Debate Is Fueled on When Humans Became Human

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?"

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."

And neither comes from a scientist...

OK, I'll give you a scientist's view of the certainty of scientific theory:

Dr. Allan Sandage was the director of the Palomar Observatory for over 30 years, and one of the world's preeminent astronomers and cosmologists. In the book LONELY HEARTS OF THE COSMOS, the author, Dennis Overby, comments that "Science, inching along, by trial-and-error and by doubt, is a graveyard of final answers." Asking Sandage about the conflicting models of the universe (expanding, contracting, first big, then small, infinite one day, doomed to collapse the next) Sandage said, "Astronomy is an impossible science. It's a wonder we know anything at all."

And yet I'd wager that we are more certain about the birth, life cycle, and death of stars and even galaxies, than we are about the origin of species.

One final comment about evolution, this from the late British journalist and social commentator Malcolm Muggeridge:

"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, expecially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. ...This age is one of the most credulous in history, and I would include evolution as an example. I'm very happy to say that I live near a place called Piltdown. I like to drive there because it give me a special glow. You probably know that a skull was discovered there and no less than five hundred doctoral theses were written on the subject and then it was discovered that the skull was a practical joke by a worthy dentist in Hastings who'd hurriedly put a few bones together, not even from the same animal, and buried them and stirred up all this business. So I'm not a great man for bones."

Real World Use for an ISID (Infinitely Stupid Ideological Doctrine) Such as Evolutionism

Archive Post (from a discussion on talk.origins)

To a very close aproximation, all change these days is due to cultural evolution (memes). Any biological change will be through genetic engineering as you say. Genetic engineering is a result of cultural evolution. Overpopulation will be curbed by either mass culling of the population by starvation, which genetically would be almost a random cull (there's no correllation between genes and wealth/power) Or else by cultural evolution leading to population control by changing breeding patterns. Id prefer the latter. In a deep sense it would be humane to supply aid to fund payments for voluntary sterilization all over the world.

Consider the following as an alternative:

Friedrich Nietzsche had a lot to say about what he saw as the next step in human evolutionary development, the uebermensch; everything pretty much EXCEPT a believeable plan for developing or breeding him. I now know how that can be done. At the very least, I have a plan which would dramatically improve the genetic pool of the entire human race in one generation.

The plan requires what I would term an Infinitely Stupid Ideological Doctrine, or ISID for short which, while modeled on evolutionism, the only real-world example of an ISID, could not be evolutionism itself since that would weight the program in favor of the offspring of religious groups, rather in the desired direction of the uebermensch.

Nonetheless, a religiously neutral ISID would be devised using evolutionism as a model, i.e. the doctrine would require belief in an infinite number of impossible/zero-probability occurances as evolutionism does, require infinite expanses of time as an enabling mechanism for believing in things which cannot be made to happen in real life as evolutionism does, and generally be unfalsifiable as is evolutionism.

This new ISID could take any of several forms: belief in the Great Pumpkin and pumpkinism; the doctrine of mettalurgical advancement; a modernized and refined version of Voodoo such as that seen in the Abbot and Costello movies (the scene in which Lou Costello goes to whack the old witch with the broom, accidentally touches the starter button on the broom and goes flying out the window and lands in a tree), or something concocted from the government list of BS organizations you swear not to know anything about when filling out government forms....

Moreover, to students at all K12 levels, the new ISID must appear to be supported in entirely the same manner as is evolutionism. It must appear to be backed by every organ of American government at nearly all levels, supported by hosts of "experts" with PHD degrees and no common-sense or judgement, defended by vicious attacks upon the intelligence and judgement of any would-be doubters, and in fact the new ISID must appear to be part of a winning program for the final victory of light over darkness, good over evil; people opposed to the new ISID must be cast as mindless "staroveriyeh", people who want to bring back the dark ages.

The truth and beauty of the new ISID must be drummed into the heads of every child in America from the day he is born until the day he graduates from high school by every facet of his existence, school, MTV, radio, the movies, mod clothes, beer cans... all should bear witness to the grandeur and beauty of the ISID.

And then, on graduation day, the kids should be brought into an interview room one at a time and asked "Do you believe in the ISID?" The ones who reply "No" should be allowed to live.

