderthal specimens.

The Neanderthals apparently lived at a time when there was not as much sunlight. We know that the ice age came as a result of worldwide volcanic dust pollution. The weather in Europe at that time was cold enough that they may have stayed so much in their caves that they did not obtain enough sunlight, especially due to the overcast sky conditions.

They may also have lived longer than men do today. Biblical records indicate that those living just after the Flood (on down to Abraham and even Moses) had somewhat longer life spans than we do today. In 1973, *H. Israel explained that certain living individuals today begin to develop Neanderthaloid features—the heavy eyebrow ridges, elongated cranial vault, and so on—with extreme age. There is definite evidence that the Neanderthals were several hundred years old.

For much more information, see the book, Buried Alive, by Jack Cuozzo (1998). In it, he clearly shows that the Neanderthals were several hundred years old. Facial bones keep growing throughout life. He also discovered that the evolutionists had mismatched the upper and lower jaw, in order to make the Neanderthals look like apes.

Here are two facts you will not find in the textbooks: (1) In 1908 a typical Neanderthal skeleton was found in Poland. It had been buried in a suit of chain armor that was not yet fully rusted ("Neanderthal in Armour," in *Nature, April 23, 1908, p. 587). (2) A Neanderthal skeleton was found in the Philippine Islands in 1910. Due to the extreme moisture of that land, it would be impossible for the skeleton to be as much as a century old ("Living Neanderthal Man," in *Nature, December 8, 1910, p. 176).

A third interesting fact is that the Neanderthals had larger craniums than we do. They had larger brains! This indicates regression of our race from a former longer-lived, more intelligent, race rather than evolutionary progression. Brain capacity is an important indicator of whether a cranium (the part of the skull which encloses the brain) belongs to an ape or a person.

They also had well-developed culture, art, and religion. At the present time, most scientists agree that Neanderthals were just plain people that lived in caves for a time. Unfortunately, we are still waiting for this change in thinking to be seen in children’s textbooks.

Two Neanderthal-like skulls were found in Santa Barbara, California in 1923. Researchers recognized that they were just Indian skulls.

Neanderthals were just racial types similar to ourselves.

The Cro-Magnons were truly human, possibly of a noble bearing. Some were over six feet tall, with a cranial volume somewhat larger than that of men today. This means they had more brains than men have today. Not only did they have some excellent artists among them, but they also kept astronomy records. The Cro-Magnons were normal people, not monkeys; and they provide no evidence of a transition from ape to man.

2 - HOMINIDS

(1) Why is it that, each time, only one specimen is found? Why not hundreds or thousands of them? If these are our ancestors, there should be millions of specimens. There are so many people alive today, there should have been large numbers of half-ape people alive during that "million years" that men are said to have lived on this planet. Indeed, evolution teaches uniformitarianism, the concept that past climates and living conditions were essentially like those we have now in the world.

(2) Why are only little pieces of bone found for each specimen—never a complete skeleton? Is this not reading a lot into almost no evidence? Or is it possible that the less found, the easier it is to try to make unfounded claims for it? (Later in this chapter we learn that if only parts of bones are found, their positions can be moved about to imitate half-ape skulls and jaws.)

(3) Although bones decay in a few years in damper regions, and in a few centuries in drier regions,—why is it that these special bones did not decay even though they are supposed to be "a million years old"? The very possibility, that these "million-year-old bones" are not supposed to have decayed, makes it all the more certain that there ought to be millions of other bones lying around belonging to our ancestors! There are millions living today, if people have lived on earth for a million years,—the earth should be filled with the bones of our ancestors!

(4) How could "million-year-old bones" possibly be found in damp earth (not encased within solid rock) in Indonesia, China, and England? Yet the evolutionists claim that such bones have been found, as we shall learn below.

In an article about the grand opening of the International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory (TILLMIAP) in Nairobi, Kenya, *Lewin wrote this:

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In September 1891 near the village of Trinil in a damp place by the Solo River, *Dubois found a skull cap. A year later and fifty feet from where he had found the skull cap, he found a femur. Later he found three teeth in another location in that area. *Dubois assumed that (1) all these bones were from the same individual, and (2) that they were as much as a million years old.

Nearby, in the same condition (indicating the same approximate age), he also found two human skulls (known as the Wadjak skulls), but he did not publicize this find; for they had a cranial capacity somewhat above that of modern man. Thirty-one years later, in 1922, he admitted the Wadjak skull was an ape.

Excitedly, *Dubois reported the find (the pieces of bone) as "Java Man," and spent the rest of his life promoting this great discovery. The thigh bone was a normal human upper leg bone. As might be expected, many experts questioned whether all the bones came from the same person, and even if they did, they said they were human bones, not ape bones. But *Dubois spent most of the remainder of his life lecturing and telling people about the "half-human/half-ape" bones that he had found in Java in 1891-1892. He named it Pithecanthropus erectus (erect ape-man).

