varmintman:
"That's the part of it which makes the least sense. God does not use broken tools. " central_va: "As far I as I can tell h.sapien is about 200,000 years old.
If you met a person from 200,000 years ago he would look like a modern human.
No gradual changes that an evolutionary theory requires."
Hayride: "If our supposed closest relative differs by 4% (at least) that’s 120 million bits of info separating us and they’re looking for a (as in 1) missing link.
If the theory of evolution is true, shouldn’t they’re be more than 1 link along the great divide?"
to all: how can you look at these transitional fossils and still pretend they don't exist?
Figure 1.4.4. Fossil hominid skulls. (Images © 2000 Smithsonian Institution.)
- (A) Pan troglodytes, chimpanzee, modern
- (B) Australopithecus africanus, STS 5, 2.6 My
- (C) Australopithecus africanus, STS 71, 2.5 My
- (D) Homo habilis, KNM-ER 1813, 1.9 My
- (E) Homo habilis, OH24, 1.8 My
- (F) Homo rudolfensis, KNM-ER 1470, 1.8 My
- (G) Homo erectus, Dmanisi cranium D2700, 1.75 My
- (H) Homo ergaster (early H. erectus), KNM-ER 3733, 1.75 My
- (I) Homo heidelbergensis, "Rhodesia man," 300,000 - 125,000 y
- (J) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, La Ferrassie 1, 70,000 y
- (K) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, La Chappelle-aux-Saints, 60,000 y
- (L) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Le Moustier, 45,000 y
- (M) Homo sapiens sapiens, Cro-Magnon I, 30,000 y
- (N) Homo sapiens sapiens, modern
to varmintman: How can a "tool" which produced humans be "broken"?
to central_va: 200,000 years ago there were a number of "not-fully-humans" walking the earth, Neanderthals for one.
to Hayride: Depending on what exactly you count, human and chimpanzee DNA is 98.4% the same, meaning about 50 million mutations separate us from them.
The rate of mutations (nearly all harmless) among humans has been measured as highly variable, up to 50 per generation.
With chimps mutating at the same rate, we are looking at 100 mutations to separate each new generation of pre-humans and chimps.
This suggests something over 500,000 generations since the human-chimp common ancestor, or 5+ million years (chimps begin to mature at age 8).
Other studies using different methods arrived at similar results.
All of the creatures you mention other than for the Cro Magnons were hominids, i.e. bipedal apes which, as far as we have any real evidence for, are all extinct, most likely because our own ancestors killed them all.
Logic is the most major tool which God has given us for understanding our world; any sort of a science theory or claim which cannot pass a sniff test for basic logic is junk science; on a scale of 1 - 10 for ability to generate logical breakdowns amongst people with PHD degrees, the Neanderthal is at least a 9.
There are several kinds of such breakdowns. One is the claim that we and the Neanderthal have a "common ancestor". The Neanderthal has been abandoned as a plausible evolutionary antecedent for modern man precisely because the genetic gap is too large (DNA halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee). Anything 300K - 500K years back which anybody could try to claim was a "common ancestor(TM)" to both us and the Neanderthal (Usually given as homo Heidelbergensis)", would be much more remote from us THAN the Neanderthal. Too-genetically-remote-to-be-ancestral-to is a transitive relationship and the nature of such relationships doesn't require graduate level math; you'd think the people making this particular claim would figure the problem out sooner or later but they don't seem to.
Another is this new claim of 1 - 4% Neanderthal genes in everybody other than Africans. Once again, the Neanderthal was a glorified ape. Any crossbreeding with a glorified ape PRIOR to the bottleneck and Africans would not get left out. Any crossing AFTER the bottleneck and not involving Africans as claimed, and the genetic gap between Africans and everybody else would be gigantic, rather than minuscule as it actually is.
Then of course there is the problem of thinking that a Neanderthal male could/would rape a woman and, rather than cooking and eating her afterwards as usual, somehow or other keep her alive long enough to bear a cross-species child, raise that child to reproductive age, and have him/her breed back into human populations without anybody catching on.....
In real life, Neanderthal females would kill that woman the first time her new owner left her alone for ten minutes; the woman wouldn't fare any better than the subjects of the commie attempts to breed humans and apes into super workers in the 1930s (no subjects survived); humans would notice the child was different (the fur coat, the odd taste for bananas etc.); and the humans would kill that child and everybody else like him as part of the same program which killed out the Neanderthal. They would not need DNA tests to determine who to kill for that sort of reason, again, it would be exceedingly obvious.
Why would it be exceedingly obvious you ask??
Again this is what a Neanderthal would look like without the 6" ice-age fur coat, image courtesy www.themandus.org:
We're not related to them.