Pastor Jeremy M. Thomas Fredericksburg Bible Church
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Pastor Jeremy M. Thomas Fredericksburg Bible Church 107 East Austin Fredericksburg, Texas 78624 830-997-8834 jthomas@fbgbible.org C1028 – August 11, 2010 – Ape-Men? I want to point something out, just to keep us from losing our bearings. In a class like this we can easily get lost in the details and lose the forest for the trees. So we want to recall why we’re doing so much talk about geology. One of the basic reasons is because unbelief has reinterpreted every area of life to support an evolutionary worldview. People fail to appreciate the systematization of the evolutionary worldview. They tend not to see that evolution is the central unifying doctrine of paganism and that every discipline of science is seen as mutually supportive of the grand scheme or worldview of evolution. Evolution is considered the hub that connects anthropology, paleontology, archaeology, biology, chemistry, physics, geology, etc…It’s not a little point here and a little point there, it’s a total re-interpretation of nature and it has to be; paganism recognizes that always and everywhere they are confronted by the God with whom we have to do so the re-interpretation of nature is a technique to suppress the knowledge of God, to create a protective barrier from coming face to face with God. This is why you can’t accept any interpretations of modern pagan science. You can usually accept the data that has been discovered, but you can’t accept the interpretations of the data because they’re presuppositionally oriented against God and Christ toward suppressing Him. This is the aim, conscious or unconscious, of the evolutionary worldview. Here’s a conscious atheist, G. Richard Bozarth in American Atheist magazine, 1978, He says, “Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing!”i Now for some reason an atheist can see this but most Christians can’t see this. And it’s terribly frustrating to watch Christians say they believe in evolution or the Big Bang or geological ages because it logically entails a rejection of the cross of Christ. And this is why we fight to take every thought captive to Jesus Christ. That means anthropological thoughts, archaeological thoughts, biological thoughts, chemistry thoughts, physics thoughts and geological thoughts, all the data in these areas must be radically re-interpreted by the Christian such that the glory and the honor is given where the glory and honor is due - the God who created the world and His Son who died for our sins. Otherwise we haven’t got anything. The re-interpretation we worked with last week was the Ice Age. Everyone agrees we have physical evidence of an ice age. The difference is in how it got started, how many ice ages there were, and when it/they occurred. The biblical explanation is that there is one ice age that occurred after the Global Flood of Noah. But what happens is Christians think they can go study the world independent of the Scriptures and build all these ideas and then when they come to the Scriptures they say we have a conflict. Well, yes we do, we have left out the most important data. If we would just start with the most important data, the data of the Scriptures, and then go interpret the evidence we wouldn’t have a problem. We have to learn the lesson that the Scriptures tell us how to interpret the data, not the other way around; the data don’t tell us how to interpret the Scriptures. So we said everyone agrees to an Ice Age, although the number of Ice Ages differs. The pagan world says there were multiple Ice Ages; the Bible indicates there was only one Ice Age. The question is, from a uniformitarian point of view, this is the non-Christian, the secular view, how do you explain the ice age? There’s a real problem here, there’s never been a secular model able to explain the ice age. Everybody talks about it, everybody says they’re confident we had between 10 and 30 glaciations and each one lasted 100,000 years, etc. Excuse me, “How did it get started?” Here’s the problem scientists have always had with the ice age; they believe it happened, but they can’t figure out how it got started. The difficulty is that you have to have two things to get an ice age started. On one hand you have to have high temperatures in order to get moisture in the air. If it’s only cold then cold air doesn’t hold much moisture so you can’t get enough moisture in the atmosphere to get the massive snow dumps you need to initiate glaciation. But on the other hand you have to have low temperatures so that when it snows it doesn’t melt off through the summer. Summer temperatures have to run 20-40 degrees F cooler or else you lose all the snow you built up. But how do you get high and low temperatures? Those contradict. Very simple problem, but it’s a very complicated one and they’ve tried and tried and tried to figure out how do you do this. They’ve got more than 60 competing models but they can’t get enough moisture in the air to create enough snow to glaciate and keep through the summers. What’s so interesting is that the Bible has an answer to that problem in the conditions