Which Chart Should We Believe?
Evolutionists tell us to accept their theory as fact, yet they're constantly redrawing their evolutionary charts that were supposed to be correct. So, which chart are we supposed to believe—one of the many past revisions, or the next one to be revealed? Read the following Associated Press article:
Two fossils poke holes in theory of evolution
August 9, 2007
WASHINGTON (AP)- Surprising research based on two African fossils suggests the human family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, challenging what had been common thinking on how early people evolved.
The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man's early evolution - that one of those species evolved from the other.
And it further discredits that iconic illustration of human evolution that begins with a knuckle-dragging ape and ends with a briefcase-carrying man.
The old theory is that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became human, Homo sapiens. But Leakey's find suggests those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years. She and her research colleagues report the discovery in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.
The paper is based on fossilized bones found in 2000. The complete skull of Homo erectus was found within walking distance of an upper jaw of Homo habilis, and both dated from the same general time period. That makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis, researchers said.
It's the equivalent of finding that your grandmother and great-grandmother were sisters rather than mother-daughter, said study co-author Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London.
Overall, what it paints for human evolution is a "chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us," Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya.
That old evolutionary cartoon, while popular with the public, is just too simple and keeps getting revised, said Bill Kimbel, the science director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.
Scientists used to think Homo sapiens evolved from Neanderthals, he said, but now know that both species lived during the same time period and that we did not come from Neanderthals.
Susan Anton, a New York University anthropologist and co-author of the Leakey work, said she expects anti-evolution proponents to seize on the new research, but said it would be a mistake to try to use the new work to show flaws in evolution theory.
Leakey's team spent seven years analyzing the fossils before announcing it was time to redraw the family tree - and rethink other ideas about human evolutionary history. That's especially true of most immediate ancestor, Homo erectus.
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