The Findings of Science
There is much scientifically accepted evidence that modern man is smaller, shorter, and weaker than the men who preceded us. Although the currently accepted Darwinian paradigm is that modern humans evolved from Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy), a bipedal primate less than four feet tall, scientists are nevertheless finding a clear trend from larger, more robust Ice Age human remains to today’s smaller, weaker men. Scientists have given many names to the various types they’ve found—Cro-Magnon man, Neaderthal man, Kinnewick Man, Heidelberg Man, Meganthropus, Homo Erectus, Denisovan, etc.—but the common thread uniting these types is that they were incredibly robust, big-boned, big-jawed, and big toothed, and many of them were taller than modern man.
A. Cro-Magnon Man
Darwinists do not claim “missing-link” status for this Ice Age man, discovered in 1868 in a rock shelter at Cro-Magnon, in the Dordogne region of France. Everyone acknowledges the humanity of this people, who are believed to have produced the amazing cave art of France and Spain. In fact, the typical two-paragraph article on Cro-Magnon man will assert that he “was anatomically identical to modern humans.” Not quite. The average Cro-Magnon man was about five inches taller than the average modern European man (6’1” versus 5’8”) and weighed more, as well.[i]
Early commentators were astonished at his size. Sir Arthur Keith stated that the Cro-Magnon race “was the finest the world has ever seen.”[ii] Another commentator noted that the tradition of a “race of giants in far-distant times was no myth.”
The teeth and jaws of the Cro-Magnons were larger than those of modern Europeans.[iii] Their faces were flatter, with more prominent cheekbones, and their skulls were larger, longer, and relatively lower than modern Europeans. Cro-Magnons also had a larger average brain size than modern humans. The modern human brain case typically falls between 1300-1500 cc, averaging around 1400 cc. Cro-Magnon specimens, by contrast, averaged over 1600 cc.[iv]
B. Kennewick Man
On July 28, 1996, near Kennewick, Washington, two boys stumbled across a human skull while wading at the edge of the Columbia River, watching a boat race. They notified the local constabulary, which asked James C. Chatters, a forensic anthropologist, to investigate. Chatters determined that the bones were not from a recently deceased person. But the skeleton appeared to be that of a Caucasian, not a Native American, and there was a stone projectile point embedded in the man’s pelvis. Chatters thought the remains were those of a white pioneer who had perhaps been wounded by an Indian arrow.
Kennewick Man turned out to be much more ancient than Chatters had imagined. Chatters asked an anthropologist to examine the projectile point, and she determined that it was from an archeological period known as the Cascade phase, which archeologists have dated between 7,000 and 2,500 B.C. Chatters then sent a bone sample to Ervin Taylor, at the University of California at Riverside, for radiocarbon testing. Taylor reported a date of 8,410 years before the present, which matched the dating of the arrowhead or spear tip.[v]
Osteological research indicated that Kennewick Man was not of European origin. Rather, the race to which he had the closest affinity was the Ainu, a native people of Japan who look more Western than Asian. He also closely resembled a Polynesian race called the Moriori.[vi]
In 1940, partially mummified remains that came to be known as “Spirit Cave” Man were found in a cave in Nevada. This skeleton also turned out to be closely related to the Ainu, and had a Carbon-14 age similar to Kennewick man. Another specimen of the same racial type was found in 1978 about 100 miles from Spirit Cave and is known as “Wizard’s Beach” Man. Taken together, the three finds establish that a Caucasoid people similar to the Ainu explored North America in prehistoric times. In a creationist model, this period would probably correspond to within a few centuries of the post-Babel radiation.
