harunyahya
Fri, Sep-09-05, 17:23
How far back do traces of man go ? Why do these not support
evolution?
HARUN YAHYA www.harunyahya.com
We need to turn to the fossil record to find an answer to the
question of when man appeared on Earth. This record shows that
man goes back millions of years. These discoveries consist of
skeletons and skulls, and the remains of people who lived at
various times. One of the oldest traces of man are the
"footprints" found by the famous palaentologist Mary Leakey in
1977 in Tanzania's Laetoli region.These remains caused a great
furore in the world of science. Research indicated that these
footprints were in a 3.6-million-year-old layer. Russell
Tuttle, who saw the footprints, wrote: "A small barefoot Homo
sapiens could have made them... In all discernible
morphological features, the feet of the individuals that made
the trails are indistinguishable from those of modern humans."
Impartial examinations of the footprints revealed their real
owners. In reality, these footprints consisted of 20
fossilized footprints of a 10-year-old modern human and 27
footprints of an even younger one. Such famous
paleoanthropologists as Don Johnson and Tim White, who
examined the prints found by Mary Leakey, corroborated that
conclusion. White revealed his thoughts by saying: "Make no
mistake about it,... They are like modern human footprints. If
one were left in the sand of a California beach today, and a
four-year old were asked what it was, he would instantly say
that somebody had walked there. He wouldn't be able to tell it
from a hundred other prints on the beach, nor would you."
These footprints sparked an important debate among
evolutionists. That was because for them to accept that these
were human footprints would mean that the imaginary
progression they had drawn up from ape to man could no longer
be maintained. However, at this point dogmatic evolutionist
logic once again showed its face. Most evolutionist scientists
once more abandoned science for the sake of their prejudices.
They claimed that the footprints found at Laetoli were those
of an ape-like creature. Russell Tuttle, who was one of the
evolutionists defending this claim, wrote: "In sum, the 3.5
million-year-old footprint traits at Laetoli site G resemble
those of habitually unshod modern humans. None of their
features suggest that the Laetoli hominids were less capable
bipeds than we are. If the G footprints were not known to be
so old, we would readily conclude that there were made by a
member of our genus Homo... In any case, we should shelve the
loose assumption that the Laetoli footprints were made by
Lucy's kind, Australopithecus afarensis."
Another of the oldest remains to do with man was the ruins of
a stone hut found in the Olduvai Gorge region by Louis Leakey
in the 1970s. The remains of the hut were found in a layer 1.7
million years old. It is known that structures of this kind,
of which similar examples are still used in Africa in the
present day, could only be built by Homo sapiens, in other
words modern man. The significance of the remains is that they
reveal that man lived at the same time as the so-called
ape-like creatures that evolutionists portray as his
ancestors.A 2.3 million-year-old modern human jaw found in the
Hadar region of Ethiopia was very important from the point of
view of showing that modern man had existed on the Earth much
longer that evolutionists expected.12 One of the oldest and
most perfect human fossils is KNM-WT 1500, also known as the
"Turkana Child" skeleton. The 1.6 million-year-old fossil is
described by the evolutionist Donald Johanson in these terms:
"He was tall and thin, in body shape and limb proportions
resembling present-day equatorial Africans. Despite his youth,
the boy's limb nearly matched the mean measurements for white
North American adult males."
It is confirmed that the fossil was that of a 12-year-old boy,
who would have been 1.83 metres tall in adolescence. The
American paleoanthropologist Alan Walker said that he doubted
that "the average pathologist could tell the difference
between the fossil skeleton and that of a modern human."
Concerning the skull, Walker wrote that he laughed when he saw
it because "it looked so much like a Neanderthal."One of the
human fossils that has attracted the most attention was one
found in Spain in 1995. The fossil in question was uncovered
in a cave called Gran Dolina in the Atapuerca region of Spain
by three Spanish paleoanthropologists from the University of
Madrid. The fossil revealed the face of an 11-year-old boy who
looked entirely like modern man. Yet, it had been 800,000
years since the child died. This fossil even shook the
convictions of Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras, who lead the Gran
Dolina excavation. Ferreras said:"We expected something big,
something large, something inflated-you know, something
primitive... Our expectation of an 800,000-year-old boy was
something like Turkana Boy. And what we found was a totally
modern face.... To me this is most spectacular-these are the
kinds of things that shake you. Finding something totally
unexpected like that. Not finding fossils; finding fossils is
unexpected too, and it's okay. But the most spectacular thing
is finding something you thought belonged to the present, in
the past. It's like finding something like-like a tape
recorder in Gran Dolina. That would be very surprising. We
don't expect cassettes and tape recorders in the Lower
Pleistocene. Finding a modern face 800,000 years ago-it's the
same thing. We were very surprised when we saw it."
As we have seen, fossil discoveries give the lie to the claim
of "the evolution of man." This claim is presented by some
media organizations as if it were a proven fact, whereas all
that actually exist are fictitious theories. In fact,
evolutionist scientists accept this, and admit that the claim
of "the evolution of man" lacks any scientific evidence.For
instance, by saying, "We appear suddenly in the fossil record"
the evolutionist paleontologists C. A. Villie, E. P. Solomon
and P. W. Davis admit that man emerged all of a sudden, in
other words with no evolutionary ancestor.16 Mark Collard and
Bernard Wood, two evolutionist anthropologists were forced to
say, "existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution
are unlikely to be reliable." in an article they wrote in
2000. Every new fossil discovery places evolutionists in an
even worse quandary, even if certain frivolous newspapers do
print headlines such as "Missing link discovered." The fossil
skull discovered in 2001 and named Kenyanthropus platyops is
the latest example of this. The evolutionist paleontologist
Daniel E. Lieberman from Washington University's Department of
Anthropology had this to say about Kenyanthropus platyops in
an article in the leading scientific journal, Nature:"The
evolutionary history of humans is complex and unresolved. It
now looks set to be thrown into further confusion by the
discovery of another species and genus, dated to 3.5 million
years ago... The nature of Kenyanthropus platyops raises all
kinds of questions, about human evolution in general and the
behaviour of this species in particular. Why, for example,
does it have the unusual combination of small cheek teeth and
a big flat face with an anteriorly positioned arch of the
cheekbone? All other known hominin species with big faces and
similarly positioned cheekbones have big teeth. I suspect the
chief role of K. platyops in the next few years will be to act
as a sort of party spoiler, highlighting the confusion that
confronts research into evolutionary relationships among
hominins."
The latest evidence to shatter the evolutionary theory's claim
about the origin of man is the new fossil Sahelanthropus
tchadensis unearthed in the Central African country of Chad in
the summer of 2002. The fossil has set the cat among the
pigeons in the world of Darwinism. In its article giving news
of the discovery, the world-renowned journal Nature admitted
that "New-found skull could sink our current ideas about human
evolution."Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University said that
"This [discovery] will have the impact of a small nuclear
bomb." The reason for this is that although the fossil in
question is 7 million years old, it has a more "human-like"
structure (according to the criteria evolutionists have
hitherto used) than the 5 million-year-old Australopithecus
ape species that is alleged to be "mankind's oldest ancestor."
This shows that the evolutionary links established between
extinct ape species based on the highly subjective and
prejudiced criterion of "human similarity" are totally
imaginary.John Whitfield, in his article "Oldest Member of
Human Family Found" published in Nature on July, 11, 2002,
confirms this view quoting from Bernard Wood, an evolutionist
anthropologist from George Washington University in
Washington:"When I went to medical school in 1963, human
evolution looked like a ladder." he [Bernard Wood] says. The
ladder stepped from monkey to man through a progression of
intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last. Now
human evolution looks like a bush. We have a menagerie of
fossil hominids... How they are related to each other and
which, if any of them, are human forebears is still debated.
The comments of Henry Gee, the senior editor of Nature and a
leading paleoanthropologist, about the newly discovered ape
fossil are very noteworthy. In his article published in The
Guardian, Gee refers to the debate about the fossil and
writes: "Whatever the outcome, the skull shows, once and for
all, that the old idea of a "missing link" is bunk... It
should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing
link, always shaky, is now completely untenable."
As we have seen, the increasing number of discoveries is
producing results opposed to the theory of evolution, not in
favour of it. If such an evolutionary process had happened in
the past, there should be many traces of it, and each new
discovery should further strengthen the theory. In fact, in
The Origin of Species, Darwin claimed that science would
develop in just that direction. In his view, the only problem
facing his theory in the fossil record was a lack of fossil
discoveries. He hoped that future research would unearth
countless fossils to support his theory. However, subsequent
scientific discoveries have actually proved Darwin's dreams to
be totally unfounded.
The importance of human-linked remains
The discoveries regarding man, of which we have seen a few
examples here, reveal very important truths. In particular,
they have once again demonstrated what a great product of
fantasy the evolutionists' claim that man's ancestor was an
ape-like creature is. For this reason, it is out of the
question that these ape species could be man's ancestors. In
conclusion, the fossil record shows us that man came into
existence millions of years ago in just the same form as he is
now, and that he has come down to the present with absolutely
no evolutionary development. If they claim to be genuinely
scientific and honest, evolutionists should throw their
imaginary progression from ape to man into the bin at this
point. The fact that they do not give up this spurious family
tree shows that evolution is not a theory that is defended in
the name of science, but rather a dogma they are struggling to
keep alive in the face of the scientific facts.
evolution?
