NEWS ANALYSIS
Time magazine's new ape-man
Publication's latest evolution contention less-than-believable
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By James Perloff
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2001 WorldNetDaily.com

In 1999, following the controversial de-emphasis of evolution in Kansas
schools, Time magazine struck in its August 23 issue with an editorial
denouncing creationists and a huge cover story called "How Man Evolved."
The latter displayed man's supposed oldest ancestor -Ardipithecus ramidus -
while neglecting to tell readers that its fragments had been found
scattered over an area of about one mile, and put together to form a "missing link."
Time's cover was of a reconstructed ape-man skull, yet well less than half
the skull consisted of actual fossil fragments - the rest was plaster,
molded by imagination.

The most recent issue of Time, dated July 23, takes no less liberty. On
the cover is a painting of an ape-man called Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba with
the headline "How Apes Became Human." Inside, the article begins: "Meet your
newfound ancestor." The painting is based on some fragmentary bones recently
found in Ethiopia by a graduate student named Yohannes Haile-Selassie.
Time assures its readers that the creature walked upright. The evidence for
this?
A single toe bone. Time displays the bone with the unequivocal caption:
"THIS TOE BONE PROVES THE CREATURE WALKED ON TWO LEGS." But not until the
last page of the eight-page article do readers learn that the toe bone was
actually found some ten miles from the other bones. What evidence exists
that the toe bone belonged to Haile-Selassie's other specimens? None,
other than speculation.

There is great danger in basing conclusions on a single bone. In 1922,
paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, an ardent evolutionist, was shown a
single tooth found in Nebraska by geologist Harold Cook. After examining
it, Osborn declared it belonged to an early ape-man, whom he named
Hesperopithecus haroldcookii in Cook's honor. Popularly, it became known
as "Nebraska Man."

Osborn hailed the tooth as "the herald of anthropoid apes in America." At
the American Museum of Natural History, William K. Gregory and Milo
Hellman, specialists in teeth, said after careful study that the tooth was from a
species closer to man than ape. Harris Hawthorne Wilder, a zoology
professor at Smith College, wrote: "Judging from the tooth alone the animal seems to
have been about halfway between Pithecanthropus [Java Man] and the man of
the present day, or perhaps better between Pithecanthropus and the man of
the Neanderthal type. ..." In England, evolutionist Grafton Elliot Smith
convinced the Illustrated London News to publish an artist's rendering of
Nebraska Man. The picture, which appeared in a two-page spread and
received wide distribution, showed two brutish, naked ape-persons, the male with a
club, the female gathering roots. All this from one tooth.

However, further excavations at Cook's site revealed that the tooth
belonged neither to ape nor man, but to a peccary, a close relative of the pig.

Or take the Piltdown Man. It was declared an ape-man, 500,000 years old, and
validated by many of Britain's leading scientists, including Grafton Elliot
Smith, anatomist Sir Arthur Keith and British Museum geologist Arthur Smith
Woodward. At the time the discovery was announced (1912), the New York Times
ran this headline: "Darwin Theory Proved True." For the next four decades,
Piltdown Man was evolution's greatest showcase, featured in textbooks and
encyclopedias.

But what did the Piltdown Man actually consist of? A very recent orangutan
jaw, which had been stained to look old, with its teeth filed down to make
them more human-looking, planted together with a human skull bone, also
stained to create an appearance of age.

Those who think such mistakes no longer occur need only consider the
Archaeoraptor, promoted in a 10-page color spread in the November 1999
National Geographic as the "true missing link" between dinosaurs and birds.
The fossil was displayed at National Geographic's Explorers Hall and viewed
by over 100,000 people. However, it too turned out to be a fake - someone
had simply glued together fragments of bird and dinosaur fossils.

Even if Time turns out to be correct, and Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba
walked on two feet, would it prove he was our "newfound ancestor"? This
assertion is based on a long-standing evolutionary assumption, usually
stated something like this: "Humans are the only creatures that have
evolved to the point where they can walk on two feet; therefore, if we can find
the fossil of an animal that could walk on two feet, such a creature was our
ancestor."

