Posted on 02/26/2002 10:50:54 AM PST by dead
On the biggest steps in early human evolution scientists are in agreement. The first human ancestors appeared between five million and seven million years ago, probably when some apelike creatures in Africa began to walk habitually on two legs.
They were flaking crude stone tools by 2.5 million years ago. Then some of them spread from Africa into Asia and Europe after two million years ago.
With somewhat less certainty, most scientists think that people who look like us anatomically modern Homo sapiens evolved by at least 130,000 years ago from ancestors who had remained in Africa. Their brain had reached today's size. They, too, moved out of Africa and eventually replaced nonmodern human species, notably the Neanderthals in Europe and parts of Asia, and Homo erectus, typified by Java Man and Peking Man fossils in the Far East.
But agreement breaks down completely on the question of when, where and how these anatomically modern humans began to manifest creative and symbolic thinking. That is, when did they become fully human in behavior as well as body? When, and where, was human culture born?
"It's the hot issue, and we all have different positions," said Dr. John E. Yellen, an archaeologist with the National Science Foundation.
For much of the last century, archaeologists thought that modern behavior flowered relatively recently, 40,000 years ago, and only after Homo sapiens had pushed into Europe. They based their theory of a "creative explosion" on evidence like the magnificent cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet.
But some rebellious researchers suspected that this theory was a relic of a time when their discipline was ruled by Eurocentrism. Archaeologists, the rebels contended, were simply not looking for earlier creativity in the right places.
Several recent discoveries in Africa and the Middle East are providing the first physical evidence to support an older, more gradual evolution of modern behavior, one not centered in Europe. But other scientists, beyond acknowledging a few early sparks in Africa, remain unswayed. One prominent researcher is putting forward a new hypothesis of genetic change to explain a more recent and abrupt appearance of creativity.
The debate has never been so intense over what archaeologists see as the dawn of human culture.
"Europe is a little peninsula that happens to have a large amount of spectacular archaeology," said Dr. Clive Gamble, director of the Center for the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of Southampton in England. "But the European grip of having all the evidence is beginning to slip. We're finding wonderful new evidence in Africa and other places. And in the last two or three years, this has changed and widened the debate over modern human behavior."
The uncertainty and confusion over the origin of modern cultural behavior stem from what appears to be a great time lag between the point when the species first looked modern and when it acted modern. Perhaps the first modern Homo sapiens emerged with a capacity for modern creativity, but it remained latent until needed for survival.
"The earliest Homo sapiens probably had the cognitive capability to invent Sputnik," said Dr. Sally McBrearty, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut. "But they didn't yet have the history of invention or a need for those things."
Perhaps the need arose gradually in response to stresses of new social conditions, environmental change or competition from nonmodern human species. Or perhaps the capacity for modern behavior came late, a result of some as yet undetected genetic transformation.
Dr. Mary C. Stiner, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, said those contrasting views, or variations of them, could be reduced to this single question: "Was there some fundamental shift in brain wiring or some change in conditions of life?"
Sudden Genetic Advance
The foremost proponent of the traditional theory that human creativity appeared suddenly and mainly in Europe is Dr. Richard G. Klein, a Stanford archaeologist. He describes his reasoning in a new book, "The Dawn of Creativity," written with Blake Edgar and being published next month by John Wiley.
"Arguably, the `dawn' was the most significant prehistoric event that archaeologists will ever detect," the authors write. "Before it, human anatomical and behavioral change proceeded very slowly, more or less hand in hand. Afterward, the human form remained remarkably stable, while behavioral change accelerated dramatically. In the space of less than 40,000 years, ever more closely packed cultural `revolutions' have taken humanity from the status of a relatively rare large mammal to something more like a geologic force."
In that view, 40,000 years ago was the turning point in human creativity, when modern Homo sapiens arrived in Europe and left the first unambiguous artifacts of abstract and symbolic thought. They were making more advanced tools, burying their dead with ceremony and expressing a new kind of self-awareness with beads and pendants for body ornamentation and in finely wrought figurines of the female form. As time passed, they projected on cave walls something of their lives and minds in splendid paintings of deer, horses and wild bulls.
As an explanation for this apparently abrupt flowering of creativity, Dr. Klein has proposed a neurological hypothesis. About 50,000 years ago, he contends, a chance genetic mutation in effect rewired the brain in some critical way, possibly allowing for a significant advance in speech. The origin of human speech is another of evolution's mysteries. Improved communications at this time, in his view, could have enabled people "to conceive and model complex natural and social circumstances" and thus give them "the fully modern ability to invent and manipulate culture."
