Now, I want to restate my purpose once more, so that there is no confusion. Here is the situation. In the world, there have been more than 8,000 fossil skeletons of “transitional” forms of humans, meaning a creature that is greater than apes (these creatures had larger brains than apes, walked upright, and made stone tools) but lessor than us, (typically smaller brains and with ape-like features, including in their skulls). These remains have been carefully studied and are associated with thousands of artifacts, including stone tools, dwelling places, and butchered bones. These archaic humans, while not in a neat “March of Progress” line of development, with a few exceptions, do show a general progression from more ape-like creatures over 3 million years old, to very human-like creatures, such as the Neanderthal, that went extinct just 40,000 years ago. This evidence is overwhelming suggesting that humans have evolved from simpler to more complex forms over time.

As a Christian, this evidence makes me uncomfortable, yet, if you are honest, it is indeed overwhelming. The choice becomes, what do we do with this information?

Whether you believe that humans were subject to a progression of creation, evolution in other words, or taking Genesis literally, that we were created from scratch, fully human, is not a moral problem for me. I have great friends whom I respect on both sides of this creation issue. At face value, it doesn’t matter what you believe. However, what does matter is what the evangelicals have decided to do with this information.

The evangelicals have decided to lie about it, create false conspiracy theories, demonize scientists, and declared war on all of science. As Christian nationalists have taken over our government, we are witnessing the catastrophic destruction of America’s science and education systems, which will haunt us for generations. And this all started when the conservative Christians felt threatened by the evidence of an old earth and human evolution. This is the problem, not whether you believe in evolution or not.

I’ve mentioned before that a few years ago I had a conversation with a conservative Christian pastor. When he asked how I had avoided getting COVID, I said, “I just simply followed the science.” He immediately started to laugh, saying, “Science? Science is from Satan. Science gave us abortions.”

I have to admit, that last statement was one of the most uninformed things I’ve ever heard. Before the scientific revolution, sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, more than fifty percentage of children died before reaching their twenties. I could write for hours about the benefit of science on human existence and life. There has never been anything more pro-human life than science.

If you want to look at the evidence for evolution honestly, and in a more comprehensive way, I suggest you spend a few days watching the debate I linked in the previous post. Erika does a decent job describing many of the fossil finds. But you need to have some basic understanding of biology to follow her. If you want a simpler examination of the evidence, I will start with typical evangelical propaganda and deconstruct that below.

When I was eighteen and entered a discipleship group, I was given a Chick Tract titled Big Daddy. In the 1960s, a professional cartoonist, Jack Chick, created Chick Publications. His purpose was to put the significant tenets of evangelicalism into cartoon pamphlets for the masses. They covered major evangelical perspectives, such as how evil homosexuality and evolution are. The pamphlet, Big Daddy, claims to represent the false evidence that supports human evolution. This was my first and only information about evolution at that time.

If you look at the tract, you will see it is a story about an evolutionist professor (and a very rude and foolish one at that) being challenged by a very friendly and well-mannered, well-dressed, and well-groomed evangelical student. Let’s look at the claims of the student.

First, I will look at their so-called “March of Progress” of human evolution in the tract and address each of their statements. As mentioned above, the “March of Progress” is not a scientific idea anymore as nature is far more complex than that.

