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ALTERNATIVE ARCHAEOLOGY • BY WILLIAM B. STOECKER Any reasonably intelligent and open minded person looking at the similarities between the various species of plants and animals alive on Earth today will logically conclude that they are related, and can be classified into families and groups. Looking at the fossil record, seeing how species arise and eventually be<strong>com</strong>e extinct to be replaced by new species similar to the old, a logical person will realize that some kind of evolution is taking place. It is only on a much closer inspection that little problems like irreducible <strong>com</strong>plexity and the truly immense gaps in the fossil record be<strong>com</strong>e obvious, leading many to the conclusion that only intelligent design can explain it all…a Supreme Being spending billions of years tinkering with genetics for reasons beyond our understanding. Theories of evolution had been proposed by others before Darwin, notably by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, but it was up to Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace to suggest that random variation (Darwin knew nothing of genetics, mutations, or the <strong>com</strong>plex internal structure of living cells) drove the evolutionary process. Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, and, in 1871, The Descent of Man, proposing that human beings were not exempt from the evolutionary process and that humans had evolved from some early species of ape. 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Ancestors? Ancestors? Ancestors? Ancestors? Ancestors? The similarities between humans and apes are obvious, but so are some of the differences: we are mostly hairless; we have large brains; we have small canine teeth; and we walk <strong>com</strong>pletely erect. Less obvious is the fact that we have 46 chromosomes and all other primates, including monkeys, apes, tarsiers, and lemurs, have 48. Of course, Darwin had never heard of chromosomes. But the Darwinists realized that the gap in the fossil record had to be filled. Neanderthal Man, discovered way back in 1856 in Germany’s Neanderthal Valley, seemed to be at least a partial solution. Many remains, even <strong>com</strong>plete skeletons, were soon discovered all over Europe and parts of Asia and the Near East, dating back as far as 130,000 BP (before the present). Remains of beings with at least some Neanderthal characteristics date back to 350,000 and possibly as far as 600,000 BP Paleontologists, eager to prove the Darwinist faith in which they truly believed, eager to preserve the knee-jerk atheism and materialism so vital to the new religion of scientism, rushed to depict Neanderthals as shambling and shaggy brutes. But Neanderthals walked fully erect, had brains on average slightly larger than ours, and the hyoid bones in their throats made them capable of speech. They had tools and fire. More recently, more honest researchers have admitted that they looked essentially like modern Homo Sapiens. <strong>We</strong> must remember that no one is ar- guing against micro-evolution within a species; only against the Darwinist version of macroevolution. There can be immense variation within a species…consider domestic dogs, or even the differences between the modern human races. And it appears that Neanderthal Man was probably nothing more than a now extinct race of Homo Sapiens…as human as we are. Even in Darwin’s time it was realized that something more primitive than Neanderthal Man was needed, so large was the gap between ape and man. Enter Piltdown Man. In 1912 a fossil collector named Charles Dawson produced some skull and jaw fragments, allegedly found in a gravel pit near the town of Piltdown in East Sussex, England. Dawson had a rather unsavory reputation even before this, and, as early as 1913, some honest researchers suspected fraud. Piltdown Man was accepted as legitimate, until, in 1953, careful study showed the remains to be a partial modern human skull and an orangutan jawbone. But, so eager were paleontologists and physical anthropologists to prove Darwinism, that they accepted the hoax for 40 years. There is no reason to believe that the current crop of researchers are doing any better. In addition to outright fraud, there are cases of wishful thinking bordering on fraud. Continued on Page 59 Number 95 • ATLANTIS ATLANTIS RISING RISING 23
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