HUMAN ORIGINS: CAN WE HANDLE THE TRUTH?
In Part One of this essay, I explained the Interventionist perspective regarding the origin of life on Earth. I showed how the great preponderance of evidence indicates life came here and did not develop here, as we have been brainwashed to believe by generations of scientists struggling to keep the creation myths of religion out of classrooms. Personally, I applaud and support all efforts to keep the most specious aspects of Creationism safely bottled up in houses of worship, where they belong. However, I have even more disdain for scientists who allow themselves to be crushed to cowardly pulp by nothing more debilitating than "peer pressure". Because both groups are so driven by their collective fears and dogma, neither has a working grip on reality. That becomes increasingly clear as research continues, which I believe was made evident in Part One. Now let’s try to do the same in Part Two, on human origins.

If anything riles Creationists and Darwinists alike, it’s the suggestion they might be wrong about how we humans have come to dominate our planet so thoroughly. Both sides can tolerate substantial criticisms regarding the wide array of subjects under their purviews, including the kind of critique I gave the origins of life in Part One. However, they have no toleration for challenges to their shared hegemony over the beginnings of us all. Dare that and you’ll find yourself in a serious fight. Thus, those of us who support the Interventionist interpretation come under attack from both sides, not to mention the other clique at the party, the educated subgroup of Creationists known as Intelligent Designers (a brilliant choice of name that enforces their bottom-line concept of a "grand designer", while simultaneously implying they are smarter than anyone who would oppose them).

All sides seem to agree that humans are "special". Creationists and Intelligent Designers consider it virtually self-evident that humans originated by some kind of divine fiat. Creationists believe the instigator is a universal "godhead" figure, which IDers water down to a more palatable "entity or system" capable of generating order out of chaos, life out of the inanimate. Even Darwinists will concede that many of our physical, emotional and intellectual traits set us far apart from the primate ancestors they believe preceded us in the biological process of evolution. However, despite our high degree of "specialness", Darwinists fervently promote the dogma that even the most fanciful distinctions separating us from our supposed ancestors can be explained entirely by "natural means".

As with the early life-forms discussed in Part One, there’s nothing natural about it.

THE EARLIEST PRIMATES
Darwinists believe the human saga begins with mouse-sized mammals called insectivores (similar to modern tree shrews) that scurried around under the feet of large dinosaurs, trying to avoid becoming food for smaller species. Then comes the Cretaceous extinction event of 65 million years ago that took out the dinosaurs and paved the way for those tiny insectivores to evolve over the next few million years into the earliest primates, the prosimians (literally pre-simians, pre-monkeys) of the early Palaeocene epoch, which lasts until 55 million years ago.

As with nearly all such aspects of Darwinist dogma, this is pure speculation. There is, in fact, no clear indication of a transitional insectivore-to-prosimian species at any point in the process. If any such transitional species had ever been found, then countless more would be known and I wouldn’t be writing this essay. Darwinian evolution would be proved beyond doubt, and that would be the end of it.

To read the fossil record literally is to discover the legitimacy of punctuated equilibrium (discussed in Part One) as a plausible explanation. "Punk eek", as detractors call it, points out that in the fossil record life-forms do seem simply to appear on Earth, most often after extinction events but not always. Both the supposed proto-primates and flowering plants appear during the period preceding the Cretaceous extinction. They come when they come, so the relatively sudden post-extinction appearance of the earliest primates, the prosimians (lemurs, lorises, tarsiers), is one of many sudden manifestations.

In terms of human origins, it begs this question: did proto-primates actually evolve into prosimians, into monkeys, into apes, into humans? Or did prosimians appear, monkeys appear, apes appear, and humans appear? Or, in our "special" case, were we created?

However it happened, there is a pattern. The earliest prosimians are found in the fossil record after the Mesozoic/Cenozoic boundary at 65 million years ago. It is assumed their ancestors will someday be found as one of countless "missing links" needed to make an airtight case for Darwinian evolution. Prosimians dominate through the Palaeocene and the Eocene, lasting from 65 to 35 million years ago. (There won’t be a test on terms or dates, so don’t worry about memorizing them; just try to keep the time-flow in mind.) At 35 million years ago, the Oligocene epoch begins and the first monkeys come with it.

