What About Ape-Men? - Creation Moments

Genesis 2:7
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

What about ape-men? Evolutionists state that humans and apes have a common ancestor. If that were true, then that common ancestor must have been very ape-like. Natural history museums around the world display creatures showing characteristics of both ape and human.

There is something about the face of such an exhibit. One of the most famous such exhibits is the reconstruction of Australopithecus afarensis by sculptor John Gurche. No one can doubt that he has done an excellent, lifelike job. But what is it? Is it ape, or is it man? Was there really a creature that looked like that?

Any sculptor, like any artist, has to take some license, and this license will indicate their presuppositions. Gurche said of his sculpture, in an interview in National Geographic in 1996: “I wanted to get a human soul into this ape-like face, to indicate something about where he was headed.” How did he do this? By giving the creature human eyes, with whites in the eyes. Examine the face of a gorilla, and it has no white in its eyes. But the skull of Australopithecus afarensis had no eyes – only eye sockets. So the very feature that gave the reconstruction humanity was a work of imagination, not of science. It turns out that all such ape-men are either apes or men, not both. In fact, all people are descended from Adam and Eve – the people who God created specially and separately from animals.

Prayer: We thank You, Lord, that Your word tells us how important people are to You. We pray that You will enable us to bring Your Gospel to the people that we meet. Amen.

Author: Paul F. Taylor

Ref: Patterson, R. (2016), How to Make Sense of Ape-Men, < https://answersingenesis.org/human-evolution/lucy/how-make-sense-ape-men/ >, accessed 7/31/2019. Image: Australopithecus afarensis, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic.