Posted on 06/11/2003 3:31:46 PM PDT by aculeus
In a discovery that several colleagues describe as "spectacular" and "extraordinary," an international team of researchers has uncovered fossils in Ethiopia that fill a crucial gap in the record of human evolution.
Judged by their physical characteristics, the 160,000-year-old-fossils - nearly complete skulls of two adults and a child found near the village of Herto - teeter on the razor-thin edge of change between anatomically early and modern humans. The team also found skull pieces and teeth from seven other individuals.
The discoveries dovetail with an expanding body of genetic evidence indicating that modern humans first evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago.
Over the years, paleoanthropologists have gathered fossils that open windows on key periods in the history of human evolution in Africa dating back millions of years, notes Tim White, co-leader of the team that made the discovery. But "the record has been mute" on what was happening 150,000 years ago, he says.
"We're opening the first window on the continent in this time period," he adds. And the view from the window is "very consistent with the predictions made by genetic evidence" that modern humans originated in Africa.
Combined with existing fossil and genetic evidence, researchers say, the new find seriously undermines hypotheses that modern humans evolved roughly simultaneously in different regions of the world and that in Europe, Neanderthals gave rise to anatomically modern Europeans.
In one sense, the finds at Herto come as little surprise to some paleoanthropologists who work in Africa.
Given the pattern of development in fossils that date to either side of the Herto group, these are the kind of hominids one could expect from that time and that region of Africa, according to Curtis Marean, professor of anthropology at Arizona State University's Institute for Human Origins.
What makes them special, he says, is their "outstanding state of preservation" and their tightly defined dates. The technique that Dr. White's team used allowed it to date the fossils between 160,000 and 154,000 years ago. The age of other potential near-modern human fossils, such as those found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, is more uncertain.
The White team, which details its results in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, first came across the site where the fossils were found on Nov. 16, 1997. It's a landscape that today looks as much like a Martian plain as anything on Earth.
Pebble-strewn, virtually treeless, scorchingly hot, the terrain along the rift valley containing the site stretches in subtle undulations toward distant mountains. But 160,000 years ago, when much of the Northern Hemisphere sagged under a sheath of ice two miles thick, this patch of Africa was the site of a shallow freshwater lake teeming with catfish, crocs, and hippos, researchers say.
According to White, he noticed a butchered hippo skull and related artifacts in an eroding slope near Herto. Eleven days later, he and colleagues returned to survey the site.
As White worked on a shaded enclosure for a lunch break, he says, "I sent two people off to begin the survey near where we had found the hippo." When they came back about a half hour later, both had found hominids, he says.
And the painstakingly slow process of collection and excavation began.
Of the specimens included in Thursday's report, the child's cranium presented perhaps the biggest reconstruction challenge. More than 200 pieces were scattered over some 4,300 square feet of the valley floor, presenting Ethiopian scientist and team member Berhane Asfaw with a 3-D jigsaw puzzle to assemble.
In addition to the hominids, stone tools also emerged from the team's excavations that signal a shift in toolmaking technology to the flake-based features of the Middle Stone Age. Moreover, one of the adult skull fragments shows evidence of parallel surface cuts that could indicate some form of primitive burial rites, the team reports.
Nothing. But both are 'interpretations' of what the Bible says. I'm saying if you choose to interpret one thing then the whole Bible is up for interpretation. Next you'll be telling me the Flood didn't really flood the whole world or maybe it didn't happen at all. I've actually had Catholic monks at an Abbey I attended for summer classes tell me that and tell me that most of the things in the Old Testament didn't happen, they were just parables of how to live. Where do you stop?
Nobody. They've all been proven hoaxes.
But of course when you're desperate to prove the God of the Bible didn't create man before you go to Hell...you'll come up with anything.
John 1
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men
9 That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth
---------------------------------
Well let's see. The Word was with God in the beginning, the Word was God, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt with us. I'm just hazarding a guess, but perhaps it was Jesus Christ? Along with the Holy Spirit that came after Christ?
No. they don't, at least not during the daytime when their colour would actually matter.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4105.asp
Goodbye, peppered moths A classic evolutionary story comes unstuck
by Carl Wieland
First published in: Creation Ex Nihilo 21(3):56, June–August 1999
The ‘textbook story’ of England’s famous peppered moths (Biston betularia) goes like this. The moth comes in light and dark (melanic) forms. Pollution from the Industrial Revolution darkened the tree trunks, mostly by killing the light-coloured covering lichen (plus soot).