Kennewick Man stood between 5’8” and 5’10” tall and was robust and muscular. He was “well-muscled and engaged in rigorous activity employing his arms.”[vii] Likewise, the Wizard’s Beach man impressed the physical anthropologists who analyzed his bones. “He was a big guy,” said one. “Obviously lots of protein in his diet.” His height was estimated to have been five feet, six inches. Another anthropologist described the bones as “large and dense,” and forensic scientists believe that he had been a vigorous, well-muscled man. Spirit Cave man was only five feet, two inches tall.[viii]
The robust and extraordinarily strong, but not particularly tall, physique of the Kennewick Man type is similar to Neanderthal Man, and, indeed, Kennewick Man has been compared to Neanderthal Man.[ix]
C. Neanderthal Man
Neanderthal man was physically superior to modern man. Without question, he was stronger:
“One of the most characteristic features of the Neanderthals is the exaggerated massiveness of their trunk and limb bones. All of the preserved bones suggest a strength seldom attained by modern humans. Furthermore, not only is this robustness present among the adult males, as one might expect, but it is also evident in the adult females, adolescents, and even children.”[x]
It is not just the extreme robustness of their limb bones that indicates strength; their muscles left unusually deep and wide attachment scars on their bones.[xi] “Thick-boned, barrel-chested, a healthy Neandertal male could lift an average NFL linebacker over his head and throw him through the goalposts.”[xii] Valerius Geist of the University of Chicago, reports:
Neanderthal was far more powerful than modern humans. Whereas archeologists can experimentally duplicate the wear patterns on tools such as were used by people from the Upper Paleolithic [e.g., Cro-Magnon man, later than Neanderthal], the wear patterns on Neanderthal’s tools cannot be duplicated. We do not have the strength to do it. Neanderthal’s skeleton reflects a supremely powerful musculature.[xiii]
Neanderthal man had significantly larger teeth than modern man.[xiv]
Neanderthal man also had a larger cranial capacity than do modern humans—about 10 percent larger on average—hence there is no anatomical reason to believe that Neanderthal was not at least as intelligent as modern man.[xv] One specimen, Amud 1, found at Wadi Amud, Israel, had a brain case of 1,740 cc, substantially larger than the average modern human.[xvi] Although they were extraordinarily strong, the Neanderthals were not tall. The average height was five feet, six and a half inches—about two inches shorter than the average modern European man.[xvii]
D. Heidelberg Man
Also known as Homo heidelbergensis, the type specimen was a lower jawbone, bearing most of its teeth, which was found in a gravel pit near Mauer, Germany, in 1907. Many authorities have classified it as either Homo erectus or archaic Homo sapiens, but the current trend is to return to the taxon Homo heidelbergensis. The jaw is extremely robust, much larger than a modern human jawbone, but it lacks a protruding chin.
One recent textbook states that the Mauer mandible “is quite large and robust, but in comparison with many other Homo erectus mandibles, it is small.”[xviii]
The teeth are larger than modern human teeth but overlap with ancient human teeth and are smaller than robust Homo erectus teeth, illustrating a trend of declining tooth size as we move from more ancient to more modern humans.
E. Homo Erectus
Homo erectus “man walking upright” differs from modern humans primarily in having a very pronounced brow ridge (as with Neanderthal man) with some specimens having a slightly smaller cranial capacity (the opposite of Neanderthal man).[xix] Homo erectus remains have been found in association with tools—stone hand-axes of the Acheulian type—with oval huts, and with evidence of the controlled use of fire, indicates that Homo erectus was fully human. His smaller cranial capacity certainly does not rule out humanity.[xx]
It was once believed that Homo erectus was short, like Neanderthal Man, but this notion was conclusively falsified when a relatively complete skeleton was found near Lake Turkana in Kenya in 1984. The only missing parts were the hands and feet. “Turkana Boy,”—also known as “KNM-WT 15000,” “15K”, and “the Nariokotome skeleton”—was five feet, three inches tall, but forensic scientists estimated that he was only 11 or 12 years old. Had he lived, he would have grown significantly. The research team estimated that as an adult he would have stood about six feet, one inch tall, “with a possible height of up to six feet ten inches if he had yet to go into an adolescent growth spurt.”[xxi]
The surprising stature of Turkana Boy prompted Alan Walker and Richard Leakey to re-measure the other Homo erectus fossils. In doing so, they discovered that Turkana Boy was not unusually tall for Homo erectus. He was average.[xxii]
“I calculated that, if these individuals were alive today and if by some bizarre chance they were all males, this erectus ‘population’ would rank among the tallest 17 percent of human populations worldwide. But it is far more likely that some these individuals were females (for that is what their anatomy indicates to me). In that case, the erectus population would rank among an even smaller percentage of the world’s populations in terms of height. Their size is truly astounding.”[xxiii]
Homo erectus was also incredibly strong, if Turkana Boy is any indication. Turkana Boy had “exceptional strength relative to modern humans, . . . literally inhuman strength.”[xxiv] He was “long-legged and immensely strong,” . . . “stronger than any living human.”[xxv]
Robust bones were the norm for our ancestors, including the recognized hominid categories. “In fact, it is our own rather puny bones which seem to be the exception.”[xxvi]
A group of distinguished paleoanthropologists surveyed the mechanical strength of the femurs of a sequence of fossil hominid categories presumed to represent an evolutionary progression—from Homo habilis,[xxvii] to Homo erectus, to archaic Homo sapiens (Neanderthals), to modern humans. They found that the older the specimen, the more robust the bones. Modern human bones are by far the weakest.
The earlier members of genus Homo, had incredibly robust bones compared to ours. “In fact, we could document a steady decline in robustness of the femur at midshaft (measured as the area of cortical bone in a cross section) through our sequence. This change is not just a downward trend; it is an exponential decline in cortical area . . .”[xxviii]
Clearly, the skeletons of the recognized hominid taxonomic categories show a marked trend from taller, stronger, and more robust to shorter, weaker, and more “gracile” (smaller), as one goes from the oldest categories to the most recent.
F. Meganthropus
The Chinese have for centuries sold “dragon’s teeth” and bones to be ground up and sold as medicines. In 1935, a Dutch anthropologist named Gustav H.R. von Koenigswald came across a very interesting fossil tooth in an apothecary shop in Hong Kong.[xxix] It was the molar of a human or an ape, but the crown was six times larger than the tooth of a modern man, and twice as large as the largest ape tooth.[xxx] Von Koenigswald realized that he had stumbled upon a new species of primate, which he christened, Gigantopithecus blacki. The genus name means “gigantic ape,” and the species name was in honor of Davidson Black, a professor at Peking Union Medical College who led the famous “Peking Man” excavation.[xxxi]
Since von Koenigswald’s discovery, Chinese researchers have found three jaw bones and over a thousand teeth, not only in apothecary shops but also in caves.[xxxii] Gigantopithecus blacki remains have been found in Vietnam and in the Hubei and Sichuan provinces of China. If bipedal, Gigantopithecus would have stood some nine or ten feet tall and weighed over 1,000 pounds.
A few years later, in 1941, one of von Koenigswald’s native collectors in Java found part of a lower jaw that was unmistakably human, but twice the size of a typical human jaw. Von Koenigswald named this specimen Meganthropus paleojavanicus— “giant man of ancient Java.” The specimen is believed to have been found in the lower Pleistocene, or Ice Age strata.[xxxiii] Von Koenigswald concluded that Meganthropus was a giant offshoot of the main line of human evolution. This was not the conclusion, however, of another scientist who examined the fossils.
In 1934, when Davidson Black died of a heart attack, Franz Weidenreich was invited to Peking to take over the supervision of the “Peking Man” excavations. Weidenreich was German and Jewish, and at 61 was forced to flee Nazi Germany for the United States, where he briefly taught at the University of Chicago before being invited to Peking Union Medical College. World War II eventually forced Weidenreich back to the U.S., where he became a visiting scholar at the American Museum of Natural History. Weidenreich had the foresight to make plaster casts of all the “Peking Man” fossils before returning to the United States, which is fortunate because the original fossils were lost during the war.
