Fossil Man: Part I

By Jon A. Covey, B.A., MT(ASCP)
Edited by Anita Millen, M.D., M.P.H., M.A.

What human remains would we expect to see in the aftermath of the Flood? We know that minerals dissolved in water enter the remains of plants and animals buried in sediment and start the fossilization process. Fossilization does not have to take a long time. It depends on the physical and chemical conditions and is nearly independent of time. If the pH, temperature, mineral content, and other conditions are right, fossilization will occur rapidly. One cannot say with any certainty what conditions were present when a particular fossil formed. We read in Rick Balough's Crossfire article (Aug 93) the Scientific American report that mineral-laden waters at Mother Shipton's Cave in Yorkshire, England fossilized animals within a few years. [Sci Am, 1889] One reader suggested that this was not true fossilization. This is a moot point. Fossilization is fossilization regardless of whether silicates, carbonates, or other minerals are involved. Clearly, the subterranean conditions immediately following the Flood were ideal for fossilization. The waterlogged sediments contained a superabundance of dissolved minerals ready to begin the mineralization process. The conditions at Shipton's Cave show what happens when hypermineralized water interacts with organic materials, including animal bodies. The Scientific American [1855] story of Abner Phillips' wife who was fossilized during the short time she was buried, from August 1847 to April 1848, further proves my point. Fossilization can and does occur rapidly. We have observed it. It is repeatable and testable–that's science.

Predictions Based on Genesis Flood

In past articles, we have made predictions based on the premise that the Genesis Flood was real. We predict that pre-Flood human fossils would be rare because:

The Volume of Flood Sediments is so great that the pre-Flood human population would have been lost in the vast sediments totaling 350 million cubic miles. [Morris, p. 71] If 350 million humans lived before the Flood, the maximum number of humans distributed in the sediments would have averaged one body/cubic mile of sediment. The entire population of Los Angeles could reside comfortably in one cubic mile of living space. If the population of Los Angeles were 10 million, that would allow about 15,000 cubic feet for each person. How big is that? It is the volume of a two-story home made up of 10 rooms 10' x 15' in size. How do you find one person in a city the size of Los Angeles if the person is hiding–no address, no eyewitnesses, and no description? This is like the problem of finding a needle in the haystack–the problem that a paleoanthropologist would face trying to find a pre-Flood human within the sediments. We would be lucky if we found even one. If someone found one, how would we know it was pre-Flood (antediluvian)? If one was found in a stratum which evolutionists considered too ancient for man, it would be a good candidate, e.g., a carbonized skull found in a Permian coal vein.

Conditions for fossilization not met

Not every human being living before the Flood would have been fossilized. How many of them were never buried in the sediments? We don't know because no one saw what happened except God. Noah and his family couldn't see what was going on; they were inside the ark. The Flood drowned the antediluvians, and their bloated bodies floated until scavengers ate them or they decayed completely. Even if the Flood sediments rapidly buried many victims, they would not have buried every corpse in an environment that would cause fossilization. Rapid burial does not guarantee fossilization.

In his book The Young Earth, which should be in everyone's library, John Morris statistically analyzes the contents of the fossil record as shown in the list below. [Morris, p. 70] Concerning those fish, however, it is not a small number of fish. Immanuel Velikovsky, a pioneer catastrophist and anti-creationist, wanted to impress his readers with the enormous numbers of fossil fish to make his point about major catastrophes in Earth's history: "However, the fossil fish found in sedimentary rocks is very often preserved with all its bones intact. Entire shoals of fish over large areas, numbering billions of specimens, are found in a state of agony, but with no mark of scavenger's attack." [Velikovsky] While there are many fossils, this does not improve the chances of finding human ones.

  • 95% of all fossils are marine invertebrates--clams, etc.
  • 4.75% of all fossils are algae and plant fossils
  • 0.2375% includes insects and other invertebrates
  • 0.0125% includes all vertebrates, mainly fish. 95% of land vertebrate fossils consist of one bone fragment or tooth. For example, only about 1,200 dinosaur skeletons have been found as of 1994.