British zoologists thought it was human, German experts decided it was ape, and the French conjectured that it was something between the two.

Finally, in 1907 a German expedition was sent from Berlin to Java to settle the matter. But *Dubois would not show them his "bone collection" nor help them in any way. Arriving in Java, they went over the Trinil site thoroughly, removed 10,000 cubic meters [1,379 cu yd] of material and 43 boxfuls of bones, and then declared it all to be wasted time. Their main discovery was that *Dubois’ Java Man bones had been taken from a depth that came from a nearby volcano. It had overflowed in the recent past and spewed forth lava, which overwhelmed and buried a number of people and animals.

About 15 years before his death, and after most evolutionists had become convinced that his find was nothing more than bones from a modern human,—*Dubois announced his conviction that the bones belonged to a gibbon!

School textbooks and popular books for the public continue to cite 500,000 years as the age of "Java Man," which, admittedly, is quite an imaginary figure.

Paintings were made of the great men who found and worked on it; and three of those men were later knighted by the king of England. Such is the stuff of glory. Ignored was the report of a dentist in 1916 who said that the teeth had been filed down by someone.

In 1953, *Joseph Weiner and *Kenneth Oakley applied a recently developed fluorine test to the bones—and found that Piltdown Man was a grand hoax! Someone had taken an ape jaw and put it with a human skull, filed the teeth somewhat, and then carefully stained it all so that the bones looked both ancient and a matching set. Imported mammalian fossils and handcrafted tools were placed nearby. It took 40 years to unravel that particular hoax. (Later in this chapter, the story is discussed in more detail.)

Further analysis revealed dental caries which modern diets tend to produce, and also a hole through the skull made by a bullet or crossbow. So Rhodesian Man was not so ancient after all.

*Henry F. Osborn, a leading paleontologist, ridiculed William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial, declaring that the tooth was "the herald of anthropoid apes in America," and that it "speaks volumes of truth" (*H.F. Osborn, Evolution and Religion in Education, 1926, p. 103). At the trial, two specialists in teeth at the American Museum of Natural History, said that, after careful study, the tooth was definitely from a species closer to man than to the ape (Science 55, May 5, 1922, p. 464).

This turned out to be some kind of town garbage dump. Although thousands of animal bones were found in this pit near Peking, only a few human skulls were found, and there was no evidence that they had evolved from anything else—even though there was 150 feet of animal bones in the pit. These human bones totaled 14 skulls in varying conditions, 11 jawbones, 147 teeth and a couple small arm bone and femur fragments, along with stone tools and carbon ash from fires.

These were human bones, but with a somewhat smaller brain capacity (1,000cc., which some people today have), and with the prominent brow ridges which we find in Neanderthals and Australopithecus.

There are races today with larger brow ridges, and some Philippine women have brow ridges,—which only men generally have. Patterns vary, but the species remains one.

A braincase of 1,000cc. is not sub-human; people today vary between 1,000 and 2,000cc., with an occasional low of 750cc., and an average of 1,500-1,600cc.

All the skulls disappeared during World War II, so we cannot now examine them with modern methods to check their genuineness.

The evidence indicates that this may have been a dining area or garbage dump, and that both animals and people had been eaten.

Twenty years later, in the 1950s, *Ernst Mayr came up with a new name, Homo erectus, and then put a variety of bone finds (Java Man, Peking Man, and several others) into it.

It is well to keep in mind that all that remains of Peking Man are plaster casts in the United States. But plaster casts cannot be considered reliable evidence.

One of the most famous was named "Lucy," and will be mentioned later on.

Some experts believe that these apes, the Australopithecines, descended from another ape, the "Ramapithecines" ("Ramapithecus" is the singular for this word), which is supposed to have lived 12 million years ago.

Homo habilis is another ape. In the 1960s, *Louis Leakey found some teeth and skull fragments at Olduvai. He dated them at 1.8 million years ago and decided they belonged to the human family, therefore naming them Homo. (People are classified as Homo Sapien.) But many experts, including *Brace and *Metress have clearly shown that habilis was nothing more than a large-brained Australopithecus.

Brain sizes: Human beings have a brain size of about 1500 cc. (cubic centimeters). In contrast, habilis was 660 cc. Other brain sizes would be 800 cc. for Hadar, 900 cc. for Koobi Fora. Most other brain sizes are about 500 cc. The Taung and Sterkfontein skulls are around 430 cc. apiece, so an adult of their species would only be 550-600 cc. Thus on the score of size of braincase, these finds prove nothing.

