The Xenophile Historian

	Ramapithecus
	Australopithecus
	Homo Habilis
	Java Man
	Peking Man
	Gigantopithecus and Meganthropus
	Piltdown Man
	Nebraska Man
	Neanderthal Man
	Rhodesian Man
	"Hobbits," er, Homo Floresiensis
	Cro-Magnon Man, Conclusion
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Most anthropology books will explain human evolution by showing a progression of apes, ape-men ("hominids"), and finally true men, like this:

Anthropologists have to make assumptions to answer the questions the bone fragments cannot explain, and since many of these have proven faulty in the past, who can be certain the same won't happen to the theories evolutionists follow today? Let us look at the true story behind each of the "cave men" discovered so far.

Ramapithecus

Only ten years after that, a new discovery took Ramapithecus out of our family tree. In 1973 a complete upper jaw of Ramapithecus was found with some facial bones attached. It turned out that previous reconstructions had been incorrect--the mouth of Ramapithecus was not manlike at all, but identical to that of the modern orangutan. The supposed missing link turned out to be nothing more than an ordinary ape!

Australopithecus

Since then it has been suggested that the Australopithecines are not really separate species, but male and female examples of the same ape. More serious is the discovery in the mid-1970s that the more manlike Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus lived in East Africa around the same time. Since the others are considered direct ancestors of modern man, their presence in the same neighborhood eliminates Australopithecus as a contender for a place in our lineage. When this was pointed out, scientists tried to laugh it off with their own attempt at ethnic humor. (What did one Homo Erectus say to another Homo Erectus? "Hey, have you heard the latest Australopithecus joke?")

Homo Habilis

Another problem was pointed out by Donald Johanson. He has stated that wherever he dug he found the bones of rhinos, boas, hippos, monkeys, and other typically African animals, but he has never found the bones of modern apes like chimpanzees. Could it be that Australopithecus and Homo Habilis are the chimps he can't find, because they are right under his nose?⁽²⁾ And in the April 1979 issue of National Geographic, Dr. Mary Leakey (Louis Leakey's wife) reported the discovery of some footprints in a volcanic ash formation that are older than any hominids found so far, but are undeniably human (ape feet have a thumb where we have a big toe). Will the real missing link please stand up!⁽³⁾

This is a good place to mention that anthropologists often go overboard in identifying their discoveries. In the nineteenth century every skeleton found was minutely described as a new race. Thus identical skulls found in different places became known by such names as "Peking Man," "Java Man," "Heidelberg Man," etc. When the number of discoveries reached double-digit figures, the classification broke down under its own weight; since the 1960s the above examples have been known simply as Homo Erectus.

Nowadays it appears that another mania for new hominids has begun. Every new discovery becomes the archetypal example of a new species, and sometimes even a new genus. Thus the newest finds are tagged with a bewildering variety of names, like Australopithecus Afarensis (Lucy), Australopithecus Anamensis, Ardipithecus Ramidus, and Morotipithecus. Two of the most recent finds, Homo Antecessor (Spain, 1997) and Homo Ergaster (Republic of Georgia, 2002), threaten to bump Homo Erectus from its favored position as the direct ancestor of modern man. In a 1995 biology textbook published by Prentice-Hall, the two authors of it declared that: "At the present time, scientists cannot agree on how many species of Australopithecus there were or whether or not they were the ancestors of human beings."

We now realize that the range of individual variation in any population can render such exact descriptions pointless, the more so because the genetic variation in early man was probably wider than in his descendants today. The isolation of people into family-sized groups favors the exaggeration of certain characteristics by inbreeding, the results of which we'll discuss when we get to Neanderthal Man.⁽⁴⁾

Java Man

Peking Man

So who was the actual tool-user? One fact rarely reported is that seven skeletons of modern men were found at the same site; they were dismissed as belonging to visitors who moved into the neighborhood hundreds of thousands of years later. The skeletons were identified as Mongolian, European, Melanesian, and Eskimo types, a perplexing ethnic mixture that no anthropologist can explain. The most plausible answer is that "Peking Man" was just another ape like "Java Man," and was killed and eaten by modern men who viewed monkey brains as a delicacy.

The most serious problem is that the bones are no longer available for study. When America entered World War II in 1941, the American-Chinese team of scientists tried to get the bones shipped out of China, but they disappeared somewhere in transit; presumably Japanese soldiers intercepted them. All we have now are photos and plaster casts of the original bones, with no guarantee that they are accurate.

