Nature magazine announced a new discovery on Wednesday: Paleontologists digging in a cave in the Philippines for the past three years have found evidence of a “previously unreported hominin species.” They named it after the island of Luzon, where the Callao Cave is located: Homo Luzonensis.
What French paleontologist Florent Detroit and his fellow diggers found were some hand and foot bones, part of a thigh bone, and some teeth from what they claim originally belonged to two adults and a child. Detroit celebrated the “discovery”:
We recognized [those fragments] almost immediately as hominin. The molars were so tiny, so small. The pre-molars had two or three roots.
I thought: Uh-oh, this is clearly a human-like something.
According to Nature, the creatures’ teeth, toes, and finger bones appeared to combine various aspects of other hominins, of which there are five: Homo sapiens, Denisovans, Neanderthals, Homo naledi, and Homo floresiensis (which is nicknamed the “hobbit species” for its small stature and big feet).
The paleontologists were unable to perform DNA testing, but they did perform something called “uranium-series testing,” which allegedly measures the rate of radioactive decay over time. It works like an hourglass: They assume a certain level of radio isotopes at the moment of birth, calculate the rate at which they decay over time (like the rate at which sand granules fall through the middle of the hourglass), and then they have the proof they need to date the age of the bone and tooth fragments. By working backwards, they concluded that these H. Luzonensis hominins lived between 50,000 and 67,000 years ago.
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There are lots of questions about the find, according to the good professor Detroit: Where did they come from, how long did they live there, and how did they support themselves (Luzon is an island!), and so on: “We don’t know how they got to Luzon. They crossed the ocean but we don’t know when and we don’t know how, but they did it a long time ago.”
The mystery follows from the assumption that hominins first appeared in the fossil record about six or seven million years ago in Africa and, according to Nature, “the earliest hominin fossils in Eurasia are about 1.8 million years old.” So this new discovery disrupts everything they think they know about humanity’s origins and “will no doubt ignite plenty of scientific debate” over it.
Missing from that debate, however, will be anything that questions the validity of this discovery, its underlying assumptions, or the long history of paleontology’s frauds and deceptions used to market the theory of evolution.
First is the questionable validity of radiometric dating. Dr. Andrew Snelling holds a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Sydney, Australia, and currently serves as Director of Research for Answers in Genesis, a creationist organization that, according to its founder Ken Ham, “believes the Bible from the very first word.” Snelling writes that “the reliability of radiometric dating is subject to three unprovable assumptions that every geologist must make when using the radioactive ‘clock.’” The first assumption is about the conditions at “time zero.” The second is that the bones haven’t been tampered with or contaminated over time. The third is that the rate of radioactive decay occurs at the same rate over time.
Snelling notes how far off radiometric dating is with two recent examples: the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1986 and a similar eruption of Mt. Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, less than 50 years ago. Radiometric dating of lava flows from Mount St. Helens showed them to be 350,000 years old, while the same tool used to date lava flows from Mt. Ngauruhoe claimed they were 133 million years old.
And then there are the paleontologists’ nightmares: the frauds perpetrated to promote evolution. The skull found in a quarry in the United Kingdom in 1912 by Charles Dawson that “proved” the existence of the “missing link” between apes and man, the Piltdown Man, was a fraud. The skull was bleached and weathered to make it look as if it was 500,000 years old.
In the 1920s, a Nebraska rancher, Harold Cook, found a tooth that evolutionists claimed proved that man descended from apes. The tooth, allegedly belonging to “Nebraska Man,” turned out to belong to a pig.
And then there’s perhaps the greatest fraud ever perpetrated: Beringer’s Lying Stones. Beringer, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, in 1725 discovered pieces of limestone carved into the shape of various animals such as lizards, frogs, and spiders in their webs. On some of them were engraved the name of God in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Beringer bought the lie (they had been planted by two of Beringer’s associates as a gag) and published a book describing them. So gullible was Beringer that, upon noticing that they had been carved, he claimed it was the finger of God: “The figures … seem to bear the unmistakable indications of the Sculptor’s knife.”
There are none so blind as those who refuse to see. Or, as the Scriptures brutally and bluntly declare (Psalm 14:1): “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good.”
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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