The following information is taken from the Washington Post, May 27, 1996:?The saga of Piltdown Man began when a lawyer and amateur geologist, Charles Dawson, met with Arthur Smith Woodward, head of the geology department of the British Museum. Dawson presented him with five bone fragments taken from a shallow pit at Piltdown in Sussex, England, suggesting they were those of a prehistoric ancestor of man. Woodward visited the site and found more fossils as well as an apelike jaw, complete with teeth. Woodward, an expert on fish rather than people or apes, reconstructed the pieces into a skull with the jaws and teeth of an ape but signs of a large brain, closer to that of man?s. Nothing like it had ever been seen: It was an ape-man, the ?dawn man,? Eoanthropus, the missing link in the Darwinian chain. In 1912 he announced the exciting and important discovery to the Geological Society.
Although this was exposed as a fraud by Waterston, Boule, Miller, Ramstrom and others, shortly after the supposed discovery, it was used as proof of evolution in school textbooks for some 40 years. (Science News Letter, 79 (1961):119;lW. Straus: "The Great Piltdown Hoax," in Science, 119 (1954):265-269.)
Those that hold to the evolution story have been looking in the fossil record for links between past and present species. (Not just ape to human, but between all major kinds ? this too is a very important point). It is not a case of ?a? missing link, but billions of missing links.
If evolution were true how could one tell in the fossil record just what specific animal had been found?
Answer: One could not!
Explanation: You couldn?t classify various animals (and all other organics) because they would all blur together. If all of the billions of transitions (links) were found you could tell a snake from a lizard, a jellyfish from a trout, etceteras.
How does the creationist view the fossil record?
Answer: Primarily as a graveyard attesting to the global flood.
The creationist is not looking for the missing links, because the links were never there in the first place. Since they were never there in the first place, they can?t be missing. The following quote of Charles Darwin is quite interesting:
"As by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed. Why do we not find them imbedded in the crust of the earth? Why is all nature not in confusion instead of being as we see them, well-defined species? Geological research does not yield the infinitely many fine gradations between past and present species required by the theory; and this is the most obvious of the many objections which may be argued against it. The explanation lies, however, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record." ("The Origin of Species," Vol. 2, 6th Ed., p. 49, R. West, 1914, New York New York)
This statement was made approximately 150 years ago and the ?links? are still missing.
Why are they still missing?
Answer: They were never there in the first place!