Again, Science assumes that monkeys evolved from prosimians, even though evidence of that transition is nowhere in sight. In fact, there is strong evidence pointing in the other direction, toward the dreaded stasis of punctuated equilibrium. The lemurs, lorises and tarsiers of today are essentially just as they were 50 million years ago. Some species have gone extinct while others have modified into new forms, but lemurs and lorises still have wet noses and tarsiers still have dry, which seems always to have been the case. That’s why tarsiers are assumed to be responsible for spinning off monkeys and all the rest.

Monkeys start appearing at 35 million years ago, looking vastly different from prosimians. There are certain physiological links, to be sure, such as grasping hands and feet to permit easy movement through trees. However, prosimians cling and jump to move around, while monkeys favor brachiating--swinging along by their arms. Also, prosimians live far more by their sense of smell than do monkeys. This list goes on.

The reason they’re linked in an evolutionary flowchart is because they seem close enough in enough ways to make the linkage stick. Simple as that. Science focuses on the similarities and tries hard to ignore their gaping discrepancies, assuming--as always--that there is plenty of time for evolution to do its magic and generate those inexplicable differences.

For the next 10 million years the larger, stronger, more "advanced" monkeys compete with prosimians for arboreal resources, quickly gaining the upper hand over their "ancestors" and driving several of them to extinction.

Then, at around 25 million years ago, the Miocene epoch brings the first apes into the fossil record, as suddenly and inexplicably as all other primates appear. Again, Science insists they evolved from monkeys, but the evidence to support that claim is as specious as the prosimian-monkey link. The transitional bones needed to support it are simply not in the fossil record.

If this isn’t a distinct pattern of punctuated equilibrium, then what is?

THE PUZZLING MIOCENE
In terms of primate evolution, the Miocene makes little sense. By 25 million years ago, when it begins, prosimians have been around for about 30 million years and monkeys for 10 million years. Yet in the Miocene’s ample fossil record, prosimians and monkeys are rare, while the new arrivals, the apes, are all over the place.

The Miocene epoch stretches from 25 million to 5.0 million years ago. (These are approximations quoted differently in various sources; I round off to the easiest numbers to keep track of.) During those 20 million years, the apes flourish. They produce two-dozen different genera (types), and many have more than one species within the genus. Those apes come in the same range of sizes they exhibit today, from smallish gibbon-like creatures, to mid-range chimp-sized ones, to large gorilla-sized ones, to super-sized Gigantopithecus, known only by many teeth and a few mandibles (jawbones) from India and China.

That’s another interesting thing about Miocene apes: their fossils are found literally everywhere in the Old World--Africa, Europe, Asia. Most of them are known by the durable teeth and jaws that define Gigantopithecus, while many others supply enough post-cranial (below the head) bones to grant a reasonably clear image of them. They present an interesting mix of anatomical features. Actually, "confusing" is more like it. They are clearly different from monkeys in that they have no tails, just like modern apes. However, their arms tend to be more like monkey arms--the same length as their legs. Modern ape arms are significantly longer than their legs so they can "walk" comfortably on their front knuckles. More than any other reason, this is why we hear so little from anthropologists about Miocene apes. Their arms don’t make sense as the forelimbs of an ancestral quadruped. Miocene arms fit better with something else.

This is not to say, of course, that no ape arms in the Miocene fossil record are longer than legs. That’s nowhere near to being determined because many species--like Gigantopithecus--have yet to provide their arm bones. However, since we do have some tailless, ape-like bodies with monkey-like arms and hands, we have to consider how such a hybrid would move around. Swing through trees by its arms, like a monkey? Not likely. Monkey arms are designed to carry a monkey’s slight body. An ape’s body needs to be brachiated and leveraged by an ape’s much longer, stouter, stronger arms. So how about walking?

From a physiological standpoint, an ape-like body with monkey-like arms and hands does not move as easily or comfortably as a quadruped (down on all fours). It simply can’t happen. In fact, there’s really only one posture that lends itself to the carriage of such a monkey-ape hybrid, and that’s upright. Go to a zoo and watch how much easier monkeys--tails and all--stand upright compared to apes. Any monkey can move with grace on its hind legs. In comparison, apes are blundering, top-heavy oafs. Thus, it seems likely that at least some of the hybrid monkey-apes of the Miocene probably had to carry themselves upright, in opposition to the other apes of the era bearing the longer, thicker arms of gibbons, orang-utans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Remember, we’re talking about two dozen genera and around 50 species.

