Fraudulent Ascent of Man

Along the path of numerous Evolutionist forgeries and frauds is the famous Ascent of Man image.

Origins of an Icon

I've been trying to do this post since I started this blog but there is a problem with an iconic image and the internet: There are thousands of versions of it and it's bloody challenging to find the original. I'm finally reasonably confident that I have found it, though.
The image is of course the March of Progress. It's that ubiquitous parade of apes from a chimp like creature up to modern man. So pervasive is this image that I found a half dozen purported to be the original under the names Ascent of Man, Descent of Man, and Evolution of Man. It was most commonly credited to Charles Darwin himself.
After much searching I have come to believe the the original was titled March of Progress and was a fold out created by Rudolph Zallinger in 1965 for a Time-Life book called Early Man. It is shown in full below.

Does that look a little odd? Well I said it was a fold out. This is what it looks like folded in.

Is that more familiar now? How about a more carefully selected version?

The background on this piece of trash is that it became virtually an overnight public image due to its use by both Time-Life books, who practically gave it away to every home and school library in North America, and simultaneously by National Geographic in their own pseudo-scientific attempts to 'document' Man's descent from early apes.

However, even in the very process of its original publication, the accompanying text acknowledged that most of the 'missing links' on the linear progression were NOT in the chain of descent, but rather unrelated 'branches' and dead-ends, or else unplaceable based on current scientific knowledge.

Critics too were quick to call foul on this audacious propaganda piece designed to brainwash children into believing the 'absolute fact' of Man's descent from early apes.

In a chapter long forgotten, because the sleight of hand was carefully covered up and ignored, the original progression was quietly dropped and the dubious 'missing links' removed, while the image was re-issued in a greatly truncated form, without the features so easy to spot as fraudulent nonsense.

"Although a powerful image that instantly evokes the idea of evolution, it is, in fact, wrong. Not just for the fact that a vast majority of the “ancestors” weren’t actually a part of human family tree, or that they’re shown walking upright, but that they’re shown in a successive line. This “parade of evolution” is something that shows up over and over again; a linear progression or advancement of lifeforms that invariably ends in an upright, close-shaven white guy. All of these notions about evolution are false, of course."