Weidenreich was a careful scientist whose qualifications on human anatomy were impeccable. Stephen Jay Gould referred to Weidenreich as “perhaps the world’s greatest human anatomist.”[xxxiv] Paleoanthropologist Alan Walker describes Weidenreich as “a superb anatomist and analyst” and states that, “I have noticed that his descriptions are so thorough that he defined new terms for previously unremarked anatomical structures. His meticulous scholarship earned the respect of his Chinese colleagues, as it earned mine, years later, when I had to consult his works closely.”[xxxv] Weidenreich correctly surmised, before Piltdown Man was finally exposed as a hoax, that the Piltdown jaw and skull did not belong to the same individual.[xxxvi]
After examining the Meganthropus jaw and the Gigantopithecus teeth, Weidenreich concluded that both were direct ancestors of modern humans. He believed that Homo sapiens evolved from Gigantopithecus by way of Meganthropus.[xxxvii] “I believe that all these forms have to be ranged in the human line and that the human line leads to giants, the farther back it is traced. In other words, the giants may be directly ancestral to man.”[xxxviii]
In fact, Weidenreich believed that Gigantopithecus was not an ape but a human:
Meganthropus vs. modern man
“Von Koenigswald did not seize the opportunity to complete his first diagnosis or to correct it on the basis of the evidence provided by the much better-preserved teeth. So I took up the question again, suspecting that there might be some relation between these gigantic ape teeth from China and the giant human jaw from Java. My suspicion proved justified.
“A thorough comparative study revealed that the teeth are those of a member of the undoubtedly most advanced primate group, as rightly stated by von Koenigswald (1935). However, this primate was not a giant ape but a giant man and should, therefore, be called Gigantanthropus and not Gigantopithecus. If the size of the crown is disregarded, the relative size of the individual cusps, their arrangement, and their special form agree with none of the anthropoids, either living or fossil, but with man; also the teeth are more like those of Pithecanthropus [Java Man], Sinanthropus [Peking Man] and modern man than those of other types.”[xxxix]
Weidenreich’s conclusion was not hasty or ill considered, and was stated in a series of lectures at the University of California, as well as in his 1946 book, Apes, Giants, and Man.
Weidenreich believed that tremendous size was a general characteristic of early man:
Are gigantism and massiveness indispensable features of the earliest mankind, and, consequently, characteristic of all human forms; or have they to be regarded as accidental, regional or individual variations as they occur in other mammalian groups? The occurrence of large fossil human skulls with very thick individual bones in early or late stages, for instance in Homo soloensis, Homo rhodesiensis and in the Heidelberg jaw, seem to indicate that gigantism and massiveness may have been a general or at least a wide-spread character of early mankind.[xl]
When Weidenreich wrote Apes, Giants, and Man, Gigantopithecus was generally regarded as a human ancestor of gigantic proportions.[xli] In the 1950s and 60s, however, Chinese scientists found more Gigantopithecus jaws, and these showed a closer affinity with the apes than with humans. Consequently, most anthropologists rejected Weidenreich’s conclusion that Gigantopithecus was an ancestor of mankind and have reverted to Von Koenigswald’s conclusion that Gigantopithecus was an extinct giant ape.[xlii]
Weidenreich’s generalization regarding the massiveness of human ancestry was not, however, based solely on his diagnosis of Gigantopithecus as a human ancestor, but upon the trend of the entire fossil record.
