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Editor's note: The following information is from the 1996 NBC documentary, “The Mysterious Origins Of Man,” narrated by Charlton Heston. See it here.

In 1859 with the publication of “The Origin Of Species” the Darwin community confidently assumed that the so-called “missing link”, an ontological intermediary spanning man and ape, would soon be discovered. It had to be there.

Time passed and, despite much archeological searching, alas, no Darwinian holy relic could be secured.

However, a ray of hope in 1892. Eugene Dubois discovered in Java, present day Indonesia, a scull cap and a thigh bone. The construction of the latter indicated an upright posture suitable for walking. This bone...

And so this arrangement – skull cap with accompanying thigh bone – pleased everyone and, in celebratory mood, it was declared that “Java Man,” the “missing link” had finally been discovered.

One nettlesome problem, however, quickly ignored, was the inconvenient fact that these two body parts had been found 40 feet apart. Nevertheless, with authority, it was presumed that a necessary connection must have existed; assuredly, they would have derived from the same creature.

But many in the anthropological society were having second thoughts and asserted that the skull cap, unsensationally, was simply the remains of an ape, and the thigh bone, fully human. Two distinct owners.

Some while later, near the end of his life (1940), Dubois found himself agreeing. He’d made a mistake and now confessed that contrary opinion was correct: There was never any “missing link” but only bodily detritus with two separate origins, man and ape; two neighbors, living near each other.

But the Darwin establishment would not be so easily put off. Just because those closest to the research had fallen away from the gospel, had lost true religion, didn't mean that the holy grail of the "missing link" should be abandoned. Instead, they doubled down on the fake news with glamorous, high-profile publicity.

It was brought out in the documentary that a fancy exhibit of Java Man, prominently displayed, with its proclamation of this-is-how-it-really-is, remained in the New York City Museum of Natural History all the way to 1984, until - effectively, finally, conceding disinformation - it was reluctantly taken down.

But it was a fraud all along; a product of wishful thinking, sloppy scholarship, connecting dots that weren’t really there. Two items of anthropological evidence put together in a fevered but mismatched marriage.

postscript:

In the last 50 years other “ape-men”, with great fan-fare, have been introduced as intermediaries, supposedly filling the gaps between man and ape.

As one reviews what is put forward as evidence, but also the objections of peers, the ensuing controversies concerning ape-men and their pitfalls would fall into certain categories:

(1) There is a rush to judgment, even a giddiness to proclaim. Salesmen want to sell you something, and they always have the latest-and-greatest which you can’t live without. This over-eagerness, seemingly palpable as one surveys the reports, to put forward a nice and tidy evolutionary progression is not objective science but showmanship.

(2) There have been no complete skeletons discovered of these ape-men. Merely bones, or scattered fragments of bones, or footprints preserved in stone. At times these elements might be 1000 miles apart and yet they are linked together as if made-to-order.

sculpting the latest ape-man for display in museums of natural history

(3) Some of these bones or footprints, it is said, are quite ape-like; maybe they are actual ape bones, as many dissenting voices assert; and some of the bones are very human-like. The possibility that they do derive from actual humans is not entertained. This is so because the artifacts were found in strata indicating an origin in time well before that theorized by Darwinists. In other words, “it can’t be human bones or footprints because there were no humans at that time.” But this is circular reasoning. We begin with a notion of when humans ought to have come forward based upon private the Darwinian metaparadigm, and then we date the fossils according to these preconceived judgments. This is not careful and reasoned science but self-serving sophism.

these are just one-sided interpretations of data, but there are other interpretations by credentialed scientists

(4) There is much debate and dissent within anthropological circles concerning the validity of the interpretations of these ape-men bones and footprints. Not everyone within science accepts the official narrative. But contrary views are shunted to the side in favor of a disingenuous united front, of the kind displayed on glossy magazine covers, offering a sanitized and massaged final product of apes-to-men. More showmanship to bedazzle the unwary.

(5) There are thousands of discovered archeological artifacts, some of them astonishingly evidential (see the inset-box on the main-page and also the NBC documentary), which strongly indicate that man enjoyed presence in the world millions of years ago, not tens of thousands. But because these artifacts do not fit the Darwinian narrative, the evidence is ignored. More censorship and cultish thinking.