The Clever Neanderthal

Recent “ground-breaking research” into Neanderthal’s hyoid bone has concluded that “the Neanderthals may well have spoken in languages not dissimilar to the ones we use today” (“Talking Neanderthals Challenge the Origins of Speech,” Science Daily, Mar. 2, 2014). An international team of scientists using 3D x-ray imaging led by Stephen Wroe of the University of New England compared a “60,000 year-old Neanderthal hyoid bone” with those of “modern humans” and concluded “that in terms of mechanical behaviour, the Neanderthal hyoid was basically indistinguishable from our own, strongly suggesting that this key part of the vocal tract was used in the same way.” This is yet another example of Darwinian scientists debunking Darwinism. For most of the 20th century, beginning with the discovery of a nearly complete skeleton in France, Neanderthal was presented as a “missing link,” an ape-man, a prominent icon of human evolution. In 1909, Marcellin Boule reported to the French Academy of Sciences that Neanderthal walked pigeon-toed like an ape with a bent-knee shuffling gait and “must have possessed only a rudimentary psychic nature ... only the most rudimentary articulate language.” Boule repeated this in his 1957 book Fossil Men (p. 251). In 1930, Frederick Blaschke modeled a Neanderthal family in a cave setting, depicting them as stooped, half-clothed, clutching bones, and with 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 more than half a century. It was not science; it was myth-making. Since the 1970s, Neanderthal has had a gradual transformation. It is now admitted that Neanderthals had a sophisticated culture (cared for the sick and elderly, buried their dead, practiced religion), made and employed a wide variety of tools, used adhesive, attached points to wooden spears with leather thongs, made bone needles, constructed walled habitations with hearths for cooking and warmth, made ornaments and figures out of bone, ivory, and polished wood, and even played flutes with the same 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. (For more about evolutionary ape men see An Unshakeable Faith: A Christian Apologetics Course, available from Way of Life in print and eBook editions.)

(Friday Church News Notes, March 14, 2014, www.wayoflife.org [email protected], 866-295-4143)

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