Dr. Morris points out that evolutionists say man has been on earth for one million years. Our present population growth is 2% per year. Starting with one man and woman, it would take only 1100 years to get 6 billion living humans, but if we have been around for one million years, the number of humans would have been 108600. [Morris, p. 70] That number is greater than the number of particles in the universe which is about 1080, according to Sir Arthur Eddington, a British astrophysicist. Of course, 108600 is a ridiculous example of uniformitarianism in this situation, but it does point out some difficulties for long ages.

Morris explains that while we cannot assume that we had stable population growth throughout the past, the last few centuries have also been some of mankind's bloodiest and deadliest years. There have been uncounted millions of abortions throughout the industrial nations. In the U.S. alone there have been over 30 million. The Japanese had so many abortions they seriously wondered whether there would be enough young people to fill the available jobs. Abortions in our country are at least partially justified on the fallacious opinion that the fetus is not human but is just tissue going through phylogenetic changes, first resembling a one-celled organism, then a fish, and finally a man. Built fully upon Darwinism, the Russian communist takeover eventually caused the wholesale murder of 20 to 30 million Russian citizens whose bodies were stacked up like cordwood in the dead of winter. World War II, sparked by the hatred of a man whose strong belief in evolution convinced him that certain human races were inferior and deserved to be exterminated, left us with about 55 million dead. As Morris says, in the last few centuries we've had the worst wars, the worst genocides and religious persecutions, the worst plagues (with the possible exception of the Bubonic Plague), the worst famines, and the worst record of infanticide, yet the growth rate has hardly slowed.

Morris suggests a growth rate of 0.002%. With this assumption, if the human race began 1 million years ago, the number of people who would have lived and died up to the present would have filled a volume the size of the earth. Where are all their bones Morris asks, and the remains of all the plants and animals? He suggests that the present fossil array is more compatible with the idea that the world at one time contained abundant life, which the Flood buried. He asks, "Where is the fossil evidence of billions of years?" [Morris, p. 71]

How Rare Are Human Fossils?

Human fossils are not as rare as the evolutionary establishment suggests. According to Marvin Lubenow, the number of human fossils is much greater than is universally assumed. Referring to the three-volume Catalogue of Fossil Hominids, he gives the following conservative tally (he could have used maximum values given in the catalogue):

  • 1390 fossil individuals are from Africa (through 1976)
  • 1516 are from Europe (to 1970)
  • 1092 are from the Americas, Asia, and Australasia (to 1974)

That is 3,998 individuals. Donald Johanson discovered Lucy in 1974. [Lubenow, pp. 28-29] These figures include about 200 Neandertal individuals and 100 Homo erectus individuals. Lubenow just informed readers of the Creation Research Society Quarterly that recent discoveries increased these totals to well over 300 Neandertal, 220 Homo erectus, and 80 archaic Homo sapiens. [Lubenow, CRSQ 1994] Since that time, anthropologists have found many more fossils, and the actual number is much larger now. Tim White's team at Aramis in Ethiopia discovered seventeen new hominid fossils–Australopithecus ramidus–supposedly a million years older than Lucy. [White] The detailed report in Nature magazine describes the seventeen new specimens (all but two are teeth), and gives the year they were collected. Bernard Wood remarking on these fossils says that the teeth of A. ramidus are more chimpanzee-like than those of A. afarensis. [Wood] Is it possible that all Australopithecines have chimp-like teeth and could fit well within the variable limits of the chimp? They may not be chimps, but they are apes and not hominids. The duck and the duckbilled platypus have some similar features, including egg laying, but no one suggests one evolved from the other. We have many things in common with all mammals, but they are not considered hominids. Why should one or two human-like features among apes be cause for considering extinct apes our ancestors? No one has ever observed or demonstrated evolution outside the limits of variation within the gene pool of each species. Why do otherwise intelligent men take these blind leaps of faith into the unverifiable, unrepeatable past, proclaim their assumptions to be facts, and foist them on us? In his book, Duane Gish remarked that the range variation in the teeth of living chimpanzee populations is greater than the differences between the teeth of two fossil species of apes, Dryopithecus and Ramapithecus. [Gish, p. 141] Evolutionists used to think Ramapithecus was our ancestor but then decided it was an orangutan. [Gish, p. 141]

