Do you remember, dear reader, Friedrich Engels’s well-read and thoroughly written article “The Role of Labor in the Process of Transforming Ape into Man” (1876)? What were its main postulates? They can be reduced to the following. In the supposed ancestors of humans - highly developed apes, in connection with upright walking as an emerging new feature the body released its hands. Further improvement in the functions of the hands occurred “only thanks to labor, thanks to adaptation to ever new operations, thanks to the inheritance of the special development of muscles, ligaments and bones achieved in this way, and thanks to the ever-new application of these inherited improvements to new, increasingly complex operations.. ." As a result of the stimulating effect of labor, according to Engels, the society of great apes became more united, and they began to carry out many actions together. The result of joint activity was the development of the necessary communicative tool - speech. It is labor, together with articulate speech, that Friedrich Engels puts at the forefront, calling them the driving force of human evolution.
Logical? Undoubtedly. We will return to these theses later, but for now we will turn our attention to the young Charles Darwin, who studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and theology at Cambridge, and then received an honorary position as a naturalist explorer on the expeditionary ship of the English Royal Navy, the Beagle. The future great naturalist, explorer and analyst, and in 1831 a twenty-three-year-old inquisitive young man, Charles Darwin boldly stepped aboard the Beagle in the hope of circumnavigating the world in two years. The journey dragged on for five years.
During this trip around the world (1831-1836), Charles Darwin collected the richest botanical, zoological, paleontological and geological collections and made a large number of observations. He unearthed the bones of huge extinct sloths and armadillos in Argentina, observed exotic insects and birds in the rainforests of Brazil, studied dolphins off the coast of Uruguay and evergreen beech forests in Chile, marveled at the diversity of flora and fauna of Australian coral reefs and admired the platypus and kangaroos.
Route of the Beagle's round-the-world voyage: 1 - Devonport; 2 - Tenerife; 3 - Cape Verde Islands; 4 - Bahia; 5 - Rio de Janeiro; 6 - Montevideo; 7 - Falkland Islands; 8 - Valparaiso; 9 - Lima; 10 - Galapagos Islands; eleven - Tahiti; 12 - New Zealand; 13 - Sydney; 14 - Hobart; 15 - King George Bay; 16 - Cocos Islands; 17 - Mauritius; 18 - Cape Town; 19 - Bahia; 20 - Azores .
A thorough analysis of observations and the obtained factual material made a sharp turn in the worldview of Charles Darwin: having stepped on board the ship as a convinced supporter of the idea of constancy of species, upon returning from the expedition the scientist became its ardent opponent, developing a theory of dynamism and variability of species.
What was the turning point for a radical change in the scientist’s scientific views? Of course, the opportunity provided to observe a huge number of new species that are inaccessible to the eye of an armchair researcher stationary working in one of the countries. A classic example is the study of so-called “Darwin’s” finches in the Galapagos Islands, an equatorial archipelago in Pacific Ocean. On the Galapagos Islands, Charles Darwin discovered 14 species of finches, differing in the type of beak structure. For example, finches eating hard seeds had thick and massive beaks, while their fellow tribesmen eating soft plant foods (for example, berries) had thin and short beaks. The finches that fed on the nectar of flowers had long and awl-sharp beaks, while their colleagues that extracted insects from under the bark of trees worked with very strong beaks, similar to the beak of a woodpecker. The Galapagos Islands are a closed system, surrounded by more than nine hundred kilometers of water from the coast. South America, where you can also find finches. But completely different, adapted to local living conditions. What conclusion did Charles Darwin draw based on what he saw? All finches descended from one common ancestor, and the reason for the change in the structure of their beaks is their feeding habits.
Biological species are not static, but dynamic!
Returning after such a significant trip to England in 1836, Charles Darwin began to view the achievements of European breeders of those years in a completely different way: no longer as a naturalist observer, but as an evolutionary analyst. It should be noted that in the first half of the 19th century, England became a developed industrial power, in which there was intensive urban growth, requiring a rapid increase in productivity Agriculture. Fruitful breeding work, thanks to artificial selection carried out by humans, was marked by the creation of many new varieties of plants and animal breeds. At the end of the 18th – beginning of the 19th centuries, the first breeding nurseries were created in England and livestock breeding was organized. “Are there any analogies in the work of breeders with natural selection in nature?” - scientific thought “asked” Charles Darwin. Of course, there are similarities in the mechanisms of action of artificial and natural selection: to choose the most suitable and fit. And Darwin would later write about this, summarizing the conclusions in his famous books.
