Posted on 07/12/2002 8:56:17 AM PDT by Junior
PARIS (Reuters) - A prehistoric skull touted as the oldest human remains ever found is probably not the head of the earliest member of the human family but of an ancient female gorilla, a French scientist said on Friday.
Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris said certain aspects of the skull, whose discovery in Chad was announced on Wednesday, were actually sexual characteristics of female gorillas rather than indications of a human character.
Two other French experts cast doubt on the skull as Michel Brunet, head of the archeological team that discovered it, was due to present his findings at a news conference at Poitiers in western France.
A self-confessed heretic amid the hoop-la over the skull, which dates back six or seven million years, Senut said its short face and small canines merely pointed to a female and were not conclusive evidence that it was a hominid.
"I tend toward thinking this is the skull of a female gorilla," she told Reuters in an interview. "The characteristics taken to conclude that this new skull is a hominid are sexual characteristics.
"Moreover, other characteristics such as the occipital crest (the back of the neck where the neck muscles attach)...remind me much more of the gorilla," she said, saying older gorillas also had these characteristics.
So little is known about the distant period of history represented by the skull that one scientist who has seen it told Nature magazine the discovery would have the impact of a "small nuclear bomb" among students of human evolution.
The London-based journal broke the news on Wednesday.
SHORT FACE, SMALL TEETH
The skull, discovered last year by an international team of palaeoanthropologists, has been nicknamed "Toumai," the name usually given in the central African country to children who are born close to the dry season.
Ten million years ago the world was full of apes and it was not until five million years later that the first good records of hominids -- or members of the human family, distinct from chimpanzees and other apes -- appeared.
Senut contested the theory that Toumai represented the missing link of human evolution between the two benchmarks.
The skull's braincase is ape-like, the face is short and the teeth, especially the canines, are small and more like those of a human.
But she said these were characteristics of female gorillas and cited the case of a skull which was discovered in the 1960s and accepted for 20 years as that of a hominid before everyone agreed that it was a female.
French media have reported extensively on the skull, not least because it came to light after years of digging through the sand dunes of northern Chad by Brunet, a Frenchman from the University of Poitiers.
Despite the national pride, Senut was not the only French scientist to raise questions about the hominid theory.
Yves Coppens of the College of France told the daily Le Figaro that the skull had an ambiguous shape, with the front looking pre-human and the back like that of a large monkey.
"The exact status of this new primate is not yet certain," he said. "Michel Brunet believes it is a pre-human, other respected palaeoanthropologists...see it as one side of the big primitive monkeys. "Others suggest a shared ancestry before the divide between hominids and monkeys took hold."
His colleague at the same institution, Pascal Picq, suggested that chemical research to establish Toumai's diet or a reconstruction of the skull by computer imaging could determine whether it was man or monkey, though for him it was "pre-human."
But no one contests the significance of the discovery.
"Even if it is a big monkey, it's even more interesting," Coppens said. "Because until now, in the genealogy of monkeys, there is a big missing link stretching over millions of years."
A total and blatant lie. Evolutionists call any Christian who disagrees with their theory a 'creationist' even if the person in no way claims to believe the earth was created 6000 years ago or not. In addition to which not to believe that God is The Creator is a denial of Christianity itself. The Bible is totally meaningless if God is not The Creator.
It's not that difficult. Some of the creationists believe that a half dozen distinctly different races could EVOLVE from an original race in only 6 thousand years. What kind of changes could we expect over 6 million or 6 billion years?
You don't need to reply. The answer is obvious to all but the blind.
Now you can call me stupid or blind or a fanatic if it makes you feel better but I cannot except the idea that the human race started out in a mud puddle. I believe we were created by GOD and not by random accident.
I may be completely wrong, and if I am, in 100 years from now, you and I will be in the same nothingness. But if I am right, then I will be someplace you are not.
This is not scientific so I'll just call it faith based. I'm not a teacher or scientist or intellectual, but we will all know the answers in the fullness of time.
You don't have to reply either.
It's not that difficult. Some of the creationists believe that a half dozen distinctly different races could EVOLVE from an original race in only 6 thousand years. What kind of changes could we expect over 6 million or 6 billion years?
