National Geographic Comes Clean on Neanderthals

 ....and ye fools, when will ye be wise? Psalm 94:8

"A 2026 National Geographic “Stones and Bones” article on October 9 has contrasted the once-common, openly racist teaching (or assertions) of evolutionists with the facts unearthed by researchers over the past century. The article also tells a true story regarding an article about human evolution written in 1916 by Theodore Roosevelt that casts reproach on his otherwise stellar reputation. The real blame, however, should fall on the Darwinian scientists who influenced his thinking.

Neanderthal Man was once considered the premier evidence for human evolution. Today, it is widely acknowledged that Neanderthals were fully human like us. The revised view became evident on the cover of the October 2008 issue of National

Geographic magazine, which labeled Neanderthals “The Other Humans.” (See National Geographic cover, right.)

In the Oct 2026 National Geographic article, Cornell University graduate and science writer Nicholas St. Fleur sharply criticizes a 1916 essay written by Theodore Roosevelt.
In that essay, Roosevelt surveyed the evidence for human evolution as it was understood in the early 20th century. He accompanied his text with illustrations by famed paleoartist Charles R. Knight.

Both the article and its illustrations represent an enormous embarrassment for evolutionists today, effectively illustrating how a handful of fragmented bones were once used to construct an elaborate evolutionary narrative complete with multi-thousand-year timelines. This bias deceived one of America’s great presidents.
The entire evolutionary case Roosevelt presented has since been thoroughly dismantled by mainline science. As is obvious, Roosevelt, a keen naturalist and published ornithologist, deeply “admired Darwin (whose work he was reading at the precocious age of ten), and he wasn’t shy about telling the world” what he believed to be the firmly established fact of human evolution from some hypothetical ape ancestor.

Furthermore, Roosevelt credited Darwin with “convincing practically all men of trained intelligence that the animal world, including man, has developed by evolution, not by an infinity of special creations,” adding that “The law of evolution is as fundamental to our understanding of life as the law of gravitation is to our understanding of the inanimate universe.”

Roosevelt’s unshakeable faith in evolution motivated his 1916 National Geographic piece. The primary evidence he cited consisted of Neanderthals, Piltdown Man, Java Man and Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis). All three of these supposed ‘missing links’ have since been discredited as evidence of transitional forms in human ancestry.

Roosevelt’s Fake Neanderthals

St. Fleur aimed his sharpest criticism at Roosevelt’s portrayal of Neanderthals, noting that Neanderthals are now recognized as our extinct cousins rather than inferior evolutionary rivals who disappeared over 40,000 years ago as had previously been claimed.
Roosevelt described Neanderthals as savages who were more advanced than Piltdown Man, yet placed them lower on the evolutionary ladder than any living human group.

Deceived by a Biased Artist

St. Fleur highlights how Charles R. Knight’s illustrations reinforced

this bias by portraying Neanderthals as hunched figures wearing makeshift fur loincloths and wielding crude wooden clubs to beat women. Directly opposite the Neanderthal stood an enlightened “Cro-Magnon Man” (i.e., anatomically modern human), shown upright painting a bison on a cave wall by the warm light of an oil lamp.
Commenting on the stark visual contrast drawn between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, St. Fleur noted:

"Both Roosevelt and Knight were echoing the scientific sentiment at that time that Neanderthals were dumb and brutish, imagery that has plagued Homo neanderthalensis to various degrees since its discovery in 1856. But now, more than a century after America’s “Rough Rider” president maligned Neanderthals within our yellow borders, scientists are giving the archaic species some long-overdue justice."

The reason for this is that decades of archaeological discoveries have thoroughly overturned these early caricatures:

"Decades of research have reshaped our image of Neanderthals, showing they were likely a sophisticated, intelligent branch of humanity, possibly even capable of art, culture, and empathy. Archaeological clues from scattered sites suggest that some may have buried their dead, practiced rudimentary dentistry, hunted birds at night, managed hearths, manufactured red ocher, constructed structures from cave stalagmites, and more."

Then, in 1864, a geologist named William King evaluated the

skeletal remains through an evolutionary framework, formally classifying them as Homo neanderthalensis—the first designated extinct human species. In his original paper, King emphasized the creature’s primitiveness:

“Considering that the Neanderthal skull is eminently simian, both in its general and particular characters, I feel myself constrained to believe that the thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of the brute.”