How many years did it take Charles Darwin, a responsible scientist, theorist and practitioner, to decide to publish his works? Five? Ten? It took him about twenty (!) years of intense thought for the world to become acquainted with the now well-known theory of the evolution of the organic world. The first detailed exposition of Darwin's theory of evolution was published in 1859 in the book On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. The book was a wild success. Its first edition (slightly more than a thousand copies) was intended only for narrow specialists. However, the entire edition was sold out in one day - an unprecedented event in the book trade of that time. During the scientist’s lifetime, this book went through six English, three American, five German, three Russian, three French, and one Italian, Dutch, and Swedish editions.
So, what did the great Darwin say in his evolutionary theory? The scientist identified three factors in the historical development of biological species in nature: hereditary variability, the struggle for existence and natural selection. As a result of the interrelation of these factors, species adapt to conditions external environment and change. The impact on living organisms of changing living conditions or crossing between individuals leads to the emergence of variability, the emergence of new features in the structure and functions of organisms. Since in nature living organisms produce more individuals in their offspring than are left, there must be some mechanism that regulates their numbers. Consequently, there must be competition between young individuals - a struggle for existence: individuals better adapted to living conditions survive, and those unadapted die. In other words, under natural conditions wild nature carries out natural selection.
Having shown enviable patience in analyzing extensive material concerning the success of breeders in selecting the most suitable varieties cultivated plants and the breeding of domestic animal breeds, Charles Darwin came to the conclusion that in agricultural practice the role of selecting the most suitable individuals is performed by the breeder, and not natural conditions. Darwin called this type of selection of individuals performed by humans artificial selection.
How does the process of evolution occur? Stepwise along a straight staircase, as Jean Lamarck suggested, or branched, as Peter Pallas argued? According to Darwin, similar organisms are related and descended from a common ancestor, and the origin of all organisms can be traced back to some single ancestor. One ancestor, many branches. We see an obvious example of Charles Darwin's presentation of the origins of living organisms, including humans, in the form of a family tree.
Why was the scientist in no hurry to publish his ideas? He prophetically understood that they would be inhospitably received not only by orthodox theologians, but also by religious naturalist friends. Did this happen? Unfortunately, it happened. But something else happened. Charles Darwin's views on the origins of man were misinterpreted by some of his would-be supporters, and this misinterpretation became quite widespread. What statement of Darwin are we talking about?
In his work “The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection” (1871), Charles Darwin, based on the similar structure of a number of organs, substantiated the idea of kinship between humans and apes and expressed the hypothesis of their common origin from an ancient original ancestor. It is necessary to emphasize once again that the scientist’s hypothesis was that man, along with apes, could have descended from a common ancient ancestor, and nothing more. The far-sighted scientist did not say that man descended directly from the ape, as some supporters of the evolutionary doctrine called “Darwinism” began to claim, having done a lot for the widespread dissemination of this stereotype. In order to confirm the correctness of these lines, the author of this article considered it his duty to read all the main works of Charles Darwin in the original and see for himself the disastrous consequences that inadequate interpretation and translation can lead to.
So, Charles Darwin argued that man did not descend from a monkey, but from an ancestral form common to apes. This formulation has a completely different biological meaning and means, first of all, the presence of kinship between monkeys and humans. The fact of the relationship between apes and humans is confirmed by modern genetic data. It should be noted that the issue of the previously declared high percentage (95%) of similarity between the genetic material of humans and some great apes is currently being actively discussed and, not without reason, remains open. With the completion in 2003 of the main work on deciphering the human genome (the totality of all genes) and the opportunities that have emerged in this regard for modern anthropologists to conduct research at a higher level of reliability, evidence in favor of a decrease in the percentage of genetic similarity between humans and monkeys.
Who was he, our common ancestor? Perhaps he was more human-like than ape-like? I also dare to suggest that now existing species apes are dead-end branches of development, descended from the possible crossing of our common ancestors with wild animals at some time.
“What about the statements of Georges Buffon, Jean Lamarck, Friedrich Engels and other researchers?” – you will definitely ask. As for the statements of Georges Buffon, according to the most reliable sources that could be found, he was more inclined to assert the existence of kinship between man and monkeys than about the direct descent of the former from the latter. It is also necessary to take into account that, as in the case of mistranslations and misunderstandings of Charles Darwin's statements, the words “monkey” and “man” should not always be taken literally: in some cases these terms are used to designate previous organisms or collective images.
