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Fossil Thoughts

Entry 564, on 2007-06-29 at 17:52:37 (Rating 4, Religion)

Occasionally I log in to religion discussion sites and engage in a bit of entertainment by arguing with the religious people there. Most recently I remarked on a movie which claimed that "if humans evolved from monkeys where are all the transitional fossils?". Whenever I see or hear a comment of such stupendous ignorance I inwardly groan but launch into the usual spiel about how no one claims humans evolved from monkeys and how there are numerous intermediate fossils between modern humans and our ape-like ancestor.

But why do people continually repeat something which has been shown to be wrong years ago? I mean, surely everyone by now knows that no scientist ever claimed that humans evolved from monkeys. It would be like someone saying the Earth is flat. OK, we've moved past that question, let's move on. Of course, if you are supporting a side of the debate which has no real evidence supporting it I suppose engaging in frivolous rhetoric is about all that is left for you, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

So I was challenged to show one fossil which represented an evolutionary step between our ancestors and modern humans and I went searching the Internet. There is a very good list of human transitional fossils at Wikipedia (search for "List of Hominina Fossils") which lists and illustrates not one but over 100 intermediate fossil human forms with ages ranging from 300 to 300 million years!

I haven't heard back from the person I sent the link to, but I'm sure he'll have some excuse. Its usually something like: you can't prove these are human ancestors, they are just deformed humans or apes, they are fakes, etc. Yeah sure thing. The only thing more fossilised than the fossils is these people's thought processes!

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