RHODESIA MAN
This famous skeleton was found in a zinc mine in 1921 in what was then British Rhodesia in southern Africa. The find consisted of the bones of three or four family members: a man, a woman, and one or two children.
The bones were dug out by workers at a mining company, not by an experienced scientist, and so there is much that still remains unknown about the exact circumstances surrounding their owners. Only the skull of the man survived, and it was this skull that ended up causing evolutionists headaches.
Once the fossil reached the British Museum of Natural History, the first staff member to examine the bones was Sir Arthur Smith-Woodward. [This was the same scientist who previously had achieved worldwide acclaim as the co-discoverer of what has since became known as one of the most blatant scientific frauds of modern times—
The facial bones forced Smith-Woodward to admit, in his paper written in 1921 for Nature, their “very human characteristics”.
He still alleged certain ape-like qualities, and no underling was going to challenge his authority while he remained in office. Smith-Woodward retired in 1928, and events took a still darker turn.
Before he retired, he placed W.P. Pycraft, one of the Museum’s professional ornithologists (a specialist in birds) and “assistant keeper” of the Museum’s department of zoology, in charge of the reconstruction of Rhodesian Man’s bones. Why a bird specialist should be assigned to reconstruct human remains, no one is quite sure.
What specialized knowledge would an ornithologist have regarding the finer points of human anatomy that would qualify him for such a task? Nevertheless, rather than have an expert in human anatomy reconstruct the crushed hip, Pycraft reconstructed it—with an entirely false orientation.
This then gave poor Rhodesian Man a rather ridiculous posture—that of having the knees bowed outwards, while the feet (which were not available) were turned inwards. Rhodesian Man thus was nicknamed “stooping man” as a result of the posture given to him by these “bird men.”
It was not until many years later—when scientists trained in human anatomy examined the skeleton—that the find was determined to be nothing more than Rhodesian modern man.
No missing link here. Man skull
CONCLUSION In the July 2002 issue of Scientific American, editor in chief John Rennie published what he intended to be a stinging rebuke of creationism, titled “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense.” Amidst all the derogatory things he had to say, he nevertheless admitted that “the historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation”(2002, 287[1]:80, emp. added).
Thank you, Mr. Rennie, for pointing out the obvious. Twenty five years earlier, Stephen Jay Gould had tried to get across the same point when he wrote: Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection, we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study (1977b, 86[5]:14, emp. added).
Just how bad are the data? Consider the following real-life scenario. The July 11, 2002 issue of Nature announced the discovery by French scientist Michel Brunet of a fossil hominid that he designated as Sahelanthropus tchadensis—a creature purported to show a mixture of “primitive” and “evolved” characteristics such as an ape-like brain size and skull shape, combined with a more human-like face and teeth.
The authors of the article also reported that the creature had a remarkably large brow ridge—more like that of younger human species— and they dated it at between six and seven million years old (i.e., 3.5 million years older than any other fossil hominid; see Brunet, et al., 2002)
In an article (“New Face in the Family”) that she authored for the July 10, 2002 on-line edition of ABCNews.com, science writer Amanda Onion reported the find as follows: A team of French and Chadian researchers announced today they have found the skull, jaw fragments and teeth of a six million to seven million-year-old relative of the human family.
The find, which is the oldest human relative ever found, suggests humans may have begun evolving from chimpanzees sooner than researchers realized. The skull’s human-like face and teeth are surprising since they come from a period when researchers believed human ancestors just began evolving. Many expected a specimen as old as this one—named Toumaï—to appear more chimp-like.
An international team led by French paleontologist Michel Brunet found the unusually complete skull, two lower jaw fragments, and three teeth last year in Chad, Central Africa. The skull shows both chimp and human-like features, but is clearly a member of the hominid family—the family including species more closely related to humans than chimpanzees. Brunet called the find Sahelanthropus tchadensis—referring to the discovery site in Chad, in Africa’s Sahel region, and nicknamed it “Toumaï,” “hope of life” in Africa’s Goran language.
