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…then, without me giving away any spoilers to those who haven’t, it’s pretty much public knowledge that the premise of the story is all about how the Catholic Church has been keeping a major secret about Jesus Christ and his personal relationships and may have manipulated history in order to keep that secret. The author Dan Brown’s research for his fictionalized story was based in great part upon factual, heavily-investigated data.

Well, whether you believe there’s been a cover-up or not, the church has been known to pull stunts that make it plausible that they wouldn’t hesitate to massage, or hide, history in order to further its religio-political agenda. Like this move they’re attempting:

Famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey is giving no quarter to powerful evangelical church leaders who are pressing Kenya’s national museum to relegate to a back room its world-famous collection of hominid fossils showing the evolution of humans’ early ancestors.

Leakey called the churches’ plans “the most outrageous comments I have ever heard.”

He told The Daily Telegraph (London): “The National Museums of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory of the origins of mankind. The collection it holds is one of Kenya’s very few global claims to fame and it must be forthright in defending its right to be at the forefront of this branch of science.” Leakey was for years director of the museum and of Kenya’s entire museum system.

The museum’s collections include the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus, the 1.7-million-year-old Turkana Boy unearthed by Leakey’s team in 1984 near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.

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 artifacts amount to the clearest record yet discovered of the origins of Homo sapiens.

Leaders of Kenya’s Pentecostal congregation, with six million adherents, want the human fossils de-emphasized.

“The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact,” said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.

“Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory,” the bishop said.

If the evidence is there, the way I see it, that doesn’t erase God’s role at all. It merely confirms it for me. Besides, as the late, great litigator Johnnie Cochran might have said:

“If the monkey bones fit, then the truth we must get.“

Or something like that.

LiveScience: Scientist Fights Church Effort to Hide Museum’s Pre-Human Fossils