Posts Tagged ‘human evolution’

Paleoanthropology, the study of human origins, is unquestionably one of today’s most contentious topics with the evolution industry. Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man only tentatively suggested that humans may have originated from an ancestor on the continent of Africa.

“On the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man… it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject.” Charles Darwin, 1871

On the one hand, speculating on the subject of human origins, was “useless” yet in The Origin of Species, Darwin countered this argument by noting that “We should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor.” Over the past 150 years, then, in the midst of this confusion, evolutionists have continued to look for the intermediate species leading to humans. Continue Reading

In a blaze of excitement in September of this year, a recent fossil discovery in South Africa was headlined one of the missing links in the evolutionary ancestry of humans.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an article entitled “Examining Ancient Fossils for Clues to Human Origins”. The Wall Street Journal chimed in with “Fossil Trove Sheds Light on a Stage of Evolution”. The Boston Globe speculated with the title “Skeleton could be human relative”; TIME with “Rethinking Human Origins: Fossils Reveal a New Ancestor on the Family Tree”. New Scientist ran the article: South African fossils halfway between ape and human.

To name the fossil, a competition was launched in South Africa. Omphemetse Keepile, a 17-year-old student from St. Mary’s School in Johannesburg. Keepile’s winning entry was selected from more than 15,000 submissions in a naming competition sponsored by Standard Bank and Palaeontological Scientific (PAST) in association with Wits University and the Department of Science and Technology. The winning name was Karabo that means “answer” in Setswana.

Once the excitement started settling, questions started circling. Does the fossil evidence really point to Karabo as an ancestor to humans? Continue Reading

The fossil remains of Australopithecus sediba, nicknamed Karabo, has generated a frenzy in the evolution loving media following the publication of five papers in the journal Science on September 9, 2011. The intention of the papers was to finally resolving the long standing human evolution fossil record gap problem.

Using state-of-the-art radiological technologies, the papers focused on the comparing the shape and size of the cranium, pelvis, hand, and ankle & foot of Karabo to humans. The fifth paper estimated the date of the fossils mains using advanced Uranium-lead dating technologies. Continue reading

In this last week’s issue of Science, researchers present two remarkably complete and well-preserved partial skeletons of a species called Australopithecus sediba discovered 3 years ago in a South African cave. The new report extended a flurry of spinning speculations on the possible human “missing link” status of A. sediba.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an article entitled “Examining Ancient Fossils for Clues to Human Origins”. The Wall Street Journal chimed in with “Fossil Trove Sheds Light on a Stage of Evolution”. The Boston Globe speculated with the title “Skeleton could be human relative”; TIME with “Rethinking Human Origins: Fossils Reveal a New Ancestor on the Family Tree”. Contniue Reading

The leading ScienceDaily Science News posted this week features the new findings from a Peking man canine tooth discovered in China during the 1920’s and laments that the fossilized tooth that had been sent to Carl Wiman in Sweden along with “40 cartons were left unopened and forgotten”—until now.

Early in the twentieth century, Carl Wiman (1867-1944), the first professor of paleontology at Uppsala University, the oldest university in Scandinavia founded in 1477, was a legend in the world of paleontology. Among his achievements, Wiman is recognized for his contributions in the naming of the extinct penguins Archaeospheniscus wimani and Palaeospheniscus wimani, the fossil turtle Dracochelys wimani, the ichthyosaur Wimanius and the sauropod dinosaur Borealosaurus wimani.

At issue, though, is why did Wiman leave the “40 cartons… unopened and forgotten”? Why have the Peking man fossils remained ”unopened and forgotten” at Uppsala University for over 80 years. Continue Reading

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications.”

Since 1859, the search for Darwin’s “slight, successive” accumulated actions of natural selection has become a driving scientific and societal phenomenon. In 1872, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger for first international exploration to discover the “missing links” resulting from natural selection.

Like the HMS Challenger experience, evidence for “slight, successive” evolutionary changes continues to be an elusive pursuit—in the fossil record and now in molecular biology. Darwin’s dilemma deepens with the latest evidence from the Denisova caves in Russia.

Continue Reading

This year, 2010, has not been a good year for the “out of Africa” evolutionary theory of human origins. The following is why.

In October 2009, Time Magazine recognized Ardipithecus ramidus, now known as “Ardi,” the number one of “Top 10 Scientific Discoveries” of 2009. The journal Science declared Ardi the “breakthrough of the year.”

