In fact, the discovery was a problem since the Neanderthal skulls are larger than human skulls. Darwin had argued that the advancement of evolution proceeded through “slight, successive changes”.

The Neanderthal fossils created a dilemma for Darwin, how could a larger brain precede a smaller brain? Darwin cautiously noted, that “it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious [large]”. For Darwin, the Neanderthal skulls were too large to have preceded humans.

As the fossil evidence for the Neanderthals continued to be discovered throughout Europe, the evidence seemed to point to the Neanderthals as a big game hunter transitional species leading to humans. With the goal of discovering our human evolutionary ancestors, the possibility that the Neanderthals represented a previously unknown ethnic group of humans was marginalized within the evolution industry.

During the twentieth century, at stake is whether the Neanderthals are a transitional species different from modern humans, or simply a human ethnic group.

Darwin, as we know now, was right to be cautious. Technology is answering the question. Just last year, a team lead by Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany eroded the genetic difference between the Neanderthals and modern humans after publishing the full Neanderthal genome.

Commenting on the findings, John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News that “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.” Since different species cannot interbreed, the Neanderthals can no longer be considered a transitional species.

Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow in New York concluded that the “publication of the full Neanderthal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” Genetic evidence is clear−the Neanderthals are not genetically distinct from modern humans.

This past week, Bruce L. Hardy of Kenyon College in Ohio and Marie-Hélène Moncel of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris has further eroded the differences between the Neanderthals and modern Humans using anthropological evidence.

In the journal PLoS ONE this past week, Hardy and Moncel in the article “Neanderthal Use of Fish, Mammals, Birds, Starchy Plants and Wood 125-250,000 Years Ago”, further dispels anthropological differences between the Neanderthals and Humans.

Hardy and Moncel dispels the Neanderthal big game hunter myth: the “Neanderthals are most often portrayed as big game hunters who derived the vast majority of their diet from large terrestrial herbivores while birds, fish and plants are seen as relatively unimportant or beyond the capabilities of Neanderthals.”

At the fossil site in Payre, France, after evaluating 182 Neanderthal plant, fish and bird processing tools based in the wear and adhering biological residues on the tools, Hardy and Moncel  concluded that contrary to the once popular big game hunted paradigm, the Neanderthal diet “was quite diverse, including plants, large and small animals, fish, and possibly birds.”

“Neanderthals practiced what has been considered exclusively modern human behavior”,  Hardy and Moncel concluded. In other words, the diet of the Neanderthal is not different from modern Human.

These discoveries using previously unknown technologies continue to erode the differences rather than supporting the concept that the Neanderthals are an ancestral transitional link to human. The evolution industry is now tasked with discovering a better potential ancestral transitional link to humans.

Darwin envisioned man evolving into existence in the same way as animals. Since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the hunt has been on to find all the missing “slight, successive” transitional links, especially the link from animal to man.

Java Man

In 1891, Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois unearthed skullcap, a femur, and a few teeth on the island of Java, Indonesia claiming the bones to be an intermediate species in between humans and apes. The evidence was hotly disputed, but Dubois continued to contend that the Java man was a transitional link. Today, scientists classify the Java man as Homo erectus—not a missing transitional link to man.

Piltdown Man

In 1911, Charles Dawson unearthed fragments of a human skull and fragments of a lower jaw with two teeth a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. On November 21, 1912, The Guardian newspaper announced the discovery: “One of the most important prehistoric finds of our time has been made in Sussex”—the ancestor of man.

In 1913, the fossils were placed on display at the British Museum of Natural History as evidence evolution from ape to man. After suspicions started flying in the early 1950’s, the exhibit was quietly slipped out the back door following the discovery that the Piltdown man was simply a glued composite of an organ tan jaw and the skull of a man—not a missing transitional link to man.

Reflecting on the fraud, paleontologist Roger Lewin in 1997 lamented -

Given all the many anatomical incongruities in the Piltdown remains, which of course are glaringly obvious from the vantage of the present, it is truly astonishing that the forgery was so eagerly embraced.

Nebraska Man

In 1917, Nebraska rancher and geologist Harold Cook found a human-like tooth. The tooth became recognized as evidence of the “Ape of the Western World.” The tooth was named Hesperopithecus haroldcookii.

By 1925, however, the tooth was recognized as belonging to neither to man nor ape, but to an extinct pig like species. In 1927, the journal Science retracted their identification of the fossil as that from an ape. The retraction made front-page news in The New York Times in 1928, with the title “Nebraska ape tooth proved a wild pig’s,” and was reported on page sixteen in The Times of London, with the more abstract title, “Hesperopithecus dethroned.”

Peking Man

During excavations in the early 1920’s partial human-like craniums, lower jaws, teeth, skeletal bones were discovered near Beijing (written ‘Peking’ before the adoption of the Pinyin romanization system), China.