WALKING THE WALK
Walking is critical to an understanding of human origins because Darwinists feel it is the factor that set our ancestors on the road to becoming us. The theory is that around 5.0 to 10 million years ago, when the heavy forests blanketing Africa began shrinking, some forest-dwelling quadrupedal Miocene apes still living then (there had been the inevitable extinctions and speciations during the preceding 15 to 20 million years) began to forage on the newly forming savannas. Though terribly ill-equipped to undertake such a journey (more about that later), several ape species supposedly took the risk by learning to stand upright to see out over the savanna grasses to scout for predators. Then--after millennia of holding that position for extended periods--they adopted constant upright posture. In doing so, one of those daring, unknown species took the real "giant step for mankind".

No one can yet say which of the early upright-walking "pre-humans" went on to become us, because the physiological gaps between us and them are simply enormous. In fact, physically, the only significant thing we have in common with those early ancestors is upright posture. But even that reveals noticeable divergence.

Incredibly, we have the walking trail of at least two early pre-humans at 3.5 million years ago. Found in Laetoli, Tanzania, these tracks were laid down on a volcanic ash fall that was then covered by another ash fall and sealed until their discovery by Mary Leakey’s team in 1978. Photos of that trail are common and can be accessed in any basic anthropology textbook or on the Internet. What is not commonly portrayed, however, is that detailed analysis of the pressure points along the surface of those prints indicates something that would be expected: they didn’t walk like us. After all, 3.5 million years is a long time, and from a Darwinist standpoint it’s logical to assume extensive evolution would occur. But whether it was evolution or not, our methods of locomotion are uniquely different.

Humans have a distinctive carriage that starts with a heel strike necessitated by our ankles placed well behind the midpoint of our feet. After the heel strike, our forward momentum is swung to the left or right, out to the edges of our feet to avoid our arches (in normal feet, of course). Once past the arch, there’s a sharp swing of the momentum through the ball of the foot from outside all the way to the inside, where momentum is gathered and regenerated in the powerful thrust of the big toe, with the four small toes drawing themselves up to act as balancers. (Watch your own bare feet when you take a step and you’ll see those final "thrust-off" stages in action.)

The pre-humans at Laetoli walked with marked differences. Instead of having a heavy heel-strike leading the way, their ankle was positioned at the centre balance point of the foot, allowing it to come down virtually flat with an almost equal distribution of weight and momentum between the heel and the ball area. Instead of a crazy momentum swing out and around the arch, their arches were much smaller and the line of momentum traveled nearly straight along the midline of the entire foot. That made for a much more stable platform for planting the foot and toeing off into the next step, which was done by generating thrust with the entire ball area rather than with just the big toe. When you get right down to it, the Laetoli stride was a superior technique to the one we utilize now.

Slow-motion studies of humans walking show that we do virtually everything "wrong". Our "heel-strike, toe-off" causes a discombobulation that courses up our entire body. We are forced to lock our knees to handle the torque as our momentum swings out and around our arches. Because of that suspended moment of torque absorption, we basically have to fall forward with each step, which is absorbed by our hip joints. Meanwhile, balance is assisted by swinging our arms. Because of those factors, we don’t walk with anything approaching optimum efficiency, and the stresses created in us work, over time, to deteriorate our joints and eventually cripple us. In short, we could use a re-design.

What we actually need to do is to walk more like the pre-humans at Laetoli. In order to secure that heel-and-toe plant with each step, we’d have to modify our stride so our knees weren’t locked and we weren’t throwing ourselves forward through our hip joints. We’d have to keep our knees in a state of continual flexion, however slight, absorbing all the stress of walking in our thighs and buttocks, which both are designed to accommodate. This would provide us with a "gliding" kind of stride that might look unusual (it would resemble the classic Groucho Marx bent-kneed comedic walk), but would actually be much less stressful, much less tiring and incredibly more efficient physiologically.

Based on the evidence of the Laetoli tracks, this is exactly how they walked.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
When Darwinists present reconstructions of so-called "pre-humans", invariably they look nothing like humans.

Lucy and her Australopithecus relatives were little more than upright-walking chimpanzees. The robust australopithecines were bipedal gorillas. The genus Homo (habilis, erectus, Neanderthals and other debatable species) was a distinct upgrade, but still nowhere near the ballpark of humanity. Only when the Cro-Magnons appear, as suddenly and inexplicably as everything else, at around 120,000 years ago in the fossil record, do we see beings that are unmistakably human.