Ardi, an nearly complete fossilized female skeleton, was discovered by Timothy Douglas White, an American Paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in the arid badlands near the Awash River in Ethiopia in 1994.

Examination and description of Ardi took nearly 15 years before releasing publication. Although it is not known whether Ardi’s offspring actually developed into Homo sapiens, the discovery was expected to be of great significance since Ardi is the oldest known hominid fossil. Ardi had been theorized to be an ancestor to Australopithecus afarensis, more commonly known as Lucy.

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“This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals; with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters,” said Sir David Attenborough who narrated the BBC documentary in May 2009. “The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo.”

“It tells a part of our evolution that’s been hidden so far. It’s been hidden because the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken there’s nothing almost to study”, said Dr Jørn Hurum, the paleontologist from Oslo University’s Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team. The fossil findings were released to the world at a press conference in New York, simultaneously with online publication of the paper in Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) on May 19, 2009.

At the opening press conference, the fossil was described as the “missing link” in human evolution. “This fossil rewrites our understanding of the evolution of primates… It will probably be pictured in all the textbooks for the next 100 years”, claimed the Ida investigative team. Ida was interpreted as our “human ancestor”—the first and only one known.

The fossil had even been formally named Darwinius masillae in honour of Darwin’s 200th birthday year during 2009.  

The widely publicized Darwinius paper was released along with a book entitled The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor, a DVD entitled The Link, This Changes Everything,  a History Channel documentary, and an exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History. At a news conference attended by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the authors unveiled the nearly complete Darwinius masillae fossil found in Germany. The New York Daily News noted,

“The unveiling of the fossil came as part of an orchestrated publicity campaign unusual for scientific discoveries.”

As the Darwinian celebrations were sinking into the sand by the end of 2009, however, so was the “missing link” status of Ida as scientists continued to analysis the fossil. By October 2009, the BBC retracted their position running ran an article entitled “Primate Fossil ‘Not an Ancestor’”, stating,

“The exceptionally well-preserved fossil primate known as “Ida” is not a missing link as some have claimed.”

The sand-sinking fossil fiasco was finalized following the March 2010 article in the Journal of Human Evolution by paleontologists Blythe Williams, Richard Kay, Christopher Kirk, and Callum Ross confirming initial suspicions that the original description of Darwinius which appeared in the journal PLoS One was fatality flawed.

The updated analysis by Williams and team members painted a damning picture of the original Darwinius study. The team reports that the features of bones in the skull teeth, and limbs clearly demonstrate that Ida is not even a primate—certainly not a human ancestor.

In March 2010 news editor for the NewScientist, Rowan Hooper, published the article entitled Confirmed: Fossil Ida is Not a Human Ancestor stating – “About a year ago we were stunned in the New Scientist offices to learn of a beautiful, 47-million-year-old primate fossil which was being hyped as the ancestor to all humans. Nicknamed ‘Ida’, The Guardian newspaper hailed it as “the eighth wonder of the world… Now an independent team has examined the fossil in detail. In a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution they strongly argue that Darwinius is not one of our ancestors.”

The Ida fossil announcement in PLoS ONE followed the same pattern as the Archaeoraptor fossil disaster announcement in National Geographic magazine in 1999. This pattern follows a strict evolutionary paradigm approach where ideology drives the interpretation. Ida serves yet another example how the evolution paradigm distorts and stifles scientific investigation and undermines the credibility of the modern scientific establishment.

Ida and Archaeoraptor join a long line of fossil fiascos, including Archaeopteryx, Java Man, and the Piltdown man. Fossil fraud and deception by the evolution industry continues to pervade the history of evolutionary, perhaps because the fossil record evidence continues to contradict the Darwinian theory of evolution.

“No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long”, pines Niles Eldredge, evolutionary paleontologist, “It seems never to [have] happen[ed].”

Douglas Futuyma, president of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Naturalists, editor of Evolution, abandoned Darwinism stating,

“The supposition that evolution proceeds very slowly and gradually, and so should leave thousands of fossil intermediates of any species in its wake, has not been part of evolutionary theory for more than thirty years.”

Ida fossil highlights again the reasons why evolution remains a theory in crisis—the fossil record evidence continues to contradict the Darwinian theory of evolution.  

In a letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, his closet friend in 1857, Charles Darwin confided,

I cannot swallow Man [being that] distinct from a Chimpanzee.