that result from a global flood. Michael Oard says, “The newly formed stratosphere would contain a thick shroud of volcanic dust and aerosols due to the extensive volcanic and tectonic activity during the flood.” We showed that and the projections of the amount of volcanic activity during and after the Flood, are in the ballpark of upwards of 700 volcano’s. Can you imagine the ash and aerosol release? Bill Bell reminded me last week of the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 over in the islands of Indonesia. In the year following the eruption, average global temperatures fell by as much as 2.2F. Weather patterns continued to be chaotic for years, and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888. The eruption darkened the sky worldwide for years afterwards. British artist William Ashcroft made thousands of color sketches of the red sunsets half-way around the world. In 2004, researchers proposed the idea that the blood-red sky shown in Edvard Munch's famous 1893 painting The Scream is also an accurate depiction of the sky over Norway after the eruption. Munch said: "suddenly the sky turned blood red ... I stood there shaking with fear and felt an endless scream passing through nature." That’s just one volcano! Think what 700 volcanoes simultaneously erupting would cause. Oard continues, “It probably was a dark, depressing world. The oceans would have been uniformly warm; the initial conditions would be established for a second, much lesser, catastrophe, a post-flood transition to the present day climate, this would be a post-flood ice age.” See, those conditions are uniquely brought about by the global flood where you have warm oceans, Oard predicts as hot as 86F and cooler air over the continents results in the perfect conditions for massive snow dumps. Such global conditions are not only rare, they happened only once according to the Scriptures and will never happen again. There will never be another ice age. Why not? Because the event which resulted in those conditions will never occur again. What did God place in the atmosphere after the Flood? The rainbow. That optical phenomena is God’s guarantee of geophysical stability. That’s the Noahic contract. So there can never be another ice age. As for the timing of the ice age, it occurred 4,350 years ago. As for it’s duration it took 500 years for it to reach maximum glaciation and then it took 200 years to melt back. We have testimony of just such a 700 year climate transition in the pages of Job. Job lived in the post-Flood world and he cites ice in what is modern Saudi Arabia, he cites heavy cloud cover we read the verse; Job 37:9-10; 38:22-23; 38:29-30. We have testimony in Genesis of major climatological changes in the Middle East during the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph; Gen 12:10; 13:10; 26:1; 41:54-57; 42:5. They faced major famines such that all the earth had to travel to Egypt to get food. Now we’re moving into some more things the Flood and ice age explain. We already said the Flood explains the evidence of massive volcanoes all over the earth which cooled the atmosphere, it explains the hot oceans due to energy release, and those two factors explain the onset of the ice age. The massive glaciation explains the exposure of land bridges and migration routes after the tower of Babel and now we want to show how it explains the woolly mammoth’s and woolly rhinoceros’ in Siberia and the so-called ape-men. 3. Woolly Mammoths, Rhinoceros, etc… Let’s start with the woolly mammoths in Siberia. “Siberia?” you say, “Siberia is an ice desert, how could woolly mammoth’s live in an ice desert? They eat grasses and plants.” Right, they do. There are other grazing animals that have been discovered there too; horses, bison, antelope, beavers, badgers and ferrets. How did they live in Siberia? Well, obviously Siberia used to have a warmer climate with foods and grasses that fit the diet of grazing animals. Then a climate shift occurred and the mammoths were trapped, died and frozen. The debate among creationists is when the woolly mammoths were frozen in Siberia. Were they instantly frozen at the Flood or were they frozen later at the end of the Ice Age? The dust storm model says they were frozen at the end of the ice age, the insta-freeze theory says they were frozen during the Flood. The insta-freeze model has a lot of problems. First, the insta-freeze model hangs its hat largely on fresh food found in the stomachs of woolly mammoths. How could fresh food remain in their stomach if the woolly mammoths were not almost instantly frozen? What is often left unsaid is that the stomach of a wooly mammoth is basically a storage tank, very little digestion occurs in the stomach and the food can remain in the stomach for a relatively long period of time only partially digested. So an insta-freeze is not required to explain partially digested food in their stomachs. Partially digested food has been discovered in the stomachs of dead mastodons in recent times. Second, there were fly pupae found on the bones and carcasses, indicating a time lapse between death and freezing. This argues against freezing as the