The Laetoli walkers lived 3.5 million years ago. Lucy lived around 3.2 million years ago. Recent discoveries show signs of pushing bipedal locomotion back as far as 6.0 million years ago. So let’s assume for the sake of discussion that some primates were upright at no less than 4.0 million years ago.

Thus, from approximately 4.0 million years ago all the way to the appearance of Cro-Magnons some time before 120,000 years ago (95% of the journey), all pre-human fossils reveal distinctly non-human characteristics. They have thick, robust bones--much thicker and more robust than ours. Such thick bones are necessary to support the stress generated by extraordinarily powerful muscles, far more powerful than ours. Their arms are longer than ours, especially from shoulder to elbow. Their arms are also roughly the same length as their legs, à la Miocene apes. And in every aspect that can be quantified--every one!--their skulls are much more ape-like than human-like. Those differences hold from australopithecine bones to the bones of Neanderthals--which means that something quite dramatic happened to produce the Cro-Magnons, and it wasn’t the result of an extinction event. It was something else.

The chasm between Cro-Magnons (us) and everything else that comes before them is so incredibly wide and deep that there is no way legitimately to connect the two, apart from linking their bipedal locomotion. All of the so-called "pre-humans" are much more like upright-walking chimps or upright-walking gorillas than they are incipient humans. Darwinists argue that this is why they are called pre-humans, because they are so clearly not human.

But another interpretation can be put on the fossil record--one that fairly and impartially judges the facts as they exist, without the "spin" required by Darwinist dogma. That spin says that the gaping physiological chasm between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons can be plausibly explained with yet another "missing link".

LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD
Darwinists use the missing link to negate the fact that Cro-Magnons appear out of nowhere, looking nothing like anything that has come before. What they fail to mention is that dozens of such links would be needed to show any kind of plausible transition from any pre-human to Cro-Magnons. It clearly didn’t happen--and since they’re experts about such things, they know it didn’t happen. However, to acknowledge that would play right into the desperate hands of Creationists and Intelligent Designers, not to mention give strong support to Interventionists like me. They face a very big rock or a very hard place.

Let’s accept for the moment that in Darwinian terms there is no way to account for the sudden appearance of Cro-Magnons (humans) on planet Earth. If that is true, then what about the so-called "pre-humans"? What are they the ancestors of? Their bones litter the fossil record looking very unlike humans, yet they clearly walk upright for at least 4.0 million years, and new finds threaten to push that back to 6.0 million years. Even more likely is that among the 50 or more species of Miocene apes, at least a few are walking upright as far back as 10 to 15 million years ago. If we accept that likelihood, we finally make sense of the deep past while beginning for the first time to see ourselves clearly.

We can be sure that at least four of the 50 Miocene apes were on their way to becoming modern quadrupeds, because their descendants live among us today. Equally certain is that others of those 50 walked out of the Miocene on two legs. Technically these are called hominoids, which are human-like beings that are clearly not human. In fact, every bipedal fossil preceding Cro-Magnon is considered a hominoid--a term that sounds distinctly outside the human lineage. So Darwinists have replaced it in common usage with the much less specific "pre-human", which not so subtly brainwashes us all into believing there is no doubt about that connection. And that brainwashing works.

We are further brainwashed to believe there are no bipedal apes alive in the world today, despite hundreds of sightings and/or encounters with such bipedal apes every year on every continent except Antarctica. Darwinists brainwash us to ignore such reports by showering them with ridicule. They call such creatures "impossible", and hope the weight of their credentials can hold reality at bay long enough for them to figure out what to do about the public relations catastrophe they will face when the first hominoid is brought onto the world stage--dead or alive. That will be the darkest day in Darwinist history, because their long charade will be officially over. The truth will finally be undeniable. Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman and several relatives are absolutely real.

IF THE SHOE FITS
I’m not going to waste time and space here going over the mountain of evidence that is available in support of hominoid reality. I cover it extensively in the third part of my book, Everything You Know Is Wrong, and there are many other books that cover one or more aspects of the subject. If you care to inform yourself about the reality of hominoids, you won’t have any trouble doing so. And the evidence is solid enough to hold up in any court in the world, except the court of public opinion manipulated by terrified Darwinists. However, I will go over a few points that bear directly on the question of human origins.

