Adapted from Creation Answer Book by Hank Hanegraaff 

As has been well said, there is no business like bone business. Pithecanthropus erectus, Piltdown man, and Peking man are prime exemplars.

First and perhaps best known among the ape-men icons is Pithecanthropus erectus. What is not as well known is that this fictional transitional form* between apes and humans is based on nothing more than a skullcap, femur, three teeth, and a fertile imagination. Darwin protégé Sir Arthur Keith pointed to Pithecanthropus as an example of evolving gullibility in his profession. Nonetheless, Harvard’s Richard Lewontin said Pithecanthropus erectus, pet-named Java man, ought to be taught as one of the “five facts of evolution.”

Furthermore, Piltdown man is a famed fraud cleverly conceived, crudely carried out—the jaw of an ape stained to match a human skull. Ironically, the aforementioned Sir Arthur Keith declared that Piltdown “represents more closely than any human form yet discovered the common ancestor from which both the Neanderthal and modern types have been derived.” And the professor was not alone. Piltdown was used for forty years to dupe unsuspecting students into thinking macroevolution* is a fact.

Finally, Peking man is pure fantasy—wish giving birth to reality. Peking man was fabricated on the basis of a dusty old tooth discovered by Dr. Davidson Black as he was about to run out of funds for his evolutionary explorations. The Rockefeller Foundation awarded Black a generous grant so he could keep on digging. While Peking man evolved over time into an interesting collection of fossils, it is hardly a credible ape-to-man transition.

One would suppose that mental digestion would improve over the years. But that has hardly been the case. In 2009, Dariwinius masillae, affectionately nicknamed “Ida,” was dubbed the “eighth wonder of the world”—the link between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom—and the most important fossil discovery in 47 million years. Currently, however, evolutionary scientists are uniformly convinced that Ida plays no role whatsoever in human evolution.

For further study, see Hank Hanegraaff, Fatal Flaws: What Evolutionists Don’t Want You to Know (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008).