Once upon a Hobbit - The Fossil Chronicles - page 96

Alan Thorne and Milford Wolpoff, who have long held that Homo erectus
should be regarded as an earlier representative of Homo sapiens, and, in
an interpretation that would undoubtedly chagrin Thorne and Wolpoff,
claimed that so much variation in one species “certainly undermines
the dogmatism with which evolutionists have claimed that these sorts
of 'apemen' demonstrate our nonhuman ancestry.” 65
It is not surprising that a young-Earth creationist such as Wieland
rejected the interpretation that Hobbit represents a new human species,
despite acknowledging that “the discovery is exciting and interesting.”
“Evolutionists,” he added, “are surprised and astonished by it. However,
they will doubtless find ways to fit it into their ever-flexible evolutionary
framework, even using it to reinforce evolutionary notions. The Flores
discovery fits very nicely into a biblical view of history.” 66 (Recall from
chapter 3 that another young-Earth creationist, Russell Grigg, considered
Taung and the other australopithecines to be apes that were created by
God on the sixth day of Creation Week, eventually becoming extinct.) 67
But not all creationists literally accept the Genesis account of an
Earth that is less than 10,000 years old or believe that the creation “days”
were each only 24 hours long. Instead, old-Earth, or “progressive,” cre-
ationists attempt to reconcile biblical accounts, including the creation
of humans as unique beings made in God's image, with a temporal
framework that accepts the scientific evidence for the Earth's being bil-
lions of years old. Old-Earth creationists, such as Fazale Rana, of the
Reasons to Believe ministry, therefore have no problem accepting the
dates published for the hobbit remains (95,000-17,000 years ago); nor do
they believe that LB1 was a microcephalic Homo sapiens. However, they
reject the notion that Homo floresiensis or other hominids were humans,
because they “were not spiritual beings made in God's image.” 68 Instead,
they consider “these hominids in the same vein as the great apes—non-
human creatures made by God (before He created human beings) that
later became extinct. ” 69
Morwood worried, and not without some justification, that the con-
troversy among scientists about the validity of Homo floresiensis was “grist