HARUN YAHYA www.harunyahya.com
We need to turn to the fossil record to find an answer to the
question of when man appeared on Earth. This record shows that
man goes back millions of years. These discoveries consist of
skeletons and skulls, and the remains of people who lived at
various times. One of the oldest traces of man are the
"footprints" found by the famous palaentologist Mary Leakey in
1977 in Tanzania's Laetoli region.These remains caused a great
furore in the world of science. Research indicated that these
footprints were in a 3.6-million-year-old layer. Russell
Tuttle, who saw the footprints, wrote: "A small barefoot Homo
sapiens could have made them... In all discernible
morphological features, the feet of the individuals that made
the trails are indistinguishable from those of modern humans."
Impartial examinations of the footprints revealed their real
owners. In reality, these footprints consisted of 20
fossilized footprints of a 10-year-old modern human and 27
footprints of an even younger one. Such famous
paleoanthropologists as Don Johnson and Tim White, who
examined the prints found by Mary Leakey, corroborated that
conclusion. White revealed his thoughts by saying: "Make no
mistake about it,... They are like modern human footprints. If
one were left in the sand of a California beach today, and a
four-year old were asked what it was, he would instantly say
that somebody had walked there. He wouldn't be able to tell it
from a hundred other prints on the beach, nor would you."
These footprints sparked an important debate among
evolutionists. That was because for them to accept that these
were human footprints would mean that the imaginary
progression they had drawn up from ape to man could no longer
be maintained. However, at this point dogmatic evolutionist
logic once again showed its face. Most evolutionist scientists
once more abandoned science for the sake of their prejudices.
They claimed that the footprints found at Laetoli were those
of an ape-like creature. Russell Tuttle, who was one of the
evolutionists defending this claim, wrote: "In sum, the 3.5
million-year-old footprint traits at Laetoli site G resemble
those of habitually unshod modern humans. None of their
features suggest that the Laetoli hominids were less capable
bipeds than we are. If the G footprints were not known to be
so old, we would readily conclude that there were made by a
member of our genus Homo... In any case, we should shelve the
loose assumption that the Laetoli footprints were made by
Lucy's kind, Australopithecus afarensis."
Another of the oldest remains to do with man was the ruins of
a stone hut found in the Olduvai Gorge region by Louis Leakey
in the 1970s. The remains of the hut were found in a layer 1.7
million years old. It is known that structures of this kind,
of which similar examples are still used in Africa in the
present day, could only be built by Homo sapiens, in other
words modern man. The significance of the remains is that they
reveal that man lived at the same time as the so-called
ape-like creatures that evolutionists portray as his
ancestors.A 2.3 million-year-old modern human jaw found in the
Hadar region of Ethiopia was very important from the point of
view of showing that modern man had existed on the Earth much
longer that evolutionists expected.12 One of the oldest and
most perfect human fossils is KNM-WT 1500, also known as the
"Turkana Child" skeleton. The 1.6 million-year-old fossil is
described by the evolutionist Donald Johanson in these terms:
"He was tall and thin, in body shape and limb proportions
resembling present-day equatorial Africans. Despite his youth,
the boy's limb nearly matched the mean measurements for white
North American adult males."
It is confirmed that the fossil was that of a 12-year-old boy,
who would have been 1.83 metres tall in adolescence. The
American paleoanthropologist Alan Walker said that he doubted
that "the average pathologist could tell the difference
between the fossil skeleton and that of a modern human."
Concerning the skull, Walker wrote that he laughed when he saw
it because "it looked so much like a Neanderthal."One of the
human fossils that has attracted the most attention was one
found in Spain in 1995. The fossil in question was uncovered
in a cave called Gran Dolina in the Atapuerca region of Spain
by three Spanish paleoanthropologists from the University of
Madrid. The fossil revealed the face of an 11-year-old boy who
looked entirely like modern man. Yet, it had been 800,000
years since the child died. This fossil even shook the
convictions of Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras, who lead the Gran
Dolina excavation. Ferreras said:"We expected something big,
something large, something inflated-you know, something
primitive... Our expectation of an 800,000-year-old boy was
something like Turkana Boy. And what we found was a totally
modern face.... To me this is most spectacular-these are the
kinds of things that shake you. Finding something totally
unexpected like that. Not finding fossils; finding fossils is
unexpected too, and it's okay. But the most spectacular thing
is finding something you thought belonged to the present, in
the past. It's like finding something like-like a tape
recorder in Gran Dolina. That would be very surprising. We
don't expect cassettes and tape recorders in the Lower
Pleistocene. Finding a modern face 800,000 years ago-it's the
same thing. We were very surprised when we saw it."
