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Ernst Haeckel, inventor of the iconic evolutionary embryo chart, was also the inventor of the dumb cave-dwelling ape-man, and it was based on nothing more scientific than his own fertile imagination. As we saw in “Lying Evolutionary Art - Haeckel’s Embryo Chart,” Haeckel was not one to draw back from inventing facts out of thin air.
Reasoning that the major difference between man and apes is the former’s ability to talk, and assuming that evolution is true and that man evolved from animals, Haeckel concluded that man’s predecessor was a dumb cave-dwelling ape-man. He even invented a scientific name for this mythical creature, Pithecanthropus alalus (“speechless ape-man”).
Haeckel had an artist, Gabriel Max, draw the imagined creature, and Max depicted an entire Pithecanthropus family. The pot-bellied father, ape-headed but having a hairy human body, stands upright and leans on a thick branch, looking as stupid as stupid can be. The poor dim-witted mother sits cross-legged nursing a dumb little ape-man baby. She has long-straggly hair but is less ape-looking than her “husband” except for her ape-like feet.
After Haeckel’s student and disciple Eugene Dubois discovered some fossils on the island of Java that he deemed the missing link, Haeckel had a life-size model made of the mythical Java Man and exhibited it in museums throughout Europe. It still stands in the basement of the Leiden Natural History Museum.
Java Man appeared in countless publications as evidence for evolution. It was hugely influential, but it was a huge deception.
“People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles I or George IV. No uniformed person, looking at its carefully lined face, would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh bone, of a few teeth, and fragment of a cranium” (G. K. Chesterton, quoted from Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe, p. 180).
In every detail, these pieces of evolutionary artwork represented a fabricated myth that was created in the attempt to discredit the Bible and prove evolution true.
Dubois’s fossil man consisted of an ape-like skullcap found in 1891 and a human thighbone discovered 50 feet away the next year. It was on this slim and dubious evidence (who could even say that the bones belong to the same individual!), after conferring with Haeckel, that Dubois announced the discovery of a creature that was “admirably suited to the role of missing link.”
For the next 30 years Dubois withheld the important information that he had also discovered two “modern” human skulls near the location of the Java Man fossils.
Dr. Duane Gish observes,
“To have revealed this fact at that time would have rendered it difficult, if not impossible, for his Java Man to have been accepted as a ‘missing link’” (Duane Gish, The Fossils Still Say No, p. 281).
In spite of the flimsy evidence and the lack of consensus about the nature of the discovery, the print media spread the news far and wide. Pictures were drawn depicting Dubois’s ape-man. The mythical Java Man appeared in museums. Based only on a skull cap, a couple of teeth, and a thigh bone (found, it will be recalled, in different locations and without any evidence that they belonged to the same individual), scientists even argued that the creature walked upright!
This, my friends, is deceit and there is nothing “scientific” about it.
Melvin Lubenow observes,
“It is just one of the many illustrations of the fact that evolutionists will use whatever ‘proof’ to sell evolution to the general public, regardless of its scientific authenticity” (Bones of Contention, p. 96).
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