The original study on the Peking man fossils was performed by anatomist Davidson Black and the findings were published in the journal Nature. The discovery garnered international attention and the support of the Rockefeller Foundation for continued exploration.

Over the next several years, more than forty fossil specimens, including six nearly complete skullcaps, were uncovered. While being shipped to the United States in 1941 for safety during World War II, the original fossils disappeared. Today, only the casts and descriptions remain.

While originally thought to be a missing link, the Peking man, after critical analysis, like the Java Man, is now classified as Homo erectus—not the missing transitional link to man.

Lucy

In November 1974, paleontologist Tom Gray affectionately named the series of human-like skeletons found in Ethiopia “Lucy.” The garnered immediate worldwide attention as the missing transitional link to man.

On analyzing the skeletal features, while the Lucy did walk upright, it best suited for tree-climbing. In the 1986journal publication Natural History, Stephen Gould noted that Lucy was “uniquely different from apes and humans, not as imperfect people on the way up.”

Drawing conclusions on the origins of man with limited evidence can be a tricky business. In 2001, Henry Gee, senior science writer of the leading British journal Nature, concedes that “hominid evolution—[is] as mysterious as ever.”

Ida

Even more tragic for the evolution industry, the brazenous Ida story in 2009 stoops to barbarian standards in a desparate attempt to crayon-in the enormous missing transitional link to man.

Neanderthal

The Neanderthal has long been considered the best missing transitional link to man. However, due to its larged skull size even Darwin had a problem with the Neanderthal as the missing link to man. Now genetic testing has determined that the Neanderthals are not different from modern man. As John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin noted, “They’re us. We’re them.”

After 150 years since publication of The Origin of Species, there is no evidence “that man must be included with other organic beings in any general conclusion respecting his manner of appearance on this earth,” as suggested by Darwin.

Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory.

In the wake of the article published in Science on May 7, 2010, entitled “A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome”, the Smithsonian Institute is definitely destined for a very busy summer updating the fiasco at the Human Origins exhibit.

The reason is the research team led by geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany that wrote the article has discovered that the Neanderthals are indistinguishable from humans—Neanderthals and humans are the same species. John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News: “They’re us. We’re them.”

Geneticist Gregory Hannon commenting on the historical event noted – the “publication of the full Neandertal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” The evidence from “A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome,” clearly contradicts the Human Origin exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute.

 The now evident fiascos at the Smithsonian Human Origin exhibit destined for updating include the following statements:

The Neanderthal sequences were substantially different from modern human mtDNA.

These results confirmed the earlier study that showed that Neanderthals were unlikely to have contributed to the modern human genome.

Neanderthals and modern humans were separate species.

“[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.”

By definition, different species cannot develop interbreeding populations, therefore the Neanderthals can no longer be considered ancestral to humans – because they are simply humans.

Clearly, the Smithsonian exhibit had presented Neanderthals as a missing link to humans not on scientific evidence, but on an evolutionary paradigm—a saga that continues as a ubiquitous plague.

 In using logic rather than scientific evidence, the Smithsonian exhibit theorized that humans and Neanderthal represents the missing link to humans because they were not interbreeding populations—a gamble that was lost.

More glaring fiascos destined for updating at the Smithsonian include the following statements:

They did not find a match between derived alleles or gene forms in modern humans and those in Neanderthals, which is evidence against interbreeding.

The preliminary sequence shows no evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred.

Also, since studies show that Neanderthal mtDNA and Y chromosomes are very different, it is unlikely that Neanderthals and modern humans were interbreeding.

The exhibit exemplifies a greater fiasco to the evolutionary movement in which ideology has replaced science. With a long legacy of wrong theories and fraud, hopefully the Smithsonian will update the Human Origin exhibit based on scientific evidence—not an ideological agenda.

The immediate addressing of the Neanderthal fiasco will avoid the “fraud” label and not become the U.S. version of the Piltdown man.   

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”.

While researchers in Germany, announced completion of the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, the hoped for links to human evolution are still missing.

 The genome team led by geneticist Svante Paabo after isolating 3.7 billion base pairs could only conclude:  ”We’re currently analyzing if we see evidence in the Neanderthal genome of contribution from human ancestors,” Paabo said. “That question I think is still totally open.”

Again, this big golden nugget of evolution, like the fossil record, continues as the emperor without clothes. In the Guardian, palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris writes:

 “[P]erhaps now is the time to rejoice not in what Darwin got right, and in demonstrating the reality of evolution… “Isn’t it curious how evolution is regarded by some as a total, universe-embracing explanation, although those who treat it as a religion might protest and sometimes not gently. Don’t worry, the science of evolution is certainly incomplete.”

Even the New York Times writer, Carl Safina, in an essay for the science section entitled “Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live” concludes, “So let us now kill Darwin.”

 After 150 years, since the natural mechanism of evolution that Darwin was looking for is still missing, in this post-modern evolution era the birthday party fizzled.