Time Magazine's New Ape-Man

By James Perloff, WorldNet Daily

In 1999, following the de-emphasis of evolution in Kansas schools, Time magazine struck in its August 23 issue with an editorial denouncing creationists and a huge cover story called "How Man Evolved." The article displayed man's supposed oldest ancestor--Ardipithecus ramidus--while neglecting to tell readers that its fragments had been found scattered over an area of about one mile, and put together to form a "missing link." Time's cover was of a reconstructed ape-man skull, yet well less than half the skull consisted of actual fossil fragments--the rest was plaster, molded by imagination.

A more recent issue of Time, dated July 23, takes no less liberty. On the cover is a painting of an ape-man called Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba, with the headline "How Apes Became Human." Inside, the article begins: "Meet your newfound ancestor." The painting is based on some fragmentary bones recently found in Ethiopia by a graduate student named Yohannes Haile-Selassie. Time assures its readers that the creature walked upright.

The evidence for this? A single toe bone. Time displays the bone with the unequivocal caption: "This toe bone proves the creature walked on two legs." But not until the last page of the eight-page article do readers learn that the toe bone was actually found some ten miles from the other bones. What evidence exists that the toe bone belonged to Haile-Selassie's other specimens? None, other than speculation.

There is great danger in basing conclusions on a single bone. In 1922, paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, an ardent evolutionist, was shown a single tooth found in Nebraska by geologist Harold Cook. After examining it, Osborn declared it belonged to an early ape-man. It became known as “Nebraska Man.”

Osborn hailed the tooth as “the herald of anthropoid apes in America.” At the American Museum of Natural History, William K. Gregory and Milo Hellman, specialists in teeth, said after careful study that the tooth was from a species closer to man than ape. In England, evolutionist Grafton Elliot Smith convinced the Illustrated London News to publish an artist's rendering of Nebraska Man. The picture, which appeared in a two-page spread and received wide distribution, showed two brutish, naked ape-persons, the male with a club, the female gathering roots. All this from one tooth.

However, further excavations at Cook's site revealed that the tooth belonged neither to ape nor man, but to a peccary, a close relative of the pig.

Or take the Piltdown Man. It was declared an ape-man, 500,000 years old, and validated by many of Britain's leading scientists, including Grafton Elliot Smith, anatomist Sir Arthur Keith and British Museum geologist Arthur Smith Woodward. At the time the discovery was announced (1912), the New York Times ran this headline: "Darwin Theory Proved True." For the next four decades, Piltdown Man was evolution's greatest showcase, featured in textbooks and encyclopedias.

But what did the Piltdown Man actually consist of? A very recent orangutan jaw, which had been stained to look old, with its teeth filed down to make them more human-looking, planted together with a human skull bone, also stained to create an appearance of age.

Those who think such mistakes no longer occur need only consider the Archaeoraptor, promoted in a 10-page color spread in the November 1999 National Geographic as the true missing link between dinosaurs and birds. The fossil was displayed at National Geographic's Explorers Hall and viewed by over 100,000 people. However, it too turned out to be a fake--someone had simply glued together fragments of bird and dinosaur fossils.

Even if Time turns out to be correct, and Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba walked on two feet, would it prove he was our newfound ancestor? This assertion is based on a long-standing evolutionary assumption, usually stated something like this: 'Humans are the only creatures that have evolved to the point where they can walk on two feet; therefore, if we can find the fossil of an animal that could walk on two feet, such a creature was our ancestor.'

However, the assumption that two-footed mobility establishes human kinship is groundless. Gorillas occasionally walk bipedally; Tanzanian chimpanzees are seen standing on two legs when gathering fruit from small trees. So even if a fossil creature did have some limited ability to stand on two feet, it doesn't make it man's ancestor any more than these modern apes. And man is not the only bipedal creature. Birds are bipedal; so was the T. rex. Therefore, are they human ancestors?

Time refers to fossil discoveries as far back as Java Man in the 1890s as validating the relationship between man and ape. But Time does not relate much of what is known about those finds. The Java Man story began with Ernst Haeckel, the German zoologist who has become notorious for using fraudulent drawings of embryos to prove the theory of evolution. Haeckel was convinced that an ape-man must have existed, and he named it Pithecanthropus alalus: ape-man without speech.

