New Fossil Discovery Sinks Evolutionary Theories

By Harun Yahya
Posted: 11 Jamad-u-Thani 1423, 20 August 2002

A newly found fossil skull in Chad has confounded the proponents of the theory of evolution. Darwinist scientists confess that this fossil has rocked the very foundations of the theory of evolution. The fairy tale of "an evolutionary chain stretching from ape to man" has once again collapsed.

Fossil Discovery Widely Publicized

The new fossil skull found in the central African country of Chad has dealt a heavy blow to the evolutionary claims regarding the origin of man. Given considerable space in world-renowned scientific journals and newspapers, this new fossil has shattered the claim that "man evolved from ape-like creatures" so doggedly maintained by Darwinists for the last 150 years. Discovered by the French scientist Michel Brunet, the fossil was given the name Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

The fossil has set the cat among the pigeons in the world of Darwinism. In its article giving news of the discovery, the world-renowned journal Nature admitted that, "[the] new-found skull could sink our current ideas about human evolution." 1

Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University said that, "this [discovery] will have the impact of a small nuclear bomb." 2

The reason for this is that although the fossil in question is 7 million years old, it has a more "human-like" structure (according to the criteria evolutionists have hitherto used) than the 5 million-year-old Australopithecus ape species that is alleged to be "mankind's oldest ancestor."

Evolutionary Scheme Demolished

Ever since the 1920s, evolutionists have claimed that some characteristics of the Australopithecus genus resembled those of human beings, for which reason they have portrayed these extinct creatures as "man's most primitive ancestor." A great deal of evidence disproving that thesis has emerged. For instance, research in the 1990s revealed that Australopithecus did not walk upright, as had been claimed, but walked with a stooped posture just like other apes. The newly-discovered Sahelanthropus tchadensis fossil, another ape species that lived 2 million years before Australopithecus, is actually more "human-like" according to evolutionary criteria. In other words, it demolishes the "evolutionary scheme."

The essence of the matter is this: there are a large number of very different ape species that once lived in the past and are now extinct. The skull or skeletal structures of some of these show similarities to those of man. Yet those similarities do not mean that these creatures have any relationship to man. Evolutionists line up the skulls from these extinct species in a manner required by their theory and try to come up with "a ladder from ape to man." Yet the deeper research into the subject goes, the more it is realized that there is no such ladder, rather different species of ape lived at different times in the past.

Moreover, it emerges that man came about all of a sudden, with no evolutionary process behind him. In other words, that he was created.

Scientists Question Evolutionist Theories

John Whitfield, in his article "Oldest Member of Human Family Found" published in Nature on July, 11, 2002, confirms this view quoting from Bernard Wood, an evolutionist anthropologist from George Washington University in Washington:

"When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder. The ladder stepped from monkey to man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last. Now human evolution looks like a bush. We have a menagerie of fossil hominids... How they are related to each other and which, if any of them, are human forebears is still debated." 3

The comments of Henry Gee, the senior editor of Nature and a leading paleoanthropologist, about the newly discovered ape fossil are very noteworthy. In his article published in The Guardian, Gee refers to the debate about the fossil and writes:

"Whatever the outcome, the skull shows, once and for all, that the old idea of a 'missing link' is bunk... It should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing link, always shaky, is now completely untenable." 4

In brief, the drawings of the "evolutionary ladder that stretches from ape to man" that we so frequently encounter in newspapers and magazines have no scientific value at all. They are merely propaganda from certain circles that are blindly devoted to the theory of evolution. At the same time as this propaganda is carried out, evidence that conflicts with the theory of evolution is kept hidden away. In his book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth, Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong, which caused a great stir in America when it was published in 2000, the U.S. biologist Jonathan Wells summed up that propaganda mechanism in these terms:

"The general public is rarely informed of the deep-seated uncertainty about human origins that is reflected in these statements by scientific experts. Instead, we are simply fed the latest version of somebody's theory, without being told that paleoanthropologists themselves cannot agree over it. And typically, the theory is illustrated with fanciful drawings of cave men, or human actors wearing heavy makeup." 5

The Darwinist myth is now finally about to collapse. The mistaken nature of Darwinism, itself merely a 19th century superstition, is becoming ever clearer as science advances. The world of science is arriving at the most important truth of all: It was God who created the universe we live in, and everything, living or inanimate, within it.