Remember that we stopped at the point where we agreed to call Friedrich Engels’ theory, which denotes the main role of labor in human evolution, logical? As well as Jean Lamarck’s assumption about the possible humanization of our ancestors. The theories mentioned are logical, the only question is adequate understanding and correct translation. If we are talking about our distant ancestor, a special branch of which, possessing intelligence and the beginnings of social forms of behavior, with the help of developing work turned into modern human society, then we can completely agree with such conclusions.
What was it like further fate Darwin's theories? In modern biology, it is still considered the fundamental natural scientific concept of the evolution of living beings, which for the first time identified natural selection as one of its main driving factors.
What was the future of Darwinism? The author of the term “Darwinism”, as well as an apologist for the statement about the origin of man from apes, is the English scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog”, an agnostic and materialist, who fiercely contrasted the evolutionary worldview with dogmatic ideas of divine creation (creationism). It was a daring attack on the Church, a challenge to an outdated system of views, an outrage that opened the gates to a bold scientific search, to the most unusual assumptions and discussions. Having turned into a kind of anti-religion, Darwinism received wide use among scientists of the 19th century. 
What happened in the 20th century? The liberal wing of Darwinism was transformed into a compromise synthetic theory of evolution, combining the postulates of Darwinism and modern data from paleontology, genetics and the evolution of the biosphere. The reactionary direction of Darwinism turned into an element of communist ideology, typical example which may be quoted from the newspaper Pravda: “The working class, armed with Marxist-Leninist theory, takes everything truly scientific in Darwinism to fight for the construction of socialism.” These and other attempts to politicize scientific knowledge have, unfortunately, had far-reaching negative consequences both for biology and for other sciences. However, this is not the responsibility of Charles Darwin: any scientific discovery can be used for both good and evil purposes. It all depends on who will use this or that information.
What is happening now, in the 21st century, the century of molecular biology and genetic engineering? Is Darwinism the fundamental theory of evolution? Should humans be considered a direct descendant of apes, or was the evolutionary process much more complex? Does Darwin's evolutionary theory contradict the ideas of spiritual development of the individual? I invite you to a discussion, dear reader. You can send your opinions, comments and questions to the editorial office of “Partner” or to the author by email:
For example, some people continue to argue that evolution is not a valid scientific theory because it cannot actually be tested. This is, of course, false. Scientists have successfully conducted numerous laboratory tests that support the basic principles of evolution.
Researchers were able to use the fossil record to answer important questions about natural selection and how organisms change over time. However, "" remains a popular idea. They even refer to the second law of thermodynamics in the following words: an ordered system will always be disordered, making regular evolution impossible.
The myth rather reflects a general misunderstanding of entropy, a term used by physicists to describe the randomness or disorder of a system. The Second Law states that the total entropy of a closed system cannot decrease, but allows parts of the system to become more ordered while other parts become smaller. In other words, evolution and the second law of thermodynamics can live together and in harmony.
One of the most persistent myths concerns people's attitudes toward apes, a group of primates that includes the gorilla, orangutan and chimpanzee. Oh, yes, many people are rightly worried about unpresentable kinship(?), well, then let me remind you: we all owe something to the simplest single-celled organism.A person who accepts evolution without external interference will say: If the theory of evolution is true, then people must have happened. The monkeys must have changed step by step into humans. Developing the thought, he will ask: If monkeys turned into people, then monkeys should no longer exist.
MONKEY> ORIGIN OF MAN.
While there are several ways to dismiss this claim, the rebuttal below is simple—humans have not literally replaced apes. This does not mean that humans and apes are not related, but the relationship cannot be a straight line with one form changing into the other. This can be traced along two independent lines. 
The intersection of two lineages represents something special that biologists call a common ancestor. The ape ancestors, which likely lived between 5 and 11 million years ago in Africa, gave rise to two separate lineages. One of the lineages was related to hominids, human-like species, and the other to ape species living today.
To put it more clearly, we use the analogy of a family tree, where a common ancestor occupied a trunk, which was then divided into two branches. Hominids evolved along one branch, and great ape species evolved along the other branch, independently of their “neighbors.”
A HUMAN ANCESTOR WAS FOUND.
What did our common ancestor look like? Although the fossil record does not provide detailed answers, it seems logical that the animal would have the characteristics of humans and apes. In 2007, Japanese scientists discovered the jaw and teeth of such an animal, which they chose to be the progenitor.
