urban legend

Originally posted on October 02, 2009 – by Andre Piet

Spectacular news in the media: the oldest primitive human is called Ardi. Ardi lived (according to reports) some 4 million years ago in what is now called Ethiopia. Below are some quotes gathered from what, among others, NRC, Trouw, and Volkskrant have reported about her.

If this reconstruction is correct, chimpanzee and gorilla must have independently taken the same evolutionary steps.

“If this reconstruction is correct…”. That is the first thing that tempers the enthusiasm. Ardi is in fact the result of much puzzle work from bone and skull fragments found here and there…

“This is one of the most important discoveries for the study of human development,” says David Pilbeam, curator at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. (…) “It represents a genus that may have preceded Australopithecus, the genus that preceded our genus Homo.”

How can it be “one of the most important discoveries for the study of human development” if it is merely guesswork that Ardi is an ancestor of humans?

Ardi is a hominid that may be considered a possible ancestor of modern humans…

And yet the newspaper headlines speak of “the discovery of the primitive human”. Talk about misleading!

“With Ardipithecus we have an undefined form that has not yet evolved far in the direction of Australopithecus. If you look from head to toe, you see a mosaic that is neither chimpanzee nor human,” says White.

In plain terms: Ardi is an extinct species of ape…

Although her nose was not as long as that of many modern apes, Ardi’s olfactory organ gave her an ape-like appearance.

Once again: Ardi is a species of ape that apparently no longer walks the earth.

But Ardi was not the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, which must have lived some 5 to 6 million years ago and which science is so eagerly searching for.

“Must have lived.” According to whom or what? Science has not found this ancestor, so where does that “must” come from? Is there perhaps a presupposition at play here?

But modern great apes are just as far removed from Ardi as we are. That ancestor must therefore have been considerably more primitive.

“Must therefore…”. According to whom or what? Answer: according to our evolutionary hypothesis that presupposes common ancestors.

In her development, Ardi was still far removed from Lucy, but she also did not resemble chimpanzee or gorilla. She walked upright, but probably not yet convincingly.

That does not sound very convincing either.

Even after Ardi and Lucy, the picture is far from clear. Australopithecus Lucy had many relatives, of whom it is not entirely clear who was on the direct line and who was on a dead-end branch.

“Not entirely clear” is a euphemism for “not clear at all”. If the scientists are honest, the truth comes out and they must admit that “the picture is far from clear” and the facts compel them to place a big question mark behind this so-called ancestor of humans.

But somewhere the leap must have been made to the genus Homo, with well-known representatives such as habilis, erectus, and sapiens. Here too it cannot be said with certainty what the evolutionary main lines were.

Why “must the leap have been made”? Why stubbornly assume a “missing link” when science has so far given no reason for it?

The propaganda machine of the evolution doctrine is running at full speed in this 200th birth year of Charles Darwin. Yet still not even a dent has been made in what has been known since time immemorial, namely that Adam is the forefather of us all.
Nothing makes this clearer than this commotion about an extinct species of ape.

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