‘The Way We Were: Human Origins Research in Ethiopia’
by Dr Terry Mortenson, AiG-US
Earlier this month I attended a lecture with the above title given at Miami University
(in Oxford, Ohio, USA) by Dr Tim White, a leading researcher on human evolution
from the University of California at Berkeley (California). The 400-seat auditorium
was about two thirds full with people ranging in age from about 8 to 80, though
most were college students.
White began his talk with the question, ‘Human Evolution—so what? Why
does it matter?’ His answer was that ‘we wouldn’t be here without
it!’ He went on to explain that cultures all over the world have myths about
how people got here. Each culture has a different myth and Genesis gives us one
of those. But, said White, human evolution studies were ‘the only way to move
beyond these myths’ and ‘the only way to know the truth about our origins.’
Dr White repeated the wearisome mantra that ‘evolution is the basis of biology’
and that without it we cannot understand medicine or AIDS or any other aspect of
biology. And then with a clear (and misleading) dig at young-Earth creationists
and ‘Intelligent Design’ proponents, he made the distorted charge that
‘many people in the United States don’t want their children exposed
to evolution at all.’
His lecture summarized the work that has been done in recent years in the Afar area
of the Rift Valley in Ethiopia. With over 50 Ph.D. scientists from 40 universities
in 11 countries working at this location, it is the largest human evolution research
site in the world, he declared. According to these evolutionists, the layers of
fossil bearing sediments represent 6 million years of human evolution. White presented
a chart of the hominids found in these layers and discussed several of the key discoveries
that had been made in very recent years, which supposedly showed the gradual transition
from ape-like creatures to man.
But before discussing these fossils he took a few moments to deal with creationists.
He said, ‘if you take a creationist view’ of these deposits, modern
humans would be expected at every level. In fact, no creationist would say this,
but most in White’s audience probably wouldn’t know he was destroying
a straw man. White went on to discuss a lecture given by Dr Duane Gish (of the Institute
for Creation Research) back in the 1980s at UC Berkeley. Gish had argued that there
were no clear transitional forms documenting human evolution. But White distorted
Gish’s lecture by saying that Gish said that there were only fossil humans
and fossil chimps with nothing in between.1
White then showed us a picture of the skull (which was a mosaic
of bone and plastic), which he had produced after Gish’s lecture to ‘prove’
Gish wrong. The pictured skull revealed a heavy brow ridge, and White told us it
had a ‘large’ cranium. But he gave us no quantitative information. He
obviously expected his audience to take his claim by faith.
His next piece of evidence was a picture of a fossil skull (again
a mosaic of bone and plastic), which had been found by one of his students. It too
had a big brow ridge, supposedly indicating a transitional form. But again White
gave us no data about the skull or about how it was dated to be millions of years
old.
Next, White discussed a picture of the skull (again some bone with
much filler molding) that had been reconstructed from many pieces found recently
by one of his graduate students, Yohannes Haile-Selassie. White didn’t tell
us how we know these scattered broken bone fragments all came from the same individual.
Such information was similarly lacking when White told us of an even more recent
discovery by Haile-Selassie of fossil fragments found over a large area, which supposedly
represent a bipedal humanoid about 5.8 million years old (see
Time’s alleged ‘ape-man’ trips up (again)! for
an enlightening analysis of these claims).
Several key facts stood out from White’s presentation, although they were
merely passing comments. He said that fossilization is now going on in the Afar
valley. But he gave no explanation of how this is happening. White only showed a
picture of horse bones on the ground with a river in the background, and said that
in the rainy season the waters rise to cover the bones. But this will not produce
fossils unless the bones are buried and cut off from scavengers and erosion processes
and unless the right chemicals are in the water.
He mentioned that volcanic ash layers are scattered through the layers of sediments
in this area and that these ash layers had been directly dated by the Argon/Argon
method to be several million years old. But as creationists have shown in several
Web articles (see Q&A: Radiometric dating)
and books (The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods, Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, The Creation Answers Book), these dating
methods are unreliable due to the uniformitarian (and anti-Biblical) assumptions
involved. White’s comment also showed that few, if any, of the layers where
the fossils are found could be dated by these radiometric methods. And yet he stated
later that the geological framework must be done first, before he and other paleoanthropologists
can draw their conclusions. He said, ‘We can’t figure out the evolution
without the geological dates.’
