Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [21]
The absence of evidence of possible transitional forms may not provide a proper disproof of evolution, but one can argue that such forms are required in order to positively prove the theory. Yet aside from the Neanderthal skulls and a few other little-reported finds of modern morphology, there were no discoveries of hominid fossil remains. This fact soon became ammunition to those who were revolted by Darwin’s suggestion that humans had apelike ancestors. Where, they asked, were the fossils to prove it?
1.6 The Incompleteness of the Fossil Record
Darwin himself (1871, p. 521) felt forced to reply and sought to defend himself by appealing to the imperfection of the fossil record: “With respect to the absence of fossil remains, serving to connect man with his ape-like progenitors, no one will lay much stress on this fact who reads sir c. Lyell’s discussion (Elements of Geology 1865, pp. 583–585 and Antiquity of Man 1863, p. 145), where he shows that in all the vertebrate classes the discovery of fossil remains has been a very slow and fortuitous process. nor should it be forgotten that those regions which are the most likely to afford remains connecting man with some extinct ape-like creatures, have as yet not been searched by geologists.”
Lyell (1863, p. 146) had argued that it was not “part of the plan of nature to store up enduring records of a large number of individual plants and animals which have lived.” Rather nature tends to regularly clear her files, employing “the heat and moisture of the sun and atmosphere, the dissolving power of carbonic and other acids, the grinding teeth and gastric juices of quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and fish, and the agency of many other invertebrata” (Lyell 1863, p. 146). Lyell also pointed out that researchers who had attempted to dredge human fossils from the sediments on the sea bottom had also been unsuccessful. He cited the attempt of the team of macAndrew and Forbes who “failed utterly in drawing up from the deep a single human bone” and found no human artifacts “on a coast line of several hundred miles in extent, where they approached within less than half a mile of a land peopled by millions of human beings” (Lyell 1863, pp. 146–147).
To the present day, the drastic incompleteness of the fossil record has remained a critical factor in paleontology. Most popular presentations of evolution give the idea that the layers of sedimentary rock offer a complete and incontrovertible record of the progressive development of life on earth. But geologists who have studied the matter have come up with some astounding findings. For example, Tjeerd H. van Andel looked at a series of sandstone and shale deposits in Wyoming, parts of which apparently were submerged in a body of water resembling our present Gulf of Mexico. The rates at which sediment is deposited in the Gulf of Mexico are known. Applying these rates to the Wyoming strata, van Andel calculated they could have been deposited in 100,000 years. Yet geologists and paleontologists agreed that the series spans a time of 6 million years. That means that 5.9 million years of strata are missing. Van Andel (1981, p. 397) stated: “We may repeat the experiment elsewhere; invariably we find that the rock record requires only a small fraction, usually 1 to 10 percent, of the available time. . . . Thus it appears that the geological record is exceedingly incomplete.”
What about the sea bottom? Shouldn’t the lack of erosional forces present on continental land masses result in a more complete record there? Van Andel (1981, p. 397) answered: “This turned out to be far from true. In the south Atlantic, for example, barely half of the history of the last 125 Myr is recorded in the sediment. It is no better in other oceans and surely worse for shallow marine and continental environments.”
This has definite implications regarding the fossil record. Van Andel (1981, p. 398) warned that “key