He may have walked on two feet but researchers say it’s difficult, if not impossible, to know if this ancient hominid was a direct ancestral link to humans or possibly a false start within the apparently complex “bush” of life (2002). The vaunted New York Times reported the find in its August 6, 2002 on-line edition, under the heading of “Skulls Found in Africa and Europe Challenge Theories of Human Origins”: Two ancient skulls, one from central Africa and the other from the Black Sea republic of George, have shaken the family tree to its roots, sending scientists scrambling to see if their favorite theories are among the fallen fruit.
Probably so, according to paleontologists, who may have to make major revisions in the human genealogy and rethink some of their ideas…. At each turn, the family tree, once drawn straight as a ponderosa pine, has had to be reconfigured with more branches leading here and there and, in some cases, apparently nowhere….
In announcing the discovery in the July 11 [2002] issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Brunet’s group said the fossils—a cranium, two lower jaw fragments, and several teeth—promised to “illuminate the earliest chapter in human evolutionary history.” The age, face, and geography of the new specimen were all surprises…. The most puzzling aspect of the new skull is that it seems to belong to two widely separated periods….
“A hominid of this age,” Dr.[Bernard] Wood [a paleontologist of George Washington University—BH/BT] wrote in Nature, “should certainly not have the face of a hominid less than one-third of its geological age” (see Wilford, 2002). So are we now to believe that some fossil hominids experienced “devolution”? Truth be told, we can believe pretty much whatever we want about Sahelanthropus tchadensis—since, as it turn out, it was manufactured from the skull of a gorilla.
Read the following assessment, made after further study of the skull. A prehistoric skull touted as the oldest human remains ever found is probably not the head of the earliest member of the human family, but of an ancient female gorilla, according to a French scientist. Dr. Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris, said yesterday that aspects of the skull, whose discovery in Chad was announced on Wednesday, were sexual characteristics of female gorillas rather than indications of a human.
Dr. Senut, a self-confessed heretic amid the hoopla over the skull, which dates back six or seven million years, said its short face and small canines merely indicated a female and were not conclusive evidence that it was a hominid. “I tend towards thinking this is the skull of a female gorilla,” she said. “The characteristics taken to conclude that this new skull is a hominid are sexual characteristics. Moreover, other characteristics such as the occipital crest [the back of the skull where the neck muscles attach—BH/BT]...remind me much more of the gorilla.” …The skull’s braincase is ape-like, the face is short, and the teeth, especially the canines, are small and more like those of a human.
But Dr. Senut said these features were characteristic in female gorillas. She cited the case of a skull that was discovered in the 1960s, and accepted for 20 years as that of a hominid before everyone agreed it was a female gorilla. Dr. Senut was not the only French scientist to raise questions about the hominid theory. Yves Coppens, of the College of France, told the daily Le Figaro that the skull
had an ambiguous shape, with a back like that of a monkey.
“The exact status of this new primate is not yet certain,” he said (Chalmers, 2002, emp. added). One scientist assessed S. tchadensis as follows: The discovery consisted of a single, partial skull, albeit distorted, broken and recemented after burial, with no bones below the neck. It has excessively heavy brow ridges, a sagittal crest, and an ape-sized brain. The living creature would have been chimp size, but its (now distorted) face was (probably) flatter than most chimps and its teeth showed wear patterns more typical of hominids than chimps….
Unfortunately there is no direct way to date the new specimen. The six-seven million year age came from nearby mammal, reptile, and fish fossils, similar specimens of which are found in Kenya, several hundred miles to the south, and have been dated to six-seven million years old…. Summarizing the facts, we have one partial, broken, distorted, and recemented skull and a few teeth, which at best, point to a transition between chimp and the chimp-like Australopithecus, coupled with a poorly established date (Morris, 2002, 31[9]:1,2, parenthetical items in orig.).
