• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1110 0

visions of body types and lifestyles that to this day decorate museum exhibits and the pages of popular science publications. The main point to be gathered, however, is that the existence of apelike precursors of modern humans was, as de Quatrefages so perceptively noted, more a matter of dogmatic assertion than scientific fact. If this is kept in mind, the subsequent developments in paleoanthropology can be seen in a new light. Were the later “discoveries” of fossil apelike human ancestors the product of unbiased scientific investigation or of a fanciful prophetic quest that ended in true believers seeing in broken iron cups the holy grail?

“The majority of the authors responsible for the evolutionary views I have discussed speak very loudly in the name of free thought,” stated de Quatrefages (1884, p. 83). The term “free thought,” in this context, refers not to the modern constitutional guarantee of freedom of conscience but to the atheistic and deistic philosophies that arose in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in opposition to established churches and their doctrines.

After commenting on the views of the Darwinist free thinkers, de Quatrefages (1884, p. 83) observed: “It is very curious to see how other authors arrive at the very similar conclusions starting from a quite different position, namely, the Mosaic tenets shared by the Christian faiths.” De Quatrefages then went on to discuss the beliefs of Boucher de Perthes, the discoverer of the flints of Abbeville, who from Christianity derived the idea of pre-Flood humans, very different from present humans. Some Christian thinkers believed that the time before the Flood was of inestimable length and that the earth had once been inhabited by pre-Adamite humans, who were “rough sketches” of the present species. For such thinkers, including Boucher de Perthes, it was these primitive humans who made the crude stone tools of Tertiary times. Boucher de Perthes suggested that the fossil bones of the antediluvian race had already been found but had perhaps been mistaken for those of anthropoid apes. The pre-Adamite race of apelike humans, constitutionally incapable of understanding and worshiping God, was thought to have been destroyed by an inundation (not the Flood of Noah’s time). After this catastrophe, and others, came the six days of the new creation during which the modern race of humans, capable of worshiping God, was brought into being, starting with Adam and Eve (de Quatrefages 1903, p. 31; 1884, pp. 84–88). The new human species was completely distinct from the old, with no connection by descent.

“On the other hand, for de Mortillet and Darwin and his disciples,” observed de Quatrefages (1884, p. 89), “the successive creations are continuous. The present human being is connected to the ancient anthropopitheque by an uninterrupted line of descent. His form has been somewhat modified, the intelligence increased; but we are nothing else than, in the accepted physiological sense of the word, his great grandson. I will not here combat this last opinion. Everyone already knows the negative nature of my views toward the doctrine of transformationism. So likewise with the religious theories just reviewed.” The question of Tertiary humans, in de Quatrefages’s view (1884, p. 89), had become “as so much else which should have remained exclusively scientific, a theater of conflict between religious dogmatism and free thought.” The same is still true today, as demonstrated by the ongoing debates between advocates of Darwinian evolution and Biblical creationism, particularly in the United States.

We share the views of de Quatrefages, in the sense that we are not satisfied with the dogmatic accounts of human origins given by either the Darwinian evolutionists or the Biblical creationists. The available empirical evidence appears to be at variance with both, which suggests that it would be advisable to seriously consider other theoretical systems. In a forthcoming book, we shall present an alternative account of human origins that agrees with all the facts