BTW. Please let me know if these quotes have been taken out of context.
"The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientist than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed with no room to spare, inside a single coffin" - Dr Lyall Watson
"Amid the bewildering array of early fossil hominoids, is there one whose morphology marks it as mans hominid ancestor? If the factor of genetic variability is considered, the answer appears to be no" - Robert B. Eckhardt, Pennsylvania State University, USA
"In recent years several authors have written popular books on human origins which were based more on fantasy and subjectivity than on fact and objectivity. At the moment science cannot offer a full answer on the origin of humanity, but scientific method takes us closer to the truth...
As far as geologically more recent evidence is concerned, the discovery in East Africa of apparent remains of Homo in the same early fossil sites as both gracile and robust australopithecines has thrown open once again the question of the direct relevance of the latter to human evolution. So one is forced to conclude that there is no clear-cut scientific picture of human evolution" - Dr Robert Martin, Zoological Society of London
"For example, no scientist could logically dispute the proposition that man, without having been involved in any act of divine creation, evolved from some ape-like creature in a very short space of time - speaking in geological terms - without leaving any fossil traces of the steps of the transformation.
As I have already implied, students of fossil primates have not been distinguished for caution when working within the logical constraints of their subject. The record is so astonishing that it is legitimate to ask whether much science is yet to be found in this field at all" - Lord Solly Zuckerman
"Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern man - of upright, naked, toolmaking, big brained beings - is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter" - Dr Lyall Watson
"Echoing the criticism made of his fathers Habilis skulls, he added that Lucys skull was so incomplete that most of it was "imagination made of plaster of paris", thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what specie she belonged to" - Referring to comments made by Richard Leakey (Director of National Museums Kenya) in The Weekend Australia, 7-8 May 1983, Magazine p3)
"The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, but it has spawned a science because it is distinguished by two factors which inflate its apparent relevance far beyond its merits. First, the fossils hint at the ancestry of a supremely self-important animal - ourselves. Secondly, the collection is so tantalisingly in complete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmentary and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing that what is present. Hence the amazing quantity of literature on the subject. Very few fossils indeed afford just one, incontrovertible interpretation of their evolutionary significance. Most are capable of supporting several interpretations. Different authoritites are free to stress different features with validity, often placing remarkable emphasis on the form they propose for the bits that are missing. Points to distinguishing the various interpretations may be so slight or unclear that each depends as much upon the proponents preconceived notions as upon evidence of the fossil. Furthermore, since the meagre collection has accumulated so slowly, the long gaps between discoveries have provided ample time for investigators to form very definate notions of what ought to be found next. 'Zijanthropus boisei' is a good example of this phenomenon, but ever since Darwins work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man" - John Reader (Author of Missing Links),'Whatever happened to Zijanthropus?' - New Scientist, 1981
"A five millions-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be the collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually a part of a dolphin rib, according to an athropologist at the University of California-Berkeley.
Dr Tim White says the discovery of the blunder may force a rethink of theories about when the line of mans ancestors seperated from that of the apes. He puts the incident on a par with two other embarassing [sic] 'faux pas' by fossil hunters: Herperopithecus, the fossil pigs tooth that was cited as evidence of very early man in North America, and Eoanthropus or 'Piltdown man', the jaw of an orangutan and the skull of a modern human that were claimed to be the earliest Englishmen...
The problem with alot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone" - Dr Time White, University of California). Quoted by Ian Anderson 'Hominoid collarbone exposed as dolphins rib' - New Scientist 28 April 1983 p199
"Not being a paleontologist, I dont want to pour too much scorn on paleontologists, but if you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head, and little fragments of jaw, theres a strong desire there to exaggerate the importance of those fragments - Dr Greg Kirby, Senior Lecturer in Population Biology, Flinders University, Adelaide).
Human Evolution
| Answers in Genesis
The Origin of Humans
| Answers in Genesis
™ Version 4.2