So what is the point of all of this? The point is this: The evidence is one thing; the inferences drawn from that evidence are entirely another. David Hull, the well-known philosopher of science, wrote as early as 1965: [S]cience is not as empirical as many scientists seem to think it is. Unobserved and even unobservable entities play an important part in it. Science is not just the making of observations. It is the making of inferences on the basis of observations within the framework of a theory (16[61]:1-18). Data (a.k.a., “the facts”) do not explain themselves; rather, they must be explained. And therein lies an important point that all too often is overlooked in the creation/evolution controversy. Rarely is it the data that are in dispute; it is the interpretation placed on the data that is in dispute
. Sady, in today’s scientific paradigm (especially where evolution is concerned), theories sometimes overrule the data. In his 2000 book, Science and Its Limits, philosopher Del Ratzsch noted that this primacy of “theories over data” has had enormous implications for the practice of science, the end result being that the ultimate “court of appeal” has effectively moved away from the actual data and toward the “informed consensus” of scientists. As he put it: Pieces of observational data are extremely important. ...
There s still room for disagreement among scientists over relative weights of values, over exactly when to deal with recalcitrant data, and over theory and evidence. But such disagreements often take place within the context of a broad background agreement concerning the major presuppositions of the discipline in question. This broad background of agreement is usually neither at issue nor at risk. It has a protected status….
Thus, objective empirical data have substantial and sometimes decisive influence on individual theories, but they have a more muted impact on the larger-scale structure of the scientific picture of reality (p. 71, emp. added). In other words, when it comes to the “large-scale structure of the scientific picture of reality” (as, for example, when the paradigm of evolution is under discussion), do not look for the data themselves to make much of a difference. In such an instance, the actual data have a “more muted impact.” Or, as Mark Twain remarked in Life on the Mississippi: “There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact” (1883, p. 156). The proposed timeline and fossil lineage for our alleged descent is so muddled and contorted that evolutionists themselves frequently have difficultly knowing which branches are viable versus which are merely dead-ends.
Jeremy Rifkin summed it up quite well when he wrote: What the “record” shows is nearly a century of fudging and finagling by scientists attempting to force various fossil morsels and fragments to conform with Darwin’s notions, all to no avail. Today the millions of fossils stand as very visible, ever-present reminders of the paltriness of the arguments and the overall shabbiness of the theory that marches under the banner of evolution (1983, p. 125, emp. added).
Once again, we find ourselves in agreement.
The Truth About Human Origins
The bones were dug out by workers at a mining company, not by an experienced scientist, and so there is much that still remains unknown about the exact circumstances surrounding their owners. Only the skull of the man survived, and it was this skull that ended up causing evolutionists headaches.
Once the fossil reached the British Museum of Natural History, the first staff member to examine the bones was Sir Arthur Smith-Woodward. [This was the same scientist who previously had achieved worldwide acclaim as the co-discoverer of what has since became known as one of the most blatant scientific frauds of modern times—
The facial bones forced Smith-Woodward to admit, in his paper written in 1921 for Nature, their “very human characteristics”.
He still alleged certain ape-like qualities, and no underling was going to challenge his authority while he remained in office. Smith-Woodward retired in 1928, and events took a still darker turn.
Before he retired, he placed W.P. Pycraft, one of the Museum’s professional ornithologists (a specialist in birds) and “assistant keeper” of the Museum’s department of zoology, in charge of the reconstruction of Rhodesian Man’s bones. Why a bird specialist should be assigned to reconstruct human remains, no one is quite sure.
What specialized knowledge would an ornithologist have regarding the finer points of human anatomy that would qualify him for such a task? Nevertheless, rather than have an expert in human anatomy reconstruct the crushed hip, Pycraft reconstructed it—with an entirely false orientation.
This then gave poor Rhodesian Man a rather ridiculous posture—that of having the knees bowed outwards, while the feet (which were not available) were turned inwards. Rhodesian Man thus was nicknamed “stooping man” as a result of the posture given to him by these “bird men.”
It was not until many years later—when scientists trained in human anatomy examined the skeleton—that the find was determined to be nothing more than Rhodesian modern man.
No missing link here. Man skull
CONCLUSION In the July 2002 issue of Scientific American, editor in chief John Rennie published what he intended to be a stinging rebuke of creationism, titled “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense.” Amidst all the derogatory things he had to say, he nevertheless admitted that “the historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation”(2002, 287[1]:80, emp. added).