By studying the size and shape of the teeth, they determined that the monkey was the size of a gorilla and had a predilection for hard nuts and seeds. They named it Nakalipithecus nakayamai, dating it to be 10 million years old.Thanks to the discovery, we get a monkey in in the right place on the timeline. Archaeologists also discovered ancient bones in the Samburu Hills of northern Kenya. This places Nakayamai in the correct geographic location, along the hominid evolutionary movement that stretched across hundreds of kilometers of eastern Africa.
Of course, today it is an inhospitable area under the scorching desert sun. But 10 million years ago, paleontologists and geologists say, a cool, wet forest teeming with life flourished here.
Is it possible that an ape-like creature like N. nakayamai lived in these fertile forests? Is it possible that this is where the creature began to experiment with a new lifestyle, leaving the trees and getting on its feet? Yes, we think so, say scientists, and for years they have been coming here to find out when and how the humanoid species separated from the apes.
A unique discovery was made in Middle America in 1994, when a group of scientists led by Tim White from the University of California, Berkeley: a skull, pelvis, arm and leg bones.
By putting the pieces of the skeleton together, scientists identified a very early hominid that, although it walked upright, still retained the opposite finger. This characteristic, commonly found in primates for tree climbing.
Scientists named the new species Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi for short, determining that it lived 4.4 million years ago. In anthropological circles, Ardi was almost as famous as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), a 3.2-million-year-old hominid discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson in Hadar, Ethiopia.
Lucy has been cited as the earliest known human ancestor for many years. For a time, it even seemed that scientists would never be able to penetrate deeper into our mysterious past.Opponents of Darwinism constantly remind us of the absence intermediate type, but Ardi has already appeared, and recently other significant discoveries that reveal the “mystery of human origins.”
MORE ARGUMENTS FOR TRADITIONAL EVOLUTION.
In 1997, scientists discovered the bones of a new species, Ardipithecus kadabba, which lived in the Middle Avakha region between 5 and 6 million years ago. And in 2000, Martin Pickford and Brigitte Senut of the College de France and a team from the Community Museums of Kenya discovered one of the oldest hominids to date.
Its official name is Orrorin tugenensis, but scientists called it the Millennium Man. The chimpanzee-sized hominid lived 6 million years ago in the Tugen Mountains of Kenya, where it spent time in both trees and on the ground. Although on the ground he most likely walked vertically.
Now scientists are working to bridge the gap between the "Man of the Millennium" and the true "missing link" - a common ancestor on the branch of life before the lineage split. Could Nakayamai be that connection, or is there another species between the two?
The answer most likely lies in the dry soil of East Africa. Another thing is obvious: the camp of an alternative history of human origins will never be empty, although now it is more difficult for us to find arguments for our theory.
The theory of the origin of man from the ape
The theory of the origin of man from the ape is the second oldest, and therefore takes an honorable fourth place in my ranking.
The essence of the theory is best expressed in the legends of Southeast Asia. Thus, representatives from the Indian Jayvast tribe believe that they descend from the monkey god Hanuman. As evidence, Hindus point out that their princes retained longer spines with tail-like appendages, with which Hanuman, the hero of the epic mythology Ramayana, was usually depicted. The Tibetans trace their origins to two extraordinary monkeys who were sent to populate the kingdom of snow. The monkeys learned to plow and sow grain, but from overwork they all became shabby. Well, the tails, of course, also dried up. This is how man appeared - exactly like Marx.
All these tales would probably have remained funny myths if not for the Count de Buffon Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707-1788), a French naturalist, biologist, mathematician, naturalist and writer, who from 1749 to 1783 published a 24-volume Encyclopedia "Natural History". In it, the count suggested that man descended from a monkey.
Such a theory aroused anger among ordinary people (the book was even publicly burned) and healthy laughter from zoologists - for all scientists perfectly understood the delusion of such a fantasy. Apparently since then there has been a joke in the scientific community that the animal world is divided into two categories: four-legged and four-armed. And since a person has two arms and two legs, only a kangaroo can be his ancestor.
Serious objections included insurmountable differences in structure internal organs, skin and skeleton. In particular, the structure of the foot:
A funny difference between the human and ape feet is that evolution can make a monkey’s foot out of a human one - if a person starts climbing trees more than walking, the big toe will gradually protrude and acquire grasping reflexes. But the reverse process is absolutely impossible. Without a supporting toe, the monkey is not able to confidently move on the ground and constantly “bumps.” And if you try to change your lifestyle, you will inevitably be eaten as a result of natural selection.
