These are really remarkable creatures.
And if you stand here and watch them long enough,
and just - they're fascinating.
Yeah, yeah they are.
Oh, my - A big yawn - oh,
and look at those fangs.
Todd this obviously brings us to the question -
the similarities between humans and apes,
and all the story we've all heard about
how we descended from apes.
And that has huge implications for for Christianity,
for the Genesis history, for a lot of things.
Absolutely, it's definitely a big hot topic
in evangelical theology right
now is this question of do we have to even bother claiming
that we're all descended from Adam and Eve,
or can we just get rid of them,
and just go with whatever evolutionary biology
tells us is our history?
Is that the r esult of the pressure from science
that is telling people,
hey no, it's all there,
it's easy to see in the fossil record,
and all of that?
yeah, I think that's a big part of it.
I think there's a lot of pressure,
and there's a lot of disillusionment
with past attempts at explaining these things,
so the Heat's on and so what are we gonna do with these?
What do you do with the gorilla,
clearly very different from human beings
but at the same time,
among the animals, gorillas, chimpanzees,
there's nothing more similar to us than those two things.
There's remarkable similarities -it is.
yeah, it is remarkable.
But, I mean,
in the papers just recently there was a new discovery,
there are new schools there is a new evidence, supposedly,
in the fossil record that links all of this.
Yeah.
What do you see there?
Absolutely.
Well, I've got something right here in my bag.
Let's have a look.
Oh, a skull.
So this guy is a Neanderthal skull from Gibraltar,
and you can see,
I mean it's it's got the classic Neanderthal look to it,
very very low forehead,
so we have really tall foreheads,
the face, the mid face,
has been pulled out, looks as if someone grabbed his nose
and pulled it out,
but at the same time, well it looks very human.
it's not anything like a gorilla skull,
it's got attributes that make it very clearly,
very similar to human beings.
Even though it has this weird forehead.
So that's the Neanderthal.
You want to hold that one for me?
Okay.
We have others that are very different.
Oh yeah.
Now this one is Australopithecus africanus.
This was found in 1947.
And it's really different.
So you can see, really, no forehead at all,
it just slopes right back.
Very very small brain case,
muzzle sticks way out so the face is sloped forward,
and so you might be wondering
what in the world does this have to do with humans, right?
I mean, it's so different.
Well, the answer is right here.
That feature is called the big hole.
"Foramen magnum" is the latin term,
but it's the big hole.
It's the place where the brain stem comes out.
And the position of this foramen magnum
tells us this thing walked around on two legs.
It had its head mounted right on the top of its spine
so that it could see where it was going.
These guys have their brain stem comes out the back.
So their foramen magnum is back here.
That's because they're walking around on all fours, right?
And so what do you do with this stuff?
I mean, there's many more that we could show,
many more pictures,
and many more skulls and you can see,
looking at them together,
there - really, there's a lot of difference there.
Well, here's the thing.
So all that created kind stuff that we already talked about,
with the horses, and the cats,
and the meerkats,
and how they're different, Archaeopteryx,
I can do the same sorts of things with humans.
And this is where it gets really cool.
Because I can show again
and again and again with multiple studies
that I can find a discontinuity between humans and nonhumans.
So this thing lands on the human side.
This neanderthal here, it's one of us.
This thing is not.
It is different,
and I can tell you that it's different.
I can diagnose it, I can do the statistics,
and I can show you with a great deal
of certainty this is not human.
Now if evolution were true,
you might think there wouldn't be any way to do that,
that there should be a gradual continuum
from ape to human,
and so there wouldn't be any place to draw that line,
but even after all of these discoveries,
that's what makes it so cool.
Even after Australopithecus africanus,
and all these other things
that we have from the fossil record,
I can still easily draw a line between things
that are human and things that are not.
So when we look at neanderthal man,
we're looking at a human,
but it's a human that,
just like we find in dogs, we have a lot of variety
of dogs, We got a lot of variety of people.
So we're talking about a human
that might be a dachshund or a Great Dane, Sure.
And so, how then do we think
about a creature that obviously was walking upright?
Just a different kind of creature?
It's a different kind of creature.
Some of my studies kind of indicated this
might be related to chimpanzees,
but I don't know that for sure.
