Milliyet"s Support For Unscientific Reconstructions For The Sake Of Darwinism

The 8 April, 2005, edition of the Turkish daily Milliyet carried a story titled “Our oldest ‘ancestor’ is 7 million years old.” The article in question concerned a last claim about fossil discovery made in Chad and announced to the world in 2002. The fossil was the bones known as the Toumai skull, the scientific name of which is Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Researchers applied a computer reconstruction to the skull and, pointing to this as support for their study, claimed that the Toumai skull belonged to man’s alleged oldest ancestor.

The 8 April, 2005, edition of the Turkish daily Milliyet carried a story titled “Our oldest ‘ancestor’ is 7 million years old.” The article in question concerned a last claim about fossil discovery made in Chad and announced to the world in 2002. The fossil was the bones known as the Toumai skull, the scientific name of which is Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Researchers applied a computer reconstruction to the skull and, pointing to this as support for their study, claimed that the Toumai skull belonged to man’s alleged oldest ancestor.

However, this claim in daily Milliyet is completely groundless. In fact the Toumai skull constitutes no evidence for evolutionary scenarios. On the contrary, this discovery dealt a severe blow to evolutionary interpretations of the fossil record, and daily Milliyet is misleading its readership by completely ignoring this.

The nuclear bomb that obliterated the myth of the missing link

When it was first announced to the world in 2002, this fossil had the effect of a “nuclear bomb,” as one renowned paleoanthropologist put it. The reason for this was that no correlation could be established between the skull’s facial anatomy and age with evolutionist outlook, speaking to the collapse of the fictitious evolutionary family tree.

Evolutionists set out fossil remains from extinct species of ape and ancient human races in the light of their own preconceptions, and then seek to use these claims as if they represented scientific evidence. This, of course, is an unscientific deception. The fact that particular objects can be set out within a logical relationship clearly does not constitute evidence that they evolved from one another. The wrenches laid out in a garage, for instance, do not show that they evolved from each other.

With the discovery of the Toumai skull, albeit fictitious, it became impossible to draw up any more of these unscientific series. According to the classic evolutionist myth on the subject of the origin of man, the human race began with alleged ape-like forerunners that emerged in the Rift Valley in Ethiopia. The start of this myth is dated to around 4 million years ago. According to this tall tale, these creatures evolved into human beings during a process in which their brains developed and in which they are assumed to have adopted an upright posture.

The Toumai discovery literally blew this scenario out of the water. Evolutionists examining the fossil’s facial anatomy stated that the Toumai skull bore a striking resemblance to fossils in the imaginary family tree that were only 2 million years old. However, for evolutionists, who construct their imaginary scenarios on the basis of similarities between bones, this resemblance came as a total “shock.” That is because the Toumai skull, which was compared to 2-million-year-old fossils, is estimated to be not 3 or 4 million years old, but 7 million. From the evolutionist perspective, this fossil has a more “modern” appearance than some 3 or 4-million-year-old fossils. This shows that setting fossils out in a line from “primitive” to “modern” according to specific criteria is scientifically unfounded. Moreover, it also appears that there was no development from ape to human, a requirement of evolutionist scenarios, and that the scenario of human evolution is a myth despite the scientific evidence.

The Toumai skull dealt another very serious blow to the evolution scenario. The fossil was discovered in Chad, 1,500 km to the west of the Rift Valley that is depicted as the place from where man’s fictitious forerunners emerged. The discovery of the fossil at such a great distance from where human evolution allegedly began, and the fact that despite looking only 2 million years old it is actually 7 million years old, spells bankruptcy for the evolutionist perspective. So evolutionists had to admit that the concept of the “missing link,” which always played a key role in the human evolution scenario, was actually completely invalid. The reason is this:

The concept of the missing link was used to describe intermediate forms assumed to have lived in the story of the series of ape-men who followed and evolved into one another. However, as can clearly be seen with the Toumai skull, there is an absence of any linear continuity among the fossils and the evolutionary family tree, which is in any case fictitious, has turned into a meaningless collection of old bones. Thus the idea that missing connections among fossils included in the evolutionary family tree will be found is now completely untenable. Henry Gee, editor of Nature magazine, made the following striking admission in an article in the 12 July, 2002, edition of The Guardian:

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. (emphasis added)

The picture to the left shows the cover of Milliyet, the Turkish daily that reported the Toumai news. On the top is the Toumai skull itself, and underneath is a reconstruction “produced” using the skull on a computer. Close inspection shows that apart from the protruding jaw, its features have been designed to present a human-like appearance. Details such as the ears, lips and eyes are actually soft tissues, and it is impossible to determine their form by examining the bones. The evolutionist prejudices of the person making the reconstruction have played a major role here. Therefore, reconstructions are not scientifically trustworthy.

Earnest Hooton, who worked at Harvard University and was one of the best known anthropologists of his time, expresses this fact:

To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little if any scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public… So put not your trust in reconstructions. (Earnest A. Hooton, Up From the Ape, New York, McMillan, 1931, p. 332)

Conclusion:

As we have seen, there is absolutely no scientifically reliable evidence to support the claim that the Toumai fossil belongs to the earliest members of the human race. The basis of the Milliyet report consists of an unscientific interpretation by circles who have adopted evolution as a dogma, and made in the light of their own prejudices. Giving the impression that reconstructions based on the imagination are a scientific discovery, and portraying these as evidence for Darwinism, is utterly ridiculous. Modern science has definitively invalidated the claims that make up the backbone of Darwinism. We advise the daily Milliyet management to put an end to its blind Darwinist propaganda.