African?: Ota Benga - the missed link?

The book sponsored by Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar, Evolution Deceit, directs my attention to the unfortunate Ota Benga : The African in the Cage, who attracted attention because he was supposed to be a missing link.

The link that was missed seems to me to have been ours, not Mr. Benga's.

I had not known his story. Having trouble keeping up, I have decided to just report in snatches for now, so will now report this.

After Darwin advanced the claim with his book The Descent of Man that man evolved from ape-like living beings, he started to seek fossils to support this contention. However, some evolutionists believed that "half-man half-ape" creatures were to be found not only in the fossil record, but also alive in various parts of the world. In the early 20th century, these pursuits for living transitional links" led to unfortunate incidents, one of the cruellest of which is the story of a Pygmy by the name of Ota Benga.

Ota Benga was captured in 1904 by an evolutionist researcher in the Congo. In his own tongue, his name meant "friend". He had a wife and two children. Chained and caged like an animal, he was taken to the USA where evolutionist scientists displayed him to the public in the St Louis World Fair along with other ape species and introduced him at "the closest transitional link to man". Two years later, they took him to the Bronx Zoo in New York and there they exhibited him under the denomination of "ancient ancestors of man" along with a few chimpanzees, a gorilla named Dinah, and an orang-utan called Dohung. Dr. William T. Hornaday, the zoo's evolutionist director, gave long speeches on how proud he was to have this exceptional "transitional form" in his zoo and treated caged Ota Benga as if he were an ordinary animal. Unable to bear the treatment he was subjected to, Ota Benga eventually committed suicide.
Evolution Deceit pp. 87-88 .

It greatly troubles me that Mr. Benga was probably only a few kilometres from Canada at some points. He could possibly have been rescued from these vile people and their zoos.

Darwinists needed to see this guy as less than human. Because that would support their theory.

Here are some links:

- Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo

"An African's odyssey in savage turn-of-the-century America"

- Book: Ota Benga - The Pygmy in the Zoo, by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume (St. Martin's Press 1992).

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Ida? I dunno. I wish I had bet a whack on the pop science press dumping all over it

Holy kazoo! Even Nature isn't buying the hype about the "missing link"? So how soon can we get "evolutionary psychology" relegated to the tabs and the funny papers?

A hyped-up fossil find highlights the potential dangers of publicity machines.
Last week's publication of paper describing a 47-million-year-old fossil primate with a remarkable degree of preservation (see http://tinyurl.com/oycvo8) prompted a trickle of news in The Daily Mail that quickly swelled to a flood of media coverage.

In normal circumstances, the interpretation of the specimen given in the paper (J. L. Franzen et al. PLoS ONE 4, e5723; 2009) would have been no more contentious than that of any other fossil primate, and a good deal less so than some.

[ ... ]

But the circumstances surrounding the paper's publication were anything but normal. Before the paper had even been submitted to the journal, Atlantic, a production company based in New York, had commissioned a television documentary and an accompanying book about the find. Just a week after the paper appeared, the book has been published and the documentary has been aired on the History Channel in the United States, as well as Britain's BBC and Norway's NRK.

Uh, yeah.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy: