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By Carman Bradley
 

Gorillas are like us in so many ways.  They live and die, copulate and reproduce like us.  They get sick from the same diseases as those we suffer from.  They belch, cough, hiccup, sneeze, pick their noses and break wind just as humans do.  They love, protect, care for and discipline their children.  They like and love one another.  Mother love, in particular, is very pronounced, as it is with all mammals.  Love is an essential emotion in the lives of these animals.[i]

Christianity cannot lose the Genesis account of creation like it could lose the doctrine of geocentricism and get along.[ii]

Since every human being is made in God’s image, every human being is worthy of honor and respect.  Each life has intrinsic worth bequeathed by the Creator’s intent - He knew us before our parents did.  When Christians think of being made in God’s image they are not thinking of anatomical parts. The Almighty is a Spirit, and therefore, the facets of “likeness” and “image” include characteristics such as righteousness, holiness, knowledge and moral judgment.  Starting with the disobedience of Adam and Eve, God established that there is a right and a wrong way to do things and that He will hold each of us accountable.
 

On the other hand, secularists contend that Adam and Eve, indeed the whole Creation-Genesis story, is myth.  In their evolution paradigm our existence is owed to a lengthy sequence of chance primate mutations and selective pressures.  And when humankind is thus framed apart from the image of God, only the rules of the evolutionary “survival game” need apply.  The implications are huge.  If right and wrong have no application in the animal kingdom, why should moral and ethical issues apply to the crown of evolution’s gestation – humankind?  Sir Julian Huxley long ago said they should not apply.  He gives us a revealing reason why people quickly embraced Darwinism:
 

It is because the concept of a Creator-God interferes with our sexual mores.  Thus, we have rationalized God out of existence.  To us, He has become nothing more than the faint and disappearing smile of the cosmic Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.[iii]
 

More recently, Bioethicist Peter Singer essentially said there should be no significant distinctions between man and the animal kingdom.  He writes:
 

I have argued that the life of a fetus…is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality [and] self-consciousness.[iv]
 

Much is at stake.  The scientific credibility of either evolution or creation theory lies in the presence or absence of “missing link(s)” – a half-man half-ape species.  In this competition of worldviews (including morality wars), the truth of the origin of man is central.  The consequence of what you believe on this point will establish unequivocally which paradigm you have chosen and likely establish your thinking on gay rights and same-sex marriage.  Richard Bozarth (quoted above) is correct, there is absolutely no provision for the reality of a hominid in Christian theology.  One can see that the claim to a free sex “Pivot of Civilization” paradigm for both heterosexuals and homosexuals rests on the premise of no Creator and, therefore, no divine accountability.
 

Thinking about evolution theory applied to humankind, one might expect to find, in light of the general theory’s legacy of falsehoods, conjectures and revisions, a similar legacy of deception and speculation in substantiating hominid existence.  In this section we will examine what the evolutionists are saying of humankind’s creation and the hominid evidence they have unearthed to support their argument.  Where beliefs compete in a zero-sum dynamic, evidence against hominid existence or proof of evolutionist fraud only strengthens the creationist paradigm.
 

Although contradicting the current theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” humanist and hierarchical reductionist Richard Dawkins explains the crucial nature of intermediary or transitionary species to the Darwinian model:
 

A complicated thing is one whose existence we do not feel inclined to take for granted, because it is too ‘improbable.’  It could not have come into existence in a single act of chance.  We shall explain its coming into existence as a consequence of gradual, cumulative, step-by-step transformations from simpler things, from primordial objects sufficiently simple to have come into being by chance.  Just as ‘big-step reductionism’ cannot work as an explanation of mechanism, and must be replaced by a series of small step-by-step peelings down through the hierarchy, so we explain a complex thing as originating in a single step.  We must again resort to a series of small steps, this time arranged sequentially in time.[v]
 

Dawkins describes what he calls the “gradualist” approach to evolution – chronological sequences of fossils, exhibiting evolutionary trends with fixed rates of change.  In his words:
 

