Full transcript:
Our ancient half-ape, half-human ancestor drops in out of the trees again, more swimming dinosaurs, and an extended play mailbag! This is Genesis Week.
Welcome! To this episode of Genesis Week, the weekly program of creationary commentary on news, views and events pertaining to the origins controversy, made possible by the supporters of CORE Ottawa, Citizens for Origins Research and Education, and carried on the Christianima network – christianima.com – Christian cinema at its finest. Excellence in pirate broadcasting, we set up our studios in the abandoned Communist Party headquarters in Bulgaria – and if you are one of the first three people to write in what is written on the wall at the entrance, we’ll send you a free copy of my new book “The Vagabond’s Guide to Successful YouTube Production While Living in your Van”. We continue to bring you the information the anticreationists don’t want you to see or hear, and giving glory to our Creator while doing it. We here at Genesis Week believe your brain was intelligently designed, and God wants you to use it. Remember if you get lost in cyberspace, you can just punch in wazooloo.com or genesisweek.com and you can find us, and also subscribe to our youtube channel to get extras like CrEvo rants and full interviews with our guests. I’m your host, Ian Juby
Back in 2010, Science magazine presented the evidence for another one of our alleged ancient half-ape, half-human ancestors. Called Australopithecus sediba, it was presented with much fanfare in a special edition of Science magazine, and this past week was once again in another special edition of Science. Now, in order to fully understand how to properly analyze these alleged half-ape, half-human fossils, you need to examine the differences between apes and humans.
While the apes you see in the zoo have many similarities to humans, there are numerous, irrevocable differences. The biggest difference has nothing to do with physical appearance! We do not see apes building rockets and flying to the moon, or producing artwork. And contrary to what has been suggested, no apes were involved in the production of Genesis Week. Apes are apes, and humans are humans, no matter how much they may look alike! This is exactly what the scriptures tell us; that only mankind was created in God’s image:
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27)
But then when we look at the physical differences between apes and man, we see numerous ways with which to identify a human skeleton or an ape skeleton. Before we get into that, we need to remember the incredible variation we can see even within the same kind of ape. For example, the skeletal differences between male and female apes; between the young apes and adult apes. Then there’s the different kinds of apes, which again we see an incredible variation in size and skeletal structure. It’s the same with humans: We see incredible variations within the human kind as well. Differences in size and stature, differences in skeletal structure between men and women, variations caused by diet and environment can be quite extreme.
So let’s examine the differences between humans and apes – Size is one of the first ways: Apes of course generally tend to be much smaller than humans, and apes have small brains compared to their body sizes in comparison to humans. The jaw shapes also are quite different – the ape jaws making a distinct “U” shape, while the human jaws have a more parabolic shape.
One sneaky trick used by paleoartists is to reconstruct our alleged ape ancestor with human eyes. Here in this picture, you can see what ape eyes actually look like – they’re eyes are black. You can’t tell where they’re looking or anything. However, because we humans communicate with our eyes, by merely giving an ape human eyes, you can subtly, yet powerfully convey things like emotions, intelligence – things that are NOT THERE. This is common in artistic reconstructions and is strictly propaganda. They are trying to make apes look human, in order to cement evolutionary progression into the minds of people.
Another difference is what is commonly called the “shovel face.” Apes have a shovel face, yet if you feel right here, you can feel a bony ridge in your nose. This is absent from apes. As a result, I concocted a little test I call the occulus test – occulus is the latin word for glasses. If you try to put glasses onto an ape skull, they will slide right off their shovel face, because they are missing that bony nose ridge.
In 2010 Sediba was presented as one of the best examples of our ancient ancestor. There were multiple fossil skeletons found in a collapsed cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa, two of which were significantly complete – at least 40% of the skeleton was found of one female and one juvenile male. The female was missing its head while the male had a fairly complete head and several other bones from the skeleton. The present study also included an isolated shin bone.
Now when the skeletons were first reported on in 2010, even other evolutionists were skeptical of the significance of these skeletons. As far as most others were concerned, sediba was just another Australophithecus africanus – which we creationists would say is just an ape. So other evolutionists would say sediba is just another africanus skeleton, with variation.
Science magazine then ran another spread on sediba a year later, in April 2011. Lee Berger, whose son made the fossil discovery, had to deal with a few problems presented by this new sediba skeleton: Namely, Homo erectus is a very modern human fossil, but by evolutionary dating is OLDER than sediba. So in other words, sediba is our very ape-like ancestor which was supposed to have evolved into a human. But the very human fossil is OLDER than sediba – since you cannot be your grandfather’s father, we got a problem here.