However, the assumption that two-footed mobility establishes human kinship
is groundless. Gorillas occasionally walk bipedally; Tanzanian chimpanzees
are seen standing on two legs when gathering fruit from small trees;
Zaire's pygmy chimpanzee walks upright so often that it has been dubbed "a living
link." Science News reports of the latter: "Like modern gorillas they tend
to be knuckle-walkers on the ground, yet they seem to be natural bipeds,
too, frequently walking upright both on the ground and in the trees." So
even if a fossil creature did have some limited ability to stand on two
feet, it doesn't make it man's ancestor any more than these modern apes.
And man is not the only bipedal creature. Birds are bipedal; so was the
T. rex.
Therefore, are they human ancestors?

Time refers to "fossil discoveries as far back as Java Man in the 1890s"
as validating the relationship between man and ape. But Time does not relate
much of what is known about those finds.

The Java Man story began with Ernst Haeckel, the German zoologist who has
become notorious for using fraudulent drawings of embryos to prove the
theory of evolution (See the July issue of WorldNet Magazine). Haeckel was
convinced that an ape-man must have existed, and he named it
Pithecanthropus alalus: ape-man without speech.

One of Haeckel's students, Eugene Dubois, became determined to find
Pithecanthropus. Haeckel believed men might have separated from apes
somewhere in Southern Asia. So in 1887, Dubois signed up as a doctor with
the Dutch medical corps in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia),
intending to hunt for fossils during all his spare time. Dubois, it should be noted,
had no formal training in geology or paleontology at the time, and his
"archaeological team" consisted of prison convicts with two army corporals
as supervisors.

Years of excavation produced little of significance. Then, in 1891, along
Java's Solo River, the laborers dug up a skullcap that appeared rather
apelike, with a low forehead and large eyebrow ridges. Dubois initially
considered it from a chimpanzee, even though there is no evidence that this
ape ever lived in Asia. However, the following year, the diggers unearthed
a thigh bone that was clearly human.

Dubois, like Piltdown's discoverers, presumed that an apelike bone
somewhere near a human bone meant the two belonged to the same creature,
constituting Darwin's missing link. Haeckel, who had not even seen the bones,
telegraphed Dubois: "From the inventor of Pithecanthropus to his happy discoverer!"

In 1895, Dubois returned to Europe and displayed his fossils. The response
from experts was mixed, however. Rudolph Virchow, who had once been
Haeckel's professor and is regarded as the father of modern pathology, said:
"In my opinion, this creature was an animal, a giant gibbon, in fact. The
thigh bone has not the slightest connection with the skull."

The circumstances of Dubois' find were unorthodox. He had apparently been
absent when the convicts dug up his fossils. Maps and diagrams of the site
were not made until after the excavation. Under such conditions, a modern
dig would be disregarded.

In 1907, an expedition of German scientists from various disciplines, led by
Professor M. Lenore Selenka, traveled to Java seeking more clues to man's
ancestry in the region of Dubois' discovery. However, no evidence for
Pithecanthropus was found. In the stratum of Dubois' find, the scientists
found hearths and flora and fauna that looked rather modern. The
expedition's report also noted a nearby volcano that caused periodic
flooding in the area. Java Man had been found in volcanic sediments. The
report observed that the chemical nature of those sediments, not ancient
age, probably caused the fossilization of Pithecanthropus.

Nevertheless, the Selenka findings and various deficiencies of Dubois' work
were largely ignored, and Java Man became one of evolution's undisputed
"facts."

Then there was Peking Man, worked on and validated by a number of Piltdown
alumni, including Davidson Black, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Smith. In
seeing textbook portrayals of Peking Man, few students learned that the
skulls had been found in scattered little fragments, and that the
reconstructions were actually composites taken from various individuals.
Where fragments were missing, plaster substituted, and the famous final
images of Peking Man were the creations of a sculptress named Lucille
Swann.
Later, all of the Peking Man fossils mysteriously vanished, except for a
couple of teeth, preventing Peking Man from being subjected to the kind of
checking that doomed Piltdown Man.

