Two months ago there was some
discussion of a current ICR broadcast in which one of the guests cited
evidence of neaderthal's using instruments from a April fools article in
Discover Mag. I noticed today that the December issue of
"Acts and Facts" from ICR contains an admission of the
error. There is some interesting spinning of situation to
make it not sound as good as possible.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29
: Fri Nov 24 2000 - 20:17:49 EST
Here is the pertinent excerpt from the December 2000 Acts and Facts
28(12)
CAUGHT
BY AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE
On
September 9, 2000, the Institute for
Creation Research released an episode on
Science, Scripture, & Salvation
titled,
“Neanderthals.” During the
broadcast,
one of our guests cited evidence that Ne-anderthals
may have produced musical
instruments including a tuba-like instru-ment
made from a mastodon tusk, a bag-pipe
made in part from an animal blad-der,
a triangle, and a xylophone made
from hollowed out bone.
It has come to our attention that this
information was taken from an article
published as a practical joke in Discover
magazine. The magazine did not identify
this as a joke and unfortunately it found
its way onto our broadcast. We deeply
apologize that our program conveyed in-correct
information.
However, on that same broadcast, we
presented another artifact that resembles
a flute carved from the thighbone of a
bear. This information has appeared in
such journals as Science (April 11,
1997,
p. 205) and Scientific American
(Septem-ber
1997, p. 28,) as well as others. The
evidence remains strong that Neander-thals
had musical abilities. So while the
information from Discover magazine
was
incorrect, the notion that Neanderthals
produced musical instruments is not in-validated
by the Discover hoax.
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