Page 180 - Darwinism Refuted
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DARWINISM REFUTED
The skull reconstructed from the Atapuerca fossil (left) bears a close resemblance to
that of man living today (right).
modern man. However, the Middle Pleistocene was a million years ago. 218
Since these discoveries turned the evolutionary family tree upside down,
they were dismissed by some evolutionary paleoanthropologists. Yet
Leakey always contended that his estimates were correct.
Just when this controversy was about to be forgotten, a fossil
unearthed in Spain in 1995 revealed in a very remarkable way that the
history of Homo sapiens was much older than had been assumed. The fossil
in question was uncovered in a cave called Gran Dolina in the Atapuerca
region of Spain by three Spanish paleoanthropologists from the University
of Madrid. The fossil revealed the face of an 11-year-old boy who looked
entirely like modern man. Yet, it had been 800,000 years since the child
died. Discover magazine covered the story in great detail in its December
1997 issue.
This fossil even shook the convictions of Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras,
who lead the Gran Dolina excavation. Ferreras said:
We expected something big, something large, something inflated—you
know, something primitive… Our expectation of an 800,000-year-old boy
was something like Turkana Boy. And what we found was a totally modern
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