IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE THAT WE HAVE EVOLVED?

Are ape-like creatures our ancestors? In Contested Bones, geneticist John Sanford argues that the evidence is simply not there. Up until the 70’s, paleontologists believed that there was a clear linear ancestral line from Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus and to humankind. However, such optimism has disappeared. Meredith Small, Cornell University, has written:

·       The straight line has blossomed into a spreading, rather uncontrolled bush, and we don’t like it. We want our history to be nice and neat, but the fossils keep messing us up…we want the last 200,000 years of human evolution, the time when modern Homo sapiens appeared, to make some kind of sense, but it doesn’t (308).

Sanford cites numerous paleo-experts who are in agreement with this assessment:

·       Donald Johanson agrees, “The transition to Homo continues to be almost totally confusing.” Paleo-expert John Hawks notes, “What a mess early Homo is!” [Bernard] Wood writes “even with all the fossil evidence and analytical techniques from the past 50 years, a convincing hypothesis for the origin of Homo remains elusive.” (309)

Why does it remain elusive? Wood admits that supposedly ancestral species lived at the same times as Homo and, therefore, couldn’t be ancestral:

·       Genetic and fossil evidence shows closely related hominin species shared the planet many times in the past few million years, making it more difficult to identify direct ancestors of modern humans than scientists anticipated even 20 years ago. (310)

Is the former ape-to-man theory still salvageable? J. Schwartz and I. Tattersall have their doubts (Science, 2015):

·       If we want to be objective, we shall almost certainly have to scrap the iconic list of names in which hominin fossil specimens have historically been trapped, and start from the beginning by hypothesizing…(311)

How far will their hypothesizing take them? According to Sanford, these experts are unwilling to follow the evidence to another hypothesis – that Homo is the special creation of God. Nevertheless, the experts do acknowledge that we are quantum leaps beyond our nearest “ancestor.” Sanford writes:

·       A famous evolutionist, Jacob Bronowski, [admitted] “Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape—he is a shaper of the landscape.”…Ian Tattersall…writes: “Even allowing for the poor [fossil] record we have of our close extinct kin, Homo sapiens appears as distinctive and unprecedented…there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period in either the physical or intellectual sense.” (324-25)

In light of these testimonies, it seems that evolutionists would prefer to find ways to fit a round peg into a square hole. Perhaps instead, they need to replace their square peg with a round one reflecting our “distinctive and unprecedented” standing. The Scriptures offer us this very peg:

·       For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. (Psalm 139:13-14)