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By Root 1567 0

the late nineteenth century, the only fossil remains relating to human origins yet discovered were those of the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man. As previously mentioned (Section 1.2), scientists favoring evolution thought that the Neanderthals, although somewhat primitive, were too humanlike to qualify as a missing link with the Miocene apes; and Cro-Magnon man, of course, was fully human. But Cro-Magnon man did put the fully human type well back into the Quaternary, contemporary with ice age mammals such as the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.

This naturally led Darwinists to place the origin of the human species from apelike ancestors much further back in time. De Quatrefages (1884, pp. 80–81) noted: “Haeckel was the first to make a proposal. He put his Homo alalus (speechless man) and Homo pithecanthropus (ape-man) in the Pliocene, or late Tertiary. Darwin, taking after his German disciple, proposed that the initial transition from ancient apes to the precursors of modern humans, as signified by the loss of the ape’s primitive coat of hair, occurred as early as the Eocene. Wallace cautiously suggested the middle Tertiary as the time during which an unspecified variety of ape attained the human form after a prolonged process of morphological evolution.”

At this time, however, the visions of ape-men propounded by Darwin and Haeckel were purely hypothetical. No fossils of creatures truly transitional between the early Tertiary apes and Cro-Magnon man had been found. But what about the stone tools discovered in Miocene formations by Ribeiro in Portugal and by Bourgeois in France?

Anatole Roujou, a French evolutionist, reacted in an interesting fashion to the stone tools found at Thenay. Roujou said: “Being convinced of the transformation of species, I did not have to wait for the discovery of Miocene flints to demonstrate the existence of Tertiary man, because his existence is a necessary consequence of transformation, as currently understood, and an indispensable corollary to the ideas I hold about the morphological affinities of the mammals and their mode of descent” (de Quatrefages 1884, p. 81).

De Quatrefages (1884, p. 81) observed: “Roujou traced back to Tertiary man, whose existence he accepted on purely theoretical grounds, the several distinct present races of humans which, he believed, have existed since the Quaternary. Roujou saw no reason to suppose that humans like those presently existing could not have existed at the time the flint implements of Thenay were being made.”

This is quite an interesting admission from an evolutionist. Today, evolutionists put the emergence of anatomically modern humans in the Late Pleistocene. Nevertheless, even from the standpoint of current evolutionary theory, there is, strictly speaking, no reason to rule out in advance the existence of modern human beings, or a closely related species, in the Miocene. After all, advocates of punctuated equilibrium no longer envision an uninterrupted process of gradual change from one species to another. The paleontological evidence, they say, shows that species remain static for long periods of time, millions of years, and that new species appear quite abruptly in the fossil record (Gould and Eldredge

1977). Accepting this point of view, we should not necessarily expect our ancestors to become progressively more primitive and apelike as we trace them back further and further. After all, there are many present-day creatures, turtles and alligators to name a couple, that have not changed substantially for tens of millions of years.

De Mortillet, also a Darwinist, took a somewhat different approach than Roujou. “He tries to accommodate the ideas of Darwin with the paleontological facts,” wrote de Quatrefages (1884, p. 81). De Mortillet himself said: “The mammalian fauna has been replaced several times, at least thrice, since the implementbearing deposits at Thenay were laid down. . . . Can human beings, who display one of the most complex levels of biological organization, have escaped from that law of transformation?” (de Quatrefages 1884,