Nebraska Man has been subject which the creationists have dished out lie after lie after lie. Here is an example. 301 Startling Proofs and Prophecies by Peter and Paul Lalonde has the following section:
120.
And You Thought Modern
Men Were Pigs!A lot of people refuse to believe the Biblical account of Genesis because they have been taught that man evolved from apes to man-like creatures know as hominids, and eventually to modern man. The Bible, they say, makes no mention of these cave men, and so simply cannot be accurate. While there appears to be archaeological evidence for the existence of such hominids, many of the examples used to prove their existence have been either fraudulent or based on insufficient evidence. Take the case of the so-called Nebraska Man for example. In 1922 one molar tooth was unearthed in the state of Nebraska. Professor Henry Osborn, who was the head of the American Museum of Natural History, claimed that it belonged to an early hominid. An artist’s depiction, based on one tooth, of this supposed ape man drawn up. Later, in 1928 it was discovered that the tooth had actually come from an extinct pig. But somehow, and this is the important point, the artist’s depiction lives on!
This is the illustration that they refer to:
Now lets start with the first lie. The above illustration does not live on whatsoever as an illustration of human evolution. The illustration was used once in 1922 in an article for the Illustrated London News. The illustration was not used in any other contemporary sources and was never reproduced until the creationists discovered and publicized it. The second lie is that the illustration was based on a single tooth. The illustration was based, as the original 1922 article stated, on Java Man, which is still accepted as genuine. Furthermore the Illustrated London News stated in its article that the “reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius.” Thus in no way was this pictured claimed to be accurate, it was in a newspaper and not a scientific source, and it was based on other specimens. Does this sound like what the creationist book quoted above said? Furthermore the illustration was criticized by scientists at the time in spite of the newspaper’s disclaimer. These facts are documented in detail in “Creationist Arguments: Nebraska Man” and in “The Role of ‘Nebraska Man’ in the Creation-Evolution Debate.”
That above quoted book is certainly not the only creationist source telling lies about this affair. Ian Taylor in “Nebraska man revisited,” which archived at Answers in Genesis’s web site, tells us:
When Dr Henry Fairfield Osbom [sic], head of the depart-ment [sic] of palaeontology at New York’s American Museum of Natural History received the fossil tooth in February 1922, he would have thought it a gift from the gods had he believed in any god at all. Marxist in his views and prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union, he was aware that plans were being made by the union to challenge the Christian- backed [sic] legislation that forbade the teaching of evolution in American schools. He saw the tooth as precious evidence for the test case which was eventually held in 1925 at Dayton, Tennessee, and became known as the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’.
Of course Taylor’s telling us that Osborn was an atheist and a Marxist is simply scare tactics and an ad hominen attack. One would think that Taylor’s views on science should be based on science and not a dead man’s political and religious views. But it is far worse than that. Osborn was neither an atheist or a Marxist. Historian of science Ronald Rainger wrote:
No Osborn was not an atheist or a Marxist. Quite the contrary, he was a devout Christian—born into a Presbyterian family he attended Princeton College in the 1870s, which was still strongly Presbyterian. In later years he began to attend services at St. John the Divine, a major Episcopal Church in New York City, primarily because of social connections. Politically he was quite reactionary, and highly opposed to materialism in any form. You might take a look at my book: An Agenda for Antiquity (University of Alabama Press, 1991)
Stephen Jay Gould tells us in “An Essay on a Pig Roast” that is collected in Bully for Brontosaurus : Reflections in Natural History:
The enemy within, as the old saying goes, is always more dangerous than the enemy without. An atheist might have laughed at Bryan or merely felt bewildered. But Osborn was a dedicated theist and a great paleontologist who viewed evolution as the finest expression of God’s intent. For Osborn, Bryan was perverting both science and the highest notion of divinity. (Darrow later selected Osborn as one of his potential witnesses in the Scopes trial not only because Osborn was so prominent, socially as well as scientifically, but primarily because trial strategy dictated that religiously devout evolutionists could blunt Bryan’s attack on science as intrinsically godless.)
