INVESTIGATING GENESIS SERIES
©2002  by Gerard Wakefield    http://www.creationism.org/wakefield/
(This article may be copied for educational purposes only.)

"No 'Missing Link' Between Animals and Humans"

The as-yet-unsuccessful search for the "missing link" between ape-men and modern human beings is well known. However, what is less widely known is that there is another important "missing link" that cannot be found: the animal that formed the alleged link between Old World monkeys and the early ape that was supposed to be the ancestor of all ape-men, cave-men, and full-fledged human beings. This link between the animal kingdom and man has never been found. For a long time, an African ape named Proconsul africanus was touted as the connection between monkeys and the branch of apes that eventually would give way to mankind, a branch known as the hominids. Paleontologist Louis S. B. Leakey, one of the foremost fossil-hunters of the twentieth century and a champion of evolution, wrote of this ape:

An especially important creature was Proconsul africanus. This, many authorities once concluded, gave us an indication of the common stock for apes and men. We have good forelimb bones for it, and in 1948 on Rusinga Island Mary [Leakey] discovered a skull, the first nearly complete specimen ever found. Its canine teeth suggest an ape’s, while its forehead reminds us of our own. It seems to me, however, to be neither an ancestral ape, nor yet an ancestor of man, but a side branch with characteristics of both stocks (L. Leakey 166). Another candidate for the "missing link" between humankind and the animal kingdom was Aegyptopithecus, "Egyptian Ape." Although this ape is being promoted by evolutionist Dr. Elwyn Simons of Duke University as "the oldest creature we know that is in the direct ancestry of man" (Weaver 581), the gap between this creature and the ape-man into which it allegedly evolved (Australopithecus) is too gigantic to be gapped, and intermediate ancestors between Aegyptopithecus and our supposed ape-like ancestors have all disappointed, as National Geographic points out: A gulf of mystery separates Aegyptopithecus at 33 million years [ago] and Australopithecus at four million. Candidates for intermediate ancestors that have been proposed at one time or another include two from Kenya known as Proconsul and Kenyapithecus; two from India, Pakistan, China, and Kenya called Ramapithecus and Sivapithecus; and two from Europe called Rudapithecus and Dryopithecus. These apelike creatures lived at various times between about 8 and 20 million years ago.

Despite much debate and speculation, none of these primates has been finally accepted as a human progenitor. Until more fossils — and more complete specimens — are found, the long geologic epoch known as the Miocene (24 million to 5 million years ago) will remain a largely veiled chapter in hominid evolution (Ibid. 581-582 [emphasis added]).

Evolutionists have admitted that the remains of the ape which supposedly linked man with animal will never be found. This creature, which is reputed to form the common stock for apes and hominids (humans), is a phantom about which evolutionists know nothing. Louis Leakey’s daughter-in-law Meave Leakey, head of the paleontology department of the National Museums of Kenya, admits: Hominids and African apes share a common ancestor. No one knows what that animal looked like....We do not know why they became bipedal.... (M. Leakey 42) National Geographic similarly commented: Two obvious questions: Who were the ancestors before four million years ago? And what was it that induced the first hominids to forsake an arboreal [tree-dwelling] existence and become terrestrial? The answers are eagerly sought, but they are still clouded by sketchy evidence and controversy (Weaver 579). The "common ancestor" of apes and men can never be found, admit evolutionists. The Dallas Morning News, reporting on an ape fossil (Ankarapithecus meteai) which is believed to be our ancestor, remarked: The actual common ancestors of humans and apes are thought to have lived in Africa at the time that Ankarapithecus meteai occupied Turkey. But fossils of those creatures may never be found, [Harvard anthropologist] Dr. [David] Pilbeam said. Fossil-preserving rocks of the proper age simply aren’t exposed on the ground surface anywhere in Africa (Crenson 8D). Even Dr. Simons, who touted Aegyptopithecus as the common ancestor of apes and man, refers to the fossil proofs of the first ape as "these bare damaged evidences" (Weaver 563). Despite this overt lack of proof for one of the most vital, elemental steps on the alleged ladder of human evolution, supporters of Darwin’s theory continue to present it as incontrovertible truth to an unsuspecting public.
 

References:

Crenson, Matt. "Fossil face of ape may provide clues on human origins," Dallas Morning News, 29 July 1996.

Leakey, Louis S. B. Animals of East Africa (Washington, DC: The National Geographic Society, 1973).

Leakey, Meave. "The Dawn of Humans: The Farthest Horizon," National Geographic 188, no. 3 (1995).

Weaver, Kenneth F. "Stones, Bones, and Early Man: The Search for Our Ancestors," National Geographic 168, no. 5 (1985).


Gerard Wakefield holds his master’s degree in anthropology and archaeology from Harvard University.  He is the author of the e-book: The Bible Encounters Modern Science, available at: www.1stbooks.com.


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