ne representation of the legacy of Darwinism comes from an excellent popular book put out by Reader's Digest. It's called The Last Two Million Years. I can thoroughly recommend it.

But I have some serious problems with this conventional approach to "evolution." First, the book itself: There are 488 pages in this book. But on page 28 what we find is a stone wall excavated at Jericho, dated to 8000 years ago. The text really begins on page 10, and on page 11 it says: "Since Darwin shocked the world with his theory that men and apes have a common ancestor, experts have pieced together the likely pattern...."

So the book has:

18 pages on the first 1,990,000 years = 0.5%

461 pages about the last 10,000 years = 99.5%

This shows how little we understand human life on earth more than 10,000 years ago. The book gives us an opening illustration of the evolutionary theory as applied to humans.

Here are the first four of the eight "ancestors" of present day mankind according to this book:

From left to right, these are listed as:

Common Ancestor

Ramapithecus

Australopithecus

1470 Man

What is said to be the 'Common Ancestor,' about 40 million years ago or before present (40 MYBP) is described this way:

a forest dwelling primate moving on all fours, the ancestor from which modern apes and man both descend. But no traces of such a creature have yet been found.

If that's the case, why is it here? So let's eliminate this purely hypothetical creature.

Next we are said to be at 14 million years ago, and we meet an artist's impression of Ramapithecus. Believe it or not, this type of reconstruction was based on the merest bits and pieces of old bone and two pieces of upper jaw bone. Here's what they look like:

There's more to it than that. These fragments weren't found like that. They were put together in that way to resemble a modern human jaw bone which is like this:

But since then, a whole Ramapithecus lower jaw bone has been found, and it looks like this:

And here's a modern chimpanzee's lower jaw:

Although all three examples have sixteen teeth it seems fairly obvious that Ramapithecus was some kind of ape, from the only hard evidence we have. So let's drop Ramapithecus, and see what we have next.

Now we are down to 5 million years ago and we are looking at another "artist's impression", this time of Australopithecus. He's the third from the left in our first (four part) image. This is still conjectural. All we have left are pieces of bone. It "probably" used tools we're told. We have no evidence for that either, but if we are to have an evolutionary theory, it makes it flow better. The creature is described as a

man-like ape , whose brain was no larger than that of a modern ape.

What scholars have apparently done is take a number of different looking finds in different places over a period of from about 4 million years ago down to about 1 million years ago and lump them all together as 'Australopithecines'. The 'species' in this 'genus' are generally said to be:

Million years before present (MYBP):

Australopithecus	Afarensis	3.6-3
A	Africanus	2.5-3
A	Africanus/Habilis	2.5-3
A	Boisei	1.8
A	Robustus	1.5-2

They have all apparently been extinct a million years or more now. Here's one of them: A Boisei (or zinjanthropus):

It has a high ridge or crest on top of the skull. That's what gorillas have today. The reason is said to be because they have massive jaws, used for chewing vast amounts of plant matter. The jaws are hooked by muscles on to the ridge.

So let's drop A Boisei as a gorilla type of ape (no man has a ridge like that), and look at A. Robustus:

This is another specimen with a gorilla-type head ridge. So I suggest we discard it. That eliminates the two younger extinct 'species'. Now we're left with

A. africanus 2.5-3 MYBP

A. africanus/habilis 2.5-3 MYBP

A. afarensis 3-3.6 MYBP

the older 'species'.

Africanus is calculated to have a cranial brain case capacity of about 425-480 ccs (cubic centimetres). Afarensis had a cranial capacity of about 400 ccs, and stood about 4 ft. tall -- if it stood at all. The skull formations of all the Australopithecenes (A) are very ape-like, and the cranial capacity is very small. The calculated range is 420 - 485 ccs.

If we compare that with living apes: chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, this is what we get:

Cranial capacities (cubic cm.) of living Hominoides (Ashton and Spence 1958,

Martin and Saller 1959):

SAMPLE	HOW MANY	MEAN CCs
Pan Troglodytes (Chimps.)
Male	33	410
Female	78	380
Pooled	111	390
Pongo Pygmaeus (Orang.)
Male	30	415
Female	16	370
Pooled	48	400
Gorilla Gorilla
Male	63	550
Female	50	460
Pooled	113	510
Homo Sapiens (Humans)
Male		1317-1609
Female		1181-1445

For Homo Sapiens the 'Range of Means' is said to have been for 37 populations.