If we have three fossils, A, B and C, A being ancestral to B, which is ancestral to C, we should expect B to be proportionately intermediate in form between A and C.  For instance, if A had a leg length of 20 inches and C had a leg length of 40 inches, B’s legs should be intermediate, their exact length being proportional to the time that elapsed between A’s existence and B’s.[vi]
 

As an example of gradualism, he cites the swelling of the human skull from an Australopithecus-like ancestor, with a brain volume of about 500 cubic centimeters (cc), to modern Homo sapiens’s average brain volume of about 1,400 cc.  This increase of about 900 cc, nearly a tripling of the brain volume, has been accomplished in no more than three million years.  By evolutionary standards this is a rapid rate of change.  The caricature of the gradualist is supposed to believe that there was a slow and inexorable change, generation by generation, such that in all generations sons were slightly brainier than their fathers, brainier by 0.01 cc.  Presumably the extra hundredth of a cubic centimeter is supposed to provide each succeeding generation with a significant survival advantage compared with the previous generation.[vii]
 

At the genetic level, the evolution of the human brain can be described as an increase in the frequency of genes that code for larger numbers of neurons in certain parts of the brain, particularly those known to be most important for making associations between different sense impressions and learned ideas.  At the level of natural selection of phenotypes, however, at least the later stages of this evolution depended on the superior adaptive value of both new combinations of genes and the kinds of cultural influences that interacted with the brain to produce functioning minds.  So can we believe that the biological basis of the complex attributes we see in humankind today derives predominantly from quantitative changes in the size and structure of our brains?
 

According to the August 2002 issue of National Geographic the answer is no.  Rick Gore reports that a new skeletal find in a medieval town called Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia, had a tiny brain:
 

This is the face that’s changing a thousand minds.  It could be the first human to leave Africa.  And it’s not what anyone expected.  This 1.75-million-year-old pioneer…had a tiny brain, not nearly the size scientists thought our ancestors needed to migrate into new land.  And its huge canine teeth and thin brow look too apelike for an advanced hominid, the group that includes modern humans and their ancestors.  Along with other fossils and tools found at the site, this skull reopens so many questions about our ancestry that one scientist muttered:  ‘They ought to put it back in the ground.’[viii]
 

Until the Dmanisi find, scientists thought hand axes allowed early humans to effectively butcher and process meat, enabling migrants to take more energy-rich fat, grow bigger brains, and build taller bodies.  But the tools found to date at Dmanisi are all simple choppers and scrapers like those that Homo habilis used in Africa to cut small pieces off carcasses or pound marrow from bone.  Concludes Rick Gore, “Maybe scavenging provided all the nutrients a migrant needed.”  Regarding the tiny brain of the Dmanisi skull?  Gore writes:
 

Scientists may be forced to reexamine the connection between brain size and intelligence.  ‘There’s no reason to downgrade these early Georgians on the IQ scale,’ says Philip Rightmire.  ‘They took a long hike, and they made it.’  Maybe, says Rightmire, brain size by itself doesn’t matter, and instead the ratio of grey matter to the rest of the body that determines intelligence.  In other words, these small-brained humans might have done more with less.[ix]
 

Philip Rightmire of Binghamton University, who has spent his career measuring the bumps on skulls and spaces between eyes of a hodgepodge of fossils known as Homo erectus, is pronouncing a paradigm shift.  He no longer believes Homo erectus (tall, large brain) was the first hominid to walk out of Africa.  Perhaps it was really Homo habilis (short legs, small brain).
 

