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Evolution's Hall of Shame

Nebraska Man: the Pig-tooth Man

In a 1922 issue of Illustrated London News, an article was published featuring a picture of Nebraska man drawn by Amedee Forestier saying the, “reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius.” Imaginative was correct because this man and his mate were concocted from a single tooth. It turns out that the tooth was that of a pig.

In 1917, Harold Cook, a rancher and geologist from Nebraska, unearthed one molar tooth in Pliocine deposits in western Nebraska. In 1922, he sent the tooth to Dr. Henry Osborn of Columbia University, head of the American Museum of Natural History, who claimed that it belonged to an early hominid and determined that the tooth had characteristics of chimpanzee, Pithecanthropus (Java man), and man. He wrote Cook saying: "I sat down with the tooth and I said to myself: 'It looks one hundred per cent anthropoid'" (Osborn, Henry Fairfield, 1922, "Hesperopithecus, the first anthropoid primate found in America," American Museum Novitates, 37, p. 2 ). One month later, Osborn announced that Hesperopithecus haroldcookii was the first anthropoid ape from America; a missing link in human evolution.

Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, F.R.S., Professor of Anatomy of Manchester, England, supported Osborn saying, "I think the balance of probability is in favour of the view that the tooth found in the Pliocene beds of Nebraska may possibly have belonged to a primitive member of the Human Family" (Smith, The Evolution of Man 1927).

Piltdown man: Orangutan Man

Piltdown man is one of the most famous frauds in the history of science. For forty years, the fraud went undetected.

Charles Dawson, and amateur archeologist, claimed to have found bones of a primitive hominid (a missing link) in a quarry near Piltdown Common in Sussex, England. Piltdown man was named Eoanthropus dawsoni and was constructed from parts of a modern-looking skull and an apelike lower jaw.

In 1953, Piltdown was discovered to be a hoax, consisting of a modern human skull and an orangutan jaw.

More than five hundred articles and memoirs are said to have been written about Piltdown man. (Nature vol. 274, #4419 (10 July 1954) pp. 61-62).

Oakely's "... radioactive flourine test proved the skull fragments were many thousands of years older than the jaw. They could not be from the same individual unless, as one scientist put it, `the man died but his jaw lingered on for a few thousand years' " (R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 363).

How did this fraud continue for so long before being exposed? Harvard paleontologist Stephen Gould suggests wishful thinking and cultural bias on the part of evolutionists.

The editor of Research News, Science, wrote, "How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones - the cranial fragments - and 'see' a clear simian signature in them; and 'see' in an ape's jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity? The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientists' expectations and their effects on the interpretation of data. ... It is, in fact, a common fantasy, promulgated mostly by the scientific profession itself, that in the search for objective truth, data dictate conclusions. If this were the case, then each scientist faced with the same data would necessarily reach the same conclusion. But as we've seen earlier and will see again and again, frequently this does not happen. Data are just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions" (Roger Lewin, 1987, Bones of Contention, pp.61, 68).

previous shame...

"A five million-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib...The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone." (Dr. Tim White, As quoted by Ian Anderson "Hominoid collarbone exposed as dolphin's rib", in New Scientist, 28 April 1983, p. 199)

"Scholars have raised significant objections to the scientific accuracy of the one-sided 'Evolution' series," says philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, director of Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. "These objections have been amply documented from the relevant scientific literature. Unfortunately, instead of engaging in a discussion of the merits of the criticisms raised, the NCSE has for the most part responded with red herrings and ad hominems." (Mark Edwards, National Center for Science Education's Shrill Campaign in Defense of ‘Evolution,’ Discovery’s Institute’s critique of PBS’s Evolution, Monday, September 22, 2001).