Replies

Your diagram is even more misleading than I had thought at first. It turns out J, K, and L are ALL Neanderthals. DNA analysis has ruled out Neanderthals as contributing to modern man's gene pool. That means you go from Egaster (I) to Cro Mag (M). Trouble is, egaster's descendents forgot to leave any fossils within the last 100K - Excluding perhaps the Neadertals who have already been ruled out as a source for mankind. There was no one around for modern man to evolve from.

Because human beings are wired to look for patterns, any graduated series has suggestive power. Your series has that power, even though it consists of dead ends and a critter placed out of order (chimp). It does not prove human evolution, it proves humans respond to the visual of a graduated series. They leap to conclusions. Most will reconsider those conclusions when presented with contradictory evidence.

Culturally, with tool making, social group size, religion and art, man shows up with a 'big bang' or creativity around 40K. Behaviorally modern humans show up suddenly.

DNA evidence shows that all humans are amazingly closely related. We disagree on the amount and implications of this evidence, but to me this far outweighs your small pile of disparate bones.

Bones are too easy to dispute, even among evos (ever read a book called "Bones of Contention"?) I could get a series of horse, dear, pig, dog and ape skulls that could show them 'evolving' from horses to apes. I could get a bunch of monkey and ape skulls, all extant species, and show modern monkies 'evolving' into apes.

Your statements about Neanderthals are just wrong and don't help you. It's another case where you emotionally take the evidence you do like farther than it goes. Neanderthals may have contributed to the human gene pool. Even if they didn't, that they intergrade at one end of their development with Homo erectus from which they sprang and at the other end with modern humans is a clue, another dot to connect. They don't seem to have contributed to modern mitochondrial DNA but that's another question from nuclear DNA.

That means you go from Egaster (I) to Cro Mag (M). Trouble is, egaster's descendents forgot to leave any fossils within the last 100K ...

Here you bludgeon with bad reasoning. The size of your gap is maybe 55K, not 100K. There are non-neanderthal hominids in the Near East variously dated at 90-100K years ago. Cro-Magnon shows up 40-45K ago. In a five or so million-year history, a gap of this size in just the presumably mainline sequence is nothing given the granularity of the fossil record, yet you hide in it and trumpet your imagined success.

Bones are too easy to dispute, even among evos (ever read a book called "Bones of Contention"?)

There's more than one, but both/all are by creationists. The best known is by Lubenow and it can safely be termed crackpot. Tell me you're not getting your material from there.

I could get a series of horse, dear, pig, dog and ape skulls that could show them 'evolving' from horses to apes. I could get a bunch of monkey and ape skulls, all extant species, and show modern monkies 'evolving' into apes.

Repeatedly, you grasp at straws. Your counterexample series have more problems than you admit, especially the first one. You have fossil records for horses, ungulates, dogs, and apes. Both of your strawman series are contradicted by those records. The apes-to-human series is un-contradicted by other data. It is evidence for the best and only real hypothesis out there.

What you're really saying is "Anything but humans-from-apes!"