Clearly, Dawkins-style gradualism applied to hominid history is not as fulfilling in practice as in theory.  G. Ledyard Stebbins, professor emeritus, University of California, writes in his book Darwin to DNA, Molecules to Humanity that with respect to human origins, the discoveries made during the past fifteen years present a complex picture.  The facts do not support the hypothesis of a simple progression Ramapithecus – Australopithecus – Homo habilis – H. erectus – H. sapiens.  Instead, they are best interpreted as reflecting a series of radiations.  Most of the radiant lines became extinct; only a few led to more advanced forms.  The nature of the transitions between H. erectus, Neanderthals, and modern humans (as exemplified by Cro-Magnon man) is still a matter of debate.  He writes:
 

What selective pressures caused certain apelike animals, about 5 million years ago, to evolve in the direction of tool-making [technology], culture-dependent humans, while contemporaneous related animals that apparently lived in very similar habitats evolved into forest-loving apes, highly specialized but without a tool-based culture?…
 

The separation may have begun when ancestors of apes and humans adopted different evolutionary strategies for surviving in forests and savannas.  This speculation is based on the fact that both Ramapithecus and the Australopithecines had similar tooth enamel.  Anthropologist Clifford Jolly suggests that this thick enamel was acquired as a result of selective pressure to cope with a diet of seeds and nuts.  Jolly emphasizes grass seeds rather than nuts as the crucial factor, but I would emphasize nuts, for several reasons.  First, nuts grow on trees and undoubtedly would have been eaten by forest-dwelling primates along with fruits, which are the principle food of modern chimpanzees.  Second, nuts have to be cracked.  Fashioned tools are not necessary for this purpose, but dexterity in handling unfashioned pebbles or stones would have great adaptive value for the nut-eater.  In addition, nuts can be stored.  Perhaps the ancestors of Ramapithecus or the Australopithecines acquired the habit of hunting nuts in caches and saving them for dry seasons when food was scarce.  Such a habit would place a premium on ingenuity in finding good hiding places and on memory to recall them.  Finally, some nuts are sweet, others are bitter; some nuts are good to eat, others are poisonous.  The ability to distinguish between good and bad nuts would have been a matter of life and death….
 

Once a race of apes had become dependent on using rocks to crack nuts and grind up grass seeds, bulbs, and tubers, they would be ready to abandon the practice (still characteristic of chimpanzees and gorillas) of crossing open country only to get from one tree or forest to another.  Instead, they would have spent most or all of their time in open country, going from nut trees to rock piles and caves where caches of food were kept.  Their main problem would then be predators.  Being adept at handling rocks for preparing their food, and being capable of running for at least short distances on their hind legs, they could have used rocks as missiles to ward off or kill predators.  As their aim improved, more access to animal meat could have brought about a change in diet.  A greater dependence on meat could have raised the adaptive value of fashioning rocks with a more lethal impact….In short, it appears that hominids increased in intelligence while apes did not because ancestors of humans relied on hard foods and on the tools that made these foods easier to prepare and eat.  In this way they became better adapted to life in open savannas, while ape ancestors lived in areas that provided soft fruits and plant shoots, for which no tools were needed.[x]
 

Well before Philip Rightmire’s suggested paradigm shift, zoologist and evolutionist Tim M. Berra, in his book Evolution and the Myth of Creationism, explained the Darwinian “gradualist” dogma applied to man’s evolution:
 

The accelerating pace of hominid fossil discoveries is truly dazzling. In Darwin’s time, only a few Neanderthal remains were known, and they were misunderstood.  Today we have a whole cast of characters in the drama of human evolution.  These fossils are hard evidence of human evolution.  They are not figments of scientific imagination.  If the australopthecines, Homo habilis and H. erectus, were still alive today, and if we could parade them before the world, there could be no doubt of our relatedness to them.  It would be like attending an auto show.  If you look at a 1953 Corvette and compare it to the latest model, only the most general resemblances are evident, but if you compare a 1953 and a 1954 Corvette, side by side, then a 1954 and a 1955 model, and so on, the descent with modification is overwhelmingly obvious. This is what paleoanthropologists do with fossils, and the evidence is so solid and comprehensive that it cannot be denied by reasonable people.  There are quibbles about individual relationships, but each new discovery helps fine-tune our increasingly detailed knowledge of human evolution.[xi]
 

As far as we can tell from the fossils at hand, Homo erectus was the first hominid to leave the African continent and was widely distributed in Africa, Europe, and Asia…H. erectus persisted until about 250,000 years ago in China and Java.
 