Gigantopithecus and Meganthropus

Here even the evolutionists admit that they have too few remains to make any claims about them, and none will seriously suggest that we have a direct ancestor here. That is why these prehistoric giants almost never turn up in textbooks, and why you may not have heard of them; even the scientists seem to have forgotten them. Some have suggested that the big teeth come from that elusive wild ape, the Yeti or Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, or its American relative, Bigfoot. If that is the case, they definitely do not come from a missing link, since the Yeti, if it exists, is one of the few monsters that is still active in the modern world.

Piltdown Man

In 1911 an amateur paleontologist named Charles Dawson brought to the British Museum some bone fragments and tools that he claimed he dug from a gravel pit, near an English field named Piltdown Common. The bones were immediately accepted as the real thing, and named Eoanthropus Dawsoni, "Dawson's dawn man." At the time it seemed to be just the missing link people were looking for; the skull looked very modern, except for an apelike jaw. He was judged to be 500,000 years old. Some skeptics (mostly non-English scientists) questioned this find, until the discovery of a second Piltdown skull, at a separate location, was announced in 1917; objects found at one site could be faked or misinterpreted, but not those found at two sites.

Problems began to crop up when undeniably authentic hominids, like Australopithecus and Peking Man, were found elsewhere. Previously it was believed that man's large brain evolved before he walked on two legs; Piltdown Man seemed to prove this. Instead, the skulls of these creatures were more apelike, and the jaws more manlike, so where did Piltdown Man fit into the evolutionary picture? A controversy more furious than that over Java Man's leg broke out concerning Piltdown Man's jaw. It degenerated to outright name-calling; one paleontologist suggested that someone measure the size of his rival's cranium, because it was probably smaller than that of Pithecanthropus! As time went on, most paleontologists decided that Piltdown Man was not the true ancestor of modern man:

"I remember writing a paper on human evolution in 1944, and I simply left Piltdown out. You could make sense of human evolution if you didn't try to put Piltdown into it."⁽⁶⁾

Still another paleontologist asserted that the skull belonged to modern man, and that the jaw could not belong to it under any circumstances, without realizing how close he was to the truth.

The techniques for chemical and radioactive dating became available in 1950, and Piltdown Man was put to the test. The skull turned out to be approximately 620 years old; the jaw came from a modern ape, but the teeth had been filed down to disguise their identity, so it wasn't identified as an orangutan's jaw until 1982. Both skull and jaw were stained dark brown to mimic great age. The tools were also fakes, having been shaped by a steel knife, and the animal fossils Dawson brought in with the bones were authentic, but had come from three locations, none of them in England. The conclusion: someone had gone to great lengths to make an elaborate and very clever fraud, one that had all the scientists fooled for nearly forty years. Presumably it was Dawson, but he had died in 1916 so he could not explain his part in the hoax.⁽⁷⁾ The whole story shows us that scientists, just like anybody, are likely to find evidence to confirm what they believe, whether it is true or not.

Nebraska Man

You would think that today's scientists would be wiser, after a mistake like this. But no!--since the evidence for human evolution is so hard to come by, some still make dumb mistakes, claiming they have specimens which turn out to be something else later. In 1983 Tim White, quoting from articles by I. Anderson and Allan Walker, reported that a dolphin rib, a horse's toe, and an alligator femur were all identified as human collarbone fragments.⁽⁸⁾ His conclusion: "The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominoid [hominid], that any scrap of bone becomes a hominoid bone."

Perhaps the worst case of misidentification occurred in Spain, when part of a skull was promoted as the oldest example of man outside of Africa. A three-day scientific symposium was scheduled to examine and discuss the find, which they named Orce Man, after the Spanish town near where it was found. However, some French scientists spoiled the party when they proved that Orce Man was really a four-month-old donkey, and the embarrased Spanish government sent out 500 letters canceling the symposium. The Daily Telegraph, an Australian newspaper, reported the story on May 14, 1984, with a headline that said it all: "ASS TAKEN FOR MAN."

Neanderthal Man

That changed in the 1950s and 60s, when skulls were found in Israel and Iraq that were old enough to be Neanderthals, but more modern in appearance, with scarcely an eyebrow ridge. In 1958 the Old Man of La Chapelle was given a second look, and it turned out that he walked poorly because he was crippled by arthritis. Other discoveries showed that Neanderthal Man had more intelligence than he had first been given credit for: his brain was a bit larger than ours, he could hunt and bring down the largest ice age beasts, wore clothes, had stone tools that required considerable planning to make, took care of his invalid relatives, and buried his dead with flowers. In 2008 it was discovered that Neanderthals made necklaces out of shell beads, and used lumps of pigment as crayons, to apply makeup. Now we believe that if you gave a Neanderthal a shave and a decent outfit to wear, he could stand on a street corner and pass himself off as one of us. The term Neanderthal is better applied to a culture than a human race. Thus, scientists no longer classify Neanderthal Man as a separate species--Homo Neanderthalensis--but as a race within the human species (Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis).