That's not really settled,
but this would be just another one of those varieties
of living things that God made in the beginning,
and that survived the flood
aboard the Ark. Do chimpanzees have that same spinal - No.
They have one much like the gorillas
that comes out the back,
so that's a very different feature
which is why this might not be anything to do with chimpanzees.
That's still sort of uncertain.
The thing that I'm really sure about is the line
between this human and this non-human.
And this human and those gorillas.
Nonhumans.
Exactly.
Very easy to draw those lines.
So we've been looking back here at the gorilla we can see
the obvious differences between us and him,
not the least of which is that he's in there,
and where we can go home when we're done.
But as we've been sitting here talking about this,
that gorilla has vomited multiple times
and eaten it again which is not a typical human behavior.
He doesn't seem to learn
that if he would stop eating his own vomit he
would probably stop vomiting.
He's got that big brow ridge,
which is very much a characteristic
like this Australopithecus.
Big canine teeth which we don't have,
his arms are much much longer than his legs,
which is a characteristic of a creature
that would walk around on all fours instead of upright
like we do.
So there's a really big gap between humans and gorillas.
Even though genetically, he is quite similar.
Now, speaking of genetics,
we also have Neanderthal genome data that can show us
that you and I, right here,
we have Neanderthal genes
in our own genomes because our ancestors intermarried
with the Neanderthals.
Now if you think
that Neanderthal is just an animal,
that's really hard to explain.
You know, how do you get human-animal hybrids?
What does that mean for the soul?
What does that mean for theology?
But if they're just another human, Neanderthal
breeding with people,
that's not really that big a deal,
because that's exactly what we would expect people to do
when they spread out and encounter other people,
they intermarry.
And that's exactly what we had with the Neanderthals.
Todd, when we read about these discoveries,
and no doubt there's gonna be the next one will come out
in a newspaper soon,
how does the average person read that and understand,
are we talking about humankind,
or are we talking about another kind?
Now having studied these issues for years
that I've worked on this problem,
I'm really confident that whatever the next one is,
it's gonna fall either into the ape camp or in the human camp.
I don't think it's as easy as just, you know,
reading a magazine
or looking at a picture and being able to say,
"oh yeah that's human,"
"oh yeah that's not,"
I think there's a lot more variety of human out there
than what we have really been thinking about.
Kind of like with cats and all the other created kinds.
We've had a very limited idea of the sorts
of varieties there are.
So, yeah.
Don't panic, be patient, let science do its thing,
let creation science do its thing,
and hopefully we'll be able to give a pretty timely update
on what is or isn't human.
Todd, what are some of those similarities
that we would find between the human and the ape,
and the chimpanzee?
Yeah, there's a lot of them.
For example, these Apes don't have any tails, much
like we don't have any tails.
When we look down at the genetic level,
we find even more similarity.
We find startling similarity.
So the question is, what do we do with that?
And so on the one hand, we could say,
well that's because there's a common designer, right?
There is one God that made us all,
so it makes sense that there would be similarity.
Ultimately, I find that a little dissatisfying
because there's clearly a pattern here, right?
So I'm more similar to you than I am to this ape,
but I'm more similar to that gorilla
than I am to the lions we already saw,
so there's clearly a pattern here
that needs to be explained,
and it needs to be more than just saying "oh well,
God made it that way."
It's not terribly satisfying.
So that's one of those research areas that we're still working
on in creationism
that I think are gonna yield
a lot of great fruit in the near future.
And those areas that we need more research,
we need more scientists.
More scientists, more students interested,
more students involved, that's exactly what we need.
Well even though there are similarities,
it's obvious that there is
something radically different about this creature called man.
Yeah.
That we would understand is made in the image of God.
Right.
And so those differences are really huge, aren't they?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean the image of God entails this idea
of being God's representative here on this earth,
and part of that then is having dominion,
and having authority,
and these guys don't have that whereas we definitely do.
But we also see
in the fossil record a lot of variation, right?
So it's not always
that you can just look at something and say,
well there's the image of God.
Sometimes the image of God can surprise you in forms
that aren't quite so familiar as you
and I might think of as being the image of God.
So that just reminds us that the image
of God is not something that you can sort of pin down,
it's this trait or that trait.
The image of God is a spiritual quality
that we have
that we don't share with animals like that.