REFERENCE 3: Newsweek, "Bones and Prima Donnas," by Peter Gwynne, John Carey and Lea Donosky, February 16, 1981, p. 77.

REFERENCE 4: The New York Times, "How Old Is Man?" by Nicholas Wade, October 4, 1982, p. A18.

REFERENCE 5: Science Digest, "The Water People," by Lyall Watson, May 1982, p. 44.

These references concern the claim that there are a limited number of hominid fossils, and that they would all fit in a coffin or on a desk. I've been working for the last week on a post on the topic, and I hope to post it within the next few days.

REFERENCE 6: Popular Science, "How Old Is It?" by Robert Gannon, November 1979, p. 81.

The text quoted is:

Man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand.

REFERENCE 7: Ibid., p. 67.

From the reference given, you'd assume that this was from the Popular Science article of reference 6, but this isn't the case. In fact, it's from the book "Origins" by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (1977. New York: E. P. Dutton). However, "Ibid., p. 67." is how it is referred to in "Life - How Did It Get Here?", since the previous two references in this Watchtower publication are to "Origins" as well. Just to refresh everyone's memory, the quote is as follows:

The evidence concerning Ramapithecus is considerable-though in absolute terms it remains tantalizingly small: fragments of upper and lower jaws, plus a collection of teeth.

The passage quoted is a faithful representation of Leakey and Lewin's beliefs as stated in the book. But why does Nowhere Man use the same reference as what's in "Life - How Did It Get Here"? I can only conclude that he didn't look it up himself.

REFERENCE 8: The New York Times, "Time to Revise the Family Tree?" February 14, 1982, p. E7.

The quoted passage is:

sat as securely as anything can at the base of the human evolutionary tree.

This is taken from an article a mere four paragraphs long, and I've reproduced it in it's entirety below:

Until recently, a group of creatures known as "ramapithecines" sat as securely as anything can at the base of the human evolutionary tree. At 9 to 12 million years old, they were widely considered the earliest known hominids, or primate ancestors to man and the African apes. Now, from the Siwalik Hills of Pakistan, come fossils that may sever this connection entirely.

The fossils include 8-million-year-old ramapithecine skull and jawbone pieces, described in a recent issue of the British journal Nature, and 13-million-year-old face and palate fragments. David Pilbeam, a Harvard anthropologist and project leader, said the specimens reveal anatomical features that relate the fossils more closely to present day orangutans, and thus to the orangutan-Asian apes lineage, than to humans and African apes and their separate hominid lineage.

Biomolecular analyses showing that man and African apes are more closely related to each other than to orangutans have long pointed to a orangutan-hominid divergence millions of years ago. A biological classification system called cladistics established three such branchings in the hominoid superfamily, with gibbons splitting from the common stock 9 million to 15 million years ago, orangutans splitting from the remaining human-African apes stock some 8 million to 12 million years ago, and humans and African apes splitting 3 million to 9 million years ago.

Believing ramapithecines to be hominid precursors, many anthropologists concluded that the orangutan split had already occurred some 13 million years ago. The Pakistani fossils suggest that it had taken place later, perhaps allowing earliest man a shorter period of time to evolve. The finds may also impel the search for another hominid ancestor.

Reference is also made to an article about cladistics on page 8E of that edition of The New York Times.

REFERENCE 9: New Scientist, "Jive Talking," by John Gribbin, June 24, 1982, p. 873.

The quoted section is:

Ramapithecus cannot have been the first member of the human line.

But looking at what is written previously in the article, we find this:

When two species split from a common stock, they each accumulate their own, separate, random changes in DNA at the same steady rate. So by measuring the differences in the DNA of two living species molecular biologists can determine when the two species last shared a common ancestor. All the molecular evidence agrees that the degree of difference between man and the other African apes implies that the three species split from a common ancestor just under 5 million years ago. In that case, Ramapithecus cannot have been the first member of the human line.

REFERENCE 10: Natural History, "False Start of the Human Parade," by Adrienne L. Zihlman and Jerold M. Lowenstein, August/September 1979, p. 86.

Nowhere man quotes:

How did Ramapithecus, . . . reconstructed only from teeth and jaws-without a known pelvis, limb bones, or skull-sneak into this manward-marching procession?

A more complete sample is:

There is unequivocal evidence from pelvic, leg, and foot bones that all of the genera Homo and Australopithecus were in fact bipedal. But how did Ramapithecus, a fossil "hominoid" reconstructed only from teeth and jaws - without a known pelvis, limb bones, or skull - sneak into this manward-marching progression?

An explanation is given later in the article, on page 89:

The evidence for hominid status, as Lewis and later Simons saw it, was the supposed parabolic shape of the dental arcade (as reconstructed from jaw fragments), a characteristic of hominid jaws that contrasts with the parallel dental arcade of apes. The upper canines were said to be to small for an ape (although they are no smaller than those of the living pygmy chimpanzees). Enamel thickness and cusp patterns were also interpreted as being more hominid than apelike. In 1964 Simons concluded that "dental and facial characters are so close to Australopithecus africanus as to make difficult the drawing of generic differences between the two species on the basis of present material."

So what happened? Later on page 89 is this:

There are no convincing new pretenders to the ancestral throne, but something has happened in the intervening years to make Ramapithecus's claim more dubious. A new field called molecular anthropology has come of age, and the findings of researchers, especially Vincent Sarich and Allan Wilson at the University of California, Berkeley, made it extremely improbable that there were any ancestral humans, in the strict sense, longer than six million years ago.