An excellent and detailed article on this, which includes 13 charts and graphs, will be found in "Some Implications of Variant Cranial Capacities for the Best-preserved Australopithecine Skull Specimens," by Gerald Duffert (Creation Research Society Quarterly, September 1983, pp. 96-104). The article reveals that there was evidence of fraudulent measurements of those ancient African skulls. Repeatedly, when initially measured a high cubic centimeter volume was announced for the skull, but later remeasurements by other investigators disclosed much smaller measurements!

Speaking of the Australopithecines, *J.S. Weiner commented:

In 1957, *Ashley Montagu, a leading U.S. anthropologist, wrote that these extremely apelike creatures could not possibly have anything to do with man (*A. Montegu, Man’s First Million Years).

After the most careful research, *Oxnard and *Zuckerman have come to the conclusion that Australopithecus is an ape, and not human, and not a transition between the two.

*Dr. Yves Coppens, appearing on BBC-TV in 1982, stated that Lucy’s skull was like that of an ape.

In 1983, *Jeremy Cherfas said that Lucy’s ankle bone (talus) tilts backward like a gorilla, instead of forward as in human beings who need it so to walk upright, and concluded that the differences between her and human beings are "unmistakable" (*J. Cherfas, New Scientist, (97:172 [1982]).

*Susman and *Stern of New York University carefully examined Lucy and said her thumb was apelike, her toes long and curved for tree climbing, and "she probably nested in the trees and lived like other monkeys" (Bible Science Newsletter, 1982, p. 4).

Several scientists have decided that the bones of Lucy come from two different sources. Commenting on this, *Peter Andrews, of the British Museum of Natural History, said this:

Regarding those knee joints, *Owen Lovejoy, *Richard Leakey’s highly qualified associate (an anatomist), declared at a 1979 lecture in the United States that a multivariate analysis of Lucy’s knee joints revealed her to be an ape

*Johanson’s theory about Lucy is based on an assumption linking two fossils 1,000 miles [1,609 km] apart:

*Johanson, himself, finally decided that Lucy was only an ape.

Mehlert sums it up.

Since the Leakeys are frequently mentioned in articles about the bones of man’s ancestors, we will here mention that *Louis Leakey was born in Africa, the son of a missionary. He and his wife, *Mary, both had doctorates. After his death, his son *Richard, who never obtained a doctorate, continued bone hunting with his mother. Olduvai Gorge is located in East Africa, about 100 miles [160.9 km] west of Mount Kilimanjaro. It consists of a 300-foot [91 m] gorge that has cut through five main horizontal beds.

*Louis Leakey called his find Zinjanthropus boisei, but the press called it "Nutcracker Man" because it had a jaw much larger than the skull. This was probably another case of mismatched skull parts. The skull was very apelike; but some tools were nearby, so *Leakey decided that it had to be half-human. Slim evidence, but that is how it goes in the annals of evolutionary science.

When he first announced it, *Leakey declared that it was the earliest man, and was 600,000 years old! Although the age was a guess, it came just as funds from *Charles Boise ran out. A new sponsor was needed, and the *National Geographic Society stepped in and has funded the *Leakeys ever since.

In 1961, the skull of Nutcracker Man was dated by the notoriously inaccurate potassium-argon method (see chapter 6, Inaccurate Dating Methods) at 1.75 million years. That story really made the headlines! In 1968, the same materials were dated by Carbon 14, which, although quite inaccurate, is far safer than potassium-argon. The C-14 dating of Nutcracker Man was only 10,100 years.

But there is more: A complete fully human skeleton just above the location of the later find of Nutcracker Man was discovered, in 1913, by the German anthropologist *Hans Reck.

There was much discussion of these remains and *Louis Leakey personally examined them in the 1930s. But in his 1959 press announcement, he made no mention of them. To do so would have ruined his announced discovery. C-14 tests on the skull that *Reck found (the rest of the skeleton had disappeared from the Munich museum) were made in 1974 and yielded a date of 16,920 years. Although radiocarbon dating can have a wide margin of error, 16,920 is far different from 1.75 million! Eventually *Leakey conceded that Nutcracker Man was just another ape skull, like *Dart’s Taung Man.

In 1964, another skull—this one belonging to a human—was found near those same tools that *Leakey found in 1959. One of its "hand bones" was later found to be a piece of a human rib.

Both Leakey and other hominid experts think it looks essentially like a modern small-brained person. It was pieced together from several fragments.

Here was *Leakey’s original announcement in regard to this skull:

But it should be understood that modern, living, small-brained (750cc.) human beings have existed; so the finding of a 750cc. Skull 1470 is no reason to think it is an "ancestor" of mankind.

Early comments on Skull 1470 included these:

It lacks the prominent eyebrow ridges common to Homo erectus (Java Man, etc.), many Neanderthals, and Australopithecus. Some fossil apes had brow ridges; others lacked them.

