Ota Benga: The African Native Put Into a Cage

After Darwin advanced the claim with his book The Descent of Man that man evolved from ape-like living beings, he started to seek fossils to support this contention. However, some evolutionists believed that "half-man half-ape" creatures were to be found not only in the fossil record, but also alive in various parts of the world. In the early 20th century, these pursuits for "living transitional links" led to unfortunate incidents, one of the cruellest of which is the story of a Pygmy by the name of Ota Benga.

OTA BENGA: "The pygmy in the zoo"

Ota Benga was captured in 1904 by an evolutionist researcher in the Congo. In his own tongue, his name meant "friend". He had a wife and two children. Chained and caged like an animal, he was taken to the USA where evolutionist scientists displayed him to the public in the St Louis World Fair along with other ape species and introduced him as "the closest transitional link to man". Two years later, they took him to the Bronx Zoo in New York and there they exhibited him under the denomination of "ancient ancestors of man" along with a few chimpanzees, a gorilla named Dinah, and an orang-utan called Dohung. Dr William T. Hornaday, the zoo's evolutionist director gave long speeches on how proud he was to have this exceptional "transitional form" in his zoo and treated caged Ota Benga as if he were an ordinary animal. Unable to bear the treatment he was subjected to, Ota Benga eventually committed suicide.(Philips Verner Bradford, Harvey Blume, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in The Zoo, New York: Delta Books, 1992.)

Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Ota Benga... These scandals demonstrate that evolutionist scientists do not hesitate to employ any kind of unscientific method to prove their theory. Bearing this point in mind, when we look at the other so-called evidence of the "human evolution" myth, we confront a similar situation. Here there are a fictional story and an army of volunteers ready to try everything to verify this story.

Even if evolutionists are unsuccessful in finding scientific evidence to support their theories, they are very successful at one thing: propaganda. The most important element of this propaganda is the practice of creating false designs known as "reconstructions."

Reconstruction can be explained as drawing a picture or constructing a model of a living thing based on a single bone-sometimes only a fragment-that has been unearthed. The "ape-men" we see in newspapers, magazines, and films are all reconstructions.

Since fossils are usually fragmented and incomplete, any conjecture based on them is likely to be completely speculative. As a matter of fact, the reconstructions (drawings or models) made by evolutionists based on fossil remains are prepared speculatively precisely to validate the evolutionary thesis. David R. Pilbeam, an eminent anthropologist from Harvard, stresses this fact when he says: "At least in paleoanthropology, data are still so sparse that theory heavily influences interpretations. Theories have, in the past, clearly reflected our current ideologies instead of the actual data."(David R. Pilbeam, "Rearranging Our Family Tree," Human Nature, June 1978, p. 45. (emphasis added)) Since people are highly affected by visual information, these reconstructions best serve the purpose of evolutionists, which is to convince people that these reconstructed creatures really existed in the past.

Reconstruction drawings reflect only evolutionists' imaginations, not scientific discoveries.

At this point, we have to highlight one particular point: Reconstructions based on bone remains can only reveal the most general characteristics of the creature, since the really distinctive morphological features of any animal are soft tissues which quickly vanish after death. Therefore, due to the speculative nature of the interpretation of the soft tissues, the reconstructed drawings or models become totally dependent on the imagination of the person producing them. Earnst A. Hooten from Harvard University explains the situation like this:

To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little if any scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public ... So put not your trust in reconstructions.(Earnest A. Hooton, Up From The Ape, McMillan, New York, 1931, p. 332. (emphasis added))

As a matter of fact, evolutionists invent such preposterous stories that they even ascribe different faces to the same skull. For example, the three different reconstructed drawings made for the fossil named Australopithecus robustus (Zinjanthropus) are a famous example of such forgery.

The biased interpretation of fossils and outright fabrication of many imaginary reconstructions are an indication of how frequently evolutionists have recourse to tricks. Yet these seem innocent when compared to the deliberate forgeries that have been perpetrated in the history of evolution.

There is no concrete fossil evidence to support the "ape-man" image, which is unceasingly promulgated by the media and evolutionist academic circles. With brushes in their hands, evolutionists produce imaginary creatures; nevertheless, the fact that these drawings correspond to no matching fossils constitutes a serious problem for them. One of the interesting methods they employ to overcome this problem is to "produce" the fossils they cannot find. Piltdown man, which may be the biggest scandal in the history of science, is a typical example of this method.