“This Face Changes the Human Story" Again!

Java Man (artistic depiction)

Today's National Geographic editorial¹ begins with the credulous assertion "This Face Changes the Human Story." The announcement is the latest edition of the “the Rosetta stone” of human origins complete with with requisite artistic depictions. Here is the remarkably similar "first" edition:









A skullcap and a femur uncovered a year and twelve meters apart, was the "quintessential evidence" for Java Man on the Indonesian island of that name. Eugène Dubois, the self-assured discoverer, immediately christened his find Pithecanthropus Erectus (erect ape man).

Imaginative artistic reconstructions, based on a single bone and a skull fragment, appeared in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals arresting the 1892 public’s attention.

The creditability of the discovery was immediately challenged, and the “brute” was generally dismissed as the jumbled combination of "human and ape remains." Although Dubois contested that the relics were from a single individual, decades later it was reported that his Pithecanthropus collection contained an additional left femur, i.e., Java Man had “two left feet.”

However, despite the hominid’s dubious authenticity, the “evidence” came just in time to rescue Darwin’s waning theory of evolution, a theory that had been increasingly discredited due to a lack of transitional fossil evidence.

Eugène Dubois

The real intrigue of the Java narrative is not the revelation of some primeval “brute” but rather the humanity of its “evolved” counterpart who, compelled by arrogance and ambition, coerced his family to leave the familial setting of his professorship in Amsterdam and live among the danger, pestilence, and stagnant malaria infested waters of the impenetrable jungles of Java. Dubois buried four children there (American Scientist, Vol: 87, Num: 6, p504). And as the desperate ship’s captain, on the itinerant paleontologist’s eventual return to Europe, readied the lifeboats during a violent storm, Dubois instructed his wife: “If the lifeboat is lowered, you see to the little ones, for I shall have to look after this [Pithecanthropus]."









“For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day” (cf. Exodus 20:11).


¹The timing of National Geographic's publication "This Face Changes the Human Story... " is suspect in that it occurred within hours of the sale of National Geographic magazine and other publishing operations to Murdoch-controlled 21st Century Fox! It appears to be the last feeble salvo of the Society's century-plus "evolutional" propaganda war.

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