As to Meganthropus, various attempts have been made to fit him into an evolutionary framework that leads from “Lucy” to modern humanity. Although the jaw was larger than other specimens of Homo erectus, it has been suggested that Meganthropus was a specimen of erectus, the size difference being attributed to sexual dimorphism (meaning that the males were much larger than females).[xliii] It has been suggested that Meganthropus was a “robust” or “hyper-robust” australopithecine, a type very different from the gracile “Lucy” type of australopithecine.[xliv]
A study published only three months ago states that Meganthropus remains sui generis, and should not be sunk into Gigantopithecus or Homo Erectus. Interestingly, the study also concludes that Pithecanthropus (better known as “Java Man”), a type found in 1891 by Eugene DuBois that many believe should be sunk into Homo Erectus, belongs with Meganthropus:
Since the first discovery of Pithecanthropus (Homo) erectus by E. Dubois at Trinil in 1891, over 200 hominid dentognathic remains have been collected from the Early to Middle Pleistocene deposits of Java, Indonesia, forming the largest palaeoanthropological collection in South East Asia. Most of these fossils are currently attributed to H. erectus. . . . To resolve the taxonomic uncertainty surrounding these and other contentious Indonesian hominid specimens, we used occlusal fingerprint analysis (OFA) to reconstruct their chewing kinematics; we also used various morphometric approaches based on microtomography to examine the internal dental structures. Our results confirm the presence of Meganthropus as a Pleistocene Indonesian hominid distinct from Pongo, Gigantopithecus and Homo, and further reveal that Dubois’s Homo erectus paratype molars from 1891 . . . are more likely to belong to Meganthropus..[xlv]
G. The Denisovans
The Denisova Cave, named after a Russian hermit who lived there in the 18th Century, is in south-central Siberia, near the borders of Kazakhstan, China, and Mongolia. In 2008, Michael Shunkov from the Russian Academy of Sciences and archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Novosibirsk investigated the cave. They found the finger bone of a girl, two teeth, a toe bone, and a partial jawbone.
The single finger bone was unusually broad and robust, much larger than is seen in modern people. And it belonged to a female, which, given typical sexual dimorphism, indicates that the Denisovan men must have been extremely robust. The tooth, which is twice the size of a modern human molar, does not share the derived morphological features seen in Neanderthal or modern human teeth.
Based upon a protein analysis study published earlier this year, a partial jaw bone with attached molars found in 1980, called the Xiahe mandible, has been assigned to the Denisovans. The fossil has a morphology “typical of Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils”: It is very robust and has very large teeth.[xlvi]
Various items of jewelry were found in the Denisova Cave, including an ivory ring and a bracelet. The bracelet was made of dark green chlorite, highly polished, with a 0.8 centimeter hole drilled through it. This surprised the researchers, who did not expect to find such advanced artifacts with such ancient human remains. Mikhail Shunkov says the Denisovans were very advanced, much more so than their cousins the Neanderthals:
“'These [artifacts] were made using technological methods — boring stone, drilling with an implement, grinding — that are traditionally considered typical for a later time, and nowhere in the world they were used so early, in the Paleolithic era. At first, we connected the finds with a progressive form of modern human, and now it turned out that this was fundamentally wrong. Obviously it was Denisovans who left these things.'
This indicated that “the most progressive of the triad' (Homo sapiens, Homo Neanderthals and Denisovans) were Denisovans, who according to their genetic and morphological characters were much more archaic than Neanderthals and modern human.”[xlvii]
Conclusion
Even though it does not fit with their model, Darwinian scientists cannot avoid the evidence that the earliest human beings were larger than later types, and that there has been a decline in human size and stature as we move from Pleistocene to the present. This might be surprising to mainstream scientists, but it is exactly what the Creationist/Seventh-day Adventist model of earth history predicts. The antediluvians and early post-Flood humans were much larger, and we have gradually devolved to where we are today.
NOTES:
[i]. Stringer, Christopher, and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 183.
[ii]. Sir Arthur Keith, as quoted by George McCready Price, Evolutionary Geology and the New Catastrophism (Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1926), p. 302.
[iii]. Macnamara, N.C., Nature, March 7, 1901, as quoted by Price, supra, pp. 302-310. “These people of Cro Magnon and Menton were evidently almost a race of giants,” reports Price, “some of them being seven feet tall, with a very extraordinary muscular development, as proved by their bones . . .” See also Wilford, John Noble, “Big teeth in ancient jaw offer clues about our ancestors,” The New York Times, September 30, 2003. (The teeth and jaw were found in a cave in Romania, and given to a scientist in Cluj, who then gave them to Dr. Erik Trinkaus. “Dr. Trinkaus said the teeth were enormous by modern standards, an archaic characteristic closer to Neanderthals than modern humans. Yet in nearly every other respect examined, the early Europeans had thoroughly modern anatomies.”)
[iv]. Stringer, et al., at 82, 183.
[v]. Slayman, Andrew, “A Battle Over Bones,” Archeology, 50:1, Jan./Feb. 1997. http://www.archaeology.org/9701/etc/specialreport.html. Subsequent Carbon-14 tests dated the specimen even older, around 9300 year before the present.
[vi]. Joseph F. Powell and Jerome C. Rose, “Report on the Osteological Assessment of the ‘Kennewick Man’ Skeleton,” at http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/powell_rose.htm. See especially Table 7, http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/p_rtable7.htm. See also Dewar, Elaine, Bones: Discovering the First Americans (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), pp. 509-511.
[vii]. Hill, Richard L., “Unforgiving Landscape Meant Rough Life for Kennewick Man,” The Oregonian, Dec. 22, 1999. Regarding the right humerus bone, the forensic scientists note, “The muscle markings are clear and well developed. The midshaft is bowed medially and suggests hyper development from extensive usage. The radiographs clearly show the build up of cortex along the lateral surface of the shaft especially within the region of the deltoid muscle insertion. This shape is not uncommon on individuals who engage in rigorous use of the arm such as modern weight lifters or construction laborers. The angle of the distal half of the shaft with the proximal half is at or just past the extreme end of the normal range.” Joseph F. Powell and Jerome C. Rose, “Report on the Osteological Assessment of the Kennewick Man.”
[viii]. “The Men from Spirit Cave and Wizard’s Beach,” Mammoth Trumpet, 12(2) 1997.
[ix]. “American Neanderthal? Unearthed Native American Could Help Solve Mystery,” Reuters/ABC News.com, Feb. 18, 2000. (“[Kennewick Man] has intrigued researchers because the features seem to suggest a more Caucasian than Asian origin. Others say he looks like an Ainu—the aboriginal people of Japan who are often said to be physically closer to Europeans than Japanese. Loring Brace, a specialist in bone measurements at the University of Michigan, says he has a simple explanation for this—both Kennewick Man and the Ainu, along with the people of Europe, descended from Neanderthals. ‘I have long maintained that Neanderthals are obviously the ancestors of living Europeans,’ Brace told a news conference held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.”)
[x]. Lubenow, Marvin, Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils, at 62, citing Eric Trinkaus, “Hard Times Among the Neanderthals,” Natural History, 87:10 (December 1978), p. 58.
[xi]. Stringer, et al., at 93.
[xii]. Shreeve, James, The Neandertal Enigma (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1995), p. 5.
[xiii]. Lubenow, at 62, citing Valerius Geist, “Neanderthal the Hunter,” Natural History, 90:1 (January 1981), p. 80.
[xiv]. Cuozzo, Jack, Buried Alive: the Startling Truth about Neanderthal Man (Green Forest, AK: Master Books, 1998), pp. 236, 237.
[xv]. Lubenow, at pp. 37, 38, 61; Shreeve, at 6; Stringer, et al., at 81-83.
[xvi]. Stringer, et al., at 82.
[xvii]. Stringer, et al., at 91, 92.
[xviii]. Larsen, Clark Spencer, Robert M. Matter, and Daniel L. Gebo, Human Origins: The Fossil Record (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998), p. 102.
[xix]. Homo erectus’ cranial capacity typically falls in the range of 850 to 1200 cc. (as opposed to 1300 to 1500 cc for modern humans).
[xx]. Skoyles, John R., “Human evolution expanded brains to increase expertise capacity not IQ: A resolution of the normal IQ but small brain anomaly.” On the net at http: http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000637/. (“Individuals exist with psychometrically normal IQ but Homo erectus sized brains.”) Among the examples Skoyles cites is Daniel Lyon, who worked for a railroad company in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was not retarded and could read and write, and had brain weighing 680 grams (with an estimated volume of 624 cc). Another famous example is Anatole France (1844-1924) a Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose brain weighed 1017 grams (933 cc) when he died. Allowing for brain shrinkage caused by old age, his brain volume when young would have been around 1013 cc., which is well within the range of Homo erectus. Among normal, modern human populations, there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence.
[xxi]. Walker, Alan, and Pat Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996), p. 191 (emphasis added).
[xxii]. Walker, et al., at 191-195.
[xxiii]. Walker, et al., at 194, 195.
[xxiv]. Walker, et al., at 199, 200.
[xxv]. Walker, et al., at 293 and at caption to figure 7.
[xxvi]. Stringer, et al., at 93.
[xxvii]. Homo habilis might not be a valid fossil category. See, e.g., Lubenow at 157-168; Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, Forbidden Archeology (Los Angeles: Bahktivedanta Book Pub., 1993), pp. 709, 710; Ariel Roth, Origins (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 1998), p. 121. Fossils classified as Homo habilis must therefore be evaluated on a case by case basis, and I offer no opinion regarding the human or non-human status of any such fossil.
[xxviii]. Walker, et al., at 199, 200.
[xxix]. Von Koenigswald, G.H.R., “Gigantopithecus blacki, Von Koenigswald, a giant fossil hominoid from the Pleistocene of southern China,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 43:295-325 (1952).
[xxx]. Weidenreich, Franz, Apes, Giants, and Man (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 61.
[xxxi]. Ciochon, Russel L., John Olsen, and Jamie James, Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), p. 90.
[xxxii]. Ciochon, et al., at 97, 93-100.
[xxxiii]. Cremo, et al., at 487, 498.
[xxxiv]. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1980), p. 115.
[xxxv]. Walker, et al., at 66.
[xxxvi]. Weidenreich, at 23 (“Form and individual features of the brain case are generally acknowledged as those of modern man; those of the lower jaw, as anthropoid characteristics. Therefore, both skeletal elements cannot belong to the same skull. . . . In all finds in which subsequent accidental mixing-up of fragments could be excluded, disharmonies like those of the Piltdown case have never been noted.”) See also, Gould, Stephen Jay, The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1980), p. 115.
Weidenreich may have known Teilhard, who was in China in the 1930s and helped with the “Peking Man” dig. It is remarkable that the Darwinist Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin worked on both the Piltdown Man and the Peking Man sites; almost enough to make one a believer in conspiracy theories.
[xxxvii]. Cremo, et al., at 487, citing Simons, Elwyn L., and Peter C. Ettel, “Gigantopithecus,” Scientific American, January, 1970: 77-85
[xxxviii]. Weidenreich, at 61.
[xxxix]. Weidenreich, at 58, 59.
[xl]. Weidenreich, as quoted in “Science and the Secret Doctrine,” Theosophy, vol. 32, no. 11, September, 1944.
[xli]. Ciochon, et al., at 92.
[xlii]. Ciochon, et al., at 92, 93.
[xliii]. Ciochon, et a.l, at 48.
[xliv]. Cremo, et al., at 488, citing T. Jacob, “Paleoanthropological discoveries in Indonesia with special reference to finds of the last two decades,” Journal of Human Evolution, 2:473-485 (1973), at p. 475.
[xlv] Zanolli, et al, “Evidence for increased hominid diversity in the Early to Middle Pleistocene of Indonesia,” Nature Ecology & Evolution, volume 3, pages 755–764 (2019).
[xlvi] Fahu Chen, "A late Middle Pleistocene Denisovan mandible from the Tibetan Plateau" Nature, 569, pp. 409–412 (May 1, 2019)
[xlvii] Anna Liesowska, “Stone Bracelet is Oldest Ever Found in the World,” The Siberian Times, May, 7, 2015: http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0100-stone-bracelet-is-oldest-ever-found-in-the-world/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_acvNaIYG0.