cause of death. Third, most of the woolly mammoths found were decomposed. Only a very few, less than 60, have been found frozen before decomposition occurred. Fourth, the carcasses that are found are partially decayed, they are not fresh meat as some people have suggested. This could not be the case in an insta-freeze. Fifth, scavenging was evident on some of the woolly mammoths, indicating that they died, but other animals were still alive and came by and tore chunks of meat off. If an insta-freeze occurred scavenger animals would also have frozen at the same time. Sixth, the woolly mammoths are not found in flood sediments which are compacted beneath, but in surficial sediments on top of flood sediments, indicating they were frozen after the Flood and not in the Flood. Seventh, the tusks of the woolly mammoths are not fossilized. If they were entombed during the Flood and covered with flood sediments they would be fossilized. The flood sediments are underneath where the mammoths and tusks are found showing they did not die in the Flood. Since a population of 15 million would require many years to grow, a late ice age theory is better. Eighth, the animals preserved as carcasses appear to have died at different times of the year. A quick freeze would be instant and in the same season. Indications as to the time of death include the type and seasonal development of stomach vegetation, the condition of its pelt, the presence of insects, and the characteristics of the teeth and tusks. Ninth, if they died in the Flood and were instantly encased in ice then the waters heated up to 86F the ice would melt and no woolly mammoths would have been found. So the only logical time for all these woolly mammoth’s to die is at the end of the Ice Age. Finally, we find cave drawings of woolly mammoths in northern Russia; those could not have survived the Flood since caves were formed during and after the Flood. Michael Oard’s model answers all these problems and more. His model argues that ice wouldn’t have glaciated in the upper Siberian latitudes until the ice age came to a close between 500-700 years after the Flood. This allows time for the woolly mammoth population to grow from two to possibly hundreds of millions. As the glaciers melted the waters returned to the oceans causing ocean levels to rise. More mobile animals were able to flee south and escape across land bridges but slower animals like woolly mammoths were trapped on islands as the land bridges were covered with water, millions drowned. How did those that did not drown die? The evidence in their lungs suggests these mammoths were trapped in dust storms that piled up around them till they couldn’t move. Finally they were covered and suffocated to death. Then the permafrost came up through the dust and froze them. The partially undigested food would remain in their stomach undisturbed. Now they are frozen permanently in the permafrost. So an Ice Age explains the woolly mammoth mysteries. Tonight our focus will be on how the ice age explains the supposed ape-men, transitional fossils between ape and man. That’s what we want to go into. In evolutionary biology the working hypothesis is that a single celled organism evolved into all multi-cellular organisms along a gradual ascent. This hypothesis predicts a smooth series of transitions in the fossil record. This we have shown is not what is found at all in the fossil record. We mentioned the Cambrian Explosion in the Paleozoic era. Despite these weaknesses, paleontologists have continued to search for the “transitional fossils” or ““missing links” between ape and man. In the most recent literature the search is apparently over and now we are merely expanding the library of fossil evidence linking ape to man. The challenge is for us to go into this. Here is the picture we are commonly shown, you’ll see it in Time magazine, Newsweek, school classrooms, offices, etc…this we are told is fact. Except the most recent fact is we are not from chimpanzees. We’ve been told that for some time, but now we’re told that’s not true, that chimpanzees evolved along a separate line. 
We want to understand how paleontologists decide how to interpret these fossils and place them in the ape to man chain. There are three methods; 1) geologic strata, 2) comparative anatomy and 3) radioisotope dating. In the earliest days, back in Darwin’s time, the late 1800’s, before they had dating methods they started using what they predicted they would find in the geologic strata. Here was the idea: if evolution is true then when should we find the transitional forms from ape to man in the geologic strata of the earth? So if I go in and find a fossil down here then it is obviously older than a fossil up here and therefore the older fossil is a possible transitional form in the evolution of man. That’s the idea. If I find a fossil in a lower strata it would be more closely related to the apes and it would have more ape-like anatomical features and if I find a fossil in higher strata it would be more closely related to modern man and it would have more man-like anatomical features. And for decades men searched trying to confirm that this