We have all been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that humans in the distant past once resembled and were related to apes. Museums, textbooks, and the media have all shown artists’ renderings, complete with hair and facial features, accompanied by explanations that include amazing detail.

 

But most of the experts themselves have never been as convinced as the media, books, and museums would have us believe. The fact is that not one single supposed “link” between humans and apes has stood the test of time. All have been shown to be either fakes or the figment of someone’s fertile imagination!1 Most people don’t know:

 

1. Nebraska Man, which was used as evidence against creationists in the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,”2  was announced in 1922 in the The Illustrated London News. The announcement included a rendering suggesting the look and lifestyle of this supposed ape-man, but it was all based upon a single tooth! And later, that tooth was confirmed to have belonged to a wild pig.3

 

2. Java Man, which was based on a “a skullcap, a thigh bone and three teeth,”4  was actually the skull of a large ape and the leg of a human.5  Its discoverer had found the thigh bone about fifty feet from (and one year later than) the other fragments. He also found two completely human skulls close to these fragments, but withheld this information from the scientific community and the world for thirty years. Obviously, Java Man couldn’t be a “link” to humans—he was living at the same time with them!

 

3. Piltdown Man was a total hoax that fooled scientists for almost 40 years. It was the “altered combined bones of an orangutan and a modern man.”6

 

4. Neanderthal Man is now widely accepted as completely human, having been misrepresented to the public as a knuckle-dragging brute. Neanderthals are now known to have had a disease called rickets, which deformed their bones, making them appear ape-like. We also know of people groups alive today who have similarly heavy brow ridges and bony bumps on the backs of their heads.7

 

5. Australopithecines such as the widely publicized one called “Lucy” in the early 1980s, are recognized as simply extinct primates, unrelated to man.8

 

Other supposed links could be mentioned, but each has suffered a similar fate. Either they are fakes, apes, or humans—but nothing in between. Anatomist and evolutionist Lord Zuckerman, in 1970, summed up the situation this way, “. . . If man evolved from an apelike creature, he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record.”9

 

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Darwin proposed that humans resulted from the gradual modifications of an ape-like creature. Darwin didn’t have any fossil evidence, but he assumed that many examples would be found in the future. Paleoanthropologists (scientists who study human origins) have tried hard to fulfill Darwin’s vision. Though many short-lived claims have been made, experts in the field know that 100 years of searching has left the assumed progression with the entire middle section missing!

 

Evolutionist Dr. Lyall Watson, in his 1982 article in Science Digest, wrote, “Modern apes . . . seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans—or upright, naked, toolmaking, big-brained beings—is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter.” 10 (emphasis added)

 

Besides the outdated information that is still being published, the average person would be appalled to know how scanty the evidence is that lies behind some of the elaborate ape-man reconstructions which are portrayed in textbooks, museums, and the media.11  In 1981, New Scientist published an article in which the author summarized the situation for Darwinian evolutionists: “The entire hominid (a so-called ‘ape-man’ fossil) collection known today would barely cover a billiard table . . . Ever since Darwin . . .

preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man.”12  What fossil evidence there is turns out to be either ape or human.