Searching for a particular message, I finnaly read some of the old postings on Why YEC. I noticed the reference to Nebraska Man, as I had a conversation with Dr. Don Prothero (who works among other things on fossil mammals from the western U.S.) at the North American Paleontological Convention about Nebraska Man.
Young-earth advocates frequently claim that Nebraska Man was a major part of evolutionary scenarios until it was shown to be a pig tooth. This claim incorporates two basic errors. First, it was a peccary tooth. Peccaries are not even the same family as pigs.
Secondly, both prior to publication and in the months that it took the author to retract his claim, other paleontologists pointed out his mistake. It was not accepted among scientists.
It may also be worth noting that Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, and Haeckel's altered embryo drawings would be problematic for evolution if they were correct. Showing them to be wrong supports current evolutionary understanding. Nebraska Man would be thoroughly out of place, with all the early hominids confined to the Old World. Piltdown Man fits Darwin's somewhat Lamarckian idea that humans got big brains first and then evolved upright walking, freeing their hands to better implement all the ideas they had. In contrast, australopithecines and other pre-Homo hominids have reasonable adaptations for upright walking, but apelike crainial capacity. Haeckel thought of embryos as repositories of past evolutionary stages. However, as particularly pointed out by Walter Garstang (often in verse), embryos must survive, too, and so they have their own evolutionary features.
Dr. David Campbell
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