In 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, declared that he had found a fossil molar tooth belonging to the Pliocene period in western Nebraska near Snake Brook. This tooth allegedly bore common characteristics of both man and ape. An extensive scientific debate began surrounding this fossil, which came to be called "Nebraska man," in which some interpreted this tooth as belonging to Pithecanthropus erectus, while others claimed it was closer to human beings. Nebraska man was also immediately given a "scientific name," Hesperopithecus haroldcooki.

Many authorities gave Osborn their support. Based on this single tooth, reconstructions of Nebraska man's head and body were drawn. Moreover, Nebraska man was even pictured along with his wife and children, as a whole family in a natural setting.

All of these scenarios were developed from just one tooth. Evolutionist circles placed such faith in this "ghost man" that when a researcher named William Bryan opposed these biased conclusions relying on a single tooth, he was harshly criticized.

In 1927, other parts of the skeleton were also found. According to these newly discovered pieces, the tooth belonged neither to a man nor to an ape. It was realized that it belonged to an extinct species of wild American pig called Prosthennops. William Gregory entitled the article published in Science in which he announced the truth, "Hesperopithecus Apparently Not an Ape Nor a Man."(William K. Gregory, "Hesperopithecus Apparently Not An Ape Nor A Man," Science, vol. 66, issue 1720, 16 December 1927, p. 579) Then all the drawings of Hesperopithecus haroldcooki and his "family" were hurriedly removed from evolutionary literature.

Nebraska man, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, who named it.

What used to be called the "recapitulation theory" has long been eliminated from scientific literature, but it is still being presented as a scientific reality by some evolutionist publications. The term "recapitulation" is a condensation of the dictum "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," put forward by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel at the end of the nineteenth century.

With his faked embryo drawings, Ernst Haeckel deceived the world of science for a century.

This theory of Haeckel's postulates that living embryos re-experience the evolutionary process that their pseudo-ancestors underwent. He theorized that during its development in its mother's womb, the human embryo first displayed the characteristics of a fish, and then those of a reptile, and finally those of a human.

It has since been proven that this theory is completely bogus. It is now known that the "gills" that supposedly appear in the early stages of the human embryo are in fact the initial phases of the middle-ear canal, parathyroid, and thymus. That part of the embryo that was likened to the "egg yolk pouch" turns out to be a pouch that produces blood for the infant. The part that was identified as a "tail" by Haeckel and his followers is in fact the backbone, which resembles a tail only because it takes shape before the legs do.

Haeckel's fake drawings.

These are universally acknowledged facts in the scientific world, and are accepted even by evolutionists themselves. Two leading neo-Darwinists, George Gaylord Simpson and W. Beck have admitted:

Haeckel misstated the evolutionary principle involved. It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny.(G. G. Simpson, W. Beck, An Introduction to Biology, Harcourt Brace and World, New York, 1965, p. 241)

The following was written in an article in New Scientist dated October 16, 1999:

[Haeckel] called this the biogenetic law, and the idea became popularly known as recapitulation. In fact Haeckel's strict law was soon shown to be incorrect. For instance,the early human embryo never has functioning gills like a fish, and never passes through stages that look like an adult reptile or monkey.(Ken McNamara, "Embryos and Evolution," New Scientist, vol. 12416, 16 October 1999. (emphasis added))

In an article published in American Scientist, we read:

Surely the biogenetic law is as dead as a doornail. It was finally exorcised from biology textbooks in the fifties. As a topic of serious theoretical inquiry it was extinct in the twenties...(Keith S. Thomson, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny Recapitulated," American Scientist, vol. 76, May/June 1988, p. 273)

In its September 5, 1997, issue, the famous journal Sciencepublished an article revealing that Haeckel's embryo drawings had been falsified. The article described how the embryos were in fact very different from one another. Observations in recent years have revealed that embryos of different species do not resemble each other, as Haeckel had attempted to show. The great differences between the mammal, reptile and bat embryos above are a clear instance of this.

