No. We are no closer today proving those last two theses than we were in Darwin’s day, a century and a half ago. In fact, we’re actually farther away.

So, what were these two important recent discoveries?

First, as reported here on August 9, two alleged ancestors of man, Homo Erectus and Homo Habilis, were found to be living together about 1.5 million years ago (MYA). This is a big deal because Erectus was supposed to have evolved from Habilis before later evolving into Sapiens (us).

Think of it as finding out dad and grandpa were actually brothers, not father and son.

This chart on Early Human Phylogeny at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, will have to be revised—again. The mythical evolutionary tree of life with man’s ascent from ape is looking more like a patch of thousands of blades of grass with the passing of each generation. Sapiens ends up all by himself—an evolutionary orphan—almost as though he just appeared in the fossil record fully formed—as though he were created and placed here. Imagine that.

The second discovery, reported here, pushed the hypothetical human-ape split back another 10 million years, to now around 20 MYA. How so? The traditional theory is that man evolved from chimps about 6 MYA, chimps evolved from gorillas about 8 MYA, and gorillas evolved from orangutans about 14 MYA. But, with the discovery of a 10.5 million year old gorilla in Africa, this pushes the human-ape split back to at least 20 MYA.

But between 15-20 MYA, there were dozens of primate species in Africa, and the hominid trail goes completely cold after 7 MYA. It looks like a dead end—or to the true believer, at least a serious detour over uncharted territory.

Bottom line, not only do we find that dad and grandpa were brothers, but now we find out that we were adopted—or created.

As the authors of the report on all this in the British journal Nature noted, “We know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes.”