There are some real facts associated with evolution. I don't have references for all of these, but you can likely find them by doing a search, if desired:
Heackel's Embryos In 1866, biologist Ernst Haeckel drew the embryonic stages of vertebrates and used them to support evolution with some artistic license and added other stages to the development of an embryo. Faking some of the drawings to make them seem more alike than they really were made no never-mind to educators. The drawings continued to be used in biology textbooks.
Piltdown man: Found in a gravel pit in Sussex England in 1912, this fossil was considered by some sources to be the second most important fossil proving the evolution of man�until it was found to be a complete forgery 41 years later. The skull was found to be of modern age. The fragments had been chemically stained to give the appearance of age, and the teeth had been filed down!
Nebraska man: A single tooth, discovered in Nebraska in 1922 grew an entire evolutionary link between man and monkey, until another identical tooth was found which was protruding from the jawbone of a wild pig. The Scopes Trial fossil.
Java man: In 1891, a skullcap, three teeth and a femur were discovered. However, the femur was found 50 feet away from the original skullcap a full year later. For almost 30 years the discoverer denied any credibility to the two undoubtedly human skulls found very close to his "missing link". (source: Hank Hanegraaff, The Face That Demonstrates The Farce Of Evolution, [Word Publishing, Nashville, 1998], pp.50-52)
Orce man: Orce, Spain - 1982. The oldest fossilized human remains ever found in Europe was claimed. One year later officials admitted the skull fragment was not human but probably came from a 4 month old donkey. Scientists had said the skull belonged to a 17 year old man who lived 900,000 to 1.6 million years ago, and even had very detail drawings done to represent what he would have looked like. (source: "Skull fragment may not be human", Knoxville News-Sentinel, 1983)
Neanderthal: Found in France in 1908. Considered to be ignorant, ape-like, stooped and knuckle-dragging, much of the evidence now suggests that Neanderthal was just as human as us, and his stooped appearance was because of arthritis and rickets. Neanderthals are now recognized as skilled hunters, believers in an after-life, and even skilled surgeons, as seen in one skeleton whose withered right arm had been amputated above the elbow. (source: "Upgrading Neanderthal Man", Time Magazine, May 17, 1971, Vol. 97, No. 20)
Lucy, consisting of a skeleton forty percent complete, was discovered in Ethiopia by Donald Johanson in 1974, and was dated at 3.2 million years of age. He calculated her to have stood about 3'6" tall, and to have weighed about 50 pounds. Certain features suggested to Johanson that it may have walked erect, and was therefore evolving into a human.
Dr. Charles Oxnard completed the most sophisticated computer analysis of australopithecine fossils ever undertaken, and concluded that the australopithecines have nothing to do with the ancestry of man whatsoever, and are simply an extinct form of ape (Fossils, Teeth and Sex: New Perspectives on Human Evolution, University of Washington Press, 1987).
In Oxnard's opinion, australopithecines were neither like humans or apes but more like Pongo, the orangutan...even more "distant" from man, than a gorilla... "to the extent that resemblances exist with living forms they tend to be with the orangutan" (U. of Chicago Magazine, Winter, 1974, pp. 11-12).
Richard Leakey's Skull 1470The ER-1470 skull was found in l972 (in fragments) a little below a geological strata known as KBS tuff. This tuff had been dated a few years earlier at 2.6 million years so Richard Leakey assigned the skull an age of 2.9 million years. This aroused a storm of controversy as the skull had an enormous brain capacity of perhaps 825 cubic centimeters and several surprisingly modern features. After nearly a decade of debate--often acrimonious--a committee of neutral experts was assembled and used a variety of sophisticated tests which included faunal comparisons (especially fossilized teeth of both Lake Turkana and Ethiopian Afar pigs). They re-dated the tuff at 1.9 million years. (The skull fragments themselves have never been dated.) Leakey then estimated the skull's age at 2 million years. He regarded it as an example of Homo Habilis.
Unfortunately the skull is too advanced for this species or this age. A new generation of scholars tends to call ER-1470 Homo Ergaster and this new species is seen as a bridge from Homo Habilis to Homo Erectus, our alleged immediate ancestor. But in some ways ER-1470 is too modern even for these species. The maturation and gender of the original owner of the skull is unknown. If ER-1470 was a female, the cranial capacity of an adult male of this species would approach 1,000 c.c, right to the edge of modern humanity. If ER-1470 was an adult male, then the small brow ridges, thin cranium and other modern features would assume greater importance and approach modern man.
Incidentally, radiogenic datings, each giving different numbers did not provide an acceptable answer to Leakey and his staff. Age was finally established based on the fossil from a pig, some distance away.
There were others, but some of those had little to do with anything other than folks trying to turn a buck with some sort of antic.
