War of the World Views: Powerful Answers for an "Evolutionized" Culture (6 page)

Artistic imagination has been used to illustrate entire “apemen” from nothing more than a single tooth. In the early 1920s, the “apeman” Hesperopithecus (which consisted of a single tooth) was pictured in the London Illustrated News complete with the tooth’s wife, children, domestic animals and cave! Experts used this tooth, known as “Nebraska man,” as proof for human evolution during the Scopes trial in 1925. In 1927 parts of the skeleton were discovered together with the teeth, and Nebraska man was found to really be an extinct peccary (wild pig)!

Skulls

Skulls are perhaps the most interesting primate fossils because they house the brain and give us an opportunity, with the help of imaginative artists, to look our presumed ancestors in the face. The human skull is easily distinguished from all living apes, though there are, of course, similarities.

Orangutan Skull

Human Skull

The vault of the skull is large in humans because of their relatively large brain compared to apes. Even so, the size of the normal adult human brain varies over nearly a threefold range. These differences in size in the human brain do not correlate with intelligence. Adult apes have brains that are generally smaller than even the smallest of adult human brains and, of course, are not even remotely comparable in intelligence.

Perhaps the best way to distinguish an ape skull from a human skull is to examine it from a side view. From this perspective, the face of the human is nearly vertical, while that of the ape slopes forward from its upper face to its chin.

From a side view, the bony socket of the eye (the orbit) of an ape is obscured by its broad flat upper face. Humans, on the other hand, have a more curved upper face and forehead, clearly revealing the orbit of the eye from a side view.

Another distinctive feature of the human skull is the nose bones that our glasses rest on. Apes do not have protruding nasal bones and would have great difficulty wearing glasses.

Leg Bones

The most eagerly sought-after evidence in fossil hominids is any anatomical feature that might suggest bipedality (the ability to walk on two legs). Since humans walk on two legs, any evidence of bipedality in fossil apes is considered by evolutionists to be compelling evidence for human ancestry. But we should bear in mind that the way an ape walks on two legs is entirely different from the way man walks on two legs. The distinctive human gait requires the complex integration of many skeletal and muscular features in our hips, legs and feet. Thus, evolutionists closely examine the hipbones (
pelvis
), thighbones (
femur
), leg bones (
tibia
and
fibula
) and foot bones of fossil apes in an effort to detect any anatomical features that might suggest bipedality.

Evolutionists are particularly interested in the angle at which the femur and the tibia meet at the knee (called the
carrying angle
). Humans are able to keep their weight over their feet while walking because their femurs converge toward the knees, forming a carrying angle of approximately 9 degrees with the tibia (in other words, we’re sort of knock-kneed). In contrast, chimps and gorillas have widely separated straight legs with a carrying angle of essentially 0 degrees. These animals manage to keep their weight over their feet when walking by swinging their body from side to side in the familiar “ape walk.”

Evolutionists assume that fossil apes with a high carrying angle (humanlike) were bipedal and thus evolving into man. Certain australopithecines (an apelike creature) are considered to have walked like us and thus to be our ancestors largely because they had a high carrying angle. But high carrying angles are not confined to humans—they are also found on some modern apes that walk gracefully on tree limbs and only clumsily on the ground.

Living apes with a high carrying angle (values comparable to man) include such apes as the orangutan and spider monkey—both adept tree climbers and capable of only an apelike bipedal gait on the ground. The point is that there are living tree-dwelling apes and monkeys with some of the same anatomical features that evolutionists consider to be definitive evidence for bipedality, yet none of these animals walks like man and no one suggests they are our ancestors or descendants.

Foot Bones

The human foot is unique and not even close to the appearance or function of the ape foot. The big toe of the human foot is inline with the foot and does not jut out to the side like apes. Human toe bones are relatively straight rather than curved and grasping like ape toes.

While walking, the heel of the human foot first hits the ground, then the weight distribution spreads from the heel along the outer margin of the foot up to the base of the little toe. From the little toe it spreads inward across the base of the toes and finally pushes off from the big toe. No ape has a foot or push-off like that of a human; and thus, no ape is capable of walking with our distinctive human stride, or of making human footprints.

Hipbones

The pelvis (hipbones) plays a critically important role in walking, and the characteristic human gait requires a pelvis that is distinctly different from that of the apes. Indeed, one only has to examine the pelvis to determine if an ape has the ability to walk like a man.

The part of the hipbones that we can feel just under our belt is called the iliac blade. Viewed from above, these blades are curved forward like the handles of a steering yolk on an airplane. The iliac blades of the ape, in contrast, project straight out to the side like the handlebars of a scooter. It is simply not possible to walk like a human with an apelike pelvis. On this feature alone one can easily distinguish apes from humans.