It would seem that this could be the end of the story about the “monkey incident” - but religion intervened in the story. XVIII century - an era of freethinking and destruction of foundations. Some of the rebels decided to make the “monkey man” a symbol of a new, progressive worldview, and the funny fake suddenly turned out to be the basic religious dogma of the fighters against the old world. Activists of “progress” called the fairy tale about the origin of man from ape a “scientific theory” and hammered it into school textbooks, not caring at all about the opinion of scientists.
Meanwhile, time passed. A century after the scandal of the ape-man theory, in 1859 Cambridge Christian College graduate and Anglican priest Charles Darwin published his Theory of the Origin of Species. It has nothing to do with the myth under discussion - except that with late XIX century, the “monkey people” began to proudly call themselves “Darwinists.”
Only in In the 20th century, biologists finally made an attempt to determine human ancestors using scientific methodology, rejecting religious dogma and relying only on the theory of evolution. The first to do this was the famous oceanographer Professor Alistair Hardy in 1929. He reasoned like this: in order to determine the ancestor of a person, we need to collect the morphological characteristics of the organism, systematize them and determine what habitat this animal is adapted to, and what characteristics the creature from which this animal evolved should have.
And he set about systematizing, checking organ by organ and following something like this:
1) Nose. There are vestigial muscles in the nose that allow the wings of the nose to move. This means that the human ancestor had full-fledged muscles that reliably closed the nostrils. None of the land animals have such adaptations, but all animals leading an aquatic lifestyle have them: dolphins, sperm whales, otters, seals, etc.
2) The upper respiratory tract with a very low larynges is a unique feature of the species Homo sapiens. None of the land animals have such an adaptation, but all marine mammals have it.
3) The ability to consciously hold your breath - similar
4) Increased content of red blood cells in the blood - similar
5) Bare skin - similar
6) The ability to give birth to children in water - similar
7) The lower limbs are in line with the spine - similar
8) Subcutaneous fat layer of infants - similar. Land cubs are born skinny. And they don’t know how to dive from birth, and even with their mouths open.
9) While in water, a person reflexively slows down the heart rate. This mechanism operates in exactly the same way in all aquatic mammals. However, land mammals, when entering water - an aggressive environment that threatens their lives - sharply increase their heart rate.
10) The location of the mammary glands on the chest, and not on the stomach, is most convenient for feeding the baby in water - so as not to interfere with air breathing at the same time as feeding. This is how people differ from all land mammals. But this same feature is characteristic of marine mammals (dugongs were mistaken for sea maidens precisely because of the presence of mermaid breasts). Women's breasts are generally strikingly different from the barely noticeable nipples of land mammals.
Well, and so on. The list of morphological differences indicating a person’s adaptability to life in water extends to several hundred positions and is largely of an anal-genital nature, since both digestion and human sexual behavior are also characteristic exclusively of marine animals, but not of land animals.
Having come to a completely logical conclusion about who exactly the man’s ancestor was, Professor Hardy immediately... hid this information, well aware that he would become a victim of religious persecution. The dogmas of the “monkeys,” alas, are considered mandatory for official science. And therefore, the first to announce the real ancestors of man in 1942 was the German biologist Max Westenhoffer, who, independently of his colleague, came to the conclusion that the ancestor of man was Hydropithecus - either an amphibian monkey, according to some scientists, or even a giant lemur, according to others (the remains of such lemurs were found in the caves of Madagascar).
For obvious reasons, the “monkey people” managed to ignore the publications of Max Westenhoffer - however, on March 17, 1960, Sir Alistair Hardy, by that day a knight and professor at Oxford University, decided that he no longer had to worry about his career and published in The New Scientist magazine » article “Was the human ancestor an aquatic dweller?” ("Was Man More Aquatic In The Past?").
And the scientific bomb finally exploded, scattering the myth of the origin of man from the ape into small pieces!
It would seem that “Darwinists” should only rejoice at how the theory of evolution allowed science to make a radical leap forward, significantly approaching the mystery of the origin of man, to erase the Asian myth from school textbooks and write it there scientific theory. But it was not there! Still, religious dogmas are religious dogmas, and if the doctrine of “scientific progress” includes a monkey as an ancestor, it is the monkey that should remain there!
A wave of curses fell on Alistair Hardy. The “scientific community” accused him of ruining everything with his idiotic evolutionary theory beautiful building Darwinism, undermines the foundations of the doctrine and insults Charles Darwin himself. The professor just chuckled, watching the hysteria of the “monkeys” from the sidelines. The orthodox could not burn it publicly along with the article - by the middle of the twentieth century, auto-da-fe went out of fashion; It was already too late to ruin the scientist’s career, anathematize him, and expel an accomplished and very eminent professional from science. To refute a scientific theory based on basic principles Naturally, opponents were unable to support the evolutionary theory. Facts are generally a damn inconvenient thing if they were not destroyed in time. And destroying the facts that every person sees in the mirror every day is beyond the power of any religion. The “monkey people” can only grind their teeth, curse biologists and ban new publications of scientific research.
