Henry Gee in Nature: “We know that, as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh. Yet we cling to it.”

Hmmm, at least he got this much right;

The Ape To Man Drawings - Another Blatant Deception of Evolution - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4236845

But he seem to have missed the memo on this:

First “Hobbits”, Now Pygmies? Excerpt: "INDONESIAN scientists have found a community of Pygmy people on the eastern island of Flores, near a village where Australian scientists discovered a dwarf-sized skeleton last year and declared it a new human species, a newspaper says. This latest discovery will likely raise more controversy over the finding of homo floresiensis." http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2005/05/first-hobbits-now-pygmies.html

These following studies confirm that the 'Hobbits' are actually human:

'Hobbit' Was an Iodine-Deficient Human, Not Another Species, - September 2010 Excerpt: The University of Western Australia's Emeritus Professor Charles Oxnard and his colleagues, in a paper in PLoS ONE have reconfirmed, on the post-cranial skeleton, their original finding on the skull that Homo floresiensis in fact bears the hallmarks of humans -- Homo sapiens -- affected by hypothyroid cretinism. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100928025514.htm Hobbits Were Brain Diseased Modern Humans - August 2011 Excerpt: A new paper compared skulls of H. floresiensis with those of modern humans, Homo erectus, and humans with microcephaly. The result favors the interpretation that the Hobbits most likely were diseased modern humans. http://crev.info/content/110808-hobbits_were_brain_diseased_modern_humans

The Hobbit 'hoax' is very similar in nature to the many other infamous, and outright, hoaxes presented by neo-Darwinists for human evolution. Many that were perpetuated for years in the past before being overturned:

EVOLUTION FORGERIES (For Human Evolution) - excerpts - Piltdown Man: An Orang-utan Jaw and a Human Skull! Nebraska Man: A Single Pig Tooth! Ota Benga: The African Native Put Into a Cage! http://www.evolutiondeceit.com/chapter9.php

Here are some sobering quotes:

When we consider the remote past, before the origin of the actual species Homo sapiens, we are faced with a fragmentary and disconnected fossil record. Despite the excited and optimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor. Richard Lewontin - Harvard Zoologist Evolution of the Genus Homo - Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences - Tattersall, Schwartz, May 2009 Excerpt: "Definition of the genus Homo is almost as fraught as the definition of Homo sapiens. We look at the evidence for “early Homo,” finding little morphological basis for extending our genus to any of the 2.5–1.6-myr-old fossil forms assigned to “early Homo” or Homo habilis/rudolfensis." http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100202 Man is indeed as unique, as different from all other animals, as had been traditionally claimed by theologians and philosophers. Evolutionist Ernst Mayr “Something extraordinary, if totally fortuitous, happened with the birth of our species….Homo sapiens is as distinctive an entity as exists on the face of the Earth, and should be dignified as such instead of being adulterated with every reasonably large-brained hominid fossil that happened to come along.” Anthropologist Ian Tattersall (curator at the American Museum of Natural History)

This paper was interesting

Earliest humans not so different from us, research suggests - February 2011 Excerpt: Shea argues that comparing the behavior of our most ancient ancestors to Upper Paleolithic Europeans holistically and ranking them in terms of their "behavioral modernity" is a waste of time. There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioral variability. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-earliest-humans.html

Moreover Darwinists keep forgetting to tell people of the growing genetic chasm between man and apes that advancing science is now revealing:

Study Reports a Whopping "23% of Our Genome" Contradicts Standard Human-Ape Evolutionary Phylogeny - Casey Luskin - June 2011 Excerpt: For about 23% of our genome, we share no immediate genetic ancestry with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. This encompasses genes and exons to the same extent as intergenic regions. We conclude that about 1/3 of our genes started to evolve as human-specific lineages before the differentiation of human, chimps, and gorillas took place. (of note; 1/3 of our genes is equal to about 7000 genes that we do not share with chimpanzees) http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/study_reports_a_whopping_23_of047041.html

as well neo-Darwinists seem to keep 'conveniently' forgetting to tell people that they have no demonstrated mechanism, much less a actual example, to account for 'trivial' change much less such macro-change;

"Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds” 2004: - Doug Axe ,,,this implies the overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as 1 in 10^77, adding to the body of evidence that functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences." http://www.mendeley.com/research/estimating-the-prevalence-of-protein-sequences-adopting-functional-enzyme-folds/

bornagain77

The point of the article is that contrary to the expectations of early researchers who, as Gee puts it,

... were in thrall to the idea that the expansion of the human brain came first, before the adoption of a fully erect gait.

the evidence that Falk reviews suggest just the opposite, that big brains arose after upright walking evolved. From the article:

Falk describes her work refuting the idea that the small brain of the Hobbit implies the creature might have had a congenital disorder of brain growth. She shows that its brain most resembled that of Homo erectus, another antique hominin, and was developed in areas associated with cognitive abilities that would have supported making the simple tools with which its fossils are associated. Yet the Hobbit has a closer resemblance in its general anatomy to Australopithecus, suggesting — again contrary to preconception — that hominins emerged from Africa much earlier than thought.

Gee adds:

Brains might be small, but they can still pack a punch.

NormO