Prof. Cope, a distinguished anatomist, says, “The femur [of the pithecanthropus] is that of a man, it is in no sense a connecting link.”
In his “Men of the Old Stone Age,” Dr. Osborn puts the pithecanthropus, the Heidelberg man, the Piltdown man, and the Neanderthal man, on limbs which terminate abruptly as extinct races. They can, in no sense, then, be the ancestors of man, or connecting links. Why, then, do they cling so desperately to these alleged proofs, when they admit they have no evidential value? Only sheer desperation, just as a drowning man will clutch a straw.
Dr. W. E. Orchard says: “The remains bearing on this issue, which have been found are very few, and their significance is hotly disputed by scientists themselves,—both their age, and whether they are human or animal, or mere abnormalities.”
Since these four creatures (of the evolutionists) can not be the ancestors of the human race, where are their descendants? Evolutionists are obliged to say they were the last of their kind. Strange! But there is no other way of escape.
Prof. Bronco, of the Geological and Palaeontological Institute of Berlin University, says, “Man appeared suddenly in the Quaternary period. Palaeontology tells us nothing on the subject,—it knows nothing of the ancestors of man.”
As fossils must be imbedded in rock, there is not a single fossil of an ape-man in the world.
31. PICTURES IN CAVERNS
To bolster up the hypothesis, that some of the scraps of bones belonged to ape-men; who lived about 50,000 years ago, we are told that, in many caverns there are paintings of animals, some of which are extinct, proving that the artists were ape-men of advancing intellect, living in that day. These drawings are rude, and inexact, and the resemblance to extinct animals rather fanciful. If the writer were to try to draw a picture of a horse on the stone walls of a dark cavern, with no light, it would be just as likely to resemble an extinct animal, or possibly an animal that never did live and never will. Many of the paintings are found in the depths of unlit caverns, often difficult of access. How could they paint any picture in the dark, when even fire was unknown, and the torch and lamp-wick had not yet been invented? And how could they make a ladder, or erect scaffolding of any sort in that rude age, before there were inventions of any kind? Yet they tell us that the frescoes on the ceiling of the dark cavern of Altamira, Spain, were made 25,000 to 50,000 years ago, when fire was unknown, and they ask us to believe that several colors are used, brown, red, black, yellow, and white; and that these drawings and colors have remained undisturbed and unchanged through these long ages. Is it easier to believe this, than to believe that these drawings were made by modern man, using modern inventions? A theory left to such support, must be poverty-stricken in argument indeed.
32. VESTIGIAL ORGANS
The claim is made that the so-called rudimentary organs in the human body such as the appendix, are the remnants of more complete organs inherited from our animal ancestors. It is a strange argument that a once complete and useful organ in our alleged animal ancestors, when it becomes atrophied in man, causes such an improvement and advance, as to cause man to survive, when his ancestors with more perfect organs became extinct. Man with less perfect organs became the dominant species. If the perfect organ were better than the rudimentary organ, how can man be the “survival of the fittest”? If rudimentary organs are a proof of descent from animals with more extensive, if not more perfect, organs, then both man and monkeys must be descended from the rat, which has the longest proportionate appendix of all. If unused muscles speak of our ancestry, the horse has the strongest claim to be our ancestor.