[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