With the very first artistic drawing of ape-men in their natural habitat that White
showed us, he warned us that the picture was based on much speculation and was not
very scientifically justified. But he continued to use such colored drawings during
the rest of the lecture. As the saying goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousand
words,’ which in most people’s minds erased from memory the few words
he said in his disclaimer.
At the end White took questions from the audience. One was from a little boy in
the front row, who asked if we were just monkeys. White replied, ‘No, we’re
a special kind of apes.’ It was sad to see this brilliant scientist speak
of himself (and all other humans) this way. And how ironic it was, for when asked
if any humans had been found at these levels in the Afar area, he said no, and added
that no tools had been found. Why is it that when evolutionists find tools they
conclude that an intelligent agent (a human being) made the tool, even though there
is no physical evidence of the existence of the agent himself, but when they look
at the fossil remains of a human (far more complex than any old primitive, or modern
sophisticated, tool), they conclude that man is the product of time plus chance
plus the laws of nature, not the creation of the supremely intelligent Creator?
But then, evolutionary thinking is full of such contradictions in logic.
Another person asked White if he was a ‘splitter’ or ‘lumper.’
Splitters tend to make a new species out of almost each new fossil; lumpers think
that many of these fossils are simply variations of a single species. He said that
he tended to be a lumper and felt that the splitters had often created many more
species than the evidence justified, which he said is a ‘huge problem’
in paleoanthropology. He further commented on a recent fossil find (which he called
‘Aurora’), which he suspected, contrary to the conclusion of the discoverer,
was actually a mosaic of more than one kind of creature since it had a canine tooth
and a humanoid tibia.
But he was very excited about the painstaking research going on in the very inhospitable
conditions of the Afar region. He said that instead of the ‘hand-waving’
speculations that have dominated paleoanthropology in the past, ‘we are going
to have in the next 10 years a real good picture’ because of all the evidence
being discovered in Ethiopia. One can only wonder how many times in the last century
an evolutionist has denigrated all previous work on human evolution as he trumpeted
his latest discovery as solid evidence that is finally giving a good picture the
development of man. We might call to mind Java Man, Peking Man, Piltdown Man, Nebraska
Man, Nutcracker Man, Lucy, etc., etc.2
Whenever we hear such grandiose claims, we should remember a recent statement by
Henry Gee, senior editor of the leading British journal, Nature. After
discussing the latest finds in Africa that discoverers have suggested are the 5–6
million year old common ancestors of chimps and humans, Gee says:
‘Sadly, I doubt that the status of these creatures can be resolved to general
satisfaction. Some researchers have suggested that the dental and skeletal traits
conventionally used as the basis for hominid systematics are unreliable guides for
reconstructing evolutionary history, in that the phylogenies created using these
traits differ from those based on molecular information from living primates. Given
that bones and teeth are, for practical purposes, all there is to go on, uncertainty
is likely to reign for some time, leaving the nature of the latest
common ancestor—and the general course of early hominid evolution—as
mysterious as ever.’3
White’s lecture, filled as it was with ‘hand-waving’ speculations,
did expose mythological thinking about human origins. I am thankful that the Creator
has given us His inerrant Word, the Bible, to tell us the truth about where man
came from!
References
- That White clearly misled his audience about Gish’s view
of the fossil evidence can be easily seen by anyone reading his book on the fossil
evidence regarding evolution. In the three editions of his book the section on human
evolution is the longest and each exposes White’s characterization—Evolution:
The Fossils Say No! (1973), 41 out of 124 pages, Evolution: The Challenge of
the Fossil Record (1985), 99 out of 262 pages, and Evolution: The Fossils Still
Say No! (1995), 124 out of 367 pages. Return to text.
- See Duane Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No! El Cajon: ICR, 1995), pp. 209–332 and Marvin
Lubenow, Bones of Contention Grand
Rapids: Baker, 1992). Return to text.
- Henry Gee, Palaeontology: Return to the planet of the apes,
Nature 412:131–132, 12 July 2001 (emphasis added). Return to text.
| You are probably accessing this site because you had questions—just like everyone else. That’s why CMI exists. You can keep the free answers on this site coming.  | | |
|
