Page 680 - Atlas of Creation Volume 2

A face bone discovered in Atapuerca in Spain, show-
ing that people with the same facial structure as pre-
sent-day people were living 800,000 years ago.

lutionary theory is the unexpectedly ancient history of today's man. Paleoanthropological findings reveal that
Homo sapiens people who looked exactly like us were living as long as 1 million years ago.

It was Louis Leakey, the famous evolutionary paleoanthropologist, who discovered the first findings on
this subject. In 1932, in the Kanjera region around Lake Victoria in Kenya, Leakey found several fossils that be-
longed to the Middle Pleistocene and that were no different from man of today. However, the
Middle Pleistocene was a million years ago. 181 Since these discoveries turned the evolu-
tionary family tree upside down, they were dismissed by some evolutionary pale-
oanthropologists. 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 man man of today. 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 excava-
tion. Ferreras said:

We expected something big, something large, some-
thing 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 face.... To me this is most spectacular—these
The skull recon-
structed from the are the kinds of things that shake you. Finding some-
Atapuerca fossil thing totally unexpected like that. Not finding fossils;
(left) bears an in- finding fossils is unexpected too, and it's okay. But the
credible resem-
blance to that of most spectacular thing is finding something you thought
man of today (right). belonged to the present, in the past. It's like finding some-

678 Atlas of Creation Vol. 2