But up until the time of Darwin’s death in 1882, no fossil evidence had been found for the supposed nonhuman or pre-human ancestors of man. Fossilized human skulls were found in Belgium in 1829 and Gibraltar in 1848 and later associated with the first recognized Neanderthal man fossils (discussed in the next chapter) found in Germany in 1856. Darwin’s Lack of Fossil Evidence for Human Evolutionĭarwin’s “evidence” in The Descent of Man for the common ancestry of man and apes consisted primarily of comparative anatomical, embryological, and behavioral arguments, rather than fossil evidence. Darwin confidently claimed that all the evidence pointed to man sharing common ancestry with the apes. In a letter to the evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin explained that while he considered the evolution of man to be “the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist” he would not discuss it in his book because the whole subject is “so surrounded by prejudices.” 1 Darwin waited 12 years for the leaven of his Origin of Species to do its work before he published The Descent of Man (1871) in which he finally made public his own prejudices about human origins. For this reason, when Darwin wrote his Origin of Species in 1859, he chose not to include his views on human evolution. Even when much of the Church had come to accommodate evolution in the late 1800s, there continued to be widespread resistance to the idea of the evolution of man from animals. Of all of the claims of biological evolution, perhaps none is more repugnant to conservative Christians than the bestial origin of man. This chapter is from the book Searching for Adam, available in our online store.
0 kommentar(er)