This look at the history of the attempts to document human evolution history in 1916 illustrated the firm unquestioning belief in human evolution by its adherents. This is in spite of the fact that every pillar of support for evolution in 1916 has been demolished by the progress of science made by the scientists themselves. One has to wonder how much of the proof of human evolution used to support the theory today will likewise be shown to be false in the future." 

CEH

Turning Romans 1:20 on Atheists

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. Romans 1:20

"Meyer cites lines of evidence [for a Creator] from cosmology, physics, and molecular biology. But, the surviving New Atheists object, science must “reject the idea of a designing mind because no such entity can be directly observed.” 

Q: Is that some sort of scientific first principle? 

A: Not at all, as is also becoming clearer:

"Dark matter …, which has been in the news of late, was first

inferred not because it could be seen, but because — if it existed — it would explain the otherwise unexplainable motions of galaxies within distant galaxy clusters. The fact is that scientists often infer unobservable causes from their observable effects, and the inference to intelligent design from the observable features of living cells has this same character." 

MindMatters

Evolution's rabbit out of a hat trick

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools... 

Romans 1:22

"Atheists believe that everything came about by purely material processes—the universe, life, mind, and morality. 

Q: However, do they have a rational, logical basis for this belief?

They actually believe in miracles without any reasonable cause for

the miracles. That is, they believe in magic, or the occurrence of things without a sufficient cause. What we commonly call ‘magic’ is actually illusion. 

For example, a rabbit does not just appear from an empty hat; there has to be a logical physical explanation; a sufficient cause. Illusion needs an illusionist.Stuff does not happen without something to cause it to happen. Even young children understand this law of causation. Magic, where things ‘just happen’, is the stuff of fairytales—there is no such thing." 

CMI

The Mathematician

God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. 

1 Corinthians 1:20 NLT

"The interpretation of a physical theory partakes of a dark art, one in

which mathematical concepts are ceded dominion over the physical world.

In practicing this art, the mathematician, like the necromancer that he is, is always liable to the temptation of confusing the structures over which he presides with things in the real world."
David Berlinski, Was There a Big Bang? 1998

Ushikawa Man DEBUNKED

 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. 

For it is written, 

He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. 

1 Corinthians 3:19

"Between 1957 and 1959 two fossilized limb bone parts were uncovered in Japan. Scientists thought the bones were human—a portion of humerus (upper arm bone) and the head of a femur (thigh bone). So they were dubbed ‘Ushikawa Man’ because they were found at the Ushikawa (牛川 = Ox River’) district in Toyohashi city, Aichi Prefecture, central Japan.

Scientists claimed that ‘Ushikawa Man’ was a male human who lived somewhere between 129–774 thousand years (ka) ago. This would make him Japan’s most ancient fossil human. A few decades later, the ‘date’ began to be progressively revised down to about 20 ka ago, still among the country’s oldest fossil humans. That is, until recently.

A 2024 study has re-examined the bones and discovered that they

are in fact the bones of a brown bear. The ‘humerus’ was actually a radius bone—from the bear’s forearm, not its upper arm. And the femur head was also from the bear. ‘Ushikawa Man’ actually never was.

This is not the first time that bear and human bones have been confused. A bone found in a cave in Alaska in the 1990s, even though found near shell beads, was thought to belong to a bear. When re-examined in 2019, it turned out instead to belong to a Native American woman.

Incidents like this should remind us to be cautious about interpretations of the past when the physical evidence is scant. In fact, this is only one of many instances in which a further examination of the physical evidence has led to museum displays correcting their signage. The obvious lesson is that we should be especially cautious about interpretations of physical evidence which promote or convey an evolutionary worldview that contradicts Biblical history." 

CMI

The Darwin Dictionary

 "The Darwin Dictionary as a unique tool to help you engagespecifically in the battle over origins.
As Proverbs 27:6 tells us, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.”

