[Published in Fortean Times, no. 176, December 2003, p. 71.]
Hominid fossils
Noel Rooney reports that Lloyd Pye's "anti-Darwinian compendium" is
"better informed than most" and that Pye "concentrates on the supposed
evolution of humanity, as it is commonly educed [sic] from a
collection of bones and fragments that wouldn't fill a decent-sized
suitcase." [FT173:34] This description of the quantity of bone
evidence for human evolution is highly inaccurate, though similar
misstatements have been made as recently as 1981 in New
Scientist, which claimed "the entire hominid collection known
today would barely cover a billiard table" (26 Mar 1981, p. 802). In
fact, there are literally thousands of fossil hominid individuals that
have been found--at least 3,998 by 1976, in the 1977 second edition of
the Catalogue of Fossil Hominids. Ironically, the best
debunking of the claim that there is scant fossil evidence of hominids
was written by young-earth creationist Marvin L. Lubenow, in chapter
three of his Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of
Human Fossils (1992), a book which I recommend as the single best
anti-evolutionary book on the human fossil record, though it suffers
from a fatally-flawed central argument based on the erroneous premise
that ancestral species and descendant species cannot exist at the same
time.
Jim Lippard
Phoenix, Arizona