It is difficult to determine exactly when Homo erectus gave rise to our species, Homo sapiens.  Some anthropologists put the transition as early as 500,000 years ago…[xii]
 

The Neanderthals (named after the Neander Valley in Germany) emerged about 150,000 years ago and persisted until about 32,000 years ago.  Homo sapiens neanderthalensis is a member of our own species, but has been portrayed in a poor light in the older literature as a beetle-browed, shambling subhuman…The ‘classic’ Neanderthal, which ranged widely in Europe and North Africa, had a large skull with heavy brow ridge and weak chin, and prognathous (protruding) jaws.  Progressive Neanderthals from the Middle East showed less massive features and more rounded skulls.  Specimens from Mount Carmel Israel and Shanidar in Iraq were intermediate between ‘classic’ Neanderthals and modern humans….
 

Whether Neanderthals evolved into modern humans, or whether modern humans displaced Neanderthals or interbred and genetically swamped them, is not clear, but by about 32,000 years ago fully modern human fossils had replaced the Neanderthals everywhere.[xiii]
 

Stebbins corroborates Berra’s interpretation of the fossil record of primate-human ancestry:
 

Australopithecines lived throughout eastern and southern Africa, and evidence in the form of tools similar to those associated with East African fossil bones suggests that Homo habilis ranged as far as northwestern Africa, western Europe, China, and South-east Asia.
 

Contemporaneous with and following the latest Australopithecines, the species Homo erectus spread through Eurasia and Africa.  First discovered by the Dutch physician Eugene Dubois on the island of Java in 1898, the remains were first called Pithecanthropus erectus – the Java ape man.  A somewhat later and more extensive series of skulls and skeletons was discovered by anthropologist Davidson Black in a cave near Peking, China, and called Sinanthropus pekinensis – the Peking man – a name that persisted until careful analyses showed that Java and Peking man differed from each other no more than do different races of modern humans.  A fossil jaw found near Heidelberg, Germany, could also be placed in the same species, and further remains of H. erectus were found by the Leakey’s in East Africa.[xiv]
 

Skeletons of humans belonging to the subspecies called Neanderthal have been unearthed in many parts of Eurasia and Africa – France, Germany, Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Central Asia (Uzbekistan), South China, South Asia, and South Africa.  Neanderthal humans existed for about 60,000 years – from 100,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago.  Although the skeletons from Europe have many primitive features, they resemble those of modern humans more than they do those of Homo erectus.  Skulls from the Middle East, particulary Israel, are even more modern in appearance. [xv]
 

Careful analysis by anthropologists Lewis and Sally Binfold suggests that Neanderthals used Mousterian-type tools for a variety of purposes – hunting game, scraping and boring holes in hides, preparing food from plant materials, and suspending meat over an open fire….Some of the remains associated with Neanderthal-type bones show that these people had acquired some of the most distinctively human qualities – reverence and spirituality.  They apparently buried their dead with ritual and ceremony.[xvi]
 

With gradualist theory and this zoological-anthropological version of our hominid legacy as background, let us further review the scientific evidence.  Although archaeological proof shows when the Neanderthals disappeared from Europe, it now appears clear the species had no hominid evolutionary relationship to modern humans.  In 1997, a team of investigators led by Svante Pääbo, a leading molecular anthropologist, painstakingly sandblasted a few grams of the arm bone of the original Neanderthal skeleton.  Pääbo found that there were twenty-seven differences between the Neanderthal sequence and a standard human mitochondrial DNA sequence.  According to Kevin Davies:
 

This strongly suggests that Neanderthals did not contribute any DNA to the current human gene pool and that Neanderthals and humans diverged some 500,000 years ago.  The cover headline accompanying Pääbo’s article in Cell emphatically declared, ‘Neanderthals Were Not Our Ancestors.’[xvii]
 

