A Is for . . . Adam or Ape?

by Ken Ham

Shoulder blade shapes have been compared between humans and existing apes as well as fossilized apes. Well, evolutionists wouldn’t call the fossils apes.

An article stated that a recent study suggests that the last common ancestor (often shortened to LCA) of humans and apes “looked a lot like a chimpanzee or gorilla . . . at least in the shoulder.” The PNAS study, titled “Fossil hominin shoulders support an African ape-like last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees,” explains,

A laterally facing shoulder blade allows humans to store energy in their shoulders, much like a slingshot, facilitating high-speed throwing, an important and uniquely human behavior.

“These changes in the shoulder, which were probably initially driven by the use of tools well back into human evolution, also made us great throwers,” said co-author Dr Neil Roach of Harvard University.

So shoulder blade shapes were compared between humans and existing apes as well as fossilized apes. Well, of course, the evolutionists wouldn’t call the hominid fossils apes. Since they assume our common ancestry, regardless of how ape-like the specimen is, they call it an ape-like ancestor or hominid, not an ape. However, when evolutionists draw pictures of such a creature, it usually looks like an ape. That’s not surprising at all, because what they are referring to really was an ape!

I’m sure it bothers them a little when we call it an ape, since they see it as a panorama of ape-like intermediaries that gave rise to humans. But since God says that He created man in His own image, and other creatures were created after their kinds, evolution didn’t happen, and we have nothing in our past but humans. Some different, and some distinct characteristics were lost due to small geographically isolated and extinct subpopulations (think Neanderthal), but all human. So apes have only apes in their history. Certainly some extinct varieties are found in the fossil record, but those fossils that look like apes are apes, of that we can be sure. So did hominids exist? We can use our humanly unique shoulders for “casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5) and confidently declare that the Bible makes it clear that humans are distinct, so that answer is a no.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.

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