News you won't see in controlled mainstream media.

OK, Harun Yahya . . .


They are not all fragmented and incomplete. I will list my primary sources for this post here and refer to them accordingly.

Turkana Boy is a nearly complete skeleton of an 11 or 12 year old homo erectus. The skeleton has been dated to approximately 1.53 million years.

We also have Lucy, the famous skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis, which is about 40% complete.

These transitional fossil skulls are remarkably complete.

These are the ones I am aware of, though I am sure there are more. More recent skeletons such as those of neandertals exist, as do other australopithecines and other early bipedal hominids.

Scientists have plenty of evidence to work with and there are people called paleoanthropoligists whose life's work is to study these fossils, so no, this is not all conjecture as Yahya claims.

The quote given here by Dr. Pilbeam has done the rounds of creationist sites and although no provenance is given for it here, this seems to be traceable to a creationist called Richard Milton, who took it out of context in an effort to try to show a scientist "admitting" that there is little evidence to go on (this was written in about 1980 -- 28 years of archaeological finds have since ensued). Pilbeam was concerned about establishing the "how," not the "if," of evolution. For example, he also said at the time:


I'll leave it up to your imagination to pick the bit from the above quote that creationists also like to pull out of its context and quote mine.

I'm not sure what Yahya is trying to get at by calling the hominid drawings here fanciful. He's presented some quite old ones as well. Facial reconstruction based on a skull is a thriving field today, using computers and intricate knowledge of the anatomy of a face. We've changed a few of our depictions accordingly -- they are always our best guess -- but that best guess is getting more accurate all the time. Yahya gives zero credit anywhere here to people who study these things for a living and who might just know a bit about what they are doing.

Yahya's quote from Hooten, again unsourced, is irrelevant. Hooten was working and writing in the first half of last century and had no knowledge of modern facial reconstruction techniques. Yahya has also spelled his name wrong.

Pildown Man is now discussed here. My comments, as previously, are 1.) That not all scientists were fooled by it, and that scientists eventually exposed the fraud; and 2.) It is a logical fallacy to take a fact (this was one fraud) and attempt to make massive generalisations from it (they could all be frauds and no one knows the difference). After studying the history of this, and the fact that too many scientists of the time were too quick to accept what they expected to see without conducting all of the tests available at the time, I don't think it's likely that the same thing could happen today if someone tried to perpetrate the same fraud. We'd get interesting uranium dates from the teeth for a start.

The story of Nebraska Man is made into a straw man by creationists and trumpeted along with Piltdown Man by the "it's all fake and scientists are deceivers" crowd. I suggest you read the facts in the case at the above link.

Ramapithecus is no longer considered a hominid. Why? Because of finds which have been more recent than the information given here. Theories are modified when new evidence emerges; this is how science works. You would not have found a serious scientist then, or now, who claims that we have it all 100% correct. I'm not sure why there's supposed to be something wrong with an artist depicting their best estimation of what an extinct creature would have looked like. Have you seen some of the Victorian engravings of what they thought dinosaurs looked like? We've learned a little bit since then.


Yes, this is possible. Maybe he's trying to say what you were claiming before Bex: that a parent population co-existing with a daughter population is supposed to be evidence against evolution. What I said was that it's possible for the daughter population to become isolated from the parent population, and that the daughter population could fill a different ecological niche. It's also rather unlikely that if an isolated daughter population encounters the original parent population, the parent population will instantly poof out of existence. I invited you to look at the example of ring species, which can be observed today.


This is wrong, and here is an example of Yahya not telling you the relevant details. It is true that the skull of australopithecus is more similar to that of a chimp, though it has a larger cranial capacity. However, the teeth and jaws are more similar to those of humans. What is more, australopithecus was undoubtedly bipedal, as can be seen from the pelvis, femur and foot. Yahya doesn't want to show you those bits. I have, however, linked to them before, and there is a lot of information out there about this.


This is a misrepresentation of the facts. Scientists debate about whether to place habilis in the homo or australopithecus genus. You can read about habilis here. What is not in dispute is that this was a bipedal hominid. No serious scientist who knows anything about anatomy claims that it was an ape or that it did not walk upright.

Yahya then goes on to discuss homo erectus. He apparently has decided to say that homo habilis is completely ape-like (false for the above reasons; he has also ignored other transitionals such as homo georgicus and homo ergaster. What's more, the line Yahya draws between human and ape -- supposedly so obviously different from each other -- is typical of creationist confusion on this issue.

He says about Turkana Boy:

What he says here is such a bunch of phooey that I will ask you simply to read the real science behind this wonderful discovery, as you can do here and here (note what it says about morphology). A note about brain size: it was 880cc, and would probably have grown to about 910cc at adulthood. This is smaller than all but a fraction of 1% of modern humans of all sizes and both sexes. A comparable human brain would be expected to have a brain size of about 1350cc. You can read more about brain sizes here.

Yahya then strays further from fossil evidence and appears to be attempting to make claims for the "humanity" of subsequent hominids by talking about seafaring skills, evidence of clothing, etc. Scientists don't classify them according to whether they sailed ships or wore clothes; remember, paleoanthropoligists decide on the classification of species largely by comparing fossil evidence. Modern evidence, including mitochondrial DNA, sppears to be pointing to neandertals as being a separate species from us and not a subspecies. You can read about them here.

Yahya goes back in time to then discuss homo antecessor. He presents a quote discussing the similarity of the face to those of modern humans, and then insinuates that these were modern humans living 800,000 years ago (YECs take note) and that scientists made up a classification for them because they didn't want to admit that modern humans could be living at that time. This of course is nonsense, as you can read here and here. Yahya is expecting you to take his word for all this, even though the real science is there to be learned at the click of your mouse -- it's up to you to decide to make that click.

I have been unable to find a reference to this 1.7 million year old hut anywhere on the internet. I need to know its provenance in order to verify the assertions here -- where it was found, by whom, what was really said about it by Leakey, and so on. Until that information is presented here, I'm afraid I don't have much faith in the truth of another bald assertion from this site. I'd quite enjoy reading about a 1.7 million year old hut. This is quite extraordinary, considering the fact that mesolithic remains, consisting of little but post holes, are the oldest examples of human habitation outside of caves in Britain. The mesolithic here was rather more recent than 1.7 million years.


And no explanation of why this should be the case. We're supposed to take his word for it apparently. There is a picture of this at one of the hominid info links I presented at the beginning of this post, so I'm not too worried that it's going to bring the ToE crashing to its knees.


Zuckerman was working decades ago and he is not as "eminent" as Yahya would like you to believe, though anyone a creationist gets a quote mine from suddenly seems to come to the forefront of his occupation. Yes, he was a scientist. His views being presented here are are decades old and have been soundly refuted -- but I'll let Jim Foley take this up -- it's late and I'm tired.



As for the ridiculous attempt at the end of this to paint every evolutionist as being complicit in a racist event which happened a hundred years ago, I'll let it speak for itself. No need to mention as well, presumably, the numbers of Christian slave owners who also lived in the past, the numbers of Christians who did nasty things to their fellow humans, many of them creationists as well . . . I don't see that any of this has any place in the discussion of homind fossils.

I'm pretty tired after all this but I wanted to put my money where my mouth is when I say that this is just another site full of bald assertions, PRATTs, misrepresentations, etc. The real science is easy to find if you truly want to look. I'm not ignoring the things you yourself said, Bex; I will adress those. I need to stop here for now though.