larshaukeland

Ape-men… fact or fantasy? – Part 1

 By Ron and Lara Gillespie

Most of you would have seen a picture something like this (below) and I’m sure you’ve heard that many People today believe that we humans evolved from something like monkeys (apes).

But we also know that the Bible teaches that we were created by God on the Sixth day of Creation Week. If scientists and books and TV say that we came from apelike animals—mustn’t that be true? Well, let’s have a look at some of the facts…

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What about all the pictures and models I’ve seen in books and museums?

An important thing to know is that you can’t believe everything you see in a book or on TV because it’s not always the truth.

Many of the pictures and models of ‘ape-men’ have been based on just a few pieces of bone. Artists are asked to guess about Things they can’t possibly know—like what the skin colour, lips, muscles, hair etc. look like.

Sometimes whole families are drawn, with their Tools and where they are living and what they are eating and what they look like all from these small pieces of bone. Some artists who do these drawings have admitted that much of it is made up or guessed!

Some ape-like Creatures have been drawn walking upright like humans when studies of their inner ear showed they actually couldn’t have walked upright—but no one changed the drawings because it suited the evolution story better!

In fact a few of these pictures of apemen were later shown to be based on false fossils—that is, ones that were made up by humans as tricks (e.g. Piltdown Man), or ones that turned out to be something else—like ‘Nebraska Man’ whose Whole family was drawn like this (see Picture underneath) based on a tooth that belonged to an extinct pig!

It just shows you can’t trust everything you read—humans are always making mistakes, but the only thing you can really trust 100% is God and the Bible.

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But what about ‘cave-men’?

If you’ve been to a museum you might have seen a ‘caveman’ display showing bentover, very hairy men living in caves, called ‘Neanderthals’. Doesn’t that prove there were part-ape creatures that evolved into men?

Well, remember that firstly we don’t know if ‘cave-men’ were that hairy or what many of their face features like lips and noses and ears looked like. Most of that has to be made up by artists and it will usually be made to fit the evolutionary story (that humans came from ‘apes’).

Some of the first Neanderthal skeletons found were bent over—but that’s now been found to be due to bone disease.

But now even most evolutionists (people who believe that humans did come from monkey-like creatures) accept that Neanderthals are actually humans much like you and me.

If you put a suit on them and gave them a shave you’d hardly notice them walking down the street!

There are Malay tribes living today who have similar features to Neanderthal skulls but they are not part-human!

And as for living in caves— there are people today who live in caves as it is the best place in their environment.

People in the Bible lived in caves at different times but they weren’t part-animal.

There are many cases of human beings choosing to live in caves even in modern times.

Sadly, it is also in more modern times that different groups of humans were once thought to be ‘missing links’ or only part-human, just like Neanderthals were said to be, and this played a part in their bad treatment by some people. Australian Aboriginals and black Africans are two examples. Science now knows this is not true either. We are all closely related—through Adam, the Bible tells us.

We can see that scientists are always changing their minds, but the Bible’s story of how we came to be stands solid. As new facts come to light they fit with the Bible story that has remained unchanged.

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