I'm not confused, I realize certain traits emerge seemingly at random, their cyclical not adaptive. Darwin's famous finches are not evolving, certain traits are cyclical not adaptive. Adaptive evolution happens, my favorite examples are in the arctic but Australia has some very unique species. They are only beginning to understand how this happens but they are gaining insights. The
Crispr gene for instance.
The fossil evidence is manipulated and contrived. Perhaps the longest running demonstration was easily the Piltdown fraud. The Piltdown Hoax was the flagship transitional of Darwinism for nearly half a century and it was a hoax. A skull taken from a mass grave site used during the Black Plague matched up with an orangutan jawbone. Even Louis Leakey, the famous paleontologist, had said that jaw didn’t belong with that skull so people knew, long before it was exposed, that Piltdown was contrived.
Leakey mentions the Piltdown skull in his book 'Adam's Ancestors':
'If the lower jaw really belongs to the same individual as the skull, then the Piltdown man is unique in all humanity. . . It is tempting to argue that the skull, on the one hand, and the jaw, on the other, do not belong to the same creature. Indeed a number of anatomists maintain that the skull and jaw cannot belong to the same individual and they see in the jaw and canine tooth evidence of a contemporary anthropoid ape
He referred to the whole affair as an enigma: In
By the Evidence he says 'I admit . . . that I was foolish enough never to dream, even for a moment, that the true explanation lay in a deliberate forgery.' (
Leakey and Piltdown)
The problem was that there was nothing to replace it as a transitional from ape to man. Concurrent with the prominence of the Piltdown fossil Raymond Dart had reported on the skull of an ape that had filled with lime creating an endocast or a model of what the brain would have looked like. Everyone considered it a chimpanzee child since it’s cranial capacity was just over 400cc but with the demise of Piltdown, a new icon was needed in the Darwinian theater of the mind. Raymond Dart suggests to Louis Leakey that a small brained human ancestor might have been responsible for some of the supposed tools the Leaky family was finding in Africa. The myth of the stone age ape man was born.
The Scottish anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith had built his long and distinguished career on the Piltdown fossil. When it was exposed it sent Darwinians scrambling, Arthur Keith had always rejected the Taung Child (Raymond Dart’s discovery) a chimpanzee child. Rightfully so since it’s small even for a modern chimpanzee. Keith would eventually apologized to Dart and Leakey would take his suggested name for the stone age ape man, Homo habilis, but there was a very real problem. The skull was too small to be considered a human ancestor, this impasse became known as the Cerebral Rubicon and Leakey’s solution was to simply ignore the cranial capacity.
"Sir Arthur Keith, one of the leading proponents of Piltdown Man, was particularly instrumental in shaping Louis's thinking. "Sir Arthur Keith was very much Louis's father in science" noted Frida. Brilliant, yet modest and unassuming, Keith was regarded at the time of Piltdown's discovery as England's most eminent anatomist and an authority on human ancestry...a one man court of appeal for physical anthropologists from around the world....and his opinion that assured Piltdown a place on every drawing of humankinds family tree." (Ancestral Passions, Virginia Morell)
Ever notice that there are no Chimpanzee ancestors in the fossil record? That’s because every time a gracial (smooth) skull, that is dug up in Asian or Africa they are automatically one of our ancestors.
Australopithecus afarensis: AL 288-1
Australopithecus africanus: Taung 1
Lucy a Chimpanzee
Taung Skull not Human-like 26 August 2014
These two are the only Hominid fossils I've seen that are really being passed of as transitional. They both have chimpanzee size brains, with all the features one would expect of a knuckle dragging, tree dwelling ape. What is far more important then finding something indicating a transitional fossil, which they have failed to do, is to understand what the basis of the three-fold of the human brain from that of apes