indeed was the case. However, as the decades passed more and more problems arose. Fossils that appeared more like modern humans were frequently found in lower strata. As Custance points out, “The fact is that modern man was continually being found in rocks older than those in which his ancestors appeared. This made man older than his forebears, which is ridiculous. But it is only ridiculous if we insist that the more primitive forms are his forebears. Evolutionary theory demands that this is so, and consequently has to arrange the series according to morphology or physical appearance.”ii Uh, oh, what do you do now? I can do two things. I can hide the fossils so nobody knows we found them or I can re-interpret the fossils to mean something else, try to force fit them. Both tactics were used. As William Koppers notes in 1952, “It should interest the wider public to know that…the distinguished anthropologist Broom frankly acknowledges that sapiens-like remains from early times have shown a strange tendency to disappear. He quotes the discoveries made at Ipswich in 1855 and at Abbeville in 1863 as special examples, and offers the following explanation: “During the latter half of the nineteenth century every apparently early human skull that was found, if it was not ape-like, was discredited, no matter how good its credentials appeared to be.”iii So, isn’t that great? If the evidence is not in our favor we either get rid of it somehow, stick it in some drawer in a deep basement somewhere so no one can find it, or we say, no, it’s no good, simply because it doesn’t fit the scheme. Custance notes, “with the passage of time, the situation has become more and more embarrassing as fossils have continued to appear which can neither be hidden from the public, nor introduced sensibly into the series. Today each new find seems to create more problems than it solves. Evidently a basic premise is at fault somewhere. This premise is that human forms must be derived from animal forms and transitional forms must therefore be provided.”iv In the 1950’s when Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote his Evolutionary Biology three of the reviewers, all paleontologists said, “stratigraphic position is totally irrelevant to determination of phylogeny…”v That is, relationship has nothing to do with where you find these fossils in the column. And they had to say that because the record was nonsense. But they weren’t ready to give up and so they shifted to an emphasis on comparative anatomy. This is where I go out and I look at skull shapes of known apes and humans and compare those with fossil skulls, or I look at hip bones and I compare the anatomy of known apes with humans and then look at the fossils. And so now the name of the game is comparing anatomy. This is still being done today and this is what you’ll read in articles coming out in the popular media. This came out last year. Ardi is the name they gave this creature. Ardi is the new thing, discovered in 1992, and they’ve been piecing this thing together, But I want to give you a sample of the kinds of evidence they’re calling on to place these in the ape-man chain. This from the Irish Times, “Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed “Ardi” by scientists, possessed an amalgam of human and ape or monkey traits.” What’s the name of the game? We’re going to compare anatomy. “Experts believe” by the way, that word “expert” is a key word you want to be watching for. What that means is you can’t challenge what is about to be said unless you are an expert, unless you have the right credentials. Always watch how the argument is being set up because it shows you how they play the game. No reasonable person could question the experts, they’re experts. “Experts believe she stood about four feet tall and walked on two legs on the ground some of the time, while also living in trees.” How do they know that? By the anatomy, hip bones, knees, feet. “However scientists were surprised to discover that her anatomy was very different from that of present-day chimpanzees. Ardi lacked the acrobatic ability of the modern-day apes and did not swing or hang from branches. Instead she would have climbed carefully on all fours, grasping with her long hands and feet.” See how they’re deriving Ardi’s abilities based on her anatomy? It seems reasonable. “Her face was more vertical and human-like than a chimp’s, having a jaw that jutted out less and was not armed with sharp, dagger-like canine teeth. She is believed to have been omnivorous, eating berries, fruits and roots as well as small mammals. Ardi is also thought to have had a back that was long and curved like a human’s rather than short and stiff like a chimpanzee’s. Yet her lower pelvis was large and primitive, sharing similarities with African apes.”vi That gives you a taste for what they’re doing. Of course, they throw in the radioisotope dating and that’s supposed to make it sure, absolutely sure because radioisotope dating is the icon of evolution. But we’ve already shown extensively that all three assumptions underlying these dating methods have been shown to be unreliable and therefore the dating methods