So Berger went to great lengths in 2011 to remove that particular homo erectus fossil right out of the picture, thus allowing sediba to take the place of our oldest homo ancestor. A major factor in painting this picture was the “precise dating” of the fossil. Now we’ve discussed the dating methods at great length in previous shows, and the dating of skull 1470 was an especially interesting case which I covered in detail in Complete Creation part 21 which you can order through my online bookstore. Nevertheless, in spite of the demonstrably unreliable dating methods, we will take their dates and reporting and analyze it at face value.
The Uranium lead “dating” of flowstone that was related to sediba showed an incredibly high “scatter” on the graph – that is, the multiple dates arrived at on the same rock were radically different from each other. So when you test a rock and get a whole bunch of different dates, what date do you use?
They were so different that the authors even acknowledged this in the article, and normally such scattering would completely disqualify the dates! The rock would be deemed too contaminated to date. But, because they WANTED a date of under 2 million years old, they used their scattered dates and picked the best one at 1.977 million years old. How did they know that was the right date? Because the ancient magnetic signature in the flowstone was remarkably the same as the ancient magnetic signature in volcanic tuffs in Northwestern United states… on the other side of the world. How do we know the age of those volcanic rocks? Well by radiometric dating of those rocks of course! And so we start to see the circular reasoning: The Radiometric dates are confirmed by other radiometric dates. So how do you know that radiometric dating works at all then? Well, because radiometric dating confirms itself!
The dating of the fossils presented in 2011 was also met with a lot of understandable skepticism from other evolutionists.
But even the fossil itself is very clearly ape-like. Now, I don’t have a cast of the sediba skull, but even just looking at the photos, we can tell it is very much ape like. A small braincase, on par with the apes. It has an ape-like jaw shape and brow ridge. And if we run a simulated occulus test, we find that glasses slide right off his ape-like face. Oddly, Berger tried to argue that the bony nose crest was good evidence it was evolving into a human. Umm….WHAT bony nose crest???
The skeleton itself screams of being an ape – except for the hips, which of course are “reconstructed.” Why are they reconstructed? Because the crucial parts of the hips that would indicate whether or not it walked upright, are MISSING. So it is assumed that sediba walked upright. Why? For the same reasons it is thought that the other famous fossil that Berger is trying to replace, also walked upright: Lucy. We all remember Lucy’s hip – remember the heavy modifications that were carried out to make Lucy’s hip more like a humans? We are seeing a similar case with sediba. The researchers desperately want the creature to walk upright like a human – but the bones match those of an ape which cannot walk upright like a human. Conveniently though, the hip bones which are the most telling, are also missing the crucial pieces, and thus giving the researchers an “out”.
There is another reason why they so desperately want these creatures to have the ability to walk upright: The Laeotoli fossil footprints, which as we discussed briefly in last weeks show, and in more detail in previous shows, these footprints are clearly those of a completely modern humans – yet the footprints are dated as 3.7 million years old. So obviously Lucy and Sediba HAD to have walked upright! Cause after all – we know that there was NO humans walking around 3.7 million years ago, right? And there couldn’t have been humans walking around 70 million years ago with the dinosaurs, right? Or maybe there were, because evolution has been proven false again – with humans around since the beginning of time.
Coming back to Sediba, this most recent special edition of Science magazine had one paper devoted to how sediba walked. Even with the few fossils they do have, and even with a lot of liberties taken with the hips, the description of how sediba allegedly walked is…awkward to say the least! They describe sediba as taking a step, landing on the outside edge of its foot, then rolling in to the inside edge. Other evolutionary scholars have described this alleged walking as putting incredible stresses on the lower back, the knee, and any muscles crossing at either the knee or hip joints. Richmond, writing in a separate article in Science and not part of the sediba study, went so far as to suggest such walking would be an indicator of an injured animal!
The alleged walking certainly does NOT match that of the perfectly normal human footprints found at Laetoli. Perhaps it’s because sediba is simply an ape, and humans have always been humans – just like at the time they made the Laetoli footprints.
Sediba’s skeleton works wonderfully for what it was created for – swinging from the trees and knuckle walking, typical of an APE. Sediba is not evidence for ape to man evolution, in spite of all the hard effort that was put into trying to portray it as such.
Dr. Mitchell, Dr. Menton and Dr. Snelling published an excellent and thorough analysis of the sediba papers here, should you care to take a closer look at the evidence.
