Page 492 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

ONCE, THERE WAS A SEARCH FOR

THE MISSING LINK

he last chapter showed how the fossil record removed all of Darwinism's underpinnings. In The Origin of the
Species, Darwin did not touch on the fossil record as it relates to human origins. But in The Descent of Man,

T published 12 years later, he proposed that human beings were the highest rung on the so-called evolution-
ary ladder, and that their nearest ancestors were primates resembling modern-day apes.
In proposing that human beings and apes were descended from a common ancestor, Darwin had no
proof to back up these claims; he just imagined that there was a family relationship between human beings

and apes, animals that, he thought, were physically best suited to being compared to human beings. In his
book, he developed his racial arguments, claming that some of the world's supposedly "primitive races"
were proof of evolution. (However, modern genetics has disproved these racial views shared by Darwin
and other evolutionists of the time.)

From the last quarter of the 19th century, almost a whole science of paleoanthropology devoted itself to
the task of finding fossils to prove this imaginary theory of evolution, and many who accepted Darwinism
started digging to find the "missing link" between apes and human beings.
The great discovery they had hoped for was made in England in 1910. For the next 43 years, the skull of

"Piltdown Man" was presented to the world as a major evidence of human evolution. The fossil was dis-
covered by Charles Dawson, an amateur paleontologist who gave it the name Eoanthropus dawsoni. It was
an odd fossil: the upper part was totally human in structure, while the lower jaw and teeth were like those
of an ape. Within a short time, this discovery became famous; and the English were very proud that this fos-

sil, discovered in their native soil, was an ancestor of their race. The considerable size of the cranium was
interpreted as an indication that "English intelligence"
had evolved very early. In the
following years, hundreds of

theses were written on
Eoanthropus dawsoni, and
the fossil was displayed in
the British Museum,

where hundreds of thou-
sands of visitors were
persuaded as to the
"truth of human evolu-

tion."
They did not know
that the "fossil" was a
fake. Tests applied in

A picture showing the excava-
tions at Piltdown, birthplace of
the "Piltdown Man" scandal

490 Atlas of Creation Vol. 3