that depend on them are unreliable. But after you’ve gone through all of this, we are still left with the question. Does similar anatomy tell you there’s a genetic relationship between the organisms? Does it prove a genetic linkage? It doesn’t tell you that. Some animals have very similar structures and yet we know from the DNA that the similar structures arose out of very different genetics. Similarity in anatomy does not necessarily mean similarity in DNA. You may be able to organize them in a hierarchy, of course you can, but does that mean that one came from the other? I can do the same thing with airplanes can’t I? Put 50 airplanes on a runway and I can categorize then and put them in a hierarchy. I can make a category called “passenger planes,” I can make a category called “bomber planes, “I can make a category called “private planes” and I can make a category called “fighter planes.” Does that mean that bomber planes came from passenger planes which came from private planes which came from fighter planes? It has nothing to do with it. All it means is humans have the ability to see similarities and organize things in categories. Putting things in categories implies nothing about relationship So these are the three things paleontologists have used to prove evolutionary links from apes to man; geological strata, comparative anatomy and radiometric dating and all three have failed to give a sound answer for the similarities. Which is why they always say, possibly, probably, points to, might mean - very vague language. Is there a better way to interpret these fossils than to say they must derive from genetic relationship? If we kick evolution out of our way of thinking and adopt the Scriptures, do the Scriptures and discoveries of science provide clues as to how to explain fossils that appear to have human and ape-like characteristics? Turn to Gen 11. This is about 100 years after the Flood. You have Creation, about 4000BC, the Flood about 2350BC, Noah, his family and the animals got off the Ark. And God told Noah and his family to scatter, multiply and have dominion (Gen 9:1). But something happened. They certainly multiplied but did they obey the command to scatter? Now, look at what they say in Gen 11:4, they’ve journeyed into the land of Shinar and in verse 4 they say, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” There’s a lot going on here but what’s the motive for building this tower and this kingdom? It’s to avoid being scattered. If you do a comparison of Gen 11:4 with Gen 9:1 you see they are diametrically opposed to each other. God said scatter, man said lest we be scattered. So we have a deliberate disobedience. That is built into the text so we see the rebellion of the creature against his Creator. God had promised them safety from dangerous animals, he had provided human government to rule, and all this but man didn’t want to trust God so we have this situation rise. And we know what God did, Gen 11:1, the whole earth spoke one language. What did God do in verse 7? “Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” That sheds light on Pentecost because division of languages is not a blessing, it’s always a cursing, it’s a sign of judgment, but people don’t pay attention to God’s prior language work and they think the tongues thing is some great blessing. It’s not a blessing, it’s a sign of cursing. So verse 8, “the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.” Obviously, they couldn’t communicate. Verse 9, watch the emphasis, over and over he repeats this so we get the point, “Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.” What’s the emphasis? Scattering. The men don’t want to scatter, God told them to scatter; they haven’t done it so God forces the scattering. Now we have a situation where men are going out, away from a centralized civilization into the harsh, rural world outside of civilization. And as they go out there are some groups that will be on the edge, they’ll be leading the way, walking into unchartered territory. You have the ice age so there are major climate challenges, you had famines going on in various places, you need to make tools, that’s a challenge, you need food to eat, which means you’re basically a hunter gatherer, you’ve got to make weapons in order to kill animals for food, you’ve got to gather berries, fruits and seeds, you have to have shelter, so any kind of makeshift shelter is sufficient until you can get some stability, caves, holes, you need space to spread out from the other tribes, you can’t be too close or you are in a war over the resources. Do you get the sense of the difficulty of surviving in that kind of world? The environmental and food pressures alone were tremendous. And the people at the leading edge of the outward moving civilization had it the most difficult. Turn to Job 30. Here’s a description from Job’s time. Job lived in this world after the scattering from the Tower of Babel. Think of this description and the typical description you get of a transitional fossil. “But now those younger than I mock me,” this is after Job lost everything, Job was a very wealthy man, he had a lot of hired hands, he was well-respected in his time, he says, “But now those younger than I mock me, Whose fathers I disdained to put with the dogs of my flock. 2“Indeed, what good was the strength of their hands to me? Vigor had perished from them. 3“From want and famine they are gaunt” that shows physiological stress, “Who gnaw the dry ground by night in waste and desolation, 4Who pluck mallow [a plant from salt marshes] by the bushes, And whose food is the root of the broom shrub.” That shows food stress, 5“They are driven from the community; They shout against them as against a thief, 6So that they dwell in dreadful valleys, In holes of the earth and of the rocks. 7“Among the bushes they cry out; Under the nettles they are gathered together. 8“Fools, even those without a name, They were scourged from the land.” There were clearly groups of people that were ostracized from the community, pushed into the extremities of the dispersion, they had disfigured frames because of the food they had to eat, and they had to live in dangerous valleys and caves. We don’t have all the details, but this sounds strikingly like descriptions of so-called transitional fossils. And in light of the Job description we want to look at four categories, well-known to modern paleontologists that affect the human frame and can modify bone structure.vii “We really have no idea at present, how extensively our conditions of life modify our bone structure, nor the exact mechanisms involved. So we simply do not know precisely why the typical fossil remains of early man were so brutalized. Certainly it need have had absolutely nothing to do with an animal ancestry.”viii 1) diet, 2) environment, 3) temperature and 4) disease. These are well known factors that can have profound influence bone structure. “The evidence of prehistoric human remains does not in itself justify the inference of a common ancestry with the apes. We base this conclusion on the fact, if fact it be, that practically all the changes in man's structure traceable through prehistoric remains are the result of changes in food and habit. The most notable changes are found in the skull…Practically all of these features of the skull are intimately linked together so that scarcely can one change without the change being reflected in the others. . . . Change is most marked in the region in which chewing muscles function. . . . The adjacent walls of the skull are flattened and forced inward as well as downward, producing the elongation of the skull. The temporal muscles reach far up on the skull, giving rise to a high temporal ridge: they extend forward as well as backward, giving a more prominent occipital region, and a more constricted forward region, resulting on the forehead region of the skull in the elevation of the supercilliary ridges and intervening glabellar region. Projecting brow ridges are associated with stout temporal and masseter muscles and large canines. . . . Constriction of outer margins of orbits produces the high orbits which we find in apes, and to a less marked degree in prehistoric human remains.”ix “C. S. Coon also attributed Neanderthal's form entirely to disease and to cold adaptation, with long trunk, short limbs and arms, deep chest, etc., exactly like the Eskimo.”x The Eskimo is a modern example we can point to and say, hey, the cold climate is obviously affecting the skull shape. Compare this ancient Eskimo skull (Fig 4 B) with the modern European skull (Fig 5 B). 
Both are truly human skulls yet “The cheek bones and jaws of the Eskimo are very massive, possibly under the influence of the intense chewing he has to practice, which also results in a tremendous development of the chewing muscles. Eskimo teeth are often worn down to the gums, like animal teeth, from excessive use.” The modern European eating a cultured diet did not develop such massive cheek bones and jaws. 
“If man is subjected to uncooked food and forced in the absence of knives to tear it from the bone, the developing muscles will find a way of strengthening their anchorage along these bony ridges. Moreover, if there is not in the diet that which will harden the bone in the earlier years of life when such strains are first encountered, it is inevitable that the skull will be depressed while still in a comparatively plastic state, and the forepart of the brain case will be low and sloping so that it lacks the high vault we tend to associate with cultured man.” See, those features have nothing to do with primitive man; they have to do with a poor diet which required development of stronger jaw muscles. “Thus the massive brow ridges of Sinanthropus, so similar to those of Pithecanthropus, are, as Ales Hrdlicka pointed out some years ago, “a feature to be correlated with a powerful jaw mechanism.”xi “Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that early man was subsequently forced to eat tough food, after the initial family had multiplied and wandered apart; and that this food lacked that which would harden the skull in its formative period of development: then the strengthening of the chewing and cervical muscles would go hand in hand with the building of a superstructure of bone to provide the