Alistair Hardy, meanwhile, founded an experimental religious research center in Oxford, stocked up on popcorn and began to watch with interest how it would all end? The “scientific community” was too short to get to him and take revenge for his freethinking. In 1985, as if mocking his opponents, he also managed to receive the Templeton Prize for his achievements.
The worst thing happened to the unfortunate Charles Darwin. The poor guy was probably twisting in his grave, watching how a handful of obscurantists, hiding behind his name, eagerly tried to refute his own theory. And then, quite unexpectedly, the “monkey people” had “sort of scientific” support: in 1975, Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson published an article in the journal Science about the genetic similarity of chimpanzees and humans. King and Wilson compared the amino acid sequences of several chimpanzee and human proteins (such as hemoglobin and myoglobin) and found that the sequences were either identical or nearly identical. "... Chimpanzee and human polypeptide sequences studied in this moment, on average more than 99% identical“, the experts concluded.
(in it, scientists tried to explain that no one truly understands how macroevolution occurred). A fragment about the “almost complete identity” of chimpanzees and humans was simply pulled out of it - and a new fable about the 1% genetic difference between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes rushed through the hummocks.
However, the delight of supporters of Asian mythology has brought enormous, simply invaluable benefits to science. Believing that genetics is capable of confirming the theory of the origin of man from ape, international scientific foundations have donated huge sums of money to decipher the genomes of humans and the monkeys closest to them in morphology. These studies were carried out according to a common program by an international team: Tomas Marqus-Bonet, Evolutionary Biology Institute, Evan E. Eichler, Washington University and Arcadi Navarro, ICREA-IBE Barcelona.
The unique project was completed in 2009 and produced a result that was simply stunning in its objectivity:
As it turned out, humans share no more than 90% of their genes with their closest relatives!!!
This means that genetically we are as close to a chimpanzee as we are to a mouse, pig or chicken. And all we have in common with monkeys are distant common ancestors that look suspiciously like lemurs.
This is how scientific discoveries are XXI centuries completely killed a theory that had existed for almost two millennia and was still not removed from the pages of textbooks. Modern schoolchildren completely waste their school hours cramming signs of their resemblance to furry poison dart frogs.
The theory of the origin of man from the ape no longer exists.
The full article can be found
Researchers claim that humans are not a descendant of wiser monkeys. From whom did the ancient ancestors descend? The most famous find of archaeologists: part of the skeleton of the female Australopithecus Lucy. Scientists discovered her remains in Ethiopia back in 1974. After careful study, it turned out that the age of the bones is more than three million years...
But that wasn’t even surprising! And the fact that in its structure the female primate was strikingly reminiscent of ancient people! That is why scientists decided that the female Australopithecus is the transitional link from ape to man that archaeologists have been unsuccessfully searching for over the past 150 years...
Today, Lucy's image can be seen in every biology textbook. And this is not surprising, because for a long time it was believed that Australopithecines are the ancestors of humans.
But in 2000, employees of the French Museum of Natural History managed to make a real archaeological revolution and prove that Charles Darwin's theory, which states that man is an wiser ape, is most likely wrong!
Ancient monkey bones discovered by French researchers Brigitte Sennu and Martin Pickford in Kenya. The remains found were named Orrorin. The sensation was that these remains were more than 6 million years old, that is, they were three million years older than the oldest human remains at that time. But the most incredible discovery was yet to come. It turned out that the very first man was much more modern in structure than that same Lucy, the Australopithecus woman from whom modern man supposedly originated.
But how is this possible? How could an ape that lived 6 million years ago be more developed and advanced than one that appeared only 3 million years later? How did it happen that a more advanced individual appeared long before primitive species arose?
Many researchers are sure that there can be only one answer to this question: the monkey is not actually the ancestor of man...
After careful analyzes and studies of the remains of Orrorin, which French researchers managed to discover, the entire scientific world was literally shocked. After all, it turned out that a primate that lived 6 million years ago walked on two legs, and its teeth, unlike the fangs of the great ape that lived much later, were small and rectangular, like yours and mine!
Moreover, reconstruction appearance proved that the ancient primate had a flat face, and not an elongated muzzle, like its later brother on the planet.
