NAIROBI, Kenya (ABP) — A young boy who experts say died 1.6 million years ago is causing a modern-day spat between Christians in Kenya and a legendary archaeologist.
The squabble involves a fossilized skeleton known as Turkana Boy, an 8- or 9-year-old male whose bones were preserved in marshland near Kenya's Lake Turkana. Experts say the 5-foot-3-inch skeleton comprises the most complete remains of a prehistoric human ever found.
Curators at the National Museums of Kenya plan to highlight Turkana Boy as the jewel of their collection when the facility reopens in July following renovations.
But leaders of evangelical groups in Kenya have criticized the fossil display, saying its purported age confuses children and contradicts biblical Christianity. Bishop Boniface Adoyo, chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, has threatened a boycott of the exhibit. Representatives from the Alliance have also asked the museum to move the Turkana collection to a back room and post a notice saying evolution is simply one of many theories about the origins of modern life.
The head of the largest Pentecostal church in the country, Adoyo has said the Christian community in Kenya is “very uncomfortable” with the museum's plans to present Turkana Boy as a key piece in its explanation about the origins of human life.
“What we are telling our congregants, which number about 10 million, is there is no reason to visit the museum if your children are going to be taught evolution,” Adoyo said in a Feb. 13 interview on National Public Radio. “Evolution is anti-God. It's a faith that contradicts God's Word. So if you want to remain in the truth of God, don't buy evolution theories.”
Richard Leakey, the famous paleoanthropologist who founded the museum's prehistory department, led the team that discovered the bones in 1984.
In a December 2006 interview with England's Daily Telegraph, Leakey labeled such criticism “outrageous” and urged the museum to be “extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case” for evolution.
“The collection it holds is one of Kenya's very few claims to global fame, and it must be forthright to defending its right to be on the forefront of this branch of science,” he said.
Besides Turkana Boy, 160,000 fossils will be displayed after the $10.5 million renovation, which was funded by the European Union. Dinosaur fossils, the bones of short-necked giraffes, and a 200-million-year-old imprint of a lizard in sedimentary rock will also be shown.
As for the exhibit centerpiece, experts say the Homo erectus boy lived in the Pleistocene period. Leakey's group found 108 bones of the skeleton (about 40 percent of a completed skeleton). As an adult, Turkana Boy would have had a cranial capacity of 910 cubic centimeters — compared to the 1350 cc of modern humans.
One American evangelical archeologist said trying to ban the skeleton from the museum creates a false dichotomoy between scientific knowledge and faith.
John Monson, associate professor of archaeology at Wheaton College in Illinois, said that while the fossil record has many large gaps that evolutionary theory has difficulty explaining, the real issue in the creation debate is one of different ways of understanding and explaining the world.
“The Bible presents God's acts in creating the world and humanity,” he said via e-mail. “The scientific pursuit, whether human or secular, seeks to understand the world and how it came to be. The conflict lies in the secular naturalism of one camp … and the biblical understanding of the other camp that argues for the existence of a creator God who built the world in an orderly fashion.”
In his personal opinion, Monson said, the hominid remains don't provide a smoking gun in support of the theory of evolution. And museum officials should have the right to display skeletal material, just as there should be “no problem” in displaying the Ten Commandments, he said.
“[Debates like this] are relevant in that they get us thinking about our faith and about how we harmonize science and the Bible,” he said. “I don't think such debates change the underlying presuppositions of the discussion, however.”
Oliver Kisaka, the deputy general secretary of Kenya's National Council of Churches, has also said that the Turkana Boy issue is really about the gap between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge. A self-described “evangelical Quaker,” he also participated in the NPR show that featured Adoyo.
“When you think about evangelical Christianity, don't see it as a reaction against knowledge,” he said. “Look at it as a communication of the gospel.”
But for Adoyo, that gospel is being “killed” by the scientists' acceptance of evolution.
“The Bible says man was the final creature to be created, [and] in God's image,” Adoyo said. “And God breathed into man the breath of life — the spirit. He didn't breathe into those animals the spirit, and that tells me I did not evolve from those creatures. I have the image of God. And that image of God begins with his creation of man.”
Leakey has criticized creationist theories about the origin of man as being “far, far from the mainstream.”
In a 1988 National Geographic film called Mysteries of Mankind, Leakey said Turkana Boy's skeleton is remarkable because it's so complete. But the fact that it gives an answer to “people who don't like the idea of human evolution” is an often-overlooked bonus, he added.
“To confront some of these people with a complete skeleton that is human and is so obviously related to us in a context where it's definitely one-and-a-half million years or even more is fairly convincing evidence, and I think many of the people who are fence-sitters on this discussion about creationism versus evolution are going to have to get off the fence in the light of this discovery,” he said.
Adoyo is just as adamant in his take on the discovery.
“Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory,” he said.
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