In forming a judgement of evolutionism, you must at some point consider the circumstances under which it arose and the most probable set of reasons for its rise to dominance.

You've heard of the Medelin Cartel, El Pino, Pablo Escobar, the Pagans, and all of the other drug dealers of our times. The truth is, all together they probably don't add up to a hill of beans compared to the operations of the British empire in the 19'th century. At least one major eastern city was set up for no other reason than to serve as a conduit for Indian opium into China and an entire war was fought to protect the opium trade.

Now, you don't need to be Albert Einstein to comprehend that for a supposedly Christian nation to be engaging in this sort of business must have created at least two problems on an organizational level. One was the question of motivating men to fight and die for such causes: "For God, Bonnie Queen Vickie, and the Opium Trade, CHARGE!!!!!!" probably wouldn't get it...

The other problem which springs to mind immediately would be that which the CEO or chairman of the board of the East India Company must have faced in conducting board meatings. Picture it:

"Gentlemen, I have some good news, and I have some bad news. The good news is that profits are up 73.2% on a volume of trade which has increased 27% over the same three-month period last year, and that all of our operations appear to be running smoothly. Indigenous peoples of India, Burma, China, and several other areas with a propensity to cause problems are now happily stoned out of their minds on our products, and are causing no further trouble."
"The bad news is that we're all probably going to spend the next 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years roasting on a barbecue pit for this shit..."

Now picture Chuck Darwin walking into this scene and telling all of these people that they're sitting around worrying over nothing, and that the only moral law in nature is "The Survival of the Fittest". Can you not see all of those peoples' eyes lighting up, their hair standing straight up, and somebody screaming "By Jove, I think he's got it?"

I mean, it doesn't even matter what led Darwin to devise the theory of evolution. In any normal time or set of circumstances, he'd have either been laughed to scorn, hanged, or burned. He succeeded precisely because he solved several major problems for the Godfathers of 100 years ago. In other words, there's more than a little truth to my claim that someone has to be stoned to buy off on this BS.

Carol Hugunin, a biologist on the staff of 21'st Century Science recently wrote an article titled:

It's Time to Bury Darwin And Get On With Real Science

Noting:

"For more than a century, Darwin has dominated the biological sciences, but his hypothesis for the evolution of life does not cohere with natural history and leads to a philosophical morass."

What would you figure the final fall-back position of the evolutionists will eventually be after it finally reaches the point at which they cannot even talk about evolution without inviting laughter and ridicule?

I fully expect, within the next five years, to hear from the talk.origins crowd and others like them, something like:

"Well, Darwin may not have been much of a scientist, and evolution was obviously a crock of BS, but Darwin was basically a good boy who simply went wrong, and he treated his dog good and his mother loved him..."

Don't believe it. The Bible itself tells us that is unlikely:

16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

Hugunin delves into the social and political melieu which spawned Darwinism, and the story which emerges is somewhat different from the picture evolutionists would have us see of Darwin, to say the least:

In an entry to his diary dated October 1838, the affable Darwin tells exactly how he came up with this hypothesis:

"I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Popula- tion, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-con- tinued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favor- able variat{ons would tend to be preserved, and un- favourable ones to be. destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work."

Parson Thomas Malthus, an economist working at the British East India Company college in Haileybury, England, had insisted that population (of men and of other living crea- tures) tends to expand geometrically, while food supply ex- pands arithmetically. Hence, the Malthusian world is so arranged that in the natural course of things, horrible crises must occur as population presses against fixed resources. This cycle can be alleviated only by the depopulating effects of "vice and misery"-that is, nonreproductive sexual activity and death-dealing poverty. To cull the human flock, neo- Maithusians advocated active social measures beyond accep- tance of starvation and disease.
The original full title of Darwin's 1859 opus, it should be noted, is

Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, went a step further than Malthus in explicitly proposing that the human race should be culled on the basis of the inferiority of certain sub- groups, thus winning his title as the father of British eugenics. With the support of T.H. Huxley, Darwin's publicist, Darwin's son Leonard wrote The Need for Eugenic Reform, "dedicated to the memory of my father. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could towards making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book."
As for Malthus, publication of his dogmas led to the enact- ment of the 1830s Poor Laws in England, which abolished "outdoor relief"-the equivalent of today's welfare pay- ments-and forced the unemployed into workhouses,. where they slaved for scant rations of food until they took sick and died. This was the practical corollary of Malthus's precept that charity (or, even worse in his view, policies of elevating a na- tion's per capita living standards and productive capabilities) would simply lead to disastrous overpopulation.
Like Alexander von Humboldt, Malthus and the East India Company knew that statecraft can transmit the benefits of sci- entific progress throughout society. The United States was al- ready a living example of geometric expansion of new re- sources when Malthus assembled his Essay Humboldt and his associates devoted themselves to promoting that statecraft, while the Malthusians devoted themselves to opposing it.
Malthus's collaborator Sir James Mackintosh at Hailey- bury was the father-in-law of Darwin's cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood; Charles himself married his Wedgwood cousin and lived on his wife's Wedgwood wealth. The Darwin- Wedgwood~cIan were among the leading merchant-banking clans with immense control over colonial raw materials.
Can we simply ignore those dark, Malthusian thoughts, or are they perhaps relevant to the scientific issues? It is generally said that Darwin synthesized and subsumed the work of the scientists such as Humboldt who preceded him, but can this be the case, when we consider how at variance their funda- mental assumptions really are?
Man, in Darwins view, is just another beast and thus the human herd might be culled (via eugenics) just as one might cull a herd of cattle. And once one tries to justify eugenics, in- evitably the claim is made that some groups of men, for rea- sons of skin color, reIigion or whatever - are more fit than another.
Compare Darwinian eugenics to Alexander Humboldt's view: Humboldt insists that man and human civilization are of a higher order that is not dominated by the same kind of law- fulness that characterized the evolution of life up to that point.
Humboldt, Dana, and others of the continental science tradi- tion assert not only that man is the crowning glory of the process we call evolution, but also that man goes beyond this, taking evolution into a different, a higher realm.
This is very much a hot issue today. The much publicized book The Bell Curve, for example, by scientists Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, claims that human beings of darker pigmentation are just not as "fit" as those of lighter pigmenta- tion. The research for the book was supported by The Pioneer Fund, which had its start in the eugenics movement of the first half of this century. Before World War II, Harry Laughlin, leader of the Pioneer Fund, wanted the "lowest" 10 percent of the human population sterilized, in order to better build a race of human thoroughbreds. Laughlin and his Fund distributed Hitler's propaganda films in American schools, while Hitler put the Darwinian implications of eugenics into practice in slave labor camps.
Other contemporary researchers with a eugenics theme in- clude neuroscientist Xandra Breakerfield at Harvard University, who is trying to prove that violent behavior is genetic, while others are trying to prove that homosexual behavior is genetic.
At this point, it ought to be clear that no scientist studying something as broad as the origin and evolution of life can to- tally avoid issues that have political, philosophical, and reli- gious connotations. As much as such scientists might want to stay out of politics, the political questions are raised because of the very nature of the underlying assumptions adopted.

Are we still talking about evolution or have we switched to the Big Bang? Anyway, the Big Bang theory doesn't say that everything came out of "nowhere". It simply says that in the beginning, the universe was condensed into a very small space, which gradually expanded.

The Big Bang idea is just as dead as Darwinism.

Big-Bang cosmology refers to an epoch that cannot be reached by any form of astronomy, and, in more than two decades, it has not produced a single successful prediction.’
Hoyle, F., Home Is Where the Wind Blows, University Science Books, Mill Valley, California, 414, 1994, as reported in The Skeptic, 16(1):52.

I have little hesitation in saying that a sickly pall now hangs over the big-bang theory. When a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that the theory rarely recovers.”
Fred Hoyle, “The Big Bang Under Attack,” Science Digest, May 1984, p. 84.

Examining the faint light from an elderly Milky Way star, astronomers have detected a far greater abundance of beryllium atoms than the standard Big Bang model predicts.”
Ron Cowen, “Starlight Casts Doubt on Big Bang Details,” Science News, Vol. 140, 7 September 1991, p. 151.

Not only don’t we see the universe slowing down; we see it speeding up.”
Adam Riess, as quoted by James Glanz, “Astronomers See a Cosmic Antigravity Force at Work,” Science, Vol. 279, 27 February 1998, p. 1298.

“In one of the great results of twentieth century science, NSF-funded astronomers have shown both that the universe does not contain enough matter in the universe to slow the expansion, and that the rate of expansion actually increases with distance. Why? Nobody knows yet.”
National Science Foundation Advertisement, “Astronomy: Fifty Years of Astronomical Excellence,” Discover, September 2000, p. 7.

“The big bang made no quantitative prediction that the ‘background’ radiation would have a temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin (in fact its initial prediction was 30 degrees Kelvin); whereas Eddington in 1926 had already calculated that the ‘temperature of space’ produced by the radiation of starlight would be found to be 3 degrees Kelvin.”
Tom Van Flandern, “Did the Universe Have a Beginning?” Meta Research Bulletin, Vol. 3, No. 3, 15 September 1994, p. 33.

A big bang should not produce highly concentrated or rotating bodies Galaxies are examples of both. A large volume of the universe should not be—but apparently is—moving sideways, almost perpendicular to the direction of expansion A big bang would, for all practical purposes, produce only hydrogen and helium. Therefore, the first generation of stars to somehow form after a big bang should consist of only hydrogen and helium. Some of these stars should still exist, but none can be found. These observations make it doubtful a big bang occurred If a big bang occurred, what caused the bang? Stars with enough mass become black holes, so not even light can escape their enormous gravity. How then could anything escape trillions upon trillions of times greater gravity caused by concentrating all the universe’s mass in a “cosmic egg” that existed before a big bang? If the big bang theory is correct, one can calculate the age of the universe. This age turns out to be younger than objects in the universe whose ages were based on other evolutionary theories. Because this is logically impossible, one or both sets of theories must be incorrect.

‘Cosmology is unique in science in that it is a very large intellectual edifice based on very few facts. The strong tendency is to replace a need for more facts by conformity.’
Arp, H.C., Burbidge, G., Hoyle, F., Narlikar, J.V. and Wickramasinghe, N.C., The extragalactic universe: an alternative view, Nature 346:807–812, August 30, 1990.

Based on assumptions and a selective view of the evidence the Big Bang is Big religion falsely parading in the priestly name of science.

No, I laud the detective who discovered the crook.

Yea and it only took them 40 years to discover something obvious. Great Science!

Reaction to Dawson's presentation of Piltdown man (which his new genus quickly became know as) was mixed. Skeptics pointed out that enough fragments of the skull and jawbone were missing that it was impossible to determine if they really fit together. Moreover, many specific details about the fossils, their age, and how they were found that are normally reported were omitted or unclear. However, the announcement of the discovery of a second skull by Smith Woodward in 1917 converted many skeptics.

How and when was Piltdown Man exposed as a fake?

"Have you heard anything of the case? " he asked.
"Not a word. I have not seen a paper for some days."
"The London press has not had very full accounts. I have just been looking through all the recent papers in order to master the particulars. It seems, from what I gather, to be one of those simple cases which are so extremely difficult." (ii)

In the early 20th Century, there were relatively few fossil hominids, and no one really knew what a "missing link" between ape and man would look like. Piltdown man contained an appropriate mix of features to be a plausible missing link. This plausibility did not hold up during the next few decades, however, when new discoveries of Peking man, australopithecine, and other types of other early hominids or near hominids were made. Piltdown man did not fit in with these new discoveries, and during the period of 1930 to 1950, the importance of Piltdown man was significantly reduced. By 1950, Piltdown man was largely ignored, and in 1953, it was finally determined that Piltdown man was a forgery.

Serious questioning of Piltdown man didn't come until near the end when new methods of dating became available and were utilized on the fossils. In 1949 fluoride dating showed that the fossils were quite young. Further study of the fossils in 1953 by Kenneth Oakley, a paleontologist at the British Museum, and Joseph S. Weiner and Wilfred Le Gros Clark, both anatomists at Oxford, found obvious signs of forgery. The jaw was from a modern orangutan. The molars and the stray canine had been filed flat to make them appear more human. The skull bones were from a modern human. All the bones had been soaked in a solution that had hardened them and imparted a stain that made them appear extremely old. The detective story of unravelling the forgery is told in .a book by Weiner.

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