What does this do to the credibility of the graduated evolutionary chain?  Three years later, a team led by William Goodwin, of the University of Glasgow, provided indispensable verification of Pääbo’s findings.  Goodwin extracted and sequenced DNA from a 29,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil recovered from the Mezmaiskaya cave in the northern Caucasus in Southern Russia, nearly 2,000 miles to the east of the Feldhofer cave (Pääbo’s fossil).  The resulting sequence, obtained by amplifying DNA extracted from a rib bone, differed in twelve positions (3.5 per cent) from the original Neanderthal specimen, but in twenty-two positions with a reference human sample.  The proof of evolutionary sequencing, what Tim Berra describes as a 1953 Corvette followed by a 1954 model, stumbles with the verification of neanderthalensis as a proverbial “truck;” although the truck is still a member of the automobile family - both have front bumpers and four tires.  Pääbo, an evolutionist, follows gradualist dogma by adding more time to the transition.  He now believes that humans and Neanderthals last shared a common ancestor roughly 500,000 years ago.  Kevin Davies suggests the true figure could be anywhere from 300,000 to 700,000 years ago.[xviii]
 

One author not surprised with Pääbo’s discovery is Ian Taylor.  He had been researching the evidence surrounding so-called “missing-links.”  In his book In The Minds of Men: Darwin and the New World Order, he refutes the claims of Java Man (Pithecanthropus Erectus),Nutcracker Man (Zinjanthropus); The ‘1470’ Man (Australopithecine); Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and others discussed here.  According to Charles Oxnard of University of Chicago, multivariate statistical analysis of a series of Australopithecus bones, shows that Australopithecus was not intermediate between man and ape but uniquely different; as different from both man and the apes as each is from the other.
 

Such a finding reveals the challenges in the classification of difference.  Taylor points out that the ape has forty-eight chromosomes and man has forty-six.  This raises the questions of at what point in the transition from ape to man the two chromosomes became lost, and how they produced fertile offspring when this loss occurred randomly to some and not to others.  In all my readings on Richard Dawkins and gradualism, I never found a discussion of this glitch.  To take another example, the ape has a bacculum or os penis (a bone in the penis) and man does not.  It might be asked, therefore, at what point in the line of transition the bone was replaced by the fluid mechanism, bearing in mind that it had to work flawlessly the first time in order to propagate the race.[xix]
 

According to Taylor, by 1900 Darwin’s theory of natural selection was found to be deficient, principally because there was absolutely no evidence that one species could become another by the accumulation of minute variation.  Breeding experiments had shown time after time that the species barrier could not be permanently crossed.  The gradualist appeal to untold millions of years simply evaded the possibility of proof, while the abundant evidence expected in the fossil record turned out to be conspicuously absent.  At the same time, Darwinian evolution was more difficult to explain in terms of Mendel’s genetics.  And as the principles of inheritance were beginning to be understood by the next generation of scientists, the time was ripe for a replacement theory to explain the mechanism of evolution.[xx]  Not surprising, the time to find a hominid to redeem the theory was equally urgent.
 

In 1908, a Neanderthal skeleton was discovered at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France.  Marcellin Boule, Darwinist and professor of L’Institut de Palaeontologie Humaine, in Paris, envisaged Homo neanderthalensis as evidence of the transition between ape and man.  He described an imagined creature, half ape, half man, head thrust forward, knees slightly bent, while the numerous reconstructions that were subsequently modeled, drawn and painted depicted this creature naked and hairy in a cave setting.  Says Taylor:
 

It should be born in mind that only bones had been found; all the rest of the reconstruction was speculation based on preconception; for all we know, Neanderthal man may have worn clothes and lived in houses.[xxi]
 

Unlike the first Neanderthal, of whom only the skullcap was found, the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skull was almost complete, and Boule’s measure of the volume gave a surprisingly high figure of 1,600 cubic centimeters, significantly more than the average person today.  This aspect was all but ignored at the time because it did not fit into the preconceived view of early man, but as more Neanderthal-type skulls were discovered, it was found that on average all were slightly larger than that of man today.  Taylor notes:
 