Meet him - perhaps this is your fifth cousin! Or his eighth cousin... Look how handsome he is: his coat is smooth, his teeth are strong. And he's great at climbing trees. So what if it's a chimpanzee? You will have to get used to the idea that it was not man who once descended from the monkey, but quite the opposite - the monkey from man. And not only monkeys, but also other vertebrates.
Traditional Darwinian teaching may be untenable. The entire history of life on Earth threatens to be turned upside down: for millions of years on our planet it was not the evolution (development) of living beings that took place, but their involution (degradation).
This is precisely the course of events that Moscow paleoanthropologist Alexander Belov proves in his research. And he gives the following arguments.
- I believe that at a certain stage of existence the human body could be transformed into the body of a vertebrate animal. Convincing proof of this is a fact that for some reason Darwin and his followers ignored, but which even a schoolchild can easily verify.
Although we are accustomed to the term “quadrupeds,” in reality there are no four-legged animals in nature: the structure of the front and hind limbs is different. A gopher, a dog, a hippopotamus - each of them has two “legs” and two “arms” that are dissimilar both anatomically and functionally. The most obvious external difference: the “leg” at the knee joint bends backward, and the “arm” at the elbow bends forward. Exactly like a person's.
For homo sapiens this design quite understandable. The hand turns just so to take something, bring it to the face, to the mouth. And the legs bend in the opposite direction to push off the ground and take steps. But in vertebrates, the anatomy as a whole is human, and the functions are non-human. It turns out that for some reason the animals adapted their “armed” and “legged” bodies to move on four limbs. The same gorillas, traditionally called among our “closest relatives,” use their “human” hands mainly as additional support when walking. But they, like other monkeys, do not really know how to move on their two hind limbs.
The structure of the hand, with a thumb opposed to the other four, allows a person to manipulate even small objects. But if you look closely at the skeletons of animals, it is easy to detect a similar structure of the forelimbs of a monkey, bat, crocodile... Even the whale with its front fins and the Permian stegocephalus, which lived more than 300 million years ago.
The question arises: why did all these animals get on all fours and turn their arms into legs? Why do vertebrates need an anatomical structure similar to the human hand if it is used only as a primitive support? It is much more logical to have a pair of “normal” legs both in front and behind.
And that is not all. The same monkeys adapted their hind limbs to perform grasping functions, changing the anatomy of the human foot “to suit themselves” (in fact, disfiguring it). The monkey's big toe is bent to the side and has a high degree of mobility. It is, of course, convenient to tear fruits with such paws and cling to branches, but they are of little use for normal movement “on foot.” What kind of evolution is this...
- “Arms are like legs” – is your most important argument?
- There are other very damning facts. IN last years Scientists have made amazing discoveries. For example, in 2000, the remains of a “proto-man” who lived 6 million years ago were excavated in Kenya. Analysis of the discovered bone fragments showed that this creature was most likely upright - it moved on two “human” legs. Meanwhile, 6 million years is precisely the point when, according to evolutionary scientists, the final divergence of the line of development of apes and humans occurred (before this period, fossil remains of the ancestors of modern apes with their characteristic “grasping” thumbs on legs).
The most ancient anthropomorphic creatures suddenly reveal signs of a very close relationship to the type modern man. In 2002, the skull of a fossil creature was discovered in the African Republic of Chad, which was called “sahelanthropus”. The researchers of the find found that the prehistoric aborigine walked on two legs and had many other signs of a human, but at the same time his skull was similar to that of a chimpanzee. The age of this hominid is 7 million years.
It turns out that he lived before the apes and before the australopithecus, which was previously considered a transitional form from ape to man. Try to explain this “trick” from the standpoint of Darwin’s theory.
- Does your hypothesis eliminate such inconsistencies?
- Certainly. The monkey is not the ancestor of man. She is his descendant. We are, of course, not talking about our contemporaries, but perhaps the great ape is, for example, a descendant of those very Sahelanthropes.
I’ll make a reservation right away: I don’t know where the person came from, and I just take it for granted. It can be assumed (this version is supported by many modern scientists) that our current community of homo sapiens is by no means the first. In different geological periods on Earth appeared independently of each other different types of people. However, these Paleozoics, Mesozoics, and Cenozoics existed for a relatively short time, and therefore did not leave a trace in the paleontological record of the planet known to us now.