Let’s grant a fairly obvious assumption: that the thousands of ordinary people who have described hominoid sightings and encounters over the past few hundred years (yes, they go back that far in the literature) were in fact seeing living creatures rather than Miocene ghosts. And no matter where on Earth witnesses come from, no matter how far from the beaten path of education and/or modern communications, they describe what they see with amazing consistency. To hear witnesses tell it, the same kinds of creatures exist in every heavily forested or canopied environment on the planet--which is precisely what we would expect if they did indeed stride out of the Miocene epoch on two legs.

Furthermore, what witnesses describe is exactly what we would expect of upright-walking apes. They are invariably described as having a robust, muscular body covered with hair, atop which sits a head with astonishingly ape-like features. In short, the living hominoids are described as having bodies we would expect to find wrapped around the bones found in the so-called "pre-human" fossil record. In addition, witnesses describe what they see as having longer arms than human arms, hanging down near their knees, which means those arms are approximately the length of their legs. Witnesses also contend that the creatures walk with a "gliding" kind of bent-kneed stride that leaves tracks eerily reminiscent of the tracks left at Laetoli 3.5 million years ago.

Now we come to the crux for Darwinists, Creationists and Intelligent Designers. Evidence supporting the reality of hominoids is overwhelming. Truly. And if they are real, it means the "pre-human" fossil record is actually a record of their ancestors, not ours. And if that’s the case, then humans have no place on the flowchart of life on Earth. And if that’s true, then it’s equally clear that humans did not evolve and could not have evolved here the way Darwinists claim. And if we didn’t evolve here, that opens the door to the Interventionist position that nothing evolved here: everything was brought or created by sentient off-world beings whom I call terraformers, whose means and motivation will remain unknown to us unless and until they see fit to explain themselves. I hope no one is holding their breath.

The point is that the Miocene epoch had the means to produce living hominoids--50 or more different species (which almost certainly will be shaved down to perhaps a dozen as more complete bodies are found) as far back as 20 million years ago. It produced some with monkey-like arms better suited to an upright walker than a brachiating tree-dweller or knuckle walker.

By the time it ended, 5.0 million years ago, a half-dozen or more bipedal apes were on the Earth, which we know from the ape-like australopithecine and early Homo fossils. And we know from Laetoli that they had a walking pattern distinct from humans, which modern witnesses describe as still being the way hominoids walk. In short, they’ve followed the punctuated equilibrium pattern of long-term stasis.

SO WHAT ABOUT HUMANS?
Humans simply do not fit the pattern of primate development on Earth. Notice the word development instead of evolution. Species that appear here do undergo changes in morphology over time. It’s called microevolution, because it describes changes in body parts. Darwinists use the undeniable reality of microevolution to extrapolate the reality of macroevolution, which is change at the species-into-more-advanced-species level. That is blatantly not evident in the fossil record, especially when it comes to human physiology.

We have shown, I hope, that humans have been shoehorned by Darwinists into having a place in the fossil record that doesn’t belong to them but to living hominoids (Bigfoot, etc.). Furthermore, humans have been shoehorned into being primates, when there is little about them--certainly nothing of significance--that fits the classic primate pattern. In fact, if it weren’t for the desperate need of Darwinists to keep humans closely linked to the primate line, we would have had our own appellation long ago--and we’ll surely have it once the truth is out from the Pandora’s box of Darwinist deception.

Relatively speaking, primate bones are much thicker and heavier than human bones. Primate muscles are five to 10 times stronger than ours. (Anyone who’s dealt with monkeys knows how amazingly strong they are for their size.) Primate skin is covered with long, thick, visible hair. Ours is largely invisible. Primate hair is thick on the back, thin on the front. Ours is switched the other way around. Primates have large, round eyes capable of seeing at night. Compared to theirs, we have greatly reduced night vision. Primates have small, relatively "simple" brains compared to ours. They lack the ability to modulate sound into speech. Primate sexuality is based on an oestrus cycle in females (though some, like bonobo chimps, have plenty of sex when not in oestrus). In human females, the effects of oestrus are greatly diminished.

This list could go on to cite many more areas of difference, but all of them are overshadowed by the Big Kahuna of primate/human difference: all primates have 48 chromosomes, while humans have "only" 46 chromosomes. Two entire chromosomes represent a heck of a lot of DNA removed from the human genome, yet somehow that removal made us "superior" in countless ways. It doesn’t make sense. Nor does the fact that even with two whole chromosomes missing from our genome, we share what is now believed to be 95% of the chimp genome and around 90% of the gorilla genome. How can those numbers be made to reconcile? They can’t.

