Researchers studying the tools used by “Neanderthals” have discovered that they started fires using flint. Archaeologist Andrew Sorensen, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, said, “I recognized this type of wear from my earlier experimental work. Being able to make their own fire gives the Neanderthals much more flexibility in their lives. It’s a skill we suspected, but didn't know for sure they possessed” (“Neanderthals could start their own fires,” UPI, Jul. 19, 2018). This is the latest finding debunking former Darwinist claims that Neanderthal was a grunting cave man. In 1907, Ernst Haeckel, Charles Darwin’s chief disciple in Germany, described Neanderthal as a pre-human and placed him between Pithecanthropus (Java man) and Homo Australis, which he called “the lowest race of recent man.” Prominent French paleontologist Marcellin Boule believed that Neanderthal was a branch of ape-men that became extinct without giving rise to “modern humans.” He believed that Neanderthal walked stooped over, with a bent-knee shuffling gait, and had “only the most rudimentary articulate language” (Fossil Men, 1957, p. 251). In 1930, Frederick Blaschke modeled a Neanderthal family in a cave setting, based on Boule’s interpretation. They were stooped, half-clothed, clutching bones, and had very stupid expressions. This was set up as a permanent display in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and was copied in countless textbooks, encyclopedias, journals, popular magazines and newspapers, and museums. This is the view that prevailed for nearly half a century, but it was not science; it was myth-making based on presumption and speculation. Since the 1960s, Neanderthal has gradually been humanized. Neanderthal has even been reclassified as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a type of “modern man.” It is now admitted that Neanderthals had a sophisticated culture (cared for the sick and elderly, buried their dead, practiced religion), made medicine, used a wide variety of tools, used adhesive, made bone awls or needles, built walled habitations, made hearths for cooking and warmth, made ornaments and figures out of bone, teeth, ivory, and polished wood, and played flutes with the seven-note musical system found in western music (Marvin Lubenow, Bones of Contention, pp. 239-244, 254-257). Have evolutionists apologized for the error they perpetrated on the world? Not in the least. In fact, it was two full decades before the Chicago Field Museum corrected its influential but grossly misleading display. As Melvin Lubenow says in Bones of Contention, “It was not until the mid-1970s that the Field Museum removed their old display of the apish Neanderthals and replaced them with the tall, erect Neanderthals that are there today. What did they do with the old display? Did they throw it on the trash heap where it belonged? No. They moved the old display to the second floor and placed it right next to the huge Apatosaurus dinosaur skeleton where more people than ever--especially children--would see it. They labeled it ‘An alternative view of Neanderthal.’ It was not an alternate view. It was a wrong view. So much for the self-correcting mechanism in science as far as Neanderthal is concerned.” Friday Church News Notes, August 31, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, [email protected], 866-295-4143 Comments are closed.
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