The tooth drawings of A. ramidus in Nature remind me of the Nebraska Man tooth drawings in the Illustrated London News for June 24, 1922 (available at UCLA). From a single tooth found in Nebraska, they reconstructed the entire body of Nebraska Man and his wife, his lifestyle and clothing, and his surroundings. Later, they announced it was a mistake. The tooth actually came from an extinct pig, and as Dr. Gish said, "This was the first time a pig made a monkey of an evolutionist." [Gish, p. 188]

Other recent discoveries of "hominids" include Boxgrove Man (Homo cf. heidelbergensis) [Roberts] and the "Son of Lucy," one of 53 new hominid fossils collected from the Hadar Formation in Ethiopia over the last three years [Kimbel].

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck,

and sounds like a duck, maybe it is a...?

Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) certainly looks chimp-like. She and her fellow Hadar inhabitants may not be chimpanzees, but they must be something closely related to them. Evolutionists believe our descent from Lucy took about three million years and five million mutations. [Lubenow, p. 45] In some ways, the Lucy saga takes on the flavor of the Piltdown Man hoax. Charles Dawson and an unknown accomplice, possibly Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, perpetrated this hoax between 1908 and 1915. In 1953, after more than 500 doctoral dissertations had been written on Piltdown, the hoax was discovered: a fraud that did much to establish the veracity of evolution in the minds of men and destroy the hope of faith in Jesus Christ for many. Sir Arthur Keith, a great anatomist and the most prolific Piltdown author, kept his faith in Piltdown although he often felt "on the verge of conversion" to Jesus Christ during his visits to evangelistic meetings. However, because he believed the Genesis account of creation was a myth, he rejected the Gospel and never realized the great assurance of hope we have in Christ. [Lubenow, p. 44] This is the most important reason for fighting against the theory of evolution. Jesus asked, "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?" [Mark 8:36] (Is your soul lost?) Jesus said he came to seek and to save those who are lost.

Reconstructing the facts to fit the Preconception

After Donald Johanson discovered Lucy, he believed something was not quite right with her hip. In the PBS presentation, In Search of Human Origins, earlier this year, he said:

"We needed Owen Lovejoy's expertise again, because the evidence wasn't quite adding up. The knee looked human, but the shape of the hip didn't. Superficially, her hip resembled a chimpanzee's, which meant that Lucy couldn't possibly have walked like a modern human."

Johanson might have been able to pass off the knee as something on its way to becoming human to his unprofessional audience, but the hip was just too chimp-like and it wouldn't have allowed her to walk like a human. He knew she couldn't be much of an intermediate unless she could walk like us. Johanson needed a knowledgeable conspirator who could remedy the problem with a note of authority and readjustment of the evidence.

The knee joint of Lucy is not as human as Johanson wants us to believe. Jack T. Stern and Randall Susman, anatomists of State University of New York at Stony Brook, carefully studied Johanson's Hadar specimens and concluded that the knees of Lucy and her fellow Hadarians are "compatible with a significant degree of arboreal locomotion." [Stern] In other words, Lucy was well adapted to living in trees. Lord Zuckerman and Charles Oxnard, who independently did multivariate computer analyses on more recent and presumably more advanced australopithecines, concluded that Lucy and her fellows spent very little time walking and not at all after the manner of man. [Gish, pp., 148-163] Continuing his narrative, Johanson says:

"But Lovejoy noticed something odd about the way the bones had been fossilized."

The next scene shows Lovejoy with the fossil. Pondering the problem he says:

"When I put the two parts of the pelvis together that we had, this part (he indicates it in one hand) of the pelvis has pressed so hard and so completely into this one that it caused it to be broken into a series of individual pieces which were then fused together in later fossilization."

