What about Lucy, Neanderthals, etc.

Who are the Neanderthals really and what about the mysterious woman named Lucy.  Scientists say that they have retrieved the fossils of ape-like humans who they claim to be the inbetween stages/links of the evolution of man from ape. Can we take them to be humans with some kind of genetic disorder such as acromegaly?  (Hannah’s third question)

When scientists chance upon a set of fossil bones, they have at their disposal, bones, scientific tools and methods, and their beliefs and presuppositions.

Lucy and the other fossils are all just bones that needed to be dated and interpreted by scientists and anthropologists. In this process, many assumptions needed to be made and were made depending on the beliefs of those who made them.

Neither the young-earth scientist nor the old-earth scientist is going to be able to prove beyond doubt, using scientific methods, that their interpretation is right. Young-earth scientists who believe in the Bible know that God created man as man. In fact man was the crown and glory of God’s creation. So these scientists interpret the fossils from the perspective of the Biblical account. Those who believe in evolution interpret fossils according to their faith. But because the latter are an overwhelming majority, when they speak together, the sheer loudness of their argument can be intimidating.  The best way to counter this is by equipping ourselves with information.

As believers, we know that human beings were created as human beings. So any fossil bone that scientists interpret as ‘links’ or ‘stages’ in human evolution cannot be what what they say it is. The fossil has to be either human or non-human.

For obvious reasons, it is in the interest of scientists, who believe in evolution, to interpret fossils as ‘links’ or ‘stages’. How do they manage to do this? We’ll look at the three ways of doing this with examples.

The three ways are:

• Ape fossils made out to be more human than they are
• Human fossils made out to be less human and more ape-like than they are
• Delibrately mixed fossils of human and ape bones (actual fraud)

Lucy—An example of ape fossils interpreted to be human like
Lucy, (Australopithecus afarensis) was a kind of ape, with body proportions like a chimpanzee, who could knuckle walk, walk on twos with a stooped posture, and climb trees.  Textbooks often show her hands and feet as being similar to humans, but this is an error that is acknowledged. Sadly wrong representations of Lucy abound in museums too.

Neanderthal Man and Cro-magnon Man—Human fossils interpreted to be ape like
I understand that the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnon people were among the people groups who were scattered from the tower of Babel.

Evolution scientists regard Cro-Magnon people as early human beings who were quite intelligent. In comparison, they claimed that the Neanderthals lacked in creativity, language skills and other human traits.

• At least in one case, it has been documented that the ‘Neanderthal’ individual had rickets, which may have contributed to the idea that the Neanderthals were inferior to the Cro-Magnon people.
• Similarly, it was thought that the Neanderthals were incapable of speech until the discovery of a hyoid bone, caused scientists and anthropologists to concede that the Neanderthals could have spoken any human language.
• It was also argued that Neaderthals were not human because they did not use symbols and rituals. This too was proved untrue.

Evolution scientists do not lack imagination and can weave a good story. The Nebraska man (and even a picture of him and Mrs. Nebraska Man in the Illustrated London Daily News) came from the 1922 discovery of a solitary tooth!

We must expect to find (and do find) all kinds of human fossils. The Bible speaks of giants. The Bible also tells us that in pre-flood times, people lived for a lot longer than we do today. Fossils of human beings who lived to the age of 800 probably look somewhat different.

Piltdown Man—A hoax using human skull plus ape jawbone
Piltdown Man comprised fragments of a skull and jawbone supposedly found in Piltdown, an English village, in 1912 by a man called Charles Dawson. For 40 long years, Piltdown man enjoyed the honour of being hailed as a great find in favour for the evolution of man.  In 1953, thanks to the separate efforts of three scientists, Piltdown man was found to be a hoax, a forged mix of a skull of a human and jawbone an orangutan.

Interesting links you could learn more from

• Neandertal Man—the changing picture: An overview of how this alleged ‘subhuman’ is being progressively rehabilitated, despite the evolutionary bias resisting the trend
• Neanderthal children’s fossils: Huge problems have been uncovered in evolutionary reconstructions of Neanderthal children’s fossils
• Piltdown Man: Britain’s Greatest Hoax
• Did humans really evolve from ape-like creatures?
• Paleontologists reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone
• Strange Relics From The Depths Of The Earth

In this post as in the posts answering Question 1 and Question 2, my intention is to demonstrate that:

• the young-earth creationist’s interpretation is very logical and reasonable.
• the interpretation of the majority (scientists who believe in evolution) has serious flaws and is not as foolproof as is made out to be.