[Ol' Sparky]

What a silly article, typical of the New York Times. The theory has more holes than a dozen doughnuts and, not surprisingly, a biased, left-wing newspaper rambles on like evolution is fact. No, evolution is a lame theory without a sufficient fossil record that contradicts scientific observation throughout human history (like in regard to mutations).

[My2Cents]

The first human ancestors appeared between five million and seven million years ago

That pins it down....And is that all that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal world: the fact we walk on two legs?

The answer to the question is easy: Our ancestors became human when God breathed His spirit into them, making them living souls. This is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal world. Any attempt to find a different definition of "human" always fails.

[lavaroise]

How about: when people became liberal and less than animals.

[RightWhale]

"The earliest Homo sapiens probably had the cognitive capability to invent Sputnik,"

They were just like us. But were they organized enough to do more than try to keep body and spirit together?

[PatrickHenry]

Ping.

[PatrickHenry]

Ping.

[balrog666]

Push it back to 70,000 years and we have the Tuva eruption and a possible explanation for the evolution of real thinking as a tool for survival.

[Random Access]

They, too, moved out of Africa...

I be African-American. Give me something, NOW.

[ThinkPlease]

interesting post placemarker.

[cracker]

I will be a little surprised if Europe turns out to the home of this cultural revolution. For starters, Europe is better researched only because it has been explored for so much longer. It is only comparatively recently that we have been able to explore Africa, and Africa is a far larger continent with lots of remote and inaccessible (to us) regions that may harbor extensive evidence of human origins.

Don't forget to visit the Crevo List for all the latest!

[Petronski]

I guess when one is making up an origination, there are a lot of details that need to be made up on the way. This replacing-God-business is tough work...

[Logophile]

Most humans don't become human until their mid-twenties.

[Prodigal Son]

"The earliest Homo sapiens probably had the cognitive capability to invent Sputnik," said Dr. Sally McBrearty

Hmmm. I wonder what they called a preborn child?

I'm not going to stake out a personal position on creationism/evolution because I've seen how those threads deteriorate into hair splitting and logical gymnastics and I see nothing useful to be gained from it.

But I always find the irony in these articles striking. Here, we can get a majority of scientists and many, many lay people to agree that man evolved and their main question is how many millions of years ago we started being human- but we cannot even agree in this day and age that what's inside a woman's womb when she's pregnant is even human at all.

Those that consider a preborn baby "human" are publicly stigamtized by a significant portion of the population and the scientific community- while those "enlightened" humans that call it "parasite" only argue over when it becomes inappropriate to smash its head with rock. And the irony is magnified by the fact that it doesn't really make one whit of difference if it was 5 or 7 million years ago does it? That's all, quite literally, Ancient History. But if we think of a baby, preborn, as a parasite- an actual human dies.

[ColdSteelTalon]

Evolution cannot and in fact does not explain origin of new species. It can only (at best) explain change and adaptation to environment. Biologists today differ as to how exactly one life form makes the cross species jump. They only assume it occurs because they "believe" evolution is the process...

[F.J. Mitchell]

"When did they become fully human in behavior as well as body?"

That is truly a challenging question, but I feel we must assume that it happened sometime prior to "Roe vs Wade", as humanity has rapidly gone to the dogs since then. Judging from observation of the retreat of humanity from a fully evolved human, back to early beginnings, seems to be pointing more toward jackasses with opposing thumbs, than to ape like critters.

[PatrickHenry]

A little bit of the famous "list-o-links" (so the creationists don't get to start each new thread from ground zero).

01: Site that debunks virtually all of creationism's fallacies. Excellent resource.
02: Creation "Science" Debunked.
03: Creationi sm and Pseudo Science. Familiar cartoon then lots of links.
04: The SKEPTIC annotated bibliography. Amazingly great meta-site!
05: The Evidence for Human Evolution. For the "no evidence" crowd.
06: Massi ve mega-site with thousands of links on evolution, creationism, young earth, etc..
07: Another amazing site full of links debunking creationism.
08: Creationism and Pseudo Science. Great cartoon!
09: Glenn R. Morton's site about creationism's fallacies. Another jennyp contribution.
11: Is Evolution Science?. Successful PREDICTIONS of evolution (Moonman62).
12: Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution. On point and well-written.
13: Frequently Asked But Never Answered Questions. A creationist nightmare!
14: DARWIN, FULL TEXT OF HIS WRITINGS. The original ee-voe-lou-shunist.

The foregoing was just a tiny sample. So that everyone will have access to the accumulated "Creationism vs. Evolution" threads which have previously appeared on FreeRepublic, plus links to hundreds of sites with a vast amount of information on this topic, here's Junior's massive work, available for all to review: The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource [ver 15].

[<1/1,000,000th%]

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."

If I can translate this, "The guys who could talk, picked up all the chicks."

I can see that this would lead to an explosion of individuals with increasingly modern speech. (Ooo baby, your eyes look like twin pools of liquid silver in the moonlight...)

[Great Dane]

As humans, we still have a long way to go.

[medved]

I say again, the evolutionists are looking at the wrong end of the "lineup" or whatever you want to call it of hominid and human types. The problem is at the near end and not the far end.

Recent studies of neanderthal DNA turned up the result that neanderthal DNA is "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee", and that there is no way we could interbreed with them or be descended from them via any process resembling evolution. That says that anybody wishing to believe that modern man evolved has to come up with some closer hominid, i.e. a plausible ancestor for modern man, and that the closer hominid would stand closer to us in both time and morphology than the neanderthal, and that his works and remains should be very easy to find, since neanderthal remains and works are all over the map. Of course, no such closer hominid exists; all other hominids are much further from us than the neanderthal.

An evolutionist could try to claim that we and the neanderthal both are descended from some more remote ancestor 200,000 years ago, but that would be like claiming that dogs couldn't be descended from wolves, and must therefore be descended from fish, i.e. the claim would be idiotic.

That leaves three possibilities: modern man was created from scratch very recently, was genetically re-engineered from the neanderthal, or was imported from elsewhere in the cosmos.

There is no rational way to believe that modern man evolved here on Earth. Only a wilfully ignorant person could believe that.

[Scully]

Something I haven't seen referenced in this article or thread is the possibility that an increase in leisure time (as opposed to "Am I going to eat anything today" survival tactics) was responsible for observable changes in human social behavior.