My response to this is to cite the dismal record of so-called missing links:
Nebraska man
Java man
Piltdown man
Orce man
Based on past "scientific" discoveries this on will likely end up being the skull of a ten year old three toes sloth.
"Based on past "scientific" discoveries this on will likely end up being the skull of a ten year old three toes sloth.
"
Nebraska man
Java man
Piltdown man
Orce man
Based on past "scientific" discoveries this on will likely end up being the skull of a ten year old three toes sloth.
Looks like you are more familiar with the creation "science" websites then anything containing real science.
The details on these finds are in PatrickHenry's List-O-Links.
"My response to this is to cite the dismal record of so-called missing links:
Nebraska man"
Would that missing Nebraska man be on offense or defense?
I knew there was a reason for their football team's demise this year.
My response to this is to cite the dismal record of so-called missing links:Nebraska man
Java man
Piltdown man
Orce man
I'd never heard of Orce man before. It sounds as dishonest as Nebraska Man, which is to say not at all.
Anyway, have you ever heard of Homo habilis? Homo erectus? (multiple fossils of each - Java Man is a perfectly legitimate H. erectus) Turkana Boy? Or any of the other dozens of fossils on this page?
Have you ever heard of Paluxy Man?
The imaginative drawing of Nebraska Man to which creationists invariably refer was the work of an illustrator collaborating with the scientist Grafton Elliot Smith, and was done for a British popular magazine, not for a scientific publication. Few if any other scientists claimed Nebraska Man was a human ancestor. A few, including Osborn and his colleagues, identified it only as an advanced primate of some kind. Osborn, in fact, specifically avoided making any extravagant claims about Hesperopithecus being an ape-man or human ancestor:
Most other scientists were skeptical even of the more modest claim that the Hesperopithecus tooth belonged to a primate. It is simply not true that Nebraska Man was widely accepted as an ape-man, or even as an ape, by scientists, and its effect upon the scientific thinking of the time was negligible. For example, in his two-volume book Human Origins published during what was supposedly the heyday of Nebraska Man (1924), George MacCurdy dismissed Nebraska Man in a single footnote:
Based on his own theories about how brains had evolved and wishful thinking, Dubois did claim that Java Man was "a gigantic genus allied to the gibbons", but this was not, as creationists imply, a retraction of his earlier claims that it was an intermediate between apes and humans. Dubois also pointed out that it was bipedal and that its brain size was "very much too large for an anthropoid ape", and he never stopped believing that he had found an ancestor of modern man (Theunissen 1989; Gould 1993; Lubenow 1992). (The creationist organization Answers in Genesis has now abandoned the claim that Dubois dismissed Java Man as a gibbon, and now lists it in their Arguments we think creationists should NOT use web page.)
Despite this, the skullcap definitely does not belong to any ape, and especially not to a gibbon. It is far too large (940 cc, compared to 97 cc for a gibbon), and it is similar to many other Homo erectus fossils that have been found. One of these is Sangiran 17, also found on Java. This skull, which is never mentioned by creationists, is an almost complete cranium and is clearly human, albeit primitive. Others are the Turkana Boy and ER 3733 fossils, both of which creationists recognize as human.
It is easy to score cheap rhetorical points by implying that scientists are so incompetent that they cannot tell the difference between a human and a donkey. A more charitable explanation, which turns out to be the correct one, is that the bone is genuinely difficult to identify, as proved by the fact that debate over its status has continued for over 10 years.
A fractal analysis of the skull sutures by Gibert and Palmqvist (1995) strongly indicated that the fragment was not from an equine. Also in 1995, an international symposium was eventually held at Orce to discuss this and other material, and a number of workers there also suggested that VM-0 was a hominid fossil (Zihlman and Lowenstein 1996).
Two articles appearing in July 1997 disputed that claim, however. Palmqvist (1997), citing errors in the paper that he had coauthored with Gibert, now claimed that the fractal evidence was clearly in favor of an equid origin for VM-0, and Moya-Sola and Kohler (1997) made the same claim based on an anatomical study. Even this has not resolved the debate, because a later paper (Borja et al. 1997) has argued in favor of VM-0 being a hominid, based on immunological studies of fossil proteins performed at two independent laboratories. For now, it would seem safest to make no firm conclusions about the identity of VM-0 or the other possible hominid fossils from Orce.