To this day, the best explanation put forward for a race of ancient men having larger heads than modern man is that it is brain quality that counts rather than quantity - an unproved assumption.[xxii]
 

Reductionist (and now revisionist) Richard Dawkins, ironically favors quality, citing examples in his defense:
 

Anatole France – a Nobel prizewinner – had a brain size of less than 1,000 cc, while at the other end of the range, Oliver Cromwell is cited for having a brain of 2,000 cc.[xxiii]
 

Coincidental with an ebbing tide of support for Darwinism, the Piltdown remains were discovered during the period from 1908 to 1912 and only a few miles from Darwin’s old home.  Parts of a human skull, together with most of the jaw of an ape, had been stained to look aged and placed in the Piltdown gravels in the country just outside London, which was known to interest an amateur fossil hunter, Charles Dawson.  These remains were brought to the attention of Authur Smith Woodward, keeper of the department of geology at British Natural History Museum and a personal friend of the fossil hunter.[xxiv]  Writes Taylor:
 

Arthur Keith, the anatomist, was called into the investigation.  Soon the team was joined by Grafton Elliot Smith, a renowned brain specialist.  The team consisted of some of the very best men of science; their collective credentials were not only impressive but impeccable…When Piltdown man was formally announced at the Geographical Society in 1912, it was warmly welcomed by the press as a sensational missing link…Needless to say, objections to man’s ape ancestry made in the pulpit were effectively silenced.  A whole generation grew up with Piltdown man in their textbooks and home encyclopedias; who in their right mind would question the veracity of the Encyclopaedia Britannica?[xxv]
 

Dawson, who died in 1916, had received his glory when formal scientific recognition was given to his discovery – classified asoanthropus dawsoni (Dawson’s Dawn man).  Keith, Woodward and Grafton Elliot were later knighted.  Unfortunately for Darwinists, in 1953, Joseph Weiner and Kenneth Oakley conducted a recently developed fluorine test on the original Piltdown material and discovered that the bones were in fact relatively recent.  The suspected hoax was finally revealed.  Piltdown man was a fraud.  The jaw of an ape was stained to make it appear as though it matched a human skull; the Piltdown fossils along with accompanying bones were not only stained but reshaped.[xxvi]  Marvin Lubenow explains:
 

The file marks on the orangutan teeth of the lower jaw were clearly visible.  The molars were misaligned and filed at two different angles…The canine tooth had been filed down so far that the pulp cavity had been exposed and then plugged.[xxvii]
 

According to Taylor, the science behind Peking Man is no more credible than asoanthropus dawsoni.  Two characters emerged to lead the search for man’s early origins in China.  The first was a Canadian physician, Davidson Black.  Enthusiastic over the prospects of finding the elusive missing link, Black went to England in 1914, to study under Grafton Elliot Smith [Knighted after Piltdown man]. The second character was the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin, who was banished by his superiors to China, for his radical views on evolution and Christianity.  Stephen J. Gould and M. Bowden, both concluded that Teilhard was the culprit in the Piltdown scandal.[xxviii]  Teilhard, had since studied under Marcellin Boule, who was responsible for the false impressions of Neanderthal man.   In 1927, just as finances were running out, a tooth was discovered at Chou K’ou Tien, and Davidson considered that it had characteristics intermediate between ape and man.  He announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis.  In 1929, after two years of digging and again just as funds were running out, an almost complete brain case was discovered fossilized and embedded in rock; there was no face, jaw, or base.  Black fervently believed that this was indeed the skull of Sinanthropus pekinensis, the name he had previously coined on the basis of a single tooth.  Black estimated the brain capacity to be just under 1,000 cubic centimeters, which happens to be midway between ape and man.[xxix]
 