Although this transformation, with the genetic change leading to the behavioral change, occurred in Africa, Dr. Klein writes, it allowed "human populations to colonize new and challenging environments."
Only after scads of doctoral candidates had written their theses on this fake, assuming it was real. Piltdown Man isn't the only fraud, btw, that was later debunked.
I admit that science works. I have a fascination with science, and as a layman do quite a bit of reading on such subjects, particularly astrophysics. But I would say, again, that evolution, as a theory, does not lend itself to the scientific method -- it's never been observed, and the assumptions from the fossil record (i.e., conclusions from opinion, or "best guess") cannot be replicated in the laboratory. In fact, it is the relentless nature of scientific inquiry which today is chipping away at the basic tenents of evolutionary theory, and which will one day conclusively prove evolutionary theory is an wholy inadequate and false explanation of the origin of species. I love the way, over the last 20 years or so, the microbiologists have tied the paleontologists into knots.
I read one scientist who said that the theory of evolution wasn't very sound, but it was the best explanation science had come up with. I will admit that evolution is the best explanation there is for the origin of life....if one discounts the possibility of an intelligent Creator.
And, unfortunately, this seems to be the principle driving force behind the theory of evolution: a denial of God, not scientific integrity.
How do we know that my dog, or my rabbit, doesn't have his own God?
It may not be like the human God, but then he can't tell us about his beliefs.
That question was asked in Ecclesiastes, by presumeably Solomon. The answer does not matter to what our [duty] is.
Ecc 3:21 Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?
Ecc 12:13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this [is] the whole [duty] of man.
Yes, but then I haven't been able to get my rabbit to use a typewriter to record his thoughts about his God, from his own perspective of his lagomorph genus.
If one discounts the supernatural? Why, that would be positively... scientific?
I liked what Carl Sagan suggested in CONTACT: that God has hidden evidence of himself, say, in the run-out of pi...that eventually pi creates a pattern that can only be explained by an intelligence placing it there -- kind of like God's signature. Sagan, and most scientists, will only allow for the existence of God if there is proof, in the sense of scientific proof. Guys like Michael Behe are attempting to look for those proofs in nature.
Care to show one? The whale/hippo DNA evidence showed the errors of the fossil assumption, but then the fossil record is rearranged to fit the findings. A typical shell game, the bone evidence that is.
Some scientists are attempting to find evidence of "intelligent design" in nature, somewhat like Sagan suggested in CONTACT. They may or may not be successful. Even with proof staring in one's face, some people will choose to dismiss it. And even then, if science finds proof of God in nature -- an unmistakeable signature of God -- that discovery tells us nothing about what that God is like in terms of his character.
For anyone who cares, take a look at the book COMING OF AGE IN THE MILKY WAY by Timothy Ferris. It's the history of cosmology. What's fascinating about it is that it's really a history of failed models of the origin of the universe -- the rise and fall of theories, and the subsequent rise of fall of other theories that replaced older theories. The lesson of the book is that any scientific theory is only as good as the next bit of evidence discovered by some scientist. Nothing can be held as the absolute explanation, as gospel truth...unless, of course, it's the Gospel itself.
Actually for long term survival the good and evil have to approximately balance. A population with too much evil ends up destroying itself, too little they will be conquered. We may have evil built into our DNA, but we also must have team player qualities, i.e. morals. We invented jail to limit the number of people with too much evil. I'm not sure why saints are so far and few between, but there must be some evolutionary reason for their rarity. Possibly because they die poor virgins? Of course how we got here doesn't mean how it will be in the future. With growing socialism, genetic engineering, better health care, the evolutionary rules have changed. Evolution as we've known it has largely ended, for now anyway.
No, science has fulfilled it's mission: it has provided the best explanation based on the observable facts. If it were possible to detect scientifically the evidence of creation, then it would not be super-natural. But if we cannot detect such a creation, how can we ever know it happened? If we cannot detect it by any means known or knowable it lies outside the realm of observation and thus outside the realms to which science lays claim.
I liked what Carl Sagan suggested in CONTACT: that God has hidden evidence of himself, say, in the run-out of pi...that eventually pi creates a pattern that can only be explained by an intelligence placing it there -- kind of like God's signature. Sagan, and most scientists, will only allow for the existence of God if there is proof, in the sense of scientific proof. Guys like Michael Behe are attempting to look for those proofs in nature.
When they get the evidence, and follow it up with a theory that explains the evidence better than any other, and is testable, falsifiable, and predictive, let us know. Until then, stay outta the schools.
For someone adept at calling others liar you seem to misunderstand your own assertion. It was ---Assumptions from the fossil record are REGULARLY borne out in the lab. . All you have posted are fossil names. Liar.
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