The existence of society in each of the previous cases had a cyclical nature: the communities of our “human” predecessors went through a phase of development and a phase of the so-called final transformation, after which comes the stage of the return of the intelligent inhabitants of the Earth to the source that gave birth to them. But not everyone goes there, beyond this Rubicon. Some part, not wanting to return to the immaterial world, remains on Earth. These are Mowgli, who, no longer able to fully exist as a person, begin to degrade, caring only about fulfilling primitive personal goals - to survive, to adapt to the environment.
Such “debris human society”, losing their minds, and turned into what we now call vertebrates. The human body was only a kind of matrix.
- In your opinion, are their further transformations possible?
- Each animal species occupies its own ecological niche. An attempt to transform, to get out of it, means an inevitable collision with those creatures that occupy neighboring niches. So our smaller brothers, having adapted well to certain conditions of existence, seem to be locked into them, preserved for thousands, millions of years...
- Where did the huge diversity of vertebrate species that now surrounds us come from?
- I have already said that communities of intelligent beings appeared on our planet more than once and disappeared just as many times. From each such civilization, degraded living beings were preserved, transformed as a result of the process of involution into various animals. Some of the involutionary branches led to the appearance, for example, of horses, some gave rise to dolphins, a third - bats...
- What about flies, spiders, mollusks?
- In a more distant, Precambrian period, non-human civilizations could well have existed on Earth, replacing each other. So, as a result of the degradation of those intelligent creatures unknown to us (their remains were not preserved, most likely due to the passage of time) insects, crustaceans, and arthropods appeared on the planet.
- According to your theory, the great-great-great ancestors of the neighbor’s domestic cat were representatives of a certain human civilization, perhaps even more developed than the current one? But why did they, so advanced, need to get on all fours and adapt to grab food with their mouths, if it is so convenient to walk on two legs and use their hands?
- The main thing here is loss of mind. And as proof of my assumptions I can cite real example from modern times. Leafing through one of the scientific magazines, I read that in a remote area of Iran, a small settlement was discovered, all the inhabitants of which - father, mother, their children - move exclusively on all fours, doing it very quickly. But at the same time, they wear clothes, use traditional tools of labor and life... Researchers have encountered a similar phenomenon in another corner globe, in the Dominican Republic.
- It’s hard to imagine that losing your mind can be a voluntary action...
- According to Freud's theory, two principles are constantly fighting in a person - the animal, with its inherent passions, and the human, associated with rational behavior. Reason often inhibits the manifestation of feelings, becomes a kind of internal censor, suppresses the very thought of the free manifestation of one’s “base” desires. An intrapersonal conflict arises, which can result in protest behavior against the dogmas and foundations of society. Further split personality is fraught with the manifestation of two mutually exclusive ways of thinking: sensual and rational. Some of the homo sapiens eventually abandon the rational perception of reality, free their souls from the norms and decencies accepted in society and are completely immersed in the elements of feelings and emotions. In our time, we are already faced with similar manifestations: drug addicts, drunkards, those “crazy people” who “out of the blue” carry out bloody mass shootings in schools, shops, on city streets...
- What are these, the first bells of the coming brutality? And are there times ahead when people will begin to run on all fours and grow claws and tails?
- There are no standards in the process of involution itself. Everyone degrades as best they can. But in my opinion, without emotions and desires there will be no random physiological accumulations. The structure of the human body is very plastic. It must correspond to the internal needs of its owner, and therefore the body can change in one direction or another: you can, for example, for ease of movement and getting food, gradually turn your arms into wings, or you can transform them into flippers; you can give up your teeth and turn your jaws into a beak, as happened in birds... Transformation human body limitless. Endowed with freedom of behavior, living beings themselves remake their bodies as they wish. In the process of involution, they acquire adaptations that are convenient for living in a specific environment, in a specific ecological niche. And they become hostages of this habitat.
- In your correspondence duel with Darwin, do you have like-minded people?
- Evolutionists have been criticized almost since the appearance of this doctrine. Even the founding father himself in his book “The Descent of Man...” mentions a certain count who claimed that the monkey is not an ancestor, but a descendant of man. The famous American paleoanthropologist Osborne expressed the idea that the hominid (“man of the dawn”) appeared on Earth immediately, without intermediate evolutionary stages, and that apes descended from him...
“It’s hard to come to terms with the idea that our future generations will face such a sad fate - turning into animals.”
- I do not at all want to prophesy the human community currently existing on the planet with an inevitable fall into the abyss of involution. It is clearly premature to talk about the causes of degradation. It is necessary to comprehend this problem from all sides. Let us believe that, with the help of the powerful intellectual potential of modern science, we will eventually be able to find the key to this process.