Charles Darwin writes in his Autobiography,

My Descent of Man was published in Feb. 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable products, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law

The chimp, since the nineteenth century, has been the poster-child missing link to humans. In twenty-first century terms, the mammalian Y chromosomes were expected to be similar, as speculated by Darwin. However, new evidence demonstrates Darwin’s speculation to be wrong—the chimp Y chromosome differs radically from humans.

The British journal Nature published a paper in January 2010 titled, “Chimpanzee and Human Y Chromosomes are Remarkably Divergent in Structure and Gene Content,” found that Y chromosomes in the chimp and humans “differ radically in sequence structure and gene content”. In fact,

More than 30% of the chimp Y chromosome lacks an alignable counterpart on the human Y chromosome

Jennifer F. Hughes led the research team at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, one of the world’s leading centers for genomic research, is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The research team concluded –

By comparing the MSYs of the two species we show that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content

“By conducting the first comprehensive interspecies comparison of Y chromosomes,” ScienceDaily noted, “Whitehead Institute researchers have found considerable differences in the genetic sequences of the human and chimpanzee Ys… The results overturned the expectation that the chimp and human Y chromosomes would be highly similar. Instead, they differ remarkably in their structure and gene content.”

The original chimp genome sequencing completed in 2005 largely excluded the Y chromosome because its hundreds of repetitive sections had typically confound standard sequencing techniques. The chimp Y chromosome is only the second Y chromosome to be comprehensively sequenced.

 Wes Warren, Assistant Director of the Washington University Genome Center, noted

These findings demonstrate that our knowledge of the Y chromosome is still advancing.

Earlier comparative studies between the chimp and human genome had centered on DNA regions that only result in the production of proteins. In addition, not only is the chimp DNA 12% larger than human DNA, the Chimp has 23 chromosomes while humans have only 22 (excluding sex chromosomes in both species).

While the researchers advance the concept that “divergence” from the Chimp occurred 6 million years ago, the more logical explanation is that the chimp is simply a distinct species.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)

Just three years before the publication of The Origin of Species, in 1856, the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered in the Neander Valley limestone quarry located in Germany.  

In The Descent of Man, however, Darwin argued against the concept that the Neanderthals were the ancestors to humans based on the larger size of the Neanderthal skull.

“Nevertheless,” Darwin noted, “it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious”—the skull was too large to be a human ancestor.

Darwin was right. The journal Science on May 7, 2010, published an article entitled “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” confirming Darwin’s position that the Neanderthal could not be an ancestor to humans. According to Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, N.Y., the “publication of the full Neandertal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” 

Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany led the study team. “[Neanderthals] are not totally extinct,” Pääbo said. “In some of us they live on, a little bit.”

John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News: “They’re us. We’re them.”

“[T]he really surprising thing for many of us,” noted Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at London’s Natural History Museum, “is the implication that there has been some interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in the past.”

This interbreeding finding is a monumental discovery since interbreeding is a defining factor for defining a species. Our current modern definition of species was developed by Ernst Mayr—Darwin’s Bulldog of the twentieth century.

In the 1942 book entitled Systematics and the Origin of Species, Ernst Mayr established the Biological Species Concept (BSC): species consist of populations of organisms that can reproduce with one another and are reproductively isolated from other such populations. Since humans and Neanderthals are now known to be isolated reproductive populations, they represent a single species—”They’re us. We’re them.”

Sequencing of the Neanderthal genome is a landmark scientific achievement. The sequencing is a culmination of a four-year investigation led from Germany’s Max Planck Institute.

Use of efficient “high-throughput” technology allowed the numerous DNA sequences to be processed at the same time from the bones of three different Neanderthals found at Vindija Cave in Croatia.

A major obstacle overcome in the study was the retrieval of quality DNA material from remains Neanderthal DNA contaminated with vast quantities of bacterial and fungal DNA. Even, the Neanderthal DNA had broken down into very short segments and had changed chemically. Since the contamination, breaks, and chemical changes were thought to be of a predictable nature, the researchers developed a software program to estimate the original DNA sequence of the Neanderthal genes.

The DNA evidence from the Neanderthal clearly aligns with the biblical account—the Neanderthals are human, descendants of Adam and Eve. Worldwide dispersion after Babel followed by environmental pressures afterward resulted in people groups with different physical characteristics, including humans with “Neanderthal” Characteristics.

Cellular biologist, David DeWitt, noted that the research was an “amazing feat” of science that continues to demonstrate the validity of the biblical record. “Finding Neanderthal DNA in humans was not expected by evolutionists, but it was predicted from a creation standpoint because we have said all along that Neanderthals were fully human: descendants of Adam and Eve just like us”.