As we have seen, fossil discoveries give the lie to the claim
of "the evolution of man." This claim is presented by some
media organizations as if it were a proven fact, whereas all
that actually exist are fictitious theories. In fact,
evolutionist scientists accept this, and admit that the claim
of "the evolution of man" lacks any scientific evidence.For
instance, by saying, "We appear suddenly in the fossil record"
the evolutionist paleontologists C. A. Villie, E. P. Solomon
and P. W. Davis admit that man emerged all of a sudden, in
other words with no evolutionary ancestor.16 Mark Collard and
Bernard Wood, two evolutionist anthropologists were forced to
say, "existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution
are unlikely to be reliable." in an article they wrote in
2000. Every new fossil discovery places evolutionists in an
even worse quandary, even if certain frivolous newspapers do
print headlines such as "Missing link discovered." The fossil
skull discovered in 2001 and named Kenyanthropus platyops is
the latest example of this. The evolutionist paleontologist
Daniel E. Lieberman from Washington University's Department of
Anthropology had this to say about Kenyanthropus platyops in
an article in the leading scientific journal, Nature:"The
evolutionary history of humans is complex and unresolved. It
now looks set to be thrown into further confusion by the
discovery of another species and genus, dated to 3.5 million
years ago... The nature of Kenyanthropus platyops raises all
kinds of questions, about human evolution in general and the
behaviour of this species in particular. Why, for example,
does it have the unusual combination of small cheek teeth and
a big flat face with an anteriorly positioned arch of the
cheekbone? All other known hominin species with big faces and
similarly positioned cheekbones have big teeth. I suspect the
chief role of K. platyops in the next few years will be to act
as a sort of party spoiler, highlighting the confusion that
confronts research into evolutionary relationships among
hominins."
The latest evidence to shatter the evolutionary theory's claim
about the origin of man is the new fossil Sahelanthropus
tchadensis unearthed in the Central African country of Chad in
the summer of 2002. The fossil has set the cat among the
pigeons in the world of Darwinism. In its article giving news
of the discovery, the world-renowned journal Nature admitted
that "New-found skull could sink our current ideas about human
evolution."Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University said that
"This [discovery] will have the impact of a small nuclear
bomb." The reason for this is that although the fossil in
question is 7 million years old, it has a more "human-like"
structure (according to the criteria evolutionists have
hitherto used) than the 5 million-year-old Australopithecus
ape species that is alleged to be "mankind's oldest ancestor."
This shows that the evolutionary links established between
extinct ape species based on the highly subjective and
prejudiced criterion of "human similarity" are totally
imaginary.John Whitfield, in his article "Oldest Member of
Human Family Found" published in Nature on July, 11, 2002,
confirms this view quoting from Bernard Wood, an evolutionist
anthropologist from George Washington University in
Washington:"When I went to medical school in 1963, human
evolution looked like a ladder." he [Bernard Wood] says. The
ladder stepped from monkey to man through a progression of
intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last. Now
human evolution looks like a bush. We have a menagerie of
fossil hominids... How they are related to each other and
which, if any of them, are human forebears is still debated.
The comments of Henry Gee, the senior editor of Nature and a
leading paleoanthropologist, about the newly discovered ape
fossil are very noteworthy. In his article published in The
Guardian, Gee refers to the debate about the fossil and
writes: "Whatever the outcome, the skull shows, once and for
all, that the old idea of a "missing link" is bunk... It
should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing
link, always shaky, is now completely untenable."
As we have seen, the increasing number of discoveries is
producing results opposed to the theory of evolution, not in
favour of it. If such an evolutionary process had happened in
the past, there should be many traces of it, and each new
discovery should further strengthen the theory. In fact, in
The Origin of Species, Darwin claimed that science would
develop in just that direction. In his view, the only problem
facing his theory in the fossil record was a lack of fossil
discoveries. He hoped that future research would unearth
countless fossils to support his theory. However, subsequent
scientific discoveries have actually proved Darwin's dreams to
be totally unfounded.
The importance of human-linked remains
The discoveries regarding man, of which we have seen a few
examples here, reveal very important truths. In particular,
they have once again demonstrated what a great product of
fantasy the evolutionists' claim that man's ancestor was an
ape-like creature is. For this reason, it is out of the
question that these ape species could be man's ancestors. In
conclusion, the fossil record shows us that man came into
existence millions of years ago in just the same form as he is
now, and that he has come down to the present with absolutely
no evolutionary development. If they claim to be genuinely
scientific and honest, evolutionists should throw their
imaginary progression from ape to man into the bin at this
point. The fact that they do not give up this spurious family
tree shows that evolution is not a theory that is defended in
the name of science, but rather a dogma they are struggling to
keep alive in the face of the scientific facts.