Lovejoy makes two unverifiable assumptions here. These are things he cannot know. Yet he must say these things to take the audience into his fantasy. When bones are broken in this manner, they don't fuse in subsequent fossilization. Fossil bones are usually found broken and scattered, not compressed and reunited in some seemingly natural, yet unnatural way. The explanation is ad hoc and begs the question.

Forensic pathology does not support Lovejoy’s claim

I spoke with two pathologists at the USC Medical Center about the characteristics of broken bones. One was a friend whom I had been trying to reach with the gospel for years and who knew my wife well, having taught her pathology for a year. He was a senior pathologist who recently committed suicide. I didn't want them to withhold any critical information concerning bone damage, so I asked them if there was any known way to make bones deformable and conformable. They said there wasn't. I asked them if there was any way to compress a bone so that it would change its configuration and look like it was not broken (similar to Lovejoy's claim). My friend said that this could happen but the microfractures would be detectable. Lovejoy did not seem to have tried to see if this was the case. In order for his theory to have any credibility, he must present evidence of compression, which he has not done. He simply made an assumption and continued with his explanation.

At this point, the narrator gives the explanation: "After Lucy died (scene shows Lucy lying in the water nearly face down), some of her bones lying in the mud must have been crushed or broken, perhaps by animals browsing at the lake shore," (scene shows an animal step on the bones). Lovejoy continues his explanation:

"This has caused the two bones, in fact, to fit together so well that they're in an anatomically impossible position."

It would be anatomically impossible for a human hip, but not for an ape's. It seems that Lovejoy has decided to stake his reputation and eternal destiny on his judgment of Lucy, perhaps as mistakenly as Sir Arthur Keith was. The narrator continues:

"The perfect fit was an illusion which made Lucy's hip bone flare out like a chimp's, but all was not lost (In the background Lovejoy is grinding a plaster cast of Lucy's hip to conform to his preconceived idea of how her hip should have been.) Lovejoy decided he could restore the pelvis to its natural shape. He didn't want to tamper with the original, so he made a copy in plaster. He cut the damaged pieces out and put them back together the way they were before Lucy died. It was a tricky job, but after taking the kink out of the pelvis, it all fit together perfectly–like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
As a result, the angle of the hip looks nothing like a chimp's, but a lot like ours. Anatomically, at least, Lucy could stand like a human. The case for our earliest ancestor walking upright was growing stronger, and Lucy wasn't the only evidence."

It all fit together perfectly before, and no wonder the angle of her hip is a lot like ours. Lovejoy is not trying to deceive us the way Charles Dawson did. Lovejoy is much bolder, making it look so reasonable and innocent. His mind has been completely blinded by his evolutionary presuppositions, and he feels perfectly justified in making these manipulations.

Continued in Part II

References

Gish, Duane T., Evolution: the Challenge of the Fossil Record, Creation-Life Publishers, Inc., El Cajon, 1985.

Kimbel, W.H., D.C. Johanson & Yoel Rak, "The first skull and other new discoveries of Australopithecus afarensis at Hadar, Ethiopia," Nature 368:449-451, 1994.

Lubenow, Marvin, Bones of Contention, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, 1992.

Lubenow, Marvin, "Human Fossils," Letters to the Editor, Creation Research Society Quarterly, 31(2):70, 1994.

Morris, John, The Young Earth, Creation-Life Publishers, Inc., Colorado Springs, 1994.

Velikovsky, Immanuel., Earth in Upheaval, Doubleday and Co., New York, p. 222, 1955.

Roberts, M.B., C.B. Stringer & S.A. Parfitt, "A hominid tibia from Middle Pleistocene sediments at Boxgrove, UK," Nature 369:311-313, 1994.

Scientific American, March 17, 1855, p. 211

Scientific American, March 23, 1889, p. 181

Stern, J.T., L.R. Susman, Am. J. Phy. Anthropol. 60:298, 313, 1983.

White, Tim D., Gen Suwa, and Berhane Asfaw, "Australopithecus ramidus, a new species of early hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia," Nature, 371:306, 1994.

Wood, Bernard, "The oldest hominid yet," Nature 371:281, 1994.