Thank you to all of you who have pitched in to help get our documentary “The Mystery of Noah’s Flood” underway – we’ve still got a long way to go and only two weeks to get there. We really believe this documentary is going to have a significant impact. And please don’t forget – even if you cannot chip in financially, there is a miriad of ways you can help out – like sharing the link with all your friends on twitter, facebook, google plus, youtube, your blog, or whatever social media you like. You can visit the website and check out the teaser video, and we have signed on composer Joshua Kattner to produce the musical score for the documentary. We raised the bar to challenge Joshua and sent him a montage of completely random footage, and told Josh to make a score for this video. You can hear what he came up with, as well as check out the project at mysteryofnoahsflood.com
We’ve said this so many times now I’m sure you’re getting bored of it. But…once again, we’ve got fossil footprints from dinosaurs caught in the act of swimming! When you read through the paper, you once again see the researchers trying to explain this away as a river rising, because you have both regular fossil dinosaur tracks, and then in the same layer, we have the claw marks from dinosaurs doing the dog paddle! This was no river bed, as these layers are huge – provincial in size. This was not a river bed, it was a tidal flat – powerful evidence of dinosaurs running around during the low tides of the onset of Noah’s flood, and then some which were swimming when the next TIDAL WAVE came in. STill more powerful evidence of Noah’s flood from the record of fossil dinosaur tracks.
Stick around – we’ll be right back after this short break.
This show sponsored in part by Canada’s first permanent Creation Museum, in the heart of Alberta’s dinosaur beds, the Big Valley Creation Science Museum. bvcsm.com
And by Genesis Park.com get your own beautiful hard covered copy of the Chronicles of Dinosauria, the history and mystery of dinosaurs and man. Now available from New Leaf Publishing.
What does the Bible say about aliens? Is there life on other planets? What can science tell us about the possibility of aliens? Ian Juby gives answers to these and many more questions in this fascinating and highly disturbing subject.
Looking analytically at the subject, complete with testimonies of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. The answers will probably surprise you. In this 1 and a half hour lecture, Ian shows that the alleged “aliens” are a problem, and that Jesus is the solution.
Order on line today at Ian’s bookstore.
[scary, dramatic music]
Wahoo! Mail for me?
[geiger counter detecting lots of radiation]
Hmmm…I wonder what it tastes like?
[drinking sounds]
[scary, dramatic music]
As predicted, we got a rash of nasty comments sent in from the anti-creationists regarding our special episode on the paluxy fossil human footprints. Not one of the nasty comments actually attempted to address the fossil evidence, which I actually showed you in the program. The skeptics didn’t even lift a finger to attempt it explain it, but instead simply hurled accusations of “liar” and “Fraud” towards Dr. Baugh and myself. Excellent, if the best response I got was clear ad-hominem attack against us, and not even a weak attempt to address the actual evidence, then it’s obvious the evidence hit its mark and the skeptics were answerless.
Interestingly, we also had people write in and ask for a response to Dr. John Morris’s article which just came out at the same time that our show did. Dr. Morris was an old time researcher of the Paluxy fossil human footprints, but had abandoned the tracks in the mid 80’s. He had been asked so many times by ICR supporters, that he felt compelled to write again what his stand on the tracks is, and why, and so he wrote a short article for the May issue of Acts and Facts.
Basically he is taking the stand for the moment that the tracks are too ambiguous. Now I have tremendous respect for Dr. Morris, and I certainly do not deny the points he made in his article. However, you’ll notice that even in his article, he acknowledged that his most recent information he is working with was from 1986. I showed you photographs of some of the human footprints which I had taken even within the past three years or so. In particular, the differential erosion that has occurred in the fossil human footprints since 1986, thus verifying that the human footprints are NOT dinosaur tracks. That’s only one of among the many other reasons we know the tracks are genuine, which we discussed in last week’s show. There has been many fossil human footprints uncovered since 1986, and many more details verifying the fossil human footprints as genuine since that time, and Dr. Morris is simply unaware of all of this information simply because he has been focused on other research. He is simply stating his stand based upon the information he was aware of, which he has even admitted is limited at best. I certainly don’t fault him for taking the stand that he has, based upon the information that he has.
Roger wrote in:
Dear Ian, One criticism often heard from evolutionists is that we as creationists
don’t come up with empirical evidence to support our view of a young earth. So far
we already have the helium-in-zircons argument for a young earth. Recent findings
have found collagen in supposedly 190 million year old dino-egg fossils and other
dino fossils. Now can’t we just simply establish the half-life of collagen and then
calculate the true age of these fossils? Or am I missing something? Kind regards,
Roger
Related to this question, Wolf wrote in on our facebook page:
Hey Ian…have you heard of Polonium Halo dating?? I understand that there is quite a story behind this method.
