Getting the Facts Straight about Ardipithecus

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Because the Discovery Channel is doing a one-hour special on Sunday entitled “Discovering Ardi” (the above picture taken from Creation Ministries International reflects meager evidence for Ardipithecus), I thought it would be good to look at a Christian response to Ardi. When you look at the actual facts about Ardipithecus, all the surrounding hype is nauseating. In any event, I saw a good response on October 2 by Dr. Carl Weiland with Creation Ministries International.

“The papers and news sites,” according to Dr. Wieland, “are full of claims about what some still think is a ‘new???’ candidate for an evolutionary ancestor of humans. Called Ardipithecus ramidus (often just ‘Ardi’), most of the articles actually explain that it???s really a detailed reanalysis of a fossil category that???s been around for years, but still the phones run hot with concerned creationists or gloating skeptics. Perhaps this is not surprising, given the journalistic temptation to run with headlines such as ‘Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found’???even though the article itself states that the bones were first discovered in 1994!1 In fact, though there is a lot of evolutionary spin, especially in the media, so far there have been few claims of this ‘proving evolution’, it is more a question of trying to score points and settle internal issues within the community of already-established ‘true believers’ in human evolution.” It is well-worth your time to continue reading “Ardipithecus again: A recycled ape-man.”

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