Thank you, Mr. Rennie, for pointing out the obvious. Twenty five years earlier, Stephen Jay Gould had tried to get across the same point when he wrote: Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection, we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study (1977b, 86[5]:14, emp. added).
Just how bad are the data? Consider the following real-life scenario. The July 11, 2002 issue of Nature announced the discovery by French scientist Michel Brunet of a fossil hominid that he designated as Sahelanthropus tchadensis—a creature purported to show a mixture of “primitive” and “evolved” characteristics such as an ape-like brain size and skull shape, combined with a more human-like face and teeth.
The authors of the article also reported that the creature had a remarkably large brow ridge—more like that of younger human species— and they dated it at between six and seven million years old (i.e., 3.5 million years older than any other fossil hominid; see Brunet, et al., 2002)
In an article (“New Face in the Family”) that she authored for the July 10, 2002 on-line edition of ABCNews.com, science writer Amanda Onion reported the find as follows: A team of French and Chadian researchers announced today they have found the skull, jaw fragments and teeth of a six million to seven million-year-old relative of the human family.
The find, which is the oldest human relative ever found, suggests humans may have begun evolving from chimpanzees sooner than researchers realized. The skull’s human-like face and teeth are surprising since they come from a period when researchers believed human ancestors just began evolving. Many expected a specimen as old as this one—named Toumaï—to appear more chimp-like.
An international team led by French paleontologist Michel Brunet found the unusually complete skull, two lower jaw fragments, and three teeth last year in Chad, Central Africa. The skull shows both chimp and human-like features, but is clearly a member of the hominid family—the family including species more closely related to humans than chimpanzees. Brunet called the find Sahelanthropus tchadensis—referring to the discovery site in Chad, in Africa’s Sahel region, and nicknamed it “Toumaï,” “hope of life” in Africa’s Goran language.
He may have walked on two feet but researchers say it’s difficult, if not impossible, to know if this ancient hominid was a direct ancestral link to humans or possibly a false start within the apparently complex “bush” of life (2002). The vaunted New York Times reported the find in its August 6, 2002 on-line edition, under the heading of “Skulls Found in Africa and Europe Challenge Theories of Human Origins”: Two ancient skulls, one from central Africa and the other from the Black Sea republic of George, have shaken the family tree to its roots, sending scientists scrambling to see if their favorite theories are among the fallen fruit.
Probably so, according to paleontologists, who may have to make major revisions in the human genealogy and rethink some of their ideas…. At each turn, the family tree, once drawn straight as a ponderosa pine, has had to be reconfigured with more branches leading here and there and, in some cases, apparently nowhere….
In announcing the discovery in the July 11 [2002] issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Brunet’s group said the fossils—a cranium, two lower jaw fragments, and several teeth—promised to “illuminate the earliest chapter in human evolutionary history.” The age, face, and geography of the new specimen were all surprises…. The most puzzling aspect of the new skull is that it seems to belong to two widely separated periods….
“A hominid of this age,” Dr.[Bernard] Wood [a paleontologist of George Washington University—BH/BT] wrote in Nature, “should certainly not have the face of a hominid less than one-third of its geological age” (see Wilford, 2002). So are we now to believe that some fossil hominids experienced “devolution”? Truth be told, we can believe pretty much whatever we want about Sahelanthropus tchadensis—since, as it turn out, it was manufactured from the skull of a gorilla.
Read the following assessment, made after further study of the skull. A prehistoric skull touted as the oldest human remains ever found is probably not the head of the earliest member of the human family, but of an ancient female gorilla, according to a French scientist. Dr. Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris, said yesterday that aspects of the skull, whose discovery in Chad was announced on Wednesday, were sexual characteristics of female gorillas rather than indications of a human.
Dr. Senut, a self-confessed heretic amid the hoopla over the skull, which dates back six or seven million years, said its short face and small canines merely indicated a female and were not conclusive evidence that it was a hominid. “I tend towards thinking this is the skull of a female gorilla,” she said. “The characteristics taken to conclude that this new skull is a hominid are sexual characteristics. Moreover, other characteristics such as the occipital crest [the back of the skull where the neck muscles attach—BH/BT]...remind me much more of the gorilla.” …The skull’s braincase is ape-like, the face is short, and the teeth, especially the canines, are small and more like those of a human.
But Dr. Senut said these features were characteristic in female gorillas. She cited the case of a skull that was discovered in the 1960s, and accepted for 20 years as that of a hominid before everyone agreed it was a female gorilla. Dr. Senut was not the only French scientist to raise questions about the hominid theory. Yves Coppens, of the College of France, told the daily Le Figaro that the skull
had an ambiguous shape, with a back like that of a monkey.
“The exact status of this new primate is not yet certain,” he said (Chalmers, 2002, emp. added). One scientist assessed S. tchadensis as follows: The discovery consisted of a single, partial skull, albeit distorted, broken and recemented after burial, with no bones below the neck. It has excessively heavy brow ridges, a sagittal crest, and an ape-sized brain. The living creature would have been chimp size, but its (now distorted) face was (probably) flatter than most chimps and its teeth showed wear patterns more typical of hominids than chimps….
Unfortunately there is no direct way to date the new specimen. The six-seven million year age came from nearby mammal, reptile, and fish fossils, similar specimens of which are found in Kenya, several hundred miles to the south, and have been dated to six-seven million years old…. Summarizing the facts, we have one partial, broken, distorted, and recemented skull and a few teeth, which at best, point to a transition between chimp and the chimp-like Australopithecus, coupled with a poorly established date (Morris, 2002, 31[9]:1,2, parenthetical items in orig.).
So what is the point of all of this? The point is this: The evidence is one thing; the inferences drawn from that evidence are entirely another. David Hull, the well-known philosopher of science, wrote as early as 1965: [S]cience is not as empirical as many scientists seem to think it is. Unobserved and even unobservable entities play an important part in it. Science is not just the making of observations. It is the making of inferences on the basis of observations within the framework of a theory (16[61]:1-18). Data (a.k.a., “the facts”) do not explain themselves; rather, they must be explained. And therein lies an important point that all too often is overlooked in the creation/evolution controversy. Rarely is it the data that are in dispute; it is the interpretation placed on the data that is in dispute
. Sady, in today’s scientific paradigm (especially where evolution is concerned), theories sometimes overrule the data. In his 2000 book, Science and Its Limits, philosopher Del Ratzsch noted that this primacy of “theories over data” has had enormous implications for the practice of science, the end result being that the ultimate “court of appeal” has effectively moved away from the actual data and toward the “informed consensus” of scientists. As he put it: Pieces of observational data are extremely important. ...
There s still room for disagreement among scientists over relative weights of values, over exactly when to deal with recalcitrant data, and over theory and evidence. But such disagreements often take place within the context of a broad background agreement concerning the major presuppositions of the discipline in question. This broad background of agreement is usually neither at issue nor at risk. It has a protected status….
Thus, objective empirical data have substantial and sometimes decisive influence on individual theories, but they have a more muted impact on the larger-scale structure of the scientific picture of reality (p. 71, emp. added). In other words, when it comes to the “large-scale structure of the scientific picture of reality” (as, for example, when the paradigm of evolution is under discussion), do not look for the data themselves to make much of a difference. In such an instance, the actual data have a “more muted impact.” Or, as Mark Twain remarked in Life on the Mississippi: “There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact” (1883, p. 156). The proposed timeline and fossil lineage for our alleged descent is so muddled and contorted that evolutionists themselves frequently have difficultly knowing which branches are viable versus which are merely dead-ends.
Jeremy Rifkin summed it up quite well when he wrote: What the “record” shows is nearly a century of fudging and finagling by scientists attempting to force various fossil morsels and fragments to conform with Darwin’s notions, all to no avail. Today the millions of fossils stand as very visible, ever-present reminders of the paltriness of the arguments and the overall shabbiness of the theory that marches under the banner of evolution (1983, p. 125, emp. added).
Once again, we find ourselves in agreement.
The Truth About Human Origins
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