"Unfortunately, the vast majority of artist's conceptions are based more on imagination than on evidence. But a handful of expert natural-history artists begin with the fossil bones of a hominid and work from there . . . Much of the reconstruction, however, is guesswork. Bones say nothing about the fleshy parts of the nose, lips or ears. Artists must create something between an ape and a human being; the older the specimen is said to be, the more apelike they make it . . . Hairiness is a matter of pure conjecture. The guesswork approach often leads to errors."

Since Neanderthal Man's rehabilitation, some have suggested that his brutish looks came from the harsh environment of ice age Europe: poor diet, rickets caused by insufficient sunlight, etc. Doctors have also pointed out that a problem with an overactive pituitary gland, called acromegaly, can make ordinary people with no apelike genes look like Neanderthals. This rare hereditary disease, which now afflicts less than one person in ten thousand, can spread through a community which practices inbreeding; that may have happened with the small Neanderthal family groups. Acromegaly causes the bones to start growing again about ten to twenty years after adulthood, when they stopped growing originally. At that stage the bones cannot grow any longer because their ends are fused, so they grow thicker instead. The result? Evolution in reverse:

"As in many endocrine types, there is considerable resemblance among all acromegalics. The large extremities, awkward movements, thickened features, and drooping shoulders with hands falling near the knees in advanced cases, give the picture of Simian (apelike) man, and where gigantism has preceded the acromegalic changes, of a primitive ape-like giant. Great strength, however, may give place to exhaustion and weakness in the later stages . . ."⁽¹¹⁾

"In recent years a wrestler by the name of Maurice Tillet, known professionally as 'the Angel,' achieved considerable notoriety. Not only did he win a number of bouts and gain recognition in that way, but his physical appearance attracted considerable attention. Apparently he suffered from acromegaly, an endocrine disorder. As a result his head and his face became very large, his hands and his feet thickened, and his torso, too became broadened. Certainly if his bones were fossilized, it is not hard to believe that they might be regarded as those of a pre-human form. And yet M. Tillet was a 20th century human being, and a cultured, well-educated member of our society at that."⁽¹²⁾

Rhodesian Man

One detail dangerous enough to wreck all our ideas on the stone age was pointed out by a few authors in the 1970s--the Broken Hill skull has a bullet hole in it! The skull has a small round hole in the left temple, with none of the radial cracks around it that an arrowhead or a spear would have produced. The right side of the skull is shattered, having been blown apart from the inside. A German forensics expert in Berlin has testified that only a high-speed projectile, like a bullet fired from a rifle, could have done this kind of damage. What conclusion can we draw from this? One is that Rhodesian Man is not very old after all; he might have been shot by a European in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The other is that somebody back in prehistoric times had guns, and this seems to be more likely, since the skull was found 60 feet underground. Either way, it poses one of those problems which evolutionists prefer to sweep under the rug and forget.

"Hobbits," er, Homo Floresiensis

Nobody is suggesting that Homo Floresiensis is any sort of missing link; attempts to date the tools and bones produced an age range from 95,000 to 13,000 years old, too late for evolutionists.⁽¹³⁾ The current theory is that an Australopithecus or Homo Erectus tribe came to Flores, survived there longer than they did elsewhere, and evolved a bit before they finally disappeared. However, most of the unique features of these little people can be explained through the form of natural selection caused by isolation on a small island. They could just as easily have been descended from the Negritos, the first ethnic group to live in Indonesia within historical times (see Chapter 1 of my Southeast Asian history). Once they arrived, Homo Floresiensis would have had no competition from other humans. On an island where food is in short supply, and no natural enemies exist, it isn't worth it to be big. A similar process explains the presence of miniature elephants (3-7 feet tall), hippos and deer on Mediterranean islands like Malta, Sicily and Crete, in prehistoric times. Consequently, over the generations Homo Floresiensis could have shrunken to a more economical size; call them Oriental Pygmies if you wish. Occasionally a very large creature, like the Galapagos tortoise, is found in an island environment, and these can be explained by those situations where being big enough to hold a territory is required to get food. One such animal may have given the little people their main challenge; Flores is one of the four islands that is home to the Komodo dragon, the world's largest lizard.

