Debunking the 'Ape Man' at the Creation Museum
The Creation Museum has a new exhibit that aims to debunk the evolutionary theory that an "ape-man" or apelike creature existed.
A year in the making, the "Ape Man" exhibit was dedicated this week and joins some 160 other exhibits that illustrate a literal interpretation of the Bible.
"There are and always have been – since the sixth day of creation recorded in Genesis – apes and humans. But there never have been any 'ape-men' as part of an evolutionary process," said Ken Ham, founder of the Petersburg, Ky., museum, in a statement Thursday.
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The Creation Museum provides visitors with both sides of the evolution debate while teaching them "how to correctly think about science," Ham told The Christian Post when the museum first opened in 2007. Visitors learn of what Ham considers the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas and are taught how to answer attacks on the Bible’s authority in geology, biology, anthropology, and cosmology.
The newest addition features Dr. David Menton, who formerly taught anatomy and histology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, describing to visitors from a video monitor the differences between apes and humans. Encased in glass are skeletons of a human and an ape as well as other animals, which are used "to highlight how the ape is more similar to other animals than to humans," Creation Museum spokeswoman Melany Ethridge explained.
"Though many similarities may be cited between living apes and humans, the only historical evidence that could support the ape ancestry of man must come from fossils," Menton explains in his book The New Answers Book 2. "Unfortunately, the fossil record of man and apes is very sparse. Approximately 95 percent of all known fossils are marine invertebrates, about 4.7 percent are algae and plants, about 0.2 percent are insects and other invertebrates, and only about 0.1 percent are vertebrates (animals with bones). Finally, only the smallest imaginable fraction of vertebrate fossils consists of primates (humans, apes, monkeys, and lemurs)."
Menton argues that there are only three ways for the evolutionist to create any type of "ape-man."
1. Combine ape fossil bones with human fossil bones and declare the two to be one individual – a real “ape-man.”
2. Emphasize certain humanlike qualities of fossilized ape bones, and with imagination upgrade apes to be more humanlike.
3. Emphasize certain apelike qualities of fossilized human bones, and with imagination downgrade humans to be more apelike.
"These three approaches account for all of the attempts by evolutionists to fill the unbridgeable gap between apes and men with fossil ape-men," he contends.
Menton conducts workshops regularly at the museum, examining life-size replicas of ape, human, and hominid or "ape-man" skulls and showing "that it’s easy to see these 'ape-men' are really either apes or men."
He asserts, "[W]e are not descended from apes. Rather, God created man as the crown of His creation on Day 6."
Along with the "Ape Man" exhibit, the Creation Museum – which has drawn more than 1.3 million visitors – has several other projects in the works, including a multi-purpose auditorium and an observatory.
"We hope to continue growing and expanding our offerings at the museum – in addition to the upcoming full-size Noah’s Ark – as we seek to present biblical history to a questioning culture," said Ham.
Ham, who also leads the apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis, is a young earth creationist – he believes that the creation of the world took place in six 24-hour days and that the world is only some 6,000 years old. To believe otherwise is to undermine biblical authority, he argues.
