So Do We Come From Apes

Most people are convinced that the so called ‘missing links’ in the evolution of ape to man are a thing of the past. They view claims of transitionary fossil finds as proof positive that we descended from apes. Some may wish to believe this, but, as always, there is another side to this story. There are other facts that are seldom advertised.

For example, did you know that the sum total of fossils used to make a case for ape to man evolution could fit into a space the size of a coffin? Most of these fossils are merely fragments of bones from which a great deal is interpreted. There are very few whole skeletons to speak of. A great deal of artistic licence is taken on the part of museums and journals world-wide in depicting what the transitional stages of man must have looked like. There have also been incidents in which certain fossil finds have been uncovered as fakes. Of the remaining fossil finds, the experts hotly contest whether these are not simply the remains of apes or men rather than intermediary forms.

Neanderthal man, homo erectus and archaic sapiens could have been human. Creationists argue that they exhibit bone deformities typical of rickets; a disease quite likely to affect struggling civilisations in the turbulent post flood ice age environment. Neanderthals, in particular, "get more severe in their archaic morphology as they approach the end of the Neanderthal sequence, the opposite of evolutionary expectations". Australopithecines, like ‘Lucy’, have been shown by some evolutionary scientists as not having the right anatomy to be an intermediary between ape and man. In the opinion of some, Lucy is simply an extinct primate.

The most compelling evidence against the evolution of man from the apes is that when the fossil finds are ‘dated’ and charted on the evolutionary time scale, it can be shown that "various categories of humans were living as contemporaries - perhaps not on the same continent or in the same community, but at the same time, rather than being one grouping ancestral to another". This is contrary to evolutionary theory which requires very long periods of time in which to effect gradual evolution. One cannot argue that some of the pre-evolved creatures co-existed with the more evolved forms either. This would have resulted in interbreeding over the long periods proposed and would have genetically compromised the evolutionary process. Evolution requires the ‘death of the unfit’ as much as the ‘survival of the fit’. This is the principle used in all other cases of evolutionary progression.

Most of the relevant fossils in all categories of ‘human evolution’ date around ‘2 million years old’. They do not exhibit the long period of slow gradual evolution proposed by the theory. In fact there are some anomolies, such as Kanapoi hominid at Laetoli, virtually identical to modern humans dating to 4.4 million years on the evolutionary time scale. This rules out all other categories of human evolution after this date.

Quotations are those of anthropologist, Professor Marvin Lubenow.

Becky Conolly