Australopithecus ramidus
Australopithecus ramidus is the name given to a collection of about fifty fossil fragments discovered by noted paleoanthropologist Tim White in Ethiopia. It was hailed in front page stories and "banner headlines" (to quote the Sunday Telegraph, 3/31/96, p. 12) around the world as the critical "missing link" between humans and modern apes.
Now, quietly, these original sensationalistic claims have been abandoned. There are no banner headlines, no apologetic retractions from the newspapers and other media who promoted ramidus as evidence for evolution. Like most other "evidence" for evolution carried in the minds of believers, the data has been evaluated and found wanting - but the public is left with other impressions.
Professor White now admits that ramidus was not the "missing link." Accordingly, he renamed the find Ardipithecus ramidus; that is, not merely a new species but not even of the right genus. The fossil is acknowledged to have "many chimp-like features."
In fact, it is rather peculiar and astonishing that out of literally many thousands of fossil hominids recovered (in full or in part), chimp-like fossils are invariably declared to be ancestors of man, rather than... chimps. Dr. Marvin Lubenow, a creationist paleoanthropologist, writes:
Evolutionists claim that no fossils of chimpanzees have ever been found. The evidence suggests that fossils of chimpanzees have been found, but the blinding power of a naturalistic evolutionary philosophy, and the determination of evolutionists to find evidence for it has not allowed these fossil chimpanzees to be recognized for what they are." ("Paleoanthropology in Review," Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, 10:1(1996), p. 13)
Return
to Creation Science