Black died of a heart attack at the age of forty-nine, in 1934, after having received many international honors for his discovery and publication of Sinanthropus pekinensis.  His place was taken by Franz Weidenreich, who subsequently reconstructed Peking man’s skull from all the bits and pieces that had been found.  Plaster models of Weidenreich’s composite reconstruction are what we see in textbooks today, labeled “Peking man.”  He is said to be half a million years old and is held to be a hominid.  Soon after Weidenreich (1948) and Teilhard (1955) died, the scientific community renamed “Peking man” Homo erectus pekinesis, lumping it together with Java man, classified as a man-like ape.  According to Taylor, every one of the fourteen fossil “skulls” and all the remaining fossil pieces listed by Weidenreich in 1943 disappeared during the confusion of World War II.
 

Taylor describes the scientific evidence indicating Homo erectus pekinesis was really primate dinner for fully modern humans.  In 1931, Professor Henri Breuil of the College of France and L’Institut de Palaeontologie Humaine, a world-renowned expert on the Stone Age, spent nineteen days at Chou K’ou Tien site, at the request of Teilhard:
 

Breuil found abundant evidence there of a large-scale human operation.  A great number of antler bones had been worked, stone tools imported to the site from more than a mile away.  Chippings eighteen inches deep in places indicated some kind of stone ‘industry.’  There was also evidence of a furnace operation of some kind.  Breuil described this as an ash heap seven meters (twenty-three feet) deep that had been kept going continuously for some time because the minerals in the surrounding soil had fused together with the heat.[xxx]  However, the picture that is conveyed to the outside world…describe this furnace operation as ‘traces of artificial fire’ and dismiss the matter in a few lines.  Bowden[xxxi] shows that efforts were made to suppress Breuil’s report, and virtually every textbook and popular book on ancient man since has used the expression ‘traces of fire’…This conveys the impression intended, that this was man in his earliest stages having just learned to use fire.  For, example, Pilbeam, in his book The Evolution of Man, says ‘From Chou K’ou Tien too came signs of the first use of fire.’[xxxii]  To emphasize the point further, in 1950 the British Museum commissioned Maurice Wilson to paint a cave scene showing Peking man.  The resulting picture shows a naked individual chipping away at some stones and squatted before a small fire consisting of three or four sticks.  This is not representative of the facts…
 

Breuil also collected a number of bone and stone items that bore the evident signs of human workmanship and left them on display at the local museum.  These have subsequently disappeared, however.[xxxiii]  Were it not for Breuil’s 1932 report, which has survived, it is certain that the only evidence available would be that which supports the view that Peking man was a hominid.  As it was, more damaging counterevidence came to light in 1934 by the discovery of the parts of six truly human skeletons, including three complete skulls that were found in what was described as the ‘upper cave.’…Evidently, the human remains caused difficulties for the imagined scenario especially as evidence for links between the two sites began to appear.  It took Weidenreich[xxxiv]  five years to finally break the news of the discovery of the true humans, and that it was confined to the relative obscurity of the Peking Natural History Bulletin.  Even so, the popular books and most textbooks today never mention the appearance of true human beings at the site of Peking man.[xxxv]
 

Marcellin Boule, when he actually saw Sinanthropus pekinensis, was angry at having traveled halfway around the world to see a battered monkey skull.  He pointed out that all the evidence indicated that the skulls found were those of monkeys.  It was further suggested at the time that the skulls were the result of the monkey brains having been eaten by the human workers.  Boule concluded with the comment:
 

We may therefore ask ourselves whether or not it is over-bold to consider sinanthropus [now called homo erectus pekinensis] the monarch of Chou K’ou Tien when he appears in its deposit only in the guise of a mere hunter’s prey, on a par with the animals by which he is accompanied.[xxxvi]
 

No objective study would be complete without looking at hominid Cro-Magnon man.  Writes Stebbins:
 

