Searching for Adam by Dr. Terry Mortenson

Author:Dr. Terry Mortenson [Mortenson, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO018000, REL006030
ISBN: 9781614580294
Publisher: New Leaf Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2016-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 8: “The Road to Homo Sapiens”

Many consider the “March of Progress” to be the most famous and influential image in the history of scientific illustration. It has been copied in a shorter form on countless t-shirts, buttons, book covers, record albums, commercial advertisements, programs for scientific meetings, and is even used as the emblem of the Leakey Foundation. As a result of this wide exposure, many laymen base their belief in the evolution of man more on this easy-to-understand image of linear “progress” than on any actual scientific evidence. But evolutionary anthropologist Bernard Wood informs us:

There is a popular image of human evolution that you’ll find all over the place. . . . On the left of the picture there’s an ape . . . On the right, a man . . . Between the two is a succession of figures that become ever more like humans. . . . Our progress from ape to human looks so smooth, so tidy. It’s such a beguiling image that even the experts are loath to let it go. But it is an illusion.18

The Whites of Their Eyes

Artistic renderings of fleshed-out fossils of presumed ancestors of man often show the face of a very ape-like creature with very human-like eyes. This is accomplished by merely putting a white sclera in the eyes (the whites of the eye). All apes and monkeys have a brown sclera that is nearly as dark as their brown iris, while all humans with normal, healthy eyes have an essentially white sclera. Obviously, the fossil record for scleral color is nonexistent so this is simply artistic license used to influence the viewer.

Artistic Extrapolation

In his book Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain wryly commented, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of evolution. Where data are missing, evolutionists often employ artists to fill in all the desired missing evidence. Artistic imagination has been used to illustrate entire “ape-men” from nothing more than a single tooth. In 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborne, director of the American Museum of Natural History, reported on a molar tooth from the Pliocene strata of Nebraska that he claimed had characteristics of both man and ape. The tooth was given the scientific name Hesperopithecus but became commonly known as “Nebraska man.” The London Illustrated News (LIN) even showed a fleshed-out, double-page illustration of Nebraska man and his wife in their natural habitat!

“Nebraska man” along with “Piltdown man” (now known to be a hoax) were the prevailing evidence for human evolution during the time of the famous Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925. It is said that even many theologians of the time accepted the evolutionary claim for the bestial origin of man on the evidence of these imaginary ape-men. In 1927, parts of the skeleton of Hesperopithecus were discovered together with more teeth, and Nebraska man was found to actually be an extinct peccary

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