The Ape’s Reflection? 359This brief summary of how they managed to get every single example in their attack on
hominin fossils completely wrong is representative of their tactics and of the abysmal level
of their understanding of human fossils. Any minor mistake, or any account that seems
to discredit a fossil, is good enough to be perpetuated over and over again. These same
examples pop up in nearly every other creationist publication and website as well, often
cribbed word for word, complete with all the same mistakes and misspellings.
There is no point in wasting more space in this chapter to correct every single cre-
ationist lie about the hominin fossil record. The example given above is very typical, and
I have not seen anything more sophisticated in any of their other publications. Just as
is the case with all the other creationist misstatements we have already discussed, their
tactics usually include quoting out of context, quoting old outdated sources that don’t
reflect the modern knowledge of the fossils, or quoting scientists who were considered
cranks even when they were active (such as Solly Zuckerman, Gish’s personal favorite).
Creationists don’t do any legitimate peer-reviewed anthropological research themselves
nor do they bother to actually work with the fossils or even learn the basics of anthropol-
ogy and human anatomy to see what the fossils really look like. They just do book reports
and pull quotes out of context; that’s as far as their scientific curiosity goes. Once they’ve
found what they think is a damaging quote, either they don’t bother to find out the con-
text or they deliberately mislead the reader about the entire context of the quotation. This
may be a sneaky way to confuse people and win them to their cause, but it is dishonest,
unethical, and unscientific.
So let’s stop wasting our time with the distorted creationist view and briefly review
what the hominin fossil record does show.
The Truth About Human Fossils
It is . . . probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to
the gorilla and chimpanzee, and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it
is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent
than elsewhere.
—Charles Darwin, The Descent of ManWhen Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, there were still no good hominin
fossils for him to point to, and this was still true when he wrote The Descent of Man in 1871.
Although the first Neanderthal specimen was known, it was usually misinterpreted as the
skeleton of a diseased Cossack who had died in a cave and didn’t figure in the early ideas
about human evolution. The first genuine hominin fossil that was truly different from us
was Eugène Dubois’s famous “Java Man” specimens of Homo erectus, originally described as
Pithecanthropus erectus in 1896. As outlined by Swisher et al. (2000), the specimens were con-
troversial and misinterpreted for many years because they were so incomplete (just a skull
cap, a thigh bone, and a few other fragments) and did not fit the biases of anthropology at the
time. On top of that, Dubois’s own paranoid behavior made his ideas harder to accept. But
Raymond Dart’s 1924 description of the South African skull known as the “Taung Child,”
Australopithecus africanus, was the first good fossil hominin species that was not a member
of the genus Homo. With its discovery almost 100 years ago, it should have clinched the