Evangelicals urge museum to hide man’s ancestors
Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya’s national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones pointing to man’s evolution from ape to human.
Leaders of the country’s six-million-strong Pentecostal congregation want Dr Richard Leakey’s ground-breaking finds relegated to a back room instead of being given their usual prime billing.
The museum also holds bones from several specimens of Australopithecus anamensis, believed to be the first hominid to walk upright, four million years ago. Together the artefacts amount to the clearest record yet discovered of the origins of Homo sapiens.
They have cemented the global reputation of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley as the cradle of mankind, and draw in tourists and locals to the museum’s sprawling compound on a hill above Nairobi.
Telegraph | News | Evangelicals urge museum to hide man’s ancestors