Another creationist article, “Early Man: Nebraska Man (Hesperopithecus haroldcookii)” tells us:
In 1922 the Illustrated London Times ran an artist’s interpretation of Hesperopithecus and his wife, all from the remains of one tooth! A few years later more evidence was found and the tooth was determined to be from an extinct pig! Little publicity was given to the error.
Hesperopithecus was the scientific name given to the Nebraska Man find. Now notice that they are claiming little publicity was given to the mistake. The before mentioned Ian Taylor has also made that claim. And yet this is false too. The scientists involved with the claim when they realized the mistake published a retraction in Science. Nature, arguable the top science journal in the world both then and now, promptly mentioned that retraction. The news that the fossil was a pig made the front page of The New York Times. That is little publicity? And both the The New York Times and The Times of London featured the error in editorials. That is little publicity? Scientific American had an editorial on the affair as well. Marcellin Boule, a man who doubted Nebraska Man from the beginning, wrote about the error in the journal L’Anthropologie in 1928 in the widely used Fossil Men: A Textbook of Human Palaeontology published in 1957. Thus the error got prominent mentions in newspapers, in scientific journals, and even made the textbooks. One could not reasonably ask for more publicity. [See: “The Role of ‘Nebraska Man’ in the Creation-Evolution Debate.”]
Another creationist article tells us:
Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn the leading Anthropologist and Paleontologist at that time said that in this century, this tooth was the best evidence of mans descent from apes.(*add reference)
Yet another falsehood. The before mentioned article by Gould quotes Osborn as saying:
The Hesperopithecus molar cannot be said to resemble any known type of human molar very closely. It is certainly not closely related to Pithecanthropus [now Homo] erectus in the structure of the molar crown….It is therefore a new and independent type of Primate, and we must seek more material before we can determine its relationships.
We need to seek out more material before determining what it is hardly sounds like what this creationist is saying. Indeed, “The Role of ‘Nebraska Man’ in the Creation-Evolution Debate.” tells us:
The argument over Hesperopithecus, especially in England, left Osborn scrambling for the middle ground. “Every discovery directly or indirectly relating to the pre-history of man attracts world-wide attention and is apt to be received either with too great optimism or too great incredulity,” Osborn observed. “One of my friends, Prof. G. Elliot Smith, has perhaps shown too great optimism in his most interesting newspaper and magazine articles on Hesperopithecus, while another of my friends, Dr. A. Smith Woodward, has shown too great incredulity . . .” (Osborn, 1922d, p. 281)
Osborn was willing to settle for an anthropoid ape, even if it was not a direct human ancestor. He put a respected colleague, William King Gregory, in charge of defending Hesperopithecus. Gregory, an unquestioned authority on fossil primates, compared the type tooth with Old World monkeys and apes and concluded that the Nebraska tooth “combines characters seen in the molars of the chimpanzee, of Pithecanthropus, and of man, but . . . it is hardly safe to affirm more than that Hesperopithecus was structurally related to all three.” (1923a, p. 14) In a second paper in 1923, Gregory backed off his earlier assertion that Hesperopithecus showed human affinities and suggested that “the prevailing resemblances of the Hesperopithecus type are with the gorilla-chimpanzee group.” (Gregory and Hellman, 1923b, p. 518)
So even during Nebraska Man’'s brief time as a suggested ancestor Osborn was not dogmatically calling it a human ancestor. Indeed this sounds like science at work to me. It was this continuing work that eventual exposed the error a few short years after Nebraska Man was first proposed in the 1920s. I will furthermore mention that at no time did Nebraska Man receive widespread scientific acceptance. Until it was exposed as an error it was a controversial claim. Creationists sources don’t usually bother to mention that.
“Ape Men or Hominids?” tells us:
Nebraska Man is still used in some modern text- books [sic], despite the fact that Osbourne [sic] himself admitted that his findings were really that of a pig.
This is simply false. No modern textbook uses Nebraska Man anymore and none had done so in a lifetime. Arkansas Bill 2548, a proposed anti-evolution bill that failed to pass in 2001, also insinuated this claim as well.
