Statement on the Recent Skull Discovery in China

2334

01 April, 2008

Evolutionists make a huge fuss over new fossil discoveries. The public are exposed to headlines carrying intensive evolutionist propaganda about claims of missing links.

Evolutionists make a huge fuss over new fossil discoveries. The public are exposed to headlines carrying intensive evolutionist propaganda about claims of missing links. But this sensational air is only temporary. Subsequent scientific findings play down the importance of the fossils involved in missing link propaganda and remove them from the fictitious evolutionary family tree. Evolutionist publications naturally devote little space to these facts about the fossil concerned. And then a new fossil is discovered and in its turn portrayed as powerful support for the theory of evolution. Until the discovery of scientific findings that undermine that fossil, too... And so the vicious circle of evolutionist propaganda continues.

Recent reports carried on the ntvmsnbc.com news portal shows that a new deception is taking place in that part of the circle exhibited to the public. Under the headline “The most significant fossil since Pekin Man,” the report in question gave the impression of promising very important backing for the theory of evolution.

An almost complete skull, discovered in China and consisting of parts, is estimated by archaeologists to date back between 80,000 and 100,000 years. It is hope that since the inner membrane has been preserved the skull will provide information about the nervous systems of the human beings living at the time,

But what does it mean for the discovery to be hailed as the “most significant fossil since Pekin Man”? That question requires a brief explanation of what Pekin Man actually is. In terms of Pekin Man’s unjustified rise and subsequent fall, the new finding emerges as a human fossil that constitutes no evidence for the theory of evolution at all.

The discovery of Pekin Man and its rise in evolutionary theories

Pekin Man is the name given to fossils discovered in the Zhoudoukian caves near Beijing in the 1920s. They were given the scientific name Sinanthropus pekinensis, meaning “Pekin Man,” on the basis of a skull discovered in 1929 and estimated at 500,000 years old. As shown by the way it was treated as a separate category to Homo sapiens, it was initially suggested that it represented a transition from ape to human.

The skull’s thick, protruding eyebrow bones (supraorbitals) led to Pekin Man being regarded as “primitive.” But this is a distorted analysis, because protruding eyebrow bones are also a feature of certain modern human races. Evolutionists were later forced to admit that there was no objective anatomical difference to prevent Pekin Man being considered an extinct human race.

In addition, the original fossils were lost under the conditions of World War II, and contemporary scientists are only able to study plaster copies of the Pekin Man bones.

Yet despite all these scientific facts, evolutionists for years insisted on keeping Pekin Man, a true human being, as an intermediate species in the fictitious tree of hum an evolution. For more than half a century pictures of Pekin Man with a hairy body and crude facial features were depicted as genuine scientific realities in school text books.

The Fall of Pekin Man

In later years Pekin Man lost its importance in the imaginary scenario of a transition from ape to man and was renamed under the category Homo erectus. That means “upright-walking human being,” and apart from small racial differences in the skull it has the same anatomy as that of modern human beings. Many anthropologists openly admit that there is no difference between Homo erectus (and therefore Pekin Man) and present-day humans. This view won majority acceptance at a conference in Germany that attracted famous palaeontologists and anthropologists. The magazine American Science reported the developments at the conference as follows:

Most of the participants at the Senckenberg conference got drawn into a flaming debate over the taxonomic status of Homo erectus started by Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, Alan Thorne of the University of Canberra and their colleagues. They argued forcefully that Homo erectus had no validity as a species and should be eliminated altogether. All members of the genus Homo, from about 2 million years ago to the present, were one highly variable, widely spread species, Homo sapiens , with no natural breaks or subdivisions. The subject of the conference, Homo erectus , didn"t exist.^[1]

The classification of Pekin Man under Homo erectus is a sign that there is no doubt even among evolutionists that it represents a human being. A program about Pekin Man on the pro-evolutionary National Geographic TV channel carried the opinions of the physical anthropologist Gary Sawyer from The American Museum of Natural History in New York, who spoke about the protruding eyebrow bones and stated that Pekin Man was a true human being.

Sensationalising a discovery was of no benefit to evolutionists

Looking at the ntvmsnbc.com report headline one might possible form the impression that a fossil representing a highly significant contribution to the theory of evolution had been discovered. But that would be incorrect. Because even though evolutionists sensationalise findings using the kind of tactics outlined above, no discovery has ever been of any benefit to the theory of evolution, and all the evolutionist claims about the fossils unearthed have subsequently been discredited and lost all their importance. Two leading U.S. palaeontologists, Niles Eldredge, from Harvard University, and Ian Tattershall from the American Museum of Natural History, express the error of the expectation that a missing link will be found in a single discovery and will shed light on hitherto unknown aspects of the theory of evolution:

One of the most pervasive myths in all of paleontology...is the myth that the evolutionary histories of living beings are essentially a matter of discovery. … But if this were really so, one could confidently expect that as more hominid fossils were found the story of human evolution would become clearer. Whereas if anything, the opposite has occurred.^[2]

The University of California palaeoanthropologist Tim White admits, in a paper published in the magazine Discovering Archaeology, that new fossil discoveries lose their importance in the face of subsequent ones:

Perhaps no area of science is more contentious than the search for human origins. Elite palaeontologists disagree over even the most basic outlines of the human family tree. New branches grow amid great fanfare, only to wither and die in the face of new fossil finds.^[3]

The new fossil provides no support for the theory of evolution

Darwinists have described the new fossil discovered as the second most important fossil after Pekin Man, itself once the subject of evolutionist propaganda. But Pekin Man no longer enjoys its former significance in evolutionary theories, for which reason the new fossil has no evolutionary basis, either.

The reason why Chinese scientists regard this fossil as important lies in questions on the racial rather than the evolutionary level. Could the existence of the Chinese, who today constitute one-fifth of the population of the world, be explained by the Out of Africa theory or by the multi-regional theory? Are the Chinese descended from a line assumed to represent modern human beings that spread out of Africa 200,000 years ago by eliminating local human inhabitants in the places they came to? Or are they the result of a mixture of human races already existing in various parts of Asia without their giving way to the new arrivals from Africa?

Whatever the answer to these questions, the human beings who came out of Africa and those already existing in Asia are the oldest modern human races. Therefore, this debate and the new fossil being equated with them have nothing to do with the theory of evolution that maintains that humans are descended from apes.

The fact that Pekin Man was once described by evolutionists as a missing link should not mislead one into thinking that this new fossil contributes anything to the idea of the “ape-man.” Pekin Man and the owner of the newly discovered skull exhibit no greater anatomical variety than those displayed by modern human races. In short, both are flawlessly created human beings like us, rather than half-man, half-ape creatures.

[1] Pat Shipman, Doubting Dmanisi, American Scientist, November-December 2000, p. 491

[2] Niles Eldredge, Ian Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution, pp. 126-127

[3] Robert Locke, "Family Fights," Discovering Archaeology, July/August 1999, p. 36

The Lie of Human Evolution