The size of the braincase is equivalent to that of a teenager, or a microcephalic, and somewhat larger than an ape: 775 cc. A gorilla averages 500 cc., and an australopithecus only 422cc. to 530 cc. The average brain size for modern man is 1450 cc. But there are exceptions to this:

Microcephalics are human beings which have brains as small as 775 cc. This condition is a birth defect which, though unfortunate, occurs from time to time.

It is significant that the lower jaw was not found. This would have told a lot. The face of the skull, below the eyes, protrudes forward in the manner of apes. The jaw and molars are somewhat larger than the average modern human’s, but not larger than those of some people. There appears to be a lack of bony support beneath the nostrils, such as is found in gorillas. Facial skeletons are relatively larger in apes than the braincase size. Skull 1470 is about midway in this category, and thus not like that of humans. It also has a long upper lip area, such as apes have.

Viewing three skulls from the rear (an adult human, Skull 1470, and Australopithecus), we find that Skull 1470 has similarities to that of Australopithecus.

John Cuozzo, in a 4-page report complete with two drawings and seven photographs (Creation Research Society Quarterly, December 1977, pp. 173-176), provides intriguing evidence for his contention that Skull 1470 may have been that of an early teenage human being, and that damage to the skull after death caused the apelike characteristics in the nasal opening, etc.

Frankly, there is not enough data available to say much more. There is no doubt that the special human qualities of speech, etc., would not reveal themselves in a skull.

It is also a fact that evolutionists eagerly desire evidence that man descended from an apelike ancestor. Yet over a hundred years of searching has not disclosed this, even though, as we learned in the chapter on Fossils and Strata, millions of fossils have been dug out of the ground and examined. If mankind had indeed descended from another creature, there should be abundant fossil evidence. But it is not there.

Although over 1400 specimens are given, most are little more than scraps of bone or isolated teeth. Not one complete skeleton of one individual exists. All that anthropologists have in their ancestral closet are bits and pieces.

As listed in the Ancient Man appendix on our website (*#12*), the number of bone pieces which have been found worldwide is incredibly small! You will want to turn to the appendix and look over the listing for yourself. There is little wonder that each new piece of bone receives so many newspaper stories!

Here are five special reasons why mankind did not descend from apes. We cover several of these in detail in other chapters:

They say that they have found the bones of our hominid ancesters. Why then have only a table-top full of bones been found? There ought to be millions of bones, if they lived for hundreds of thousands of years before us. And why do all those bones look only like ape bones or human bones—and never like both?

They say that modern evolutionary anthropology is based on the pioneering discoveries of six men: * Eugene Dubois and his Java Man, *Charles Dawson’s Piltdown Man, the 1921 Rhodesian Man, the 1922 Nebraska Man, *Raymond *Dart’s Taung African Man, and *Davidson Black’s Peking Man. But the finds of *Dubois and *Dawson were later discovered to be outright fakes. Rhodesian and Taung Man were found to be apes. Nebraska Man turned out to be a pig tooth, and Peking Man was just human bones.

Even *Richard Leakey, the foremost hominid bone hunter of the past 20 years has begun to question what it is all about. When asked on television to name our ancestor, he walked over to a chalkboard and drew a large question mark.

The full implication of this point is of the highest significance; yet it has been acknowledged by few evolutionist anthropologists. Consider these three facts:

(1) It is well-known that many extinct animals were gigantic in size. (See chapters 12 and 14, Fossils and Strata and Effects of the Flood, for more on this.) (2) Young apes have skulls which are shaped similarly to those of humans. (3) Relics of what once was an amazingly large ape have been found (see quotation below).

The search for hominid skulls has usually occurred in areas well able to preserve skulls of both apes and men for thousands of years. But relatively few have been found, simply because time only goes back a few thousand years.

In addition, there is also another possibility: giant monkeys. Just as giant apes could be found, so giant monkeys could have once existed. The discovery of a skull of a giant monkey would also appear human-like, small-brained, yet with some variant features.

The following statement by Brown is highly significant. It tells us this: (1) The very expensive mass spectrometer machine actually counts C-14 atoms and gives more accurate totals. (2) Every organic specimen has some radiocarbon atoms, therefore none are more than a few thousand years old. (3) The earliest skeletal remains in the Western hemisphere have been dated by this method, and found to be only about 5,000 years old.

The problem is that when orthodox science discovers that a new procedure will topple major evolutionary foundations, a cover-up occurs. It is likely that the mass spectrometer technique will never be permitted to be applied to major ancient archaeological or pre-archaeological materials, such as ancient hominid bones. To do so would reveal their recent age. (For more on this, see the radiocarbon cover-up section in chapter 21, Archaeological Dating. [Due to a lack of space, we had to omit most of this chapter, but it is on our website.])

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