About 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals were replaced in Europe and southwestern Asia by people who in every detail of their skeletons were indistinguishable from ourselves.  Their best known remains consist of several such complete skeletons found in central France. They bear the name Cro-magnon, a locality of that country.  The nature of the transition from the Neanderthal to the Cro-Magnon race of Homo sapiens is somewhat in doubt.  A common theory is that Cro-Magnon invaders from some unknown part of Eurasia displaced the less efficient Neanderthals, causing them to become extinct, presumably by conquest and slaughter.  Others postulate that one race was gradually transformed into the other by natural selection of new gene complexes.  Skeletons were found in a cave on Mount Carmel in Israel that are intermediate between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon races.  They have been variously interpreted as transitional forms that support the genetic replacement hypothesis, hybrids resulting from contact between two distinct races, and self-perpetuating race of hybrid origin containing a mixture of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon characteristics.  The exact sequence of events that gave rise to modern human races may never be known, but the superficial nature of differences between modern human races has been biochemically established.[xxxvii]
 

Contradicting Stebbins account of the Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal hybrid is a more recent hypothesis, which to a lay Christian observer closes the circle to the Adam and Eve account.  On New Years Day, 1987, Allan Wilson, Rebecca Cann, and Mark Stoneking published a paper in Nature, which heralded evidence that mankind descended from a single woman, the so-called “African Eve.”  Wilson conducted a thorough comparison of mitochondrial DNA sequences from 147 people representing five geographic populations: African, Asian, Australian, Caucasian, and New Guinean.  By comparing sequence differences he concluded most ancestral sequence rose in Africa.  Moreover, by assuming that mutations accrue at a constant rate [a poor assumption – see punctuated evolution in the previous section] of 2 to 4 per cent per million years, Wilson’s group came to the dramatic conclusion: “All these mitochondrial DNAs stem from one woman who is postulated to have lived about 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa.”[xxxviii]  One can only wonder what to do about the Dmanisi hominid dating back to 1.75 million years ago.  What theory is one to believe?
 

Regarding the “African Eve” hypothesis, Davies writes:
 

This is not to say that there was only one woman alive at the time; more likely, there was a small population of a few thousand people, but the progeny of only one woman successfully thrived.[xxxix]
 

Interestingly, analogous studies performed using markers on the Y chromosome produce remarkably similar results, agreeing to a reasonable approximation on both the date (up to 200,000 years ago) and the location (Africa) of the earliest ancestor.  But the comparisons of data from mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome point to some interesting differences.  If anything, “Y-chromosome Adam” lived somewhat later than ‘mitochondrial Eve.’[xl]
 

Over the past few years, Douglas Wallace, a prominent mitochondrial geneticist, systematically catalogued the diversity of mitochondrial DNA sequences in the world’s populations.  These results suggest that mitochondrial Eve had eighteen “daughters,” each with a distinct mitochondrial DNA sequence that spread to different regions of the globe.[xli]
 

One ponders, given the legacy of self-supporting conceptualizations and the variance (indeed contradiction) between the mentioned theories of humankind’s origin, whether it might be time to concede that the location, genesis process and event timings now scientifically support Biblical interpretation.  Just speed-up the mutation rate and adjust the location only slightly from Africa to the Middle East?
 

Indeed, it appears that Old Testament records have recently received full vindication.  A most remarkable application of Y-chromosome markers has been made to Jewish populations in the Middle East and beyond.  The Book of Exodus describes the sanctification of Moses’s brother Aaron and his sons, “so that their anointing will make an eternal hereditary priesthood for all generations.”  Aaron thus became the first Jewish priest, or cohen, a tradition that has since been handed down from father to son.  Michael Hammer, Karl Skorecki, David Goldstein, and colleagues studied Y markers from three hundred Jews, including more than one hundred cohanim, and found that half of the Jewish priests shared the same genetic signature, compared to less than 5 per cent in the lay Jewish population.  Moreover, the origin of this chromosome dates back some 3,000 years, in agreement with biblical history.[xlii]
           

Have we descended by chance after the accidental start of the universe; from a freak random spark of life; and from chance curious nut-loving primates; and by continuous selective random mutations; or are we unique creatures of God, with intrinsic worth and purpose?

 
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