Something is wrong here. Someone has been cooking the genetic books.

THE STUFF OF LIFE
In the wild, plants and animals tend to breed remarkably true to their species. That’s why stasis is the dominant characteristic of life on Earth. Species appear and stay essentially the same (apart from the superficial changes of microevolution) until they go extinct for whatever reason (catastrophe, inability to compete for resources effectively, etc.). When "faulty" examples appear, they’re nearly always unable to put the fault into their species’ collective gene pool. A negative mutation that doesn’t kill the individual it appears in is unlikely to be passed along to posterity, despite Darwinist assertions that this is precisely how evolution occurs. All genomes have hard-wired checks and balances against significant changes of any kind, which is why stasis has been the hallmark of all life since beginning here. Aberrant examples are efficiently weeded out, either early in the reproductive process or soon after reproduction (birth). Faulty copies are deleted.

This deletion of faults holds true in the vast majority of species. Most genomes are--and stay--remarkably clear of gene-based defects. All species are susceptible to mistakes in the reproductive process, such as sperm/egg misconnections. In mammals, this produces spontaneous abortions, stillbirths or live-birth defects. However, there are precious few defects that swim in the gene pools of any "wild" or "natural" species. The only places we find significant, species-wide genetic defects are in domesticated plants and animals, and in those they can be--and often are--numerous.

Domesticated plants and animals clearly seem to have been genetically created by "outside intervention" at some point in the distant past. (For those interested in learning more about this, I discuss it in considerable detail in NEXUS 9/04.) Domesticated species have so many points of divergence from wild/natural species, it’s not realistic to consider them in any kind of relative context. As we’ve seen above, the same holds true for humans and the primates we supposedly evolved from. They’re apples and oranges.

We humans have over 4,000 genetic defects spread throughout our common gene pool. Think about that. No other species comes close. And yet, our mitochondrial DNA proves we have existed as a species for "only" about 200,000 years. Remember the first Cro-Magnon fossils showing up in strata 120,000 years old? That fits well with the origin of a small proto-group at around 200,000 years ago. (There will almost certainly be Cro-Magnon fossils found prior to 120,000 years ago, but it is unlikely they were dispersed widely enough to have left fossils near the 200,000-year mark. Naturally, the very first one could have been fossilized, but that’s not the way to bet. Fossilization is quite rare.)

All that being the case, how did over 4,000 genetic defects work their way into the human gene pool, when such genome-wide defects are rare to nonexistent in wild or natural species? (Remember, Darwin himself noticed that humans are very much like domesticated animals in many of our physical and biological traits.) It can only have occurred if the very first members (no more than a handful of breeding pairs) had the entire package of faults within their genome. That’s the only way Eskimos and Watusis and all the rest of humanity can express the exact same genetic disorders.

If we descended from apes, as Darwinists insist, then apes should have a very large number of our genetic defects. They do not. If, on the other hand, we’ve been genetically unique for only 200,000 years, then the only way those defects could be with us is if they were put into our gene pool by the genetic manipulation of the founding generation of our species, and the mistakes made in that process were left in place to be handed down to posterity. And, as might be expected, this is also how domesticated plants and animals came to have their own inordinate numbers of genetic defects. It simply couldn’t happen any other way.

THE FINAL NAIL
When Einstein was asked in reference to relativity, "How did you do it?", he replied, "I ignored an axiom." This is what everyone must do if we are to get anywhere near the truth about human origins.

Darwinists ask us to believe a theory based on this axiom:

"There are good grounds to believe our early ancestors lived in forests. There are equally good grounds to believe our later ancestors lived by hunting game on African savannas. Therefore, we can assume that somehow, some way, we went from living in forests to living on the savannas."

The trick, for Darwinists, is in explaining it plausibly.

Savanna theorists ask us to believe that, 5.0 to 10 million years ago, several groups of forest-dwelling Miocene apes were squeezed by environmental pressures to venture out onto the encroaching savannas to begin making their collective living. This means they had to rise from the assumed quadrupedal posture attributed to all Miocene apes to walk and run on two legs, thus giving up the ease and rapidity of moving on all fours. Those early groups had to make their way with unmodified pelvises, inappropriate single-arched spines, absurdly under-muscled thighs and buttocks, and heads stuck on at the wrong angle, and all the while doggedly shuffling along on the sides of long-toed, ill-adapted feet, thereby becoming plodding skin-bags of snack-treats for savanna predators. If any harebrained scheme ever deserved a re-think by its originator(s), this would be the one.