1. Lucy: Nearly all experts agree Lucy was just a 3-foot-tall chimpanzee. There is no polite way to address this but to say, This is a bold-faced lie. There is not a single “expert” paleoanthropologist who thinks Lucy was a chimpanzee. None. Lucy is the first discovered fossil of the species, Australopithecus afarensis. To date, there have been fossils of more than 400 Australopithecus afarensis found. Their brain is 20% larger than that of any chimpanzee, but more than that, their legs, feet, pelvis, and foramen magnum make it clear that they walked upright just like modern humans. They are clearly a transitional form and have been dated to around 3.2 million years ago. The fossils have been dated by potassium-argon, argon-argon, and cosmogenic nuclide dating. Unlike what evangelicals claim, these dating methods are are highly reliable techniques for determining the age of old (> 50,000 years) volcanic samples.
2. Heidelberg Man: Built from a jawbone that was conceded by many to be quite human. The official name of this creature is Homo heidelbergensis. While the original fossil was a jawbone found in 1908, since then, there have been dozens of remains of this creature from around the world, more than 32 individuals in Spain alone. Of the more than 5,000 bones found, they have completed more than 90% of the entire skeleton. The evangelicals still choose to state that only a jawbone was found, which is a lie. It has been dated as living between 200,000 and 700,000 years ago. The skeleton is different from homo sapiens, smaller brains and more of a Neanderthal build (and indeed they were likely a predecessor to Neanderthals), and no expert would say they are like modern humans.
3. Nebraska Man: Scientifically built up from one tooth, later found to be the tooth of an extinct pig. Again, the evangelicals are being quite dishonest by listing this event as part of the basis of evolution. This tooth was found in a Nebraskan fossil bed in 1922, when the science of paleoanthropology was beginning. Two scientists thought it might represent an early human or ape. The general scientific community never accepted that belief. Just five years later, with further excavations in the area, it was identified as belonging to an extinct pig. It wasn’t that the foolish scientist got it wrong and the evangelicals straightened them out. It was the mainstream paleoanthropology world, the scientists, who doubted and disproved the claim. This event was a tiny footnote in paleontology until the evangelicals falsely resurrected the story to prove evolution is a hoax.
4. Piltdown Man: The jawbone turned out to belong to a modern ape. This is the one hoax that evangelicals love to use as proof that all scientists are liars and fraudsters. However, it was Charles Dawson, an amateur fossil hunter and con man (not a scientist), who created the fossil from an ape jawbone and a human skull. The scientific community was skeptical from the beginning (1912) and was finally able to put it to rest as a fraud in the 1950s. It is shameful that young-earth creationists still use this to discredit the scientific community. Can you imagine using evangelical fraudsters, thousands of them like Jim and Tammy Bakker, or Jimmy Swaggart, to characterize all Christians?
5. Peking Man: Supposedly 500,000 years old, but all evidence has disappeared. This is very misleading, and it’s an outright lie. Peking Man was the first name given to a group of fossils found in a fossil-rich area near Beijing, China, starting in the 1920s. By the time World War II broke out and Japan invaded China, over forty skeletons were found. It became clear that this creature was a subspecies of Homo erectus, living in the area from 800,000 to 230,000 years ago. The collection of fossils from this site was gathered and shipped to the US because of the war; however, the ship they were on was caught up in the Pearl Harbor attack, and was sunk, and the fossils were never recovered. However, hundreds of other fossils of Homo erectus have been found across Asia, Africa, and Europe. This creature is a transitional form (using an evangelical term) that has ape features such as thick bones, a bulging brow, and a small brain size (but much larger than apes), and walked upright like we do.
6. Neanderthal Man: Not only are the Neanderthal humans, but the DNA sequencing has shown that they are fully human and interbred with other people groups. For years, the evangelicals argued that the (only) Neanderthal skeleton was human but of a man with arthritis. At least they have updated their rhetoric. More than five hundred Neanderthal skeletons have been found along with their tools, art, and structures. Yes, the neanderthal DNA has been sequenced and is 99.6% similar to human DNA, but it is not exact. We share almost 99% DNA with chimpanzees. Yes, there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. But horses and donkeys, two different species, can interbreed, as can lions and tigers. However, when comparing Neanderthal and human phenotypes, they are distinct, more so than between the human races. We also know a great deal about the Neanderthals. Since they are not found in Africa, it is likely that they evolved directly from the European Homo heidelbergensis and homo sapiens evolved directly from the Africana branch of Homo heidelbergensis.
7. Cro-Magnon Man: One of the best-established fossils is at least equal in physique and brain capacity to modern man. So, what’s the difference? This is the most accurate statement in the Chick pamphlet. Indeed, what was called “Cro-Magnon Man” is now referred to as “early modern man.” While it is considered the same species, it does have a few differences. Like the Neanderthals, their brain size is larger than ours, and they were more robust than we are. However, it was different than the Neanderthals, as the Cro-Magnon Men were taller. So, if Cro-Magnon were alive today, they would likely be seen as a different race. Unlike the Neanderthals, they have DNA that is indistinguishable from modern humans.

I will now list the hominids that the tract does not address, but each of these are a “transitional” form, meaning not quite human and not quite ape. Some have a few fossils, and others have dozens: Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster, Homo georgicus, Homo antecessor, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo cepranensis and Homo naledi. Transitional forms outside the homo genus include Ardipithecus ramidus, Ardipithecus kadabba, Orrorin tugenensis, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Kenyanthropus platyops, and Denisovans (a distinct group related to Neanderthals and modern humans and have not been classified yet as the first skull was identified only a few weeks ago, although the DNA has been sequenced from a finger bone, several years ago. They will likely be called Homo denisova).

I will mention more about Homo Naledi. In 2013, 1500 bones were found in one cave in Africa, representing 18 individuals. They are small in stature, with feet, legs, hips, and arms that are almost identical to humans’, but they have a small brain and a head more like an ape’s.

So, my conclusion from this part is that, whether we like it or not, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that we humans have non-human ancestors. The great tragedy is that because a part of the Christian church has made the belief in any part of evolution a complete moral failure, they have resorted to lying about the record and creating false narratives and conspiracy theories. If there is a God, that God would live in factual truth. The scriptures say nothing about evolution but say a lot about giving false witness or lying. As we advance, I want to look at what the evidence tells us about God and creation.
Respectfully, Mike