No matter what worldview you bring to the table, we hope your thinking will be challenged and sharpened by The Darwin Dictionary. Happy reading!
Abiogenesis, n. – Rocks begetting life, in violation of the most basic, observed law of biology.
Apemen, n. – Ever-changing, imaginary creatures that inhabit museums and textbooks, concocted by speculation wrapped in conjecture bundled with an unhealthy dose of artistic license.
Big bang, n. – The logic-bending theory that everything was produced when nothing at all exploded.
Consensus, n. – What evolutionists appeal to when the evidence is lacking.
Convergent evolution, n. – The position of refuge for evolutionists who think that complex, sophisticated structures like camera eyes, billed snouts, sticky tongues, and electrosensory organs must have arisen multiple times by coincidence on separate branches of the evolutionary tree. Don’t bother them with the odds.
Dark matter, n. – The invisible, undetectable substance that supposedly holds the universe together, invoked liberally to prop up evolutionary cosmological theories that would otherwise fail to fit the evidence.
Dysteleology (poor design), n. – The not-at-all-pretentiouscategory into which evolutionists put the many ingeniously-designed biological features whose purposes they have failed to understand.
Evolutionary stasis (lack of change), n. – The part of the evolutionary process which has by far the most abundant fossil evidence—during which no evolution occurs.
God of the gaps, n. – The deceitful charge, seemingly immune to correction, that the case for a Creator is based on ignorance rather than positive evidence—a misrepresentation which evolutionists believe will become legitimate if they just keep repeating it.
Junk DNA, n. – Highly functional parts of the genome that specialize in confounding smug evolutionary claims that these genetic segments represent nothing more than clutter accumulated in the distant Darwinian past.
Living fossil, n. – An organism that refused to change over time, just so that it might bewilder evolutionary textbook authors.
Millions of years ago, adv. phrase – A heads-up that an ideologically-driven just-so story is coming next. Not so different from the phrase, “Once upon a time.”
Multiverse, n. – A desperate, evidence-free, unscientific gimmick to explain away the spectacularly precise fine-tuning of theuniverse without resorting to a Creator.
Nebular hypothesis, n. – An easy way for solar systems to form from gas clouds, as long as the laws of physics (such as the conservation of angular momentum) need not be a constraint.
Peer reviewed, v. – Vetted by the evolutionary echo chamber.
Pseudoscience, n. – Any field of study that poses a challenge to naturalism.
Quantum fluctuation, n. – The phenomenon of subatomic particle materialization which strictly obeys the well-established laws of physics, yet which big bang proponents confusingly invoke in their attempts to circumvent these same laws of physics (i.e., postulating that something can spontaneously come from nothing for no reason).
Quote mining, n. – The reasonable creationist practice of accurately citing a leading evolutionary authority figure whose comments somehow escaped censorship from the Darwinian thought police.
Settled science, n. – A phrase evolutionists find useful to preemptively shut down critical thinking.
War on science, n. – The fearmongering ‘sky-is-falling’ narrative spun by evolutionists whenever their unscientific worldview is challenged in public."
CMI

Sign of Allegiance to the CREATOR

 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: 

Exodus 20:10

“Pointing to God as the Maker of the heavens and the earth, it [the

Sabbath] distinguishes the true God from all false gods. 

*All who keep the seventh day signify by this act that they are worshipers of Jehovah. 

*Thus the Sabbath is the visible sign of man’s allegiance to God as long as there are any upon the earth to serve Him.” 

E.G.W.

Consciousness —as the Music of the Mind

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. Genesis 2:7

"University of California (Santa Barbara) cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has written a significant article at IAI.TV. He and synthetic biologist Bridget Queenan maintain there that “People with missing brains make clear the mystery of consciousness.”

Mystery? Gazzaniga, who trained under Nobelist Roger Sperry (1913–1994), is a close colleague of leading neuroscientist Christof Koch. Is he backing away from eliminative materialism (the mind is simply what the brain does)? He and Queenan dance around the topic in a most interesting way, beginning with people missing large parts

of their brains:
A 2013 case reported a 60-year-old missing the back of her brain. Again, normal on the outside: employed until recently, married, with one child and the ability to live alone. Inside, a cavity where the cortex should be. A 2018 case reported a 60-year-old, unmarried and unemployed, but active in a band and a choir, with his head full of fluid and only a thin sheet of cortex. A 2021 case reported a 72-year-old living independently, again largely without what we might recognize as “a brain.” Even rats got in on the action: R222 lived well into adulthood, performing well in lab-rat escapades despite a hollowed-out brain.

