The little people

Last October it happened again — another spectacular fossil find of a long-gone race of people… or should that be “almost people”? The discovery on the island of Flores in Indonesia of remains of a Lilliputian human, nicknamed Hobbit, who stood barely a meter tall and had a skull the size of a grapefruit, electrified the community of hominid lovers and inspired National Geographic to devote an entire article to it in the April, 2005, edition. Some of the remains are dated at 13,000 years old, making them contemporaneous with us, assuming such an antiquity for modern man. Kate Wong describes the significance of the find: “Homo sapiens was supposed to have had the planet to itself for the past 25 millennia, free from the company of other humans following the apparent demise of the Neandertals in Europe and Homo erectus in Asia” (“The Littlest Human”, Scientific American, February, 2005). So we were not alone.

The find has, of course, been used by those with a mindset permeated by evolutionary concepts as evidence of the evolution of man. “See, we told you so”, they say. “The only explanation for the existence of different kinds of “humans” that makes sense is that one kind evolved from the other”. Who says?

Few realize that the united front presented by evolutionists on the origins and evolution of man papers over both deep disputes among experts and serious conflicts between facts and theories.

Though most students of human evolution are convinced that our race sprang from Australopithecus Lucy and her ilk in Africa, spreading thence through the Jordan Valley into the Middle East and radiating out to the rest of the world, disquiet is felt by many. Some Australian scientists have thrown a fox among the hens by presenting evidence that Lucy is the ancestor not only of man, but of chimpanzees. In other words, she was not nearly as human as often portrayed. Other scientists question the sacred cow of Africa as the birthplace of man, and put it in Asia (see Scientific American, August, 2003). In short, confusion reigns. If evolutionary theory were correct, everything should fit neatly and simply into place.

For those who believe that Genesis describes creation events over the course of million years, evidence that human-like creatures walked, or whatever, around our fair planet before Adam and Eve were created from dirt some millennia ago, or that Adam and Eve gave rise to races whose genes have vanished for some reason, causes no embarrassment. Their existence, like that of dinosaurs, trilobites, huge dragonflies and mammal-like reptiles, provides yet more proof of the infinite ingenuity of the biblical God, the Holy One of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ. Let's not put constraints in our thinking on what God might or might not have done. Let the evidence speak for itself.