Dr. Filler makes an unusual claim in this book. He argues that humans descended from an ape ancestor. Filler certainly has credentials to be an expert on the subject. He has degrees in anthropology and in medicine and is a world famous neurosurgeon for spinal disorders. Someone asked him to examine a twenty-two-million-year-old fossil and he quickly realized that it was a mid lumbar section of vertebrae from an animal that stood upright fifteen million years earlier than any paleontologist postulated an upright posture for a hominoid.

Filler felt that these lumbar vertebrae belonged to an entirely new genus among the hominoids, really an entirely new kind of animal. It was a hominoid that not only stood erect, but could not comfortably walk in a stooped-over position as modern apes do. Anthropologists had been convinced that upright posture and walking on two legs must have arisen from an ancestor that did not have an upright posture. That ancestor gave rise to several lines of hominoids including humans and chimpanzees. However, according to Filler, there is no definitive fossil evidence at all to support this conviction. “All the fossil evidence actually points the other way.”

In Filler’s his own words: “And so we have a new possibility: a first human child, born to an ape parent, awkward and erect, and always at a loss to keep up with its quadrupedal proconsulid siblings, but nonetheless the harbinger of a new and remarkable species. The first upright ape was also the first human. In the millions of years that followed, new species branched off and abandoned their upright posture to descend to what we now call ‘ape.’”

I always had reservations about claims that humans descended from apes, and I’m very much aware of the arguments between creationists and evolutionists. I never thought I would live to see a qualified evolutionist turn Darwin’s theory upside down and claim that apes descended from humans. This book will launch a firestorm of debate. ( )