Another interesting aspect of "recapitulation" was Ernst Haeckel himself, a faker who falsified his drawings in order to support the theory he advanced. Haeckel's forgeries purported to show that fish and human embryos resembled one another. When he was caught out, the only defense he offered was that other evolutionists had committed similar offences:

After this compromising confession of 'forgery' I should be obliged to consider myself condemned and annihilated if I had not the consolation of seeing side by side with me in the prisoner's dock hundreds of fellow - culprits, among them many of the most trusted observers and most esteemed biologists. The great majority of all the diagrams in the best biological textbooks, treatises and journals would incur in the same degree the charge of 'forgery,' for all of them are inexact, and are more or less doctored, schematised and constructed.(Francis Hitching,The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, Ticknor and Fields, New York, 1982, p. 204)

In the September 5, 1997, edition of the well-known scientific journalScience, an article was published revealing that Haeckel's embryo drawings were the product of a deception. The article, called "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," had this to say:

The impression they [Haeckel's drawings] give, that the embryos are exactly alike, is wrong, says Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London... So he and his colleagues did their own comparative study, reexamining and photographing embryos roughly matched by species and age with those Haeckel drew. Lo and behold, the embryos "often looked surprisingly different," Richardson reports in the August issue of Anatomy and Embryology.(Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," Science, 5 September, 1997. (emphasis added))

Science explained that, in order to be able to show the embryos as similar, Haeckel deliberately removed some organs from his drawings or else added imaginary ones. Later in this same article, the following information was revealed:

Not only did Haeckel add or omit features, Richardson and his colleagues report, but he also fudged the scale to exaggerate similarities among species, even when there were 10-fold differences in size. Haeckel further blurred differences by neglecting to name the species in most cases, as if one representative was accurate for an entire group of animals. In reality, Richardson and his colleagues note,even closely related embryos such as those of fish vary quite a bit in their appearance and developmental pathway. "It (Haeckel's drawings) looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology," Richardson concludes.(Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," Science,5 September, 1997. (emphasis added))

The Science article goes on to discuss how Haeckel's confessions on this subject were covered up from the beginning of the last century, and how the fake drawings began to be presented in textbooks as scientific fact:

Haeckel's confession got lost after his drawings were subsequently used in a 1901 book called Darwin and After Darwin and reproduced widely in English language biology texts.(Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,"Science, 5 September, 1997. (emphasis added))

In short, the fact that Haeckel's drawings were falsified had already emerged in 1901, but the whole world of science continued to be deceived by them for a century.

In 1912, a well-known doctor and amateur paleoanthropologist named Charles Dawson came out with the assertion that he had found a jawbone and a cranial fragment in a pit in Piltdown, England. Even though the jawbone was more ape-like, the teeth and the skull were like a man's. These specimens were labelled the "Piltdown man." Alleged to be 500,000 years old, they were displayed as an absolute proof of human evolution in several museums. For more than 40 years, many scientific articles were written on "Piltdown man," many interpretations and drawings were made, and the fossil was presented as important evidence for human evolution. No fewer than 500 doctoral theses were written on the subject.(Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1980, p. 59) While visiting the British Museum in 1921, leading American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn said "We have to be reminded over and over again that Nature is full of paradoxes" and proclaimed Piltdown "a discovery of transcendant importance to the prehistory of man." (Stephen Jay Gould, "Smith Woodward's Folly," New Scientist, 5 April 1979, p. 44)

For 40 years, Piltdown man was accepted as the greatest evidence for human evolution. Evolutionist fossil experts claimed to have found a lot of transitional features in the skull. It only emerged later that the fossil was a fake.

In 1949, Kenneth Oakley, from the British Museum's Paleontology Department, attempted to use "fluorine testing," a new test used for determining the date of fossils. A trial was made on the fossil of Piltdown man. The result was astonishing. During the test, it was realized that the jawbone of Piltdown man did not contain any fluorine. This indicated that it had remained buried no more than a few years. The skull, which contained only a small amount of fluorine, showed that it was only a few thousand years old.

It was determined that the teeth in the jawbone, belonging to an orangutan, had been worn down artificially and that the "primitive" tools discovered with the fossils were simple imitations that had been sharpened with steel implements. In the detailed analysis completed by Joseph Weiner, this forgery was revealed to the public in 1953. The skull belonged to a 500-year-old man, and the jaw bone belonged to a recently deceased ape! The teeth had been specially arranged in a particular way and added to the jaw, and the molar surfaces were filed in order to resemble those of a man. Then all these pieces were stained with potassium dichromate to give them an old appearance. These stains began to disappear when dipped in acid. Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark, who was in the team that uncovered the forgery, could not hide his astonishment at this situation, and said: "The evidences of artificial abrasion immediately sprang to the eye. Indeed so obvious did they seem it may well be asked-how was it that they had escaped notice before?" (Stephen Jay Gould, "Smith Woodward's Folly," New Scientist, 5 April 1979, p. 43. (emphasis added)) In the wake of all this, "Piltdown man" was hurriedly removed from the British Museum where it had been displayed for more than 40 years.