The only thing bones and fossils prove is that something lived, then died. The rest is assumptions about those bones and fossils.
The only thing bones and fossils prove is that something lived, then died. The rest is assumptions about those bones and fossils.
Hogwash. You can learn a great deal about life in the past without having to go as far as "assumptions". Unless, of course, you're going to pull the dishonest creationist trick of naming every observation you find uncomfortable as "mere assumption", no matter how obvious and unarguable it may be.
Here, for example, is one of the things we can indisputably observe about the fossil record:
It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun.The controversies about evolution lie in the realm of the relative importance of various forces in molding evolution.
- R. C. Lewontin "Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth" Bioscience 31, 559 (1981) reprinted in Evolution versus Creationism, J. Peter Zetterberg ed., ORYX Press, Phoenix AZ 1983