Neanderthals were long portrayed as ape-men, stooped over. This
misconception was largely the result of a faulty reconstruction by French
paleontologist Marcellin Boule, who mistook the skeleton of a man with
kyphosis (hunchback) for an ape-man in the process of becoming upright.
Another snag: Neanderthal skulls are larger than those of modern humans.
This flies in the face of evolutionary tradition, which says that man
evolved progressively from creatures with smaller brains and skulls. In any
event, Neanderthals are no longer classed as "ape-men," and some
evolutionists have even discarded them as human ancestors.

Which basically leaves us with australopithecines, currently in vogue as
man's ancestor.

However, australopithecine fossils show that they had long forearms and
short hind legs, like today's apes. They also had long curved fingers and
toes, like those apes use for tree-swinging. This may pose a problem for
Time's thesis, since it claims the toe bone of Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba
was over 5 million years old, yet relatively human-like - implying that it
was more evolved than the toes of australopithecines, who supposedly came
2 million years later.

The main substance to the claim that australopithecines are our ancestors is
some evidence suggesting that the famed "Lucy" and her peers may have walked
upright. But as noted, limited bipedality does not prove human ancestry, and
a number of scientists - contrary to the impression created in Time - have
disagreed that australopithecines are man's relatives.

Britain's Lord Solly Zuckerman, who was raised to peerage for his scientific
achievements, was a leading authority on australopithecines, having
subjected them to years of biometric testing. He stated:

     For my own part, the anatomical basis for the claim that the
     australopithecines walked and ran upright like man is so much more
     flimsy than the evidence which points to the conclusion that their
     gait was some variant of what one sees in subhuman primates, that
     it remains unacceptable.

Charles Oxnard, former director of graduate studies and professor of anatomy
at the University of Southern California Medical School, subjected
australopithecine fossils to extensive computer analysis. Stephen Jay Gould
called him "our leading expert on the quantitative study of skeletons."
Oxnard concluded:

     [T]he australopithecines known over the last several decades are
     now irrevocably removed from a place in the evolution of human
     bipedalism, possibly from a place in a group any closer to humans
     than to African apes and certainly from any place in the direct
     human lineage. All of this should make us wonder about the usual
     presentation of human evolution in introductory textbooks, in
     encyclopaedias and in popular publications. In such volumes not
     only are australopithecines described as being of known bodily
     size and shape, but as possessing such abilities as bipedality and
     tool-using and -making and such developments as the use of fire
     and specific social structures. Even facial features are happily
     (and non-scientifically) reconstructed.

The July 23 Time includes a graphic showing the evolution of man, starting
with the supposed Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba, with progressively more
human figures culminating in man. However, it is very easy to arrange bones
to demonstrate "evolutionary progress." In 1927, Osborn, along with other
evolutionists, created a diagram of man's evolution. Skulls were displayed
in progressive order. No. 1 in the sequence was the fraudulent Piltdown Man.
No. 4 was a Neanderthal; No. 6 Cro-Magnon Man. No. 8 was labeled
"Australian" (aborigine). No. 9? "Negro." No. 10? "Chinese." No. 11 (and
last)? "Caucasian."

Because 99 percent of an organism's biology resides in its soft anatomy, it
is very easy to invest a bone with imagination. For this reason - despite
the protests of Darwinists - evolutionary anthropology is not a science like
physics or chemistry. The laws of physics and chemistry can be demonstrated
in a high school laboratory. Evolutionary anthropology, on the other hand,
consists of speculations about unobserved events that supposedly occurred
millions of years ago. Science cannot observe the past with the same
authority as the present. As Lowenstein and Zihlman noted in New Scientist:
"The subjective element in this approach to building evolutionary trees,
which many palaeontologists advocate with almost religious fervor, is
demonstrated by the outcome: There is no single family tree on which they
agree."

