Fossils: The following is taken from an article entitled: Evolution: Fact or Fiction, by James Melton.
In 1922, a bunch of bones were found in Nebraska by a man named Harold Cook. After studying the upper and lower jaws and the teeth of some thirty animals, a complete ape known as Ramapithecus was constructed on the basis of ONE TOOTH! Years later, the entire skeleton from which the tooth came was found. It turned out to be an extinct species of pig.
Dr. Eugene Dubois discovered the famous Java Man (Pithecanthropus erectus) in 1891. This "great discovery" consisted of a small piece of the top of a skull, a fragment of a left thigh bone, and three molar teeth. But, instead of being found all together, these remains were found in an area of about seventy feet, and they were found over about a year's time. They were also found in an old river bed with other assorted extinct animal bones. This, of course, presents a number of problems for Java Man. How can the "experts" be so sure that these remains all came from the same being? Better yet, how do such bones survive for 750,000 years without decaying? Where's the EVIDENCE to PROVE these theories? We know what the scientists want to believe about these findings, but WHERE'S THE PROOF?
Piltdown man was discovered by Charles Dawson in 1912. Dawson claimed to have found some bones, some teeth, and even some primitive implements in a gravel pit in Piltdown, Sussex, England. He took them to a British museum where anthropologists claimed that they were 500,000 years old. Textbooks throughout the world then proclaimed Piltdown Man as the greatest find to date. Then in October of 1956, Reader's Digest EXPOSED this finding as "The Great Piltdown Hoax." The bones where found to be fraudulent. The jaw bone was proven to have belonged to an ape which had died only FIFTY YEARS before (not 500,000). The teeth had been filed down, and both, teeth and bones, had been discovered with bichromate of potash to cover up their true identity! So much for Piltdown Man.
The so-called Neanderthal Man was discovered around 1900 in a cave in the Neanderthal Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. Naturally, he was hailed as another great "missing link." Since that time, it has been proven that Neanderthal wasn't an ape-man at all. He turned out to be a fully erect human being with a cranial capacity of over 13% more than that of normal man. Today, he is classified as "Homo Sapiens" (completely human). The "missing link" is still missing.
Finally, we come to Lucy, a 40% skeleton found in Ethiopia by D.C. Johanson in the 70's. Johanson claimed that "Lucy" had walked on two legs, because of the "angle of the thigh bone and the flattened surface at it's knee joint" (National Geographic, December, 1976). However, the knee joint was badly crushed; so Johanson's conclusion is mere speculation. Anatomist Charles Oxnard said the "Lucy" did NOT walk upright, at least not in the same manner as humans. The chimpanzee DOES spend some time walking upright, so this was probably just another ape. (Evolution: Fact or Fiction). To effectively use a fossil record as evidence that humans are the descendants of apes and other creatures, there needs to be a fossil linking creature A to creature C... do you see what I'm saying? If creature A is an ape, and creature C is a modern day human (you or me) there needs to be a fossil linking the two together. Today, with all of the fossils that have been found, there is no fossil B (the missing link effectively) to show that A evolved into C. If someday the right fossil is found, the fossil record will read A B C... right now it has wide gaps in it and reads something like: A C E G H I M O P...
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