The lighter forms, which had been well camouflaged against the light background, now ‘stood out’, and so birds more readily ate them. Therefore, the proportion of dark moths increased dramatically. Later, as pollution was cleaned up, the light moth became predominant again.
The shift in moth numbers was carefully documented through catching them in traps. Release-recapture experiments confirmed that in polluted forests, more of the dark form survived for recapture, and vice versa. In addition, birds were filmed preferentially eating the less camouflaged moths off tree trunks.
The story has generated boundless evolutionary enthusiasm. H.B. Kettlewell, who performed most of the classic experiments, said that if Darwin had seen this, ‘He would have witnessed the consummation and confirmation of his life’s work.’1
Actually, even as it stands, the textbook story demonstrates nothing more than gene frequencies shifting back and forth, by natural selection, within one created kind. It offers nothing which, even given millions of years, could add the sort of complex design information needed for ameba-to-man evolution.
Even L. Harrison Matthews, a biologist so distinguished he was asked to write the foreword for the 1971 edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, said therein that the peppered moth example showed natural selection, but not ‘evolution in action’.
However, it turns out that this classic story is full of holes anyway. Peppered moths don’t even rest on tree trunks during the day.
Kettlewell and others attracted the moths into traps in the forest either with light, or by releasing female pheromones — in each case, they only flew in at night. So where do they spend the day? British scientist Cyril Clarke, who investigated the peppered moth extensively, wrote:
‘But the problem is that we do not know the resting sites of the moth during the day time. … In 25 years we have found only two betularia on the tree trunks or walls adjacent to our traps (one on an appropriate background and one not), and none elsewhere.’2
The moths filmed being eaten by the birds were laboratory-bred ones placed onto tree trunks by Kettlewell; they were so languid that he once had to warm them up on his car bonnet (hood).3
And all those still photos of moths on tree trunks? One paper described how it was done — dead moths were glued to the tree.4 University of Massachusetts biologist Theodore Sargent helped glue moths onto trees for a NOVA documentary. He says textbooks and films have featured ‘a lot of fraudulent photographs’.5,6
Other studies have shown a very poor correlation between the lichen covering and the respective moth populations. And when one group of researchers glued dead moths onto trunks in an unpolluted forest, the birds took more of the dark (less camouflaged) ones, as expected. But their traps captured four times as many dark moths as light ones — the opposite of textbook predictions!7
University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne agrees that the peppered moth story, which was ‘the prize horse in our stable’, has to be thrown out.
He says the realization gave him the same feeling as when he found out that Santa Claus was not real.5
Regrettably, hundreds of millions of students have once more been indoctrinated with a ‘proof’ of evolution which is riddled with error, fraud and half-truths.8
References
1. H. Kettlewell (1959), ‘Darwin’s missing evidence’ in Evolution and the fossil record, readings from Scientific American, W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1978, p. 23.
2. C.A. Clarke, G.S. Mani and G. Wynne, ‘Evolution in reverse: clean air and the peppered moth’, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 26:189–199, 1985; quote on p. 197.
3. Calgary Herald, March 21, 1999, p. D3.
4. D.R. Lees & E.R. Creed, ‘Industrial melanism in Biston betularia: the role of selective predation’, Journal of Animal Ecology 44:67–83, 1975.
5. J.A. Coyne, Nature 396(6706):35–36.
6. The Washington Times, January 17, 1999, p. D8.
7. D.R. Lees & E.R. Creed, ref. 4.
8. Unfettered by evolutionary ‘just so’ stories, researchers can now look for the real causes of these population shifts. Might the dark form actually have a function, like absorbing more warmth? Could it reflect conditions in the caterpillar stage? In a different nocturnal moth species, Sargent has found that the plants eaten by the larvae may induce or repress the expression of such ‘melanism’ in adult moths (see Sargent T.R. et al. in M.K. Hecht et al, Evolutionary Biology 30:299–322, Plenum Press, New York, 1998).
Don't take anyone's word for anything. Examine everything carefully. But it also sounds like you would take the word of a priest, who is sinful and fallable over G-d's word. That is pitiful.
Any fallable human being who sets himself and his office up as "Christ on earth" yet denies the truth of the word of G-d isn't fit to be considered an authority on the Bible, nor should anyone who believes in Y-shua look to such a person for spiritual guidance.
You should get your Bible facts straight before you quote it. First of all, Lot lived in Sodom, not Gomorrah.
Evolution is the folklore of those who don't want to believe in G-d.
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