One of Haeckel's students, Eugene Dubois, became determined to find Pithecanthropus. Haeckel believed men might have separated from apes somewhere in Southern Asia. So in 1887, Dubois signed up as a doctor with the Dutch medical corps in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), intending to hunt for fossils during all his spare time. Dubois, it should be noted, had no formal training in geology or paleontology at the time, and his “archaeological team” consisted of prison convicts with two army corporals as supervisors.

Years of excavation produced little of significance. Then, in 1891, along Java's Solo River, the laborers dug up a skullcap that appeared rather apelike, with a low forehead and large eyebrow ridges. Dubois initially considered it from a chimpanzee. However, the following year, the diggers unearthed a thigh bone that was clearly human.

Dubois, like Piltdown's discoverers, presumed that an apelike bone somewhere near a human bone meant the two belonged to the same creature, constituting Darwin's missing link.

In 1895, Dubois returned to Europe and displayed his fossils. The response from experts was mixed, however. Rudolph Virchow, who had once been Haeckel's professor and is regarded as the father of modern pathology, said: “In my opinion, this creature was an animal, a giant gibbon, in fact. The thigh bone has not the slightest connection with the skull.”

In 1907, an expedition of German scientists from various disciplines traveled to Java seeking more clues to man's ancestry in the region of Dubois' discovery. However, no evidence for Pithecanthropus was found. The expedition's report also noted a nearby volcano that caused periodic flooding in the area. Java Man had been found in volcanic sediments. The report observed that the chemical nature of those sediments, not ancient age, probably caused the fossilization of Pithecanthropus.

Nevertheless, the expedition's findings and various deficiencies of Dubois' work were largely ignored, and Java Man became one of evolution's undisputed “facts.”

Then there was Peking Man, worked on and validated by a number of Piltdown alumni. In seeing textbook portrayals of Peking Man, few students learned that the skulls had been found in scattered little fragments, and that the reconstructions were actually composites taken from various individuals.

Where fragments were missing, plaster was substituted, and the famous final images of Peking Man were the creations of a sculptress named Lucille Swann. Later, all of the Peking Man fossils mysteriously vanished, except for a couple of teeth, preventing Peking Man from being subjected to the kind of checking that doomed Piltdown Man.

Neanderthals were long portrayed as ape -men, stooped over. This misconception was largely the result of a faulty reconstruction by French paleontologist Marcellin Boule, who mistook the skeleton of a man with kyphosis (hunchback) for an ape-man in the process of becoming upright.

Which basically leaves us with australopithecines, currently in vogue as man's ancestor. However, australopithecine fossils show that they had long forearms and short hind legs, like today's apes. They also had long curved fingers and toes, like those apes use for tree-swinging.

Charles Oxnard, former director of graduate studies and professor of anatomy at the University of Southern California Medical School, subjected australopithecine fossils to extensive computer analysis. Stephen Jay Gould called him “our leading expert on the quantitative study of skeletons.” Oxnard concluded:

The australopithecines known over the last several decades are now irrevocably removed from a place in the evolution of human bipedalism, possibly from a place in a group any closer to humans than to African apes, and certainly from any place in the direct human lineage.

All of this should make us wonder about the usual presentation of human evolution in introductory textbooks, in encyclopedias and in popular publications. In such volumes not only are australopithecines described as being of known bodily size and shape, but as possessing such abilities as bipedality and tool-using and -making and such developments as the use of fire and specific social structures. Even facial features are happily (and non-scientifically) reconstructed.

There was a wealth of evidence concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy: hundreds of eyewitnesses interviewed by the Warren Commission; the Zapruder movie that caught the actual slaying; the autopsy; fingerprint evidence; ballistics evidence. Nevertheless, controversy has never stopped raging about what actually took place. Scores of books challenged the evidence, offering widely differing explanations as to who killed Kennedy, from what angle(s) he was shot, etc. Even the autopsy results were challenged in a best-selling book.

Granted, the Kennedy assassination was a politically charged event. Nonetheless, if that much disagreement can occur over something that happened just 38 years ago, how can a paleontologist pick up a fragment of bone, supposedly 5 million years old, and declare its meaning with a high degree of certainty? Unlike the Kennedy assassination, there are no eyewitnesses who saw this creature, no Zapruder movie of it, no soft tissues to examine.

Dr. Tim White, anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has stated: “The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone.”

As creationist Marvin Lubenow notes, “No one will care if you discover the oldest fossil broccoli, but if you are fortunate enough to discover the oldest fossil human, the world will beat a path to your door.”

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