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INVESTIGATING GENESIS SERIES ©2002 by Gerard Wakefield http://www.creationism.org/wakefield/ (This article may be copied for educational purposes only.) |
"A New Missing Link?"
As is well known, the theory of human evolution is fraught with questionable fossils that are trumpeted as the incontrovertible missing link, only to be toppled years - or sometimes decades - later. The most recent fossil in this long line of failures is Kenyanthropus platyops, discovered in East Africa by famed paleontologist Meave Leakey. It is being touted in the media as our true evolutionary ancestor, and thus as solid evidence for human evolution.
Problems, as always, plague this find. For example, the entire fossil consists only of a skull and partial upper jaw (Wong 2001: 32). It is thus impossible to determine anything about how this creature walked, stood, or climbed, since no limb bones were present. Moreover, the tiny percentage of the skeleton that did remain for Leakey to find "really was a horrible mess," she admitted (Ibid.).
On top of the limited and "messy" nature of the bone fragments, not all scientists have accepted platyops' enthronement as the new missing link. Scientific American reported: "Not everyone agrees with her assessment. Paleoanthropologist Tim D. White of the University of California at Berkeley, an expert on early hominids, remains to be convinced that the fossils represent anything but a variant of A. afarensis ["Lucy"]. Other researchers accept the new species designation [platyops, meaning "flat-faced"] but question the new genus [Kenyanthropus, meaning "Kenya Man"].
Despite these doubts, media reports have trumpeted the find as solid evidence for evolution. The October 2001 issue of National Geographic, for example, said that the discovery of Kenya Man "shook the human family tree" (Lange 2001: 86). It has done no such thing, as Leakey has admitted: "One of these early hominids was ancestral to us, but we don't know which. It could well be something we haven't yet found" (Ibid. 84). As for how Kenya Man supposedly has redrawn the "tree" of human evolution, she stated, "I don't like drawing family trees. We simply don't have the evidence" (Ibid. 86).
Even if Kenya Man is eventually accepted, it will once again show the
cracks in evolution's facade, because it will mean that "Lucy," touted
as the incontrovertible missing link since the 1970's, will be overthrown.
In other words, everything that evolutionists have been telling us for
the past quarter-century about Lucy being our unquestionable ancestor must
be thrown out. How many more decades will elapse, one wonders, until platyops
is overthrown?
References:
Wong, K. (2001). "Finding Homo sapiens' Lost Relatives." Scientific American 285, no. 4.
Lange, K. E. (2001). "Meet Kenya Man." National Geographic 200, no. 4.