necessary anchorage in the form of crests as well as ridges in the front, at the rear, and on the top of the skull, but the skull itself would remain pliable enough that it would undergo considerable distortion.”xii “Thus if early man were to have been utterly deprived of culture it seems quite certain his fossil remains would have revealed an extreme primitiveness which might easily be misinterpreted as evidence of a recent emergence from some anthropoid stock.”xiii “Coon also mentions that modifications in the skull form resulting from dietary habits, particularly the eating of raw meat and the absence of bone hardening substances in childhood, may occur, under sub-Arctic conditions, with remarkable rapidity…We have, then, a mechanism that might account for all the variant forms of fossil man without recourse to hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary history. Such changes appear to persist so long as the environmental conditions which provoked them persist.”xiv “The significance of such facts here is that there may be a measure of persistence or carry-over in facial forms which have been developed in response to certain environmental pressures, which thus provides us with racial characteristics which are then traceable not to a diversity of stocks, but to an historical circumstance. It does not require any great feat of imagination to see that as man began to multiply and spread into new areas where new types of food became available and new environments led to modified living habits, changes might take place in his physical form.”xv Temperature “Cold climates tend to stimulate a lengthening of the nose, perhaps to create a longer passage of warming for the air inhaled, before it reaches the lungs. Limbs may be shortened slightly, for the same reason, to reduce radiation of heat from the body.”xvi Disorders of Hormonal Glands “Among the disorders which commonly operate to effect a modification of bone structure, those which are related to glandular disturbances are the most common. In fact a few years ago there was a remarkable man by the name of Maurice Tillet, a wrestler better known in some circles as “the Angel,” who was so Neanderthal in aspect that Henry Field who knew him very well, induced him to pose appropriately dressed as a caveman, with ax and loin cloth, among a group of reconstructed Neanderthal men in the Field Museum of Natural History. It appears that he was so readily lost among the wax figures that surrounded him that he could not be singled out until at a given signal he plunged forward with an unearthly howl while Pathe Cameras ground away! The sudden coming to life of this apparently prehistoric figure was quite a shock to all who subsequently viewed the film. (47) Henry Field says of this man, however, that he was highly intelligent, a graduate of the University of Toulouse, and spoke in addition to his mother tongue, Spanish, English, and a little Russian, for his father, a French geologist, had once worked in the Urals. The secret of his extraordinary Neanderthal appearance was in the most unusual enlargement of his pituitary gland. He was examined by a number of experts and it was unanimously agreed that this was a clear case of acromegaly caused by hyperpituitarism for which, fortunately in his case, nature had made some special provision, so that he had survived into adulthood. So enlarged was the gland that he would certainly have died long before but for the fact that a space of unusual development had been left for the growth of this ductless gland. He died in September, 1954. Field considered him a true Neanderthal type.”xvii “Abnormal growth of the pituitary leads as we have seen to enlargement of the chin, nose, and brow. These features to some extent are common to almost all so-called cavemen…brow ridges are among the features of fossil man which have tended, in the public mind, to give the most ape-like cast to the face. It is curious that such ridges are more marked among Europeans, i.e., the White Man, than among some of the other races. In fact Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley showed quite marked brow-ridge formation, and it has been suggested by some physiologists that such prominences are evidence of great energy.”xviii Diet “Congenital blindness, missing kidneys, missing limbs (hardly likely to be inherited), cleft palate, harelip, and other abnormalities were apparently produced in calves, pigs, and rats by withholding vitamin A (and also vitamin B2 in rats) from the pregnant mother's diet…Deficiency of some unknown essential dietary factor may account for this abnormality.”xix “As men multiplied on the earth and began to crowd out the original settlements, weaker elements in the population would be driven out. Such people might become waifs and strays, and could well perish in isolation because of the hardships encountered in a new and unfamiliar environment. Possibly it is such people whose remains we find, for as a rule the fossils represent only a very small group, and often only a single individual.”xx “The style of living is ascertained to have a powerful effect in modifying the human figure in the course