Yet another creationist article says:
Discovered in 1922 in the Pliocene deposits of Nebraska by a mysterious “Mister Cook” and made famous by Henry Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History.
I do not understand how “Mister Cook” is mysterious. His name was Harold J. Cook. He was a geologist and a rancher. He was a man who studied fossils. One ironic thing is that Cook and W. D. Matthew and wrote in 1909, long before Nebraska Man was found:
The anterior molars and premolars of this genus of peccaries [i.e. pigs] show a startling resemblance to the teeth of Anthropoidea, and might well be mistaken for them by anyone not familiar with the dentition of Miocene peccaries.
[Quoted by Gould in “An Essay on a Pig Roast.”]
The Pathlights Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia, which is one of the more dishonest creationist sources in “Anthropology Class Discussion” claims that Nebraska Man was used in the Scopes trial. This is another common creationist claim. And you guessed it, it is completely false. Nebraska Man was not even mentioned during the trial. It, like some other creationists sources, calls Nebraska Man a “fake.” Since when is an honest mistake called a fake? Unless they are speaking in some other language besides English where fake means mistake, they are being dishonest in the extreme.
Raymond C. Harris tells us in his “Nebraska Man”:
…Guess what? It was an extinct species of pig. The evolutionist/scientific community fabricated an entire species of humanity from one pig’s tooth. Nebraska Man is a fake and a fraud.The scientific community should be embarassed [sic] and ashamed of itself.
Not only a fake, but also a fraud? Fraud means that it was an intentional deception. This is not the case so the only fraud is Mr. Harris (assuming that he was not just uncritically copying someone else). But my real reason that I quoted this one is the claim that the scientists should be “ashamed.” For heaven’s sake why? Science works largely by various scientist postulating hypothesizes. The vast majority turn out to be wrong after exposure to more data, just like Nebraska Man. Indeed, if scientists did not risk the possibility of being wrong and even extremely wrong, science would come to a halt. Because if you don’t take the chance of being wrong, you will never postulate what is correct either. And a great deal is often learned in the process of incorrect ideas being shown to be wrong. The gist of this story is that a few scientists proposed a controversial hypothesis, they shared their data with a mostly skeptical scientific community, after several years of debates within the scientific community they found more information that showed that their hypothesis was wrong, they admitted it, and the process of science continued from then on without Nebraska Man. The entire process only took a few years in the 1920s.
Nebraska Man was eliminated from science far faster then a far more recent case in chemistry called polywater. If you think we should through out evolutionary science for the mistake of a small minority of scientists making an error in the 1920s, than you have no right not to reject chemical science for a far larger group of scientists making an error in the 1960s and 1970s. An error, which in retrospect, seems extremely inane; arguably even more inane than Nebraska Man. But as the saying goes, hindsight is twenty-twenty. Are you ready to toss out chemistry? Science outside of evolutionary biology often make errors. But there is no politically or ideologically powerful movement opposed to chemistry and thus chemistry’s error doesn’t get repeatedly retold by people trying to replace it by alchemy or whatever. Those interested in a history of polywater might try to find a copy of Polywater by Felix Franks. It is out of print so you might consider an interlibrary loan. Polywater, if it had been real, would have had great deal in common with the ice-nine in Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Cat’s Cradle which was published before polywater was proposed.
But just like Nebraska Man, polywater was shown to be false by additional evidence. The process of science works because it is not a dogma. Indeed the reason why creationism is not science has more with the fact that it is dogma than the fact that happens to be wrong. It was evolutionary scientists that showed that Nebraska Man was wrong. They should be congratulated for doing it. It is commonplace for evolutionary scientists to show that a particular hypothesis is wrong. Now how common is it for creationists as a group to admit that one of their ideas is wrong? This web site is loaded with example after example of things which have been known to be false for many years and yet the creationist continue to state them. Contrast this to the evolutionists who ceased to use Nebraska Man after it was proven wrong. Consider that there is no point that I made in this essay that could not have been easily made a decade ago with minimal research since the errors of the creationists on this matter was widely mentioned. And yet creationists are still using false stories about Nebraska Man. And there has never been a time which the creationists could have made these claims and honestly said that they had researched the subject.