Hmmm, real-life hobbits and dragons? Sometimes truth is stranger than fantasy!

Cro-Magnon Man

Finally, let us consider what population growth can do. At the beginning of this chapter I declared that human fossils are the rarest of all. Well, according to our census figures the population of the human race is increasing at an average annual rate of 2% (3% in Moslem countries, 1% or less in the most advanced countries). And we can have more babies than that if we choose to do so. In fact, if our numbers hadn't been set back by calamities like wars and epidemics, it would only take us 4,000 years to go from a single couple to the six billion people that walk the earth today. If mankind is really 4 million years old, then about 150,000 generations have come and gone, and hundreds of billions of our ancestors have lived and died already. If the world has really seen that many humans, where are their bones? We ought to be treading on graveyards everywhere we go!⁽¹⁵⁾

Late in the twentieth century, the study of genetics was applied to human fossils, now that we knew how DNA works. First the DNA of mitochondria from several individuals was compared, and attempts were made to extrapolate how many generations would be required to find a common ancestor to all of those people. Mitochondrial DNA is different from the more familiar DNA in a cell's nucleus, being passed down to a child only from the mother, so all mitochondrial DNA supposedly comes from the mother of the human race, appropriately nicknamed "Eve." The result they came up with was that "Eve" could have lived as recently as 90,000 years ago, and still be ancestor to everyone alive today. This was startling enough, but when enough of the human genome was mapped to make comparing the DNA from chromosomes feasible, an even more recent ancestor was revealed:

"The most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a randomly mating population would have lived in the very recent past. . . . In particular, the MRCA of all present-day humans lived just a few thousand years ago in these models. . . . And a few thousand years before that, . . . the ancestors of everyone on the earth today were exactly the same."⁽¹⁶⁾

Of course evolutionists don't want to think that we've found the genomes of Adam and Eve. To explain this oddity, they backtrack from the usual uniformitarian thinking and propose a catastophist answer: the human race evolved and increased its numbers nicely over a period of millions of years, until a worldwide disaster, like a sudden climate change, killed off most of the humans and prehumans. The latest variant of this theory has a supervolcano, like Mt. Toba in Indonesia, explode 70,000 years ago, and the resulting ash from the eruption fills the atmosphere, causing a sudden cooling of the earth and beginning the most recent ice age. The only hominids that survived this "nuclear winter" were a community of about two thousand individuals in Africa, and when the world warmed up again, they went forth and repopulated it. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds a lot like what happened to the human race during and immediately after Noah's Flood (see Chapter 10).

The assumptions required to believe in human evolution gave even Mr. Darwin some sleepless nights. Late in his career he wrote:

"The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (Life and Letters, pg. 285)

Darwin hit the nail right on the head when he named his book on human evolution The Descent of Man. But it is not the kind of descent he had in mind. We started with Adam, who was created in God's image. People did not start looking and acting like monkeys until after Adam ate the forbidden fruit, and though he took a deadly poison he was so vigorous that it didn't kill him for 930 years. Today we have degenerated to the point that we live off vitamin pills, often wear glasses, and consider ourselves lucky if we live longer than the proverbial "threescore and ten" years. We have more in common with the sniveling losers of today's comic strips and TV shows than we do with the patriarchs and heroes of the past (see also footnote #10). We are proud of the technology that has made our lives easier, but it has also given us obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and infertility; our pre-industrial ancestors almost never got those diseases. When Darwin said "descent" he meant "going up" (it's a good thing he was never an elevator operator!). The truth of the matter is that nature has not made man from a monkey, but that the devil has made a monkey out of man!

"We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own."

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

2. Recently biologists classified the pygmy chimpanzee, or bonobo, as a separate species from other chimps, and some commented on the physical similarities "Lucy" shared with the bonobos. They're probably closer to the mark than they think!

3. Mary Leakey died while I was working on the first draft of this work, in December 1996. Three months earlier, in an Associated Press interview, she still had faith in evolution, but thought that searching for a missing link was futile, because scientists cannot pinpoint exactly when an ape became a man. "We shall probably never know where humans began and where hominids left off," she said. And about the existing charts of human evolution, full of gaps and question marks, she commented, "All these trees of life with their branches of our ancestor, that's a lot of nonsense."

4. The variation of characteristics among individuals makes it just as difficult to identify a living person's ethnic group. For example, we can distinguish a hundred Swedes from a hundred Latinos by counting the number of blondes in each group, but we cannot look at one Swede and one Latino and be certain which is which. Social behavior and language are better tools for classification; a linguist once said that "Languages are the pedigrees of nations."

5. In 1996 Dr. Carl Swisher of the Berkeley Geochronology Center published the results of his tests on the site where Java Man was found; instead of the expected date of 300,000-500,000 years, he found that the bones cannot be more than 40,000 years old. Evolutionists went into a tizzy trying to figure out how to accept this and keep Java Man on the hominid family tree. (Newsweek, December 23, 1996)

6. Sherwood Washburn, quoted by Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins, University of Chicago Press, 1997, pg. 75.

7. More recently it has been suggested that one of those involved in the hoax was none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the beloved author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Why? In a 1983 paper, The Perpetrator at Piltdown, John Winslow and Alfred Meyer described Doyle as "a doctor who knew human anatomy and chemistry, someone interested in geology and archaeology . . . a man who loved hoaxes, adventure . . . and most important of all had a grudge against the British science establishment." In addition, Doyle was a neighbor and a friend of Dawson, and published his novel on prehistoric life, The Lost World, very soon afterwards, in 1912--which, among other things, included a tribe of red-haired ape-men called the "missing link." It's too late to know who was the mastermind behind Piltdown Man, so if it was Doyle, a man who certainly knew how to write a good mystery, then he got away with one of the greatest frauds of the twentieth century.

8. "Humanoid Collarbone Exposed as Dolphin's Rib", New Scientist, April 28, 1983, pg. 199. Someone jokingly suggested that the dolphin be named Flipperpithecus!

9. "Cave man" is actually a misnomer. They didn't all live in caves; those on the move were perfectly capable of building tents or lean-tos out of sticks and animal skins. Unfortunately most of their artifacts were exposed to the elements and not preserved for us, so the troglodyte gets all the credit.

10. In 2009 an Australian anthropologist, Peter McAllister, wrote a book comparing Neanderthals, primitive tribesmen of our time like the Aborigines, and modern man, and concluded that we are wimps. According to him, even Neanderthal women would have been strong enough to beat a modern muscleman like Arnold Schwartzenegger in an arm-wrestling contest. The book has the provocative title "Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male,", and begins with these sentences:
"If you're reading this then you - or the male you have bought it for - are the worst man in history. No ifs, no buts -- the worst man, period...As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet."

11. A. Stuart Mason & G. I. M. Swyer, Major Endocrine Disorders, Fairlawn, NJ, Oxford University Press, 1959, pg. 15.

12. John W. Klotz, Genes, Genesis and Evolution, St. Louis, Concordia Publishing House, 1955, pp. 198-199.

13. This doesn't necessarily mean they died out that long ago. The same scientists who found Homo Floresiensis are looking into local legends which suggest that modern Indonesians used to encounter them. The November/December 2004 issue of Archaeology Magazine said this about the folklore:
"Villagers in Flores say that up until around 150 years ago, there were small, three-foot-tall hairy 'people' who used to steal food from them. Known as the ebu gogos (literally 'the grandmothers who eat anything'), they were tolerated by islanders until they stole a baby and ate it. Whether the ebu gogo is pure myth or an accurate recollection of Homo floresiensis is at present unprovable. 'The folklore material raises the real possibility that Homo floresiensis actually survived until sometime in the nineteenth century,' said excavation member Bert Roberts, a geochronologist at the University of Wollongong who conducted interviews with the villagers earlier this month. 'Indeed, there has to be a remote possibility that they still survive today in some remote jungle area of the island.'
On Flores, there have been no sightings of such creatures--at least, potentially, since the nineteenth century. However, in the same island chain, on the much larger island of Sumatra to the west, there have in recent years been brief, as yet unpublished sightings by a primatologist and others of a small, hairy four-foot-tall ape-like creature known to local tribesmen as orang pendek--literally 'little person.' Some zoologists suspect that a few hundred of them survive in the remote jungles of the Sumatran interior, but none have yet been captured or examined by scientists."

14. McGowen, Tom, Album of Prehistoric Man, Chicago, Rand McNally & Company, 1975, pg. 38.

15. The most recent population estimate (from The Telegraph, December 29, 2008), asserts that the total population of Neanderthals never exceeded 15,000. Compare this with Gunnar Heinsohn's theory about Neanderthals, in Chapter 11.

16. Douglas L. T. Rohde, Steve Olson, and Joseph T. Chang, "Modelling the Recent Common Ancestry of all Living Humans," Nature, Vol. 431, September 30, 2004, pp. 562 and 565.

© Copyright 2005 Charles Kimball