Of course, the real re-think needs to be done by Darwinists, because it is glaringly obvious that no forest-bound species of ape could have ventured onto the savanna as a stumbling, bumbling walker and learned to do it better out there among the big cats. If a collective group had been unfit for erect movement on the savanna, they wouldn’t have gone. If they did go, they couldn’t and wouldn’t stay. Even primates are smarter than that. And understand, there are primates that did make the move onto the savanna, albeit always remaining within range of a high-speed scurry into nearby trees. Baboons are the most successful of this small group, all of which have retained quadrupedal locomotion.

In addition to the forest-to-savanna transition, Darwinists face numerous other improbable--if not impossible--differences between humans and terrestrial primates. In addition to bipedalism and the genetic discrepancies already addressed, there are major differences in skin and the adipose tissue (fat) beneath it; in sweat glands, in blood, in tears, in sex organs, in brain size and function, and on and on and on. This is a very long list that can be examined in much fuller detail in the work of a brilliant, determined researcher into human origins, named Elaine Morgan.

Ms Morgan is the chief proponent of what challenged Darwinists derisively call "the Aquatic Ape theory", as if the juxtaposition of those disparate words were enough to dismiss it as an absurd notion. Nothing could be further from the truth. In books like The Scars of Evolution (Souvenir Press, London, 1990), she makes a devastating case against the notion that humans evolved from forest-dwelling apes that moved out onto the savannas. She believes humans must have gone through an extended period of development in and around water to generate the bizarre array of physiological oddities we exhibit relative to the primates we supposedly evolved from.

However, despite all her wonderfully creative work, Ms Morgan remains wedded to the Darwinist concept of evolution, which had to play itself out in only the 200,000 years dictated by our mitochondrial DNA.

MAKING SENSE OF THE INSENSIBLE
The pieces of the puzzle are on the table. The answer is there for anyone to see. But rearranging those pieces properly is no easy task, and it is even more difficult to get dogmatists of any stripe to look at the picture in a light different from their own. That has been my purpose in writing these two essays on origins--of life and of humans. They are two of the world’s most sensitive areas of scholarship and debate, producing some of the most vitriolic exchanges in all of academia. But vitriol, like might, doesn’t make right.

I once knew a baseball player who’d pitched a no-hitter against a seriously inferior team. Upon being criticized for the obvious imbalance between his abilities and those of his opponents, the pitcher shrugged and said, "A no-hitter is a no-hitter, even against Lighthouse for the Blind." And so it is with a mistaken belief. If millions believe a thing, that doesn’t make it correct.

I believe that the facts, if fairly evaluated, will over time prove that humans--and indeed, life itself--did not originate on Earth, and that nothing has macroevolved on Earth. It has all been brought here and left to fend for itself, then replaced when events required the introduction of new forms. No other theory suits the facts nearly as well.

As for humans (the object of this essay), look back to the Miocene epoch, where the earliest traces of our ancestors supposedly originate. Apes dominate. Look at the fossils--the so-called "pre-humans"--from the Pliocene epoch, starting 5.0 million years ago. Other than bipedal walking, all of their physical aspects shout out "ape roots". Look at today’s tracks, sightings and encounters with living hominoids, Bigfoot and others. These all-too-real creatures will one day be proved to have a direct link back to the Miocene--which, at a stroke, will eliminate any possibility that humans and apes share any kind of common ancestor.

We humans are not indigenous to planet Earth. We were either put here intact or we developed here, but we did not evolve here. Our genes make clear that we’ve been cut-and-pasted from other, non-primate, non-Earthly species.

Personally, I believe that the work of Zecharia Sitchin (The Earth Chronicles) comes closest to a plausible explanation. But even if some aspects of what he says are wrong, or even if all of it someday is proved to be wrong, that won’t change the basic facts that his work--and my own work--address.

Humans are not primates. We do indeed stand apart as a "special" creation, long espoused by theologians and now by certain credentialed scientists. The only question left hanging is, of course: who or what was the creator? I don’t think I’ll be privileged to learn that in my lifetime. But I’m confident I’m within reach of the next best answer.

I’m confident that we were created by invasive genetic manipulation.
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