Thanks for writing in guys. First of all, Roger, you are correct, there has been multiple studies of decay rates of collagen fibers, DNA, etc… There’s two issues here though: 1) The decay rates are far too fast for those fossils with collagen fibers, because the fossils are alleged to be millions of years old. So the evolutionary researchers simply claim there must be some unknown way that this has been preserved. This is nonsense of course, and believed in completely blind faith. But the second part of this problem is that the decay rate studies are then calibrated using evolutionary assumptions. In other words, if DNA is extracted from a Neanderthal skeleton, the evolutionary scholars then use the evolutionary age assigned to that skeleton, and then calculate the decay rates of DNA and soft tissues using the deep time. Hopefully you see what I’m getting at here: It’s circular arguing again: We “know” this skeleton is say, 500,000 years old, and it has DNA, therefore we “know” that DNA decays very slowly over 500,000 years, therefore this proves that DNA decays very slowly. Actual studies for forensic research shows the actual decay rates are many magnitudes higher than the decay rates calculated from assumed evolutionary time, and those fossils cannot be millions of years old.
Roger also mentioned helium dating of zircon crystals. This was one fascinating dating technique developed by the RATE group as part of their 8 year study project. Basically, they took small crystals called zircons, which are found in the basement rocks of earth. Those rocks are supposed to be some 2 BILLION years old according to conventional evolutionary ages. We creationists would claim the rock is a mere 6,000 years old. There is Uranium in those crystals which breaks down, radioactively, into lead. For every Uranium atom that breaks down into lead, it produces 8 helium atoms. So, think of it like a miniature helium gas generator inside the crystal. The helium gas atom is soooo small though, that it leaks right through the crystal. The problem is though, there is a LOT of helium in these crystals, which indicates they’re very young, because the helium leaks out so quickly.
So, the RATE team made two predictions: They estimated how very, very, very slowly the helium would have to leak out if the crystal was 2 BILLION years old, in order to have all this helium gas still in it. They also predicted how quickly it would leak out if the crystal was only 6,000 years old. When you look at the two predictions on a graph, the young earth rate is 100,000 times FASTER than the old earth rate, so when they actually measured the leakage rate, and discovered that it was exactly bang on the 6,000 year old rate, they knew they were on to something. They just demonstrated that the earth is only 6,000 years old.
Wolf”s question about radiohalo dating works on a similar principle – in fact the researcher who did the most work on radiohalo dating, Dr. Robert Gentry, was the one who first noticed the large amounts of helium in zircon crystals. Dr. Gentry took samples of coal from three different levels in the rock record. When the coal was wood, it was buried and soaked up water, which happened to contain Uranium – a radioactive element. As the Uranium breaks down radioactively, it emits radiation. This radiation gets emmited in all directions, and causes radiation damage inside the wood, making a circle called a radiohalo. The wood was then squished and compressed into coal. When the wood was squished, it also squished the radiohalos. Now because the Uranium was still there and still radioactive, it continued making a new, round halo.
Dr. Gentry and his team measured the amount of radioactivity that had gone on to produce these halos and it was only a few thousand years. Here’s the kicker: These radiohalos were found in coal from the Triassic, Jurassic and Eocene “periods.” Those times are supposed to represent 37 to 245 million years ago. What Gentry showed was that not only were the 37 to 245 million years actually the exact same time, he showed all the coal was formed at the same time, only a FEW THOUSAND YEARS AGO. This was published in Science magazine in 1976. It has never been explained, nor refuted. He just demonstrated that the earth and the rock record does not represent millions of years, but it was all laid down in the past several thousand years. This is powerful evidence of a young earth and powerful refutation of deep time. If there is no deep time, then there is no evolution. If the earth is young, then the Bible is correct about the age of the earth and creation. That Bible tells us that this world has been corrupted and God will create a new heaven and a new earth – but none of us is worthy to enter in to that new heaven and new earth.
But that is why Jesus died on the cross for your sins and mine. He paid the price so that you could enter in to the new heaven and new earth, but you must give your life to Him, and live your life as if it were His life. Why don’t that today – simply pray and ask Him for forgiveness for your sins, and He will save you and give you eternal life.
Well we gotta call that a show for today – I’m your host, Ian Juby – thank you for watching, and I hope you’ll join us next Genesis week. Remember you can send in your comments, questions and feedback to us in a number of ways. Remember those words of warning from our Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ, who said “I am the way, the truth and the life – no man comes to the Father but through me.” See you next time.
We are a viewer supported program and need your support to keep this program on the air. Please pray for us, and if you wish to financially support the program, Canadians can make a tax-deductible donation to CORE Ottawa, Kanata North Post Office Box 72075, Ottawa, ON. Canada, K2K 2P4
While we cannot offer tax deductable receipts outside of Canada, donors wishing to financially support the program can do so on line at ianjuby.org/donations and thank you for your support.
[Music]