Only three ways to make an “apeman”

Knowing from Scripture that God didn’t create any apemen, there are only three ways for the evolutionist to create one.

1. Combine ape fossil bones with human fossil bones and declare the two to be one individual—a real “apeman.”
   
2. Emphasize certain humanlike qualities of fossilized ape bones, and with imagination upgrade apes to be more humanlike.
   
3. Emphasize certain apelike qualities of fossilized human bones, and with imagination downgrade humans to be more apelike.
   

These three approaches account for
all
of the attempts by evolutionists to fill the unbridgeable gap between apes and men with fossil apemen.

Combining Men and Apes

The most famous example of an apeman proven to be a combination of ape and human bones is Piltdown man. In 1912, Charles Dawson, a medical doctor and an amateur paleontologist, discovered a mandible (lower jawbone) and part of a skull in a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. The jawbone was apelike but had teeth that showed wear similar to the human pattern. The skull, on the other hand, was very humanlike. These two specimens were combined to form what was called “Dawn man,” which was calculated to be 500,000 years old.

The whole thing turned out to be an elaborate hoax. The skull was indeed human (about 500 years old), while the jaw was that of a modern female orangutan whose teeth had been obviously filed to crudely resemble the human wear pattern. Indeed, the long ape canine tooth was filed down so far that it exposed the pulp chamber, which was then filled in to hide the mischief. It would seem that any competent scientist examining this tooth would have concluded that it was either a hoax or the world’s first root canal! The success of this hoax for over 50 years, in spite of the careful scrutiny of the best authorities in the world, led the human evolutionist Sir Solly Zuckerman to declare: “It is doubtful if there is any science at all in the search for man’s fossil ancestry.”
¹

Making Man Out of Apes

Many apemen are merely apes that evolutionists have attempted to upscale to fill the gap between apes and men. These include all the australopithecines, as well as a host of other extinct apes such as
Ardipithecus, Orrorin, Sahelanthropus
and
Kenyanthropus
. All have obviously ape skulls, ape pelvises and ape hands and feet. Nevertheless, australopithecines (especially
Australopithecus afarensis
) are often portrayed as having hands and feet identical to modern man, a ramrod-straight, upright posture and a human gait.

The best-known specimen of A.
afarensis
is the fossil commonly known as “Lucy.” A life-like mannequin of “Lucy” in the
Living World
exhibit at the St. Louis Zoo shows a hairy humanlike female body with human hands and feet but with an obviously apelike head. The three-foot-tall Lucy stands erect in a deeply pensive pose with her right forefinger curled under her chin, her eyes gazing off into the distance as if she were contemplating the mind of Newton.

Few visitors are aware that this is a gross misrepresentation of what is known about the fossil ape
Australopithecus afarensis
. These apes are known to be long-armed knuckle-walkers with locking wrists. Both the hands and feet of this creature are clearly apelike. Paleoanthropologists Jack Stern and Randall Sussman
²
have reported that the hands of this species are “surprisingly similar to hands found in the small end of the pygmy chimpanzee–common chimpanzee range.” They report that the feet, like the hands, are “long, curved and heavily muscled” much like those of living tree-dwelling primates. The authors conclude that no living primate has such hands and feet “for any purpose other than to meet the demands of full or part-time arboreal (tree-dwelling) life.”

Despite evidence to the contrary, evolutionists and museums continue to portray Lucy (A.
Afarensis
) with virtually human feet (though some are finally showing the hands with long curved fingers).

Making Apes Out of Man

In an effort to fill the gap between apes and men, certain fossil
men
have been declared to be “apelike” and thus, ancestral to at least “modern” man. You might say this latter effort seeks to make a “monkey” out of man. Human fossils that are claimed to be “apemen” are generally classified under the genus
Homo
(meaning “self”). These include
Homo erectus
,
Homo heidelbergensis
and
Homo neanderthalensis
.

The best-known human fossils are of Cro-Magnon man (whose marvelous paintings are found on the walls of caves in France) and Neandertal man. Both are clearly human and have long been classified as
Homo sapiens
. In recent years, however, Neandertal man has been downgraded to a different species—
Homo neanderthalensis
. The story of how Neandertal man was demoted to an apeman provides much insight into the methods of evolutionists.

Neandertal man was first discovered in 1856 by workmen digging in a limestone cave in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. The fossil bones were examined by an anatomist (professor Schaafhausen) who concluded that they were human.

At first, not much attention was given to these finds, but with the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
in 1859, the search began for the imagined “apelike ancestors” of man. Darwinians argued that Neandertal man was an apelike creature, while many critical of Darwin (like the great anatomist Rudolph Virchow) argued that Neandertals were human in every respect, though some appeared to be suffering from rickets or arthritis.