6. The video claims that the Piltdown Man fossil was a fraud created by combining a human skull and ape jaw and was taught in science text books as a missing link in human evolution.
This is correct. Pilotdown Man was one of the biggest frauds in scientific history.
What the video doesn't reveal, however, is that even at the time Piltdown was controversial and not universally accepted by the scientific community. British scientists were generally credulous whereas American and French scientists suspected that the skull didn't belong with the jaw and that the bones were a mixture of human and ape (which was eventually found to be the case).
The Piltdown Fossil may have been fabricated but there was no way to examine such things in 1910. Chemical tests that are common today did not exist at the time and there was no radiometric dating. Also, because very few human evolutionary fossils had been discovered by that time, scientists didn't know what the missing links in human evolution looked like. When thousands of legitimate human/primate evolutionary fossils were subsequently discovered, scientists realised that Piltdown man did not fit with the pattern that was emerging. It was subsequently rejected by the scientific community and taken off public display.
In the 1950s the Piltdown fossil was re-examined with more modern techniques and the hoax was definitively exposed - by evolutionary scientists!
No one knows who fabricated the Piltdown fossil. The fact that some scientists were duped by the hoax is regrettable but ultimately the hoax was exposed by evolutionary scientists which demonstrates their intellectual integrity and the self correcting nature of the scientific method.
8. Nebraska Man was accepted as an early form of human based on a single tooth later discovered to be from a pig.
This claim is false in almost every regard. In 1917 a tooth similar to a human tooth was discovered in Nebraska. In 1922 the tooth was sent to a palaeontologist named Henry Fairfield Osborn who quickly announced the tooth as belonging to either an ape or human like species:
"I have not stated that Hesperopithecus was either an Ape-man or in the direct line of human ancestry, because I consider it quite possible that we may discover anthropoid apes (Simiidae) with teeth closely imitating those of man (Hominidae), ...Until we secure more of the dentition, or parts of the skull or of the skeleton, we cannot be certain whether Hesperopithecus is a member of the Simiidae or of the Hominidae." (Osborn 1922)
Osborn's claims about the tooth never gained widespread scientific acceptance even at the time. Most scientists were sceptical even of the more modest claim that the Hesperopithecus tooth belonged to a primate. For example, in his two-volume book Human Origins published during what was supposedly the heyday of Nebraska Man (1924), George MacCurdy dismissed Nebraska Man in a single footnote:
"In 1920 [sic], Osborn described two molars from the Pliocene of Nebraska; he attributed these to an anthropoid primate to which he has given the name
Hesperopithecus. The teeth are not well preserved, so that the validity of Osborn's
determination has not yet been generally accepted."
It is simply not true that Nebraska Man was widely accepted as an ape-man, or even as an ape, by scientists, and its effect upon the scientific thinking of the time was negligible. Few, if any scientists claimed that Nebraska Man was a human ancestor.
9. The video claims that Nebraska Man was reconstructed from a single tooth while referring to this picture:
The video very quickly skims over Peking Man which is understandable because it's claim is an outright lie.
Peking Man has never been shown to be a fraud, it is a remarkably well preserved specimen of Homo Erectus , a hominin species that lived between 1.4 million and 400,000 years ago.
Homo Erectus exhibited a mixture of ape and human-like features but Creationists reject it as a transitional species (so they can maintain their lie that no 'missing links' have been found) by claiming that it was just an ‘ape’.
This is clearly nonsense however because the largest Homo Erectus skull is almost twice as large as that of a large Gorilla. Any ape with a brain that size would be enormous, but no such ape has ever been found. Homo Erectus also had a smaller human-like jaw, walked upright, used tools and lived in primitive hunter gatherer societies.
Here is a Homo Erectus skull and reconstruction
http://sciencepenguin.com/homo-erectus/
clearly not not just an ape
