Orce Man

A single skull was found near the village of Orce in Spain. Based on this one bone some over eager scientists again took artistic freedom and reconstructed an entire man from this single bone. (Duane Gish, "The Amazing Story of Creation" pg 82)

The name given to this "man" was "Orce man". Orce man was said to represent the oldest human fossil ever discovered in Europe. (Duane Gish, "The Amazing Story of Creation" pg 82)

Later, to the embarrassment of many the bone was correctly identified as being a skull cap belonging to a six month old donkey. (Duane Gish, "The Amazing Story of Creation" pg 82) So clearly, if man evolved from apes, then the Jackass must be the missing link!

Set back, and slightly embarrassed, those who believed in Evolution were not willing to give up, and the search continues for a missing link.

Would this search continue to embarrass those who believe in Evolution? Or would the search yield fossils that would support the Theory of Evolution?

Recently a "collar bone" was found that many believed belonged to a primitive ape-man. To many, this was the fossil evidence they had been looking for.

The fossil was found by Noel Boaz in the Libyan Desert at the Sahabi site in 1979. Boaz claimed this ape man lived 5 million years ago.

This date did not come from carbon dating, but was based on the estimated age of some fossil marine plankton at the site.

The Sahabi fossil was the oldest known fossil "ape man" in the world. Boaz claimed this ape man walked upright based on the backward "S" shape of the clavicle. This claim should have been enough to draw up some red flags, as the Sahabi clavicle did not even exhibit the "backwards "S" Boaz claimed it had. In fact the top portion of the clavicle was not even there. The actual shape of the bone was more of a backwards "C" shape, than an "S". Another fine example of a Scientist seeing what he wanted to see in a fossil.

But there's more. In 1983, Donald Johanson's "Institute for Human Origins" held its first Scientific conference. Both Johanson and Dr. Tim White (an Anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley) were to speak on hominid locomotion.

Johanson believed his 3 million year old "Lucy" skeleton was bipedal. But with Boaz's Sahabi ape man already walking upright 2 million years before Lucy, this made Boaz's find a bit of a problem. It would mean as far as human ancestors go, Boaz's find was more significant than Johanson's.

So Tim White and his students took a closer look at the so called "ape man collarbone". They determined that it was not a collarbone at all. But a rib.

Then they realized that this rib did not belong to an ape man at all. Upon further study they determined that it was not a human rib, nor was it the rib of a primate.

During the "Institute of Human Origins" conference, Tim White took to the podium and challenged the fossils credibility.

It was then that Dr. White revealed the fossils true identity to the public. The Sahabi ape man based entirely on one bone, was not a collar bone but actually the fossilized rib of a dolphin.

Oddly enough in the audience was Noel Boaz, the scientist who discovered the Sahabi "collarbone". Though he angrily defended his fossil, all could see that when a cast of the fossil was displayed next to a modern dolphin rib, the two were identical.

On April 28, 1983 Dr. Tim White wrote an article in "New Scientist" ( pg. 199) on the Sahabi fossil titled:
"Hominoid collarbone exposed as dolphins rib"

This has caused many to jokingly refer to this "missing link" as: "Flipper-pithecus boazi"

Referring to the Sahabi fossil Evolutionist Herbert Wray defends evolutionists acceptance of the fossil:

"While the changes do not fundamentally alter views of early humanity, they have sparked much discussion about anthropologists’ over-zealous pursuit of human ancestry." (Herbert, Wray, "Hominids Bear Up, Become Porpoiseful," Science News, vol. 123 (April 16, 1983), p. 246.(That their words may be used against them). )

"I don't want to pour too much scorn on paleontologists, but if you were to spend your life picking up bones and finding little fragments of head and little fragments of jaw, there’s a very strong desire there to exaggerate the importance of those fragments..." (Dr. Greg Kirby Senior Lecturer in Population Biology 1976 (RQB #69))

Dr. Tim White was about to debunk another ape-man "missing link". This time the bone in question was not properly curved. And a tiny opening in the bone (called the nutrient foramen) did not open the correct way.

Tim White was quoted as saying:

"The problem with a lot of Anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominoid (ape-man), that any scrap of bone becomes a hominoid bone." (Tim White Revised Quote Book, quote #70)

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A few other scattered bone fragments were also thought to belong to a primitive ape-man. A clavicle once thought to belong to an ape-man was later determined to be nothing more than an alligator femur and a horse toe.

Herbert Wray also had this to say:

"According to John Hopkins University anthropologist Alan Walker, there is a long tradition of misinterpreting various bones as human clavicles; in the past, he says, skilled anthropologists have erroneously described an alligator femur and the toe of a three-toed horse as clavicles…." (Herbert, Wray, "Hominids Bear Up, Become Porpoiseful," Science News, vol. 123 (April 16, 1983), p. 246 (ttwmbuat)

If you ask World famous Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould if there is ANY fossil Evidence supporting the Theory of Evolution here is what he would say:

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability even in our imagination to construct functional intermediates in so many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradulistic accounts of evolution" (quote from Stephen Jay Gould Professor of Geology and Paleontology Harvard University Paleobiology vol. 6(1)Jan 1980 p 127 RQB Quote #34)

Picture of rib comparison, and partial research source on the Sahabi fossil comes from the book: "Lucy's Child" by Donald Johanson pg. 196.

References:

(1) Research on "Orce man" also comes from Duane Gish's book: "The Amazing Story of Creation" pg 82

(3) Dr. Greg Kirby Senior Lecturer in Population Biology 1976 (RQB #69)

(4) Tim White Revised Quote Book, quote #70

(5)Herbert, Wray, "Hominids Bear Up, Become Porpoiseful," Science News, vol. 123 (April 16, 1983), p. 246.(That their words may be used against them).

(6) Herbert, Wray, "Hominids Bear Up, Become Porpoiseful," Science News, vol. 123 (April 16, 1983), p. 246 (ttwmbuat)

(7) quote from Stephen Jay Gould Professor of Geology and Paleontology Harvard University Paleobiology vol. 6(1)Jan 1980 p 127 RQB Quote #34

Journal of Human Evolution Vol. 33, No. 1, July 1, 1997 ISSN: 0047-2484 EISSN: 1095-8606 The Orce skull: anatomy of a mistake pp. 91-97 (doi:10.1006/jhev.1997.0121) Salvador Moyà-Solà, Meike Köhler

Journal of Human Evolution Vol. 33, No. 5, November 1, 1997 ISSN: 0047-2484 EISSN: 1095-8606 Fuente Nueva-3 (Orce, Granada, Spain) and the first human occupation of Europe pp. 611-620 (doi:10.1006/jhev.1997.0158) Bienvenido Martínez Navarro*, Alain Turq, Jorge Agustí Ballester, Oriol Oms§

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