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Last Updated: Wednesday,December 1, 1999
Gaps in the Fossil Record
The right conditions in the soil where something dies has to be present for fossilization to occur. There is a four million year gap in the Great Rift area of Africa because for four million years the conditions were not right. There may be other places in Africa or Asia where fossilized bones of hominids exist for this crucial time period but no one has found them yet. It is in this time period that some ape species turned into huminoids.
There are two other problems with finding evidence of ape to hominid evolution:
- The identification of how 'apish' or 'humanish' a particular skeleton is, since usually the skeleton is incomplete, as described on another page.
- The human tendency to make stuff up when there is no evidence, and then believe this made up stuff, or very closely related to have a belief before seeing evidence that does not agree with the belief, and ignoring the evidence and keeping the belief. A good example of the former human trait is given in the reference above.
Here is a personal example of how belief system gets in the way of evidence.
One day my oldest daughter came to me and stated emphatically that baby flies were born in rotten meat. I agreed that could happen when female flies layed their eggs in it. "No" insisted my daughter. "Flies have nothing to do with it. The rotting meat creates baby flies."
I said a lot of people used to believe that but experiments would show that was not so. I convinced her to try the experiments herself. She put meat from the refridgerator (sawed off actually from a frozen piece) into a jaw she cleaned herself, and tightened the lid on it. She put the jar into a window which got some sunlight. In five days there was a very visibly rotten piece of meat in that jar, and no flies. In five more days the meat was practically all a liquid ooze, and still no flies. I pointed this out her. She said maybe it did not always happen. I praised her for quick thinking. I said that could be tested by a lot of jars. I told her to compare that to how often baby flies appeared in meat which rotted after a fly or two had landed on it for a while. She agreed to try about ten jars of each situation. One set of ten like the first try, and the next ten opened until she was sure some flies had landed on each piece of meat. Then she agreed to put lids on them especially when I said how we would smell the stink of rotting meat otherwise. After five days we had ten jars with maggots in them, and ten with nothing but ooze. The maggots always happened when the meat had flies land on it at the beginning. The other meat jar never had any maggots. Keeping a few of the maggot jars showed they would turn into baby flies. I asked what she thought now. "Perhaps the shape of the jars where no maggots appeared is why none showed up." I laughed and realized the problems Pasteur had to convince some people that if what they believed and what their senses showed them were different they could change what they believed.
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