There was a wealth of evidence concerning the assassination of John F.
Kennedy: hundreds of eyewitnesses interviewed by the Warren Commission; the
Zapruder movie that caught the actual slaying; the autopsy; fingerprint
evidence; ballistics evidence. Nevertheless, controversy has never stopped
raging about what actually took place. Scores of books challenged the
evidence, offering widely differing explanations as to who killed Kennedy,
from what angle(s) he was shot, etc. Even the autopsy results were
challenged in a best-selling book.

Granted, the Kennedy assassination was a politically charged event.
Nonetheless, if that much disagreement can occur over something that
happened just 38 years ago, how can a paleontologist pick up a fragment of
bone, supposedly 5 million years old, and declare its meaning with a high
degree of certainty? Unlike the Kennedy assassination, there are no
eyewitnesses who saw this creature, no Zapruder movie of it, no soft tissues
to examine.

Other weaknesses permeate the Time article. It states that Haile-Selassie's
bones are known to be 5.6-5.8 million years old, because this "can be
accurately gauged by a technique known as argon-argon dating." It says the
result was "confirmed by a second dating method." However, argon-argon
dating has been demonstrated in various studies to be unreliable, and Time
doesn't mention what the second method was.

Time refers to the "astonishingly complete skeleton of Lucy"- but those
words belie the fact that about 60 percent of Lucy's skeleton, including
most of the skull, was missing.

In explaining why apes began to walk upright, Time quotes anthropologist C.
Owen Lovejoy: "To walk upright you have to do so in synchrony. If the
ligaments and muscles are out of synch, that leads to injuries. And then
you'd be cheetah meat." But even fully coordinated, healthy human beings
cannot outrun a cheetah!

Time also neglects the fact that species vary widely within themselves.
Darwinian anthropologists use cranial capacity (skull size) to judge the
evolutionary status of our supposed ancestors, but even in modern humans,
cranial capacity ranges from 700 to 2200 cubic centimeters, and has no
bearing on intelligence. People's bone structure varies greatly, based on
heredity, age, sex, health and climate. Some are big-boned, some
small-boned. There are sumo wrestlers and pygmies. Doubtless, our ancient
forebears were also diverse in their looks. How, then, can one assign a
single fossil bone to a distinct place in human history? Apes vary widely,
too; australopithecines may simply be a type that became extinct. Science
journalist Roger Lewin, though an outspoken evolutionist, has noted:

     It is an unfortunate truth that fossils do not emerge from the
     ground with labels already attached to them. And it is bad enough
     that much of the labeling was done in the name of egoism and a
     naive lack of appreciation of variation between individuals; each
     nuance in shape was taken to indicate a difference in type rather
     than natural variation within a population.

Another oddity surfaces in Time's diagram of the evolution of humans, chimps
and gorillas. Human ancestors are shown going back almost 6 million years.
But no chimpanzee or gorilla ancestors are depicted before a million years
ago. If chimps and humans really diverged about 7 million years ago, as Time
asserts, then where are all the fossils of chimpanzee and gorilla ancestors?
Why does every bone fragment turn out to be a human ancestor?

Perhaps that question was answered by Dr. Tim White, anthropologist at the
University of California, Berkeley. Though quoted in Time, and noted as
Haile-Selassie's thesis adviser, he has previously stated: "The problem with
a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that
any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone."

As creationist Marvin Lubenow notes, "No one will care if you discover the
oldest fossil broccoli, but if you are fortunate enough to discover the
oldest fossil human, the world will beat a path to your door."

Editor's note: James Perloff covers the debate over evolution in more detail
in his cover story for the July edition of WorldNet magazine,
WorldNetDaily.com's offline companion. Entitled "EVOLUTION: The complex and
profound basis of all life, or a fairy tale for scientists who reject God?"
Perloff's investigative report is a must-read for anyone interested in the
origins of life. Readers may subscribe to WorldNet at WND's online store.

Perloff's book, "Tornado in a Junkyard," has been widely praised as one of
the most reader-friendly - yet scientifically accurate - books available on
the fallacies of evolution. It sells in WND's online store for $16.95, plus
$5 shipping. But between now and the end of this month (while supplies
last), new 2-year subscribers to WorldNet can receive the book FREE - a
$21.95 value.

Oryginal:
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=3D23765