“Gigantic Apes Coexisted with Early Humans, Study Finds,” Bjorn Carey, (07 November 2005), can be downloaded at www.livescience.com/animalworld/051107_giant_ape.html

“A gigantic ape standing 10 feet tall and weighing up to 1,200 pounds lived alongside humans for over a million years, according to a new study. . . While the idea of a giant ape piqued the interest of scientists — and bigfoot hunters — around the world, it was unclear how long ago this beast went extinct.

Now Jack Rink, a geochronologist at McMaster University in Ontario, has used a high-precision absolute-dating method to determine that this ape — the largest primate ever — roamed Southeast Asia for nearly a million years before the species died out 100,000 years ago during the Pleistocene period. By this time, humans had existed for a million years.

Since the original discovery, scientists have been able to piece together a description of Gigantopithecus (short for Gigantopithecus blackii) using just a handful of teeth and a set of jawbones. It may not be much, but the unusually large size of these teeth indicates they belong to one big ape.

Currently, scientists are debating over how Gigantopithecus got around — was it bipedal or did it use its arms to help it walk, like modern chimpanzees and orangutans? The only way to answer this is to collect more bones.

I didn’t feel this was an earth-shaking bit of information; rather I included it to show just how deceptive these articles can be. Let me say at the beginning, I believe that this find is probably legitimate. The Creation Model would predict that these large apes would have walked the earth at the same time as man. Furthermore, with verified fossil remains of other extremely large mammals, it is no surprise that we should find giant apes. It is when they begin to apply their evolutionary time frames so positively, that I feel the hair on the back of my neck begin to rise.

Conveniently, they have omitted just what the “high- precision absolute dating” method is, so there can be no formal challenge. However, it is common knowledge within both creation and evolution circles that most scientific dating methods do not allow for a cataclysmic, world-wide catastrophe anywhere in the earth ‘s past history, and that failure to do so will have tremendous impact on test results. However, this is not even considered; rather, it is “established” that this dating method cannot be assailed and therefore, these dates are the real deal. So, why is this “discovery ” such a great find? Because “I” said so!

“New View of Early Earth: A Habitable Place,” Robert Roy Britt (18 November 2005), can be downloaded at www.livescience.com/othernews/051118_early_earth.html

“There are a trio of longstanding views of what Earth might have looked like in its formative years: a moon-like desert, a fiery volcano hell, or a waterworld with no firm footing. All three may be wrong.

A…study reported in May…also suggesting that notions of a fiery, hellish planet back
then have been overblown.  Here’s why it matters: A world with water and land and somewhat moderate temperatures and volcanic conditions would have been habitable.  That does not mean here was life, but the conditions were in place.”

Did that title fool you? Yeah, it did me, too. I thought “at last, they are beginning to come around.” I should have known better.  This is but another attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole… it just won‘t work. The article spends not a little bit of time trying to convince you that they have finally figured it out. At the end, it is still just “Star Trek” science.

“Group wants to see humans extinct,” United Press International — News Track (San Francisco, November 16, 2005), www.upi.com/NewsTrack?view.php?StoryID=20051116-040458-3167r

“Make no mistake about it, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement isn’t anti-child, it’s more like anti-human. The VHE is dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth, founder Les Knight told Wednesday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

With 16,000 people born per hour and a current global population of 6.5 billion, there are already more than enough people on the planet, Knight said. ‘Where humans live, not much else lives,’ Knight said. ‘It isn’t that we’re evil and want to kill everything — it’s just how we live.’

Knight, who had a vasectomy at age 25, emphasizes VHE likes kids and says many of its members are parents as well as children.”

I wonder where “planned natural selection “fits into the evolutionary scenario? Well, don ‘t laugh — I ‘just know” there has to be an evolutionary benefit to suicide.

“Archaeopteryx in the Headlines Again: New Specimen Reported,” Creation-Evolution Headlines, (12/02/2005), http://creationsarfaris.com/crev200512.htm . Originally appeared in Science magazine and can be downloaded at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/310/5753/1483/DC1

“The best preserved fossil yet of Arc haeopteryx was announced in Science this week, the ninth in all. This one, described by Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Natural History Museum (Frankfurt, Germany), had a better-preserved foot than the others (all found in the Solnhofem Limestone beds of Bavaria) with indications it had a hyperextendable second toe somewhat similar to those on deinonychosaurs … National Geographic News is convinced this and the therapod-shaped skull settles the dispute about the relationship of birds to theropod dinosaurs.

Eric Stokstad, however, in a News Focus article in the same issue of Science, denied that there was anything radically different about this specimen. There’s another problem: Burkhard Pohl, an amateur collector and founder of the for-profit Wyoming Dinosaur Center where it will be housed (also co-author of the announcement in Science) is not forthcoming on this fossil’s pedigree:

The origins of the Archaeopteryx, however remain hazy. Pohi says he ‘found a donor’ to buy it from a private collector qfter the Senckenberg failed to raise enough money. (Mayr declines to reveal the asking price, but the Palaontologische Museum München paid DM 2 million — about $1.3 million — for a less spectacular specimen in 1999). The Archaeopteryx appears to be legal, because Bavaria allows the export of fossils. Pohi won ‘t say who legally owns it , but he says that it ‘guaranteed that it will stay in a public collection.’ (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

(The author of the article comments: “Once again, a cloud of doubt is raised around this icon of evolutionary ‘transitional forms.’ Fred Hoyle wrote a whole book about possible fraud surrounding the most famous feathered Archaeopteryx fossils [not all have feather impressions], and others have done the same over the years. Now, we have another, the best-looking of all, and we can’t be absolutely sure where it came from. Why can’t the best paleontologists go over to Bavaria and uncover a clear example of a feathered specimen in situ to end all doubt?)

This certainly is beginning to smell of Nebraska man, Piltdown man, Java man, etc.. These people really want to find that “missing link” (despite many diehards’ claims that they already have multitudes of transitional fossils).