You don't need to reply. The answer is obvious to all but the blind.
The "races" of mankind do not comprise different species. They are not even considered to be different subspecies! From the darkest aborigine to the lighest European, we are all "Homo sapiens sapiens." Every domesticated animal or plant exhibits much more variation than human races. Chihuahuas and Great Danes and every other dog are precisely the same species, yet all or most of their variation has occured in historical times. The same with cats, horses, pigeons, apples, cabbages, and hundreds of other species.
It is not hard to explain the development of various races in a few thousand years due to genetic mutations and isolation. This has not resulted in new species. Different races can interbreed and produces perfectly healthy and fertile offspring.
The truly hard thing to explain is how in 100 million years the coelacanth has not changed one iota. How is it logical to believe that coelacanths (or a similar species) evolved into humans and whales and penguins and ostriches and snakes and mice and turtles and every other vertebrate species (except fish, of course), yet the coelacanth as a species has not evolved at all? I don't have enough "faith" to believe that. This is one of the things that convinced me that evolution is not true.
Similarly horseshoe crabs, bats, and almost every other species have not changed at all since there first appearance in the fossil record.
It seems like they change that mess of an evolutionary tree every time they find a new fossil. I think hilarious that they expect us to accept this stuff as fact when they can't even agree among themselves.
I, and I think many others, use the term far more broadly (e.g young-earth v.s. old-earth creationists). In fact IMO it's possible to be a creationist and evolutionist.
I agree with you. The more I read and understand both arguments, the more silly evolution becomes. There are more holes than I can count. Here is a little something that was written by an evolution debunker that you may find interesting and may help to solidify your beliefs even more.
"There is a big difference between micro and macro-evolution. No one denies micro-evolution, the adaptation of a species to different environments. However, macro-evolution is much more than adaptation, it is a transformation of a species into another much more complex one. Macro-evolution is clearly required to occur if evolution is true. Otherwise there is no way that we could have gotten from bacteria to humans without the intervention of The Creator.
The theory of evolution posits that step by step through the millenia since life began, species have been transforming themselves into new species each one more complex in their organisms than the previous ones. They posit that fish developed legs and started walking on earth. They posit that reptiles grew wings and became birds. They posit that reptiles again grew mammary glands, became live bearing, and turned themselves into mammals. These transformations by small adaptations were very questionable even when first made. However, genetics and specifically the discovery of DNA has made them quite impossible. Adaptations can occur by single point mutations in a gene. Transformations require not just a totally new gene, but many new genes to be created to support those transformations. The impossibility of this happening by random mutations (and there can be no selection in the creation of a gene since there is no function until the gene is completed) is astronomical. The possibility of thousands of new genes being created for the millions of species living and dead is a total impossibility.
Speciation while a prerequisite to such transformations is not proof of macro-evolution. A species (especially with the loose terminology of evolutionists) can arise (according to evos) by merely being geographically isolated from the rest of the group (guess Robinson Crusoe was not a man anymore because he ended up in a deserted island), it can also (according to the evos) become a new species just because the bird-songs it sings are not recognized for mating by other individuals having all the same characteristics. The classic definition of speciation is the ability to mate and produce offspring. This however is not sufficient because the two species can still have essentially the same characteristics and still not be able to produce offspring with each other. In other words they will still be birds, they will still be fruit flies, they will still be fish. They can be the same in all essential characteristics and still not be able to produce progeny. This is still micro-evolution because the species, neither one, has acquired any new faculties, and has not become more complex in any way.
So to sum up. Macro-evolution is a transformation requiring new genes, more complexity and new faculties. In terms of genetics, it requires at a minimum the creation of more than one new gene. In terms of taxonomy it would require an organism to change into a different genus." -gore3000
Fregards and happy debunking :) ~MM
Well, it’s pretty humorous when evolutionists put all their faith in ignorant men who write books based on nothing but theory - book that tend to stretch truths and make a laughing stock of science just in order to prove the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob does not exist. But, I like it is written: The fool says in his heart, There is no God. Psalms 14:1.
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