Collectively, these findings suggest that the human (and rat!) brain is considerably more plastic than expected. If you were born with bones or muscles half the expected size, or a quarter, or a tenth, you wouldn’t carry on unimpeded. If you were born with a tenth of your liver, we’d have a problem. Yet, somehow, the human brain can rise to the occasion—at a performance review…

Q: Is your brain really necessary for consciousness? 

Gazzaniga and Queenan argue that “It may be time for a new approach to brains and ‘consciousness’—as the music of the mind.” Music, they remind us, is more than volume and can be produced in a variety of ways.

What’s missing from Gazzaniga and Queenan’s model of consciousness becomes clear when they turn to analysis:
They write, “We can explain what makes music bad, though it’s much harder to explain what makes it good or great. That’s why we need to build a definition of consciousness from the ground up.” They then, puzzlingly, seek to downgrade language — unique to humans — compared to the “music” of consciousness:

Language is not the same as consciousness. Plenty of composers —Beethoven and Tchaikovsky among them—are in the Pantheon of “Great Composers” for music alone. We don’t require them to handle the words. We only seem to demand words when we want to exclude members from the club.
It’s time to admit that many living creatures aren’t so great at language, while being perfectly good at consciousness. They are musicians, but not singers, they are composers, but not librettists—get over it and move on. “Necessary for consciousness?”

Q: What’s obviously missing from this account is the mind of the composer?

A: Everything else flows from the immaterial ideas that inspired the composer who began the process by writing them down in musical notation:
Second, human language is similarly the outcome of abstract ideas arising in an immaterial mind. It is in no way inferior to music, as great literature attests. 

Animals have languages, to be sure. But their languages are signal systems — Even if Gazzaniga and Queenan wanted to provide an account of the origin of music in immaterial ideas, they could not do so. They would find themselves in direct conflict with the — increasingly unbelievable — mantra that the mind is simply what the brain does. So they end up confusing the issues around language and talking around the inescapable fact of human exceptionalism often complex ones, to be sure, but not the same thing." 

MindMatters

Idolatry and natural selection

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The Creator of all things is the Lord Jesus Christ, who has no equal in authority and status. The first two commandments reiterate that this high position is His alone: “You shall have no other gods before Me. . . . You shall not make any . . . likeness . . . . You shall not bow down to them nor serve them” (Exodus 20:3, 4).

Darwin’s clever link between idolatry and the evolutionary worldview is natural selection and the concept behind that term. Scientists initially criticized natural selection as a personification. As a science historian explains, “One source of trouble was that Darwin liked the term ‘natural selection’ because it [a mental concept] could be ‘used as a substantive governing a verb [a real agent that can act]’ (F. Darwin, 1887, vol. 3, p. 46). But such uses appeared to reify, even to deify, natural selection as an agent.”

Q: Do evolutionists invoke natural selection as a substitute creator? 

A: Let’s hear from them.

"This was Darwin’s fundamental discovery, that there is a process that is creative, although not conscious. . . . It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent."

"Natural selection is a creative process that can explain the appearance of genuine novelty."

Natural selection is venerated as the creator of biology, so why not for the entire universe? As one evolutionist put it, “Charles Darwin .

. . [has] brought the entire natural world under a single law of natural selection . . . [the] starting point [of my theory about the universe’s evolution] is the remarkable theory of cosmological natural selection proposed by the physicist Lee Smolin.” It follows that “the universe could be further understood as a self-coherent and self-creating whole, without the need for anything outside itself to give it law, meaning or complexity.”

Natural selection is idolatrous in the basest of ways. Not only does it ascribe rational powers to unconscious environmental features, like any other idol, but it also induces people not to give the Lord Jesus credit for the incredible intelligence and machinery He has built into His creatures that enable them to adapt to their environment. Consider the Lord’s declaration in Isaiah 42:8: “I am the LORD: that is My name: and My glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images” . . . or to nature as creator." 

ICR