of generations, and this even in its osseous structure. About 200 years ago, a number of people were driven by a barbarous policy from the counties of Antrim and Down in Ireland, towards the seacoast: there they have ever since been settled, but in unusually miserable circumstances. And the consequence is that they now exhibit peculiar features of the most repulsive kind, projecting jaws with large open mouths, depressed noses, high cheek bones, and bow legs, together with an extremely diminutive stature. These, with an abnormal slenderness of limbs, are the marks of a low and barbarous condition all over the world. It is peculiarly seen in the Australian aborigines.”xxi “As regards prehistoric human remains we cannot conclude that the increasing resemblance to apes as we go back in time implies simian ancestry, seeing that these changes may be due to changes in food and posture, representing the acquisition of form growing out of function or closely correlated with function. In that case prehistoric man's increasing resemblance to apes has some other explanation than descent from a common ancestor…We cannot afford to close our eyes to facts because we shy away from their implications. A good case is not strengthened by adducing poor reasons in support of it, and no fear of giving comfort to the enemy should lead us to suppose that a partial concealment of truth, which arises from a concealment of part of the truth, can compensate for the loss of unprejudiced consideration of the facts of life whether they seem to fit into our schemes of evolution or fail to fit. Since the day of Darwin the evolutionary idea has largely dominated the ambitions and determined the findings of physical anthropology, sometimes to the detriment of the truth.”xxii Here’s our position, this is the biblical interpretation of these fossil findings. As men went out from the Tower of Babel region in Mesopotamia, notice what happens as you get to the fringes of the dispersion. I’ve ranked the fossils that appeared the most primitive as yellow, less primitive as red and most advanced as blue. What I’m trying to do on this map is to point out a very interesting thing. If you look at the areas of the world where the most primitive skulls and body parts have been found, for example in China the “Peking Man”, in Indonesia the “Java Man”, South Africa, isn’t it striking that those finds are all the most remote from the Tower of Babel? And isn’t it interesting that as you move closer to the Tower of Babel area, where we do have finds of early man, you find more advanced skulls? 
Why do we have this apparent primitiveness in the extremities of the dispersion and this apparent advanced-ness in the central regions? I think again the Scriptures are pointing to something. In fact, what has happened to the human form, as they went out into the harsh world of the ice age, the environment, the habit, the food, is all the stresses took a toll on their bodies. We don’t knowa all the details, I am simply pointing out that when you get the data and begin to think seriously about the Scriptures, we have powers of explanation that we have not tapped into and we want to take these thoughts captive to Christ. Alright, next time we’ll deal with dinosaurs and the question of extinction. If we have time we can look at some of the creative artistry used to depict so-called transitional fossils. i G. Richard Bozarth, “The Meaning of Evolution,” American Atheist, February 1978, p. 30. ii Sir Arthur Custance, The Doorway Papers: Vol II, Genesis and Early Man, p. 6. iii William Koppers, Primitive Man and His World Picture, (Sheed and Ward, London, 1952,) p. 238 iv Custance, Ibid., p. 7. v Ibid., p. 3. vi http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/1001/breaking64.html vii Portmann says, “One and the same piece of evidence will assume totally different aspects according to the angle -- paleontological or historical -- from which we view it. We shall see it either as a link in one of the many evolutionary series that the paleontologist seeks to establish, or as something connected with remote historical action. . . . Let me state clearly that for my part, I have not the slightest doubt that the remains of early man known to us, should be judged historically.” A. Portmann, Das Ursprungsproblem, Eranos-Jahrbuch, 1947, p.19. What he means by historical action is what kind of diet was eaten, what kind of environment they lived in, the temperature, disease, these kinds of factors. He denies these have anything to do with genetics, and everything to do with historical situation in life. viii Custance, Ibid, Factors Influencing the Shape of a Skull, p. 3 ix Wallis, Wilson D., "The Structure of Prehistoric Man," in The Making of Man, Modern Library, New Yok, 1931, pp.69ff. x Ibid, p. 1 xi Ibid., p. 4. xii Ibid., p. 7. xiii Ibid., p. 9. xiv Ibid., p. 12. xv Ibid., p. 12. xvi Ibid., p. 16-17. xvii Ibid., p.17-18. xviii Ibid., p. 20. xix Ibid., p. 22. xx Ibid., p. 22. xxi Chambers, Robert, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Churchill, London, 1844. xxii Custance, Ibid., p. 24. Back To The Top Copyright (c) Fredericksburg Bible Church 2010 |