Who has not heard the name of the Neanderthal Man ? He occupies a place of great importance in many Biology textbooks. Whenever they discuss the theory of evolution he is usually there. Picture in the textbooks depict him as a hairy brute not quite human, but rather as a half ape and half man.

This creature is so well known that even many people who do not have any background in science have heard something or other about this assumed evolutionary ancestor of man. However, this picture is changing very fast due to modern scientific researches.

In a recent article, an expert on the Neanderthal fossils has made these findings know to the general scientific community. "The Neanderthals" was published in the April-May, 1987 issue of The World Scientist, a prestigious scientific  magazine originating from France. Erik Trinkaus, the author of this article, is professor at the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, USA), and he specializes in the study of the Neanderthal man.

According to this expert, scientific opinion on this group of fossils has undergone many change and now we have a "less biased" image of who these creatures were. In other words, what we read about this man in the evolutionary discussions is more of biased opinions and less of objective scientific opinion. One is surprised to note that due to the biases of evolutionists, it has taken over half a century to get a correct scientific picture of the Neanderthal fossils.

According to the author, the original picture of a beastly hunter (as depicted in most textbooks) is very much a thing of the past. Today the Neanderthal man has to be accepted as a very complex human being sharing many similarities with the modern man. There are many differences too, because people of two eras, cultures and build will naturally differ from each other in many ways.

It is no longer correct to maintain that the Neanderthal man perished tens of thousands of years before the time of the modern man. According to this author, they vanished only about a thousand years ago. In other words, Neanderthal man was a contemporary of the Christians who lived for the first half of the church age ! And all these years the textbooks have been telling us that here is a link between man and apes that died out tens of thousands of years ago. The recent findings, however, imply that our so-called ancestor is in fact our close relative.

In the popular imagination, conditioned by books and articles on evolution, Neanderthal man was a slouching brute that could not stand erect due to its half-ape body.  However this is a thing of the past. According to this scientist, the present image is that of a complex human who had the same posture, modes of locomotion, and mastication as modern man has. He had a totally modern brain, having a complexity equal to ours. This group of humans exhibited slight variation from race to race as exhibited by all other human races.

Further, this scientist affirms a fact that has repeatedly been  emphasized by many creationists -- that the original reconstruction of the Neanderthal was made from an erroneous arrangement of the skeleton. Once this error is corrected, it is difficult to differentiate between the feet, the limbs and the vertebral column of a Neanderthal and a modern man. Similarly the Neanderthal's jaw functioned  in the same manner as modern man's.

These people used to bury their dead, and used to take much care of invalids who were no longer able to help the group in any way. The archaeological remains from this period show that they had a well devloped artistic and asthetic sense too.

After saying all this, the author summerizes to the effect that : "After taking all these things into consideration, most experts of the present era hold the opinion that the Neanderthals resembled us so closely that he has to be considered fully a human being, not an ape-man."

The observations mentioned above will come as a surprise to most of the students of Biology because they have been told time and again that the Neanderthal man was a very important link in human evolution. In fact there are many writers who claim that it "The" missing link between apes and man -- the perfect ape-man. But just like the numerous other alleged missing links, another link has vanished from before us. This does not come as a surprise to creation scientists, because they have been saying these things now for a very long time.

Neanderthal man is not the only vanished link. Many other proofs evolution mentioned in the Indian textbooks are equally non existent. For example, the embryological proof of evolution given in our books with some interesting photographs of different embryos has been proved to be a deception. Yet nearly a century after this exposure, the Indian textbooks still exhibit these pictures as a proof of evolution. This is not honest science but something else: As far as the experimental sciences are concerned, they have only refuted the theory of evolution.