On my way back from the States this morning, I picked up the newest New
Scientist in London and read it on the flight to Aberdeen. It had an article
"Are Chimps Chumps? with a fascinating insert article in the middle of it.
It talks about why chimps don't seem to be good at understanding the
thoughts of fellow chimps. It says:
“Without language, chimps have little chance of developing an
understanding of how another individual thinks, suspects Celia Heyes, a
comparative psychologist at University College London. She suggests that we
learn our theory of mind—all those beliefs and desires we spend so much time
talking about—in the same way that we learn language.
“It could be rather like our theory of gravitation, she argues. Five
hundred years ago the theory didn’t exist—it is a recent product of our
culture. Perhaps the theory of mind itself was devised thousands of years
ago, as early humans tried out different ways of predicting what people will
do. ‘Perhaps, when trying to predict what people do, they hit on this idea:
maybe there are ghostly inner states and forces—thoughts, beliefs and
desires—that drive behaviour.”
“Evidence in support of Heyes’s delightfully contentious idea comes from
Australian research on deaf children born to hearing parents. Because the
parents themselves are not adept at sign language, they can’t use it to
communicate ideas about unobservables—everthing from heaven, ghosts and
fairies to mental states. The researchers found that deaf children brought
up in this situation were slower to develop a theory of mind.” Gail Vines,
“The Ghost in the Machine,” ,” New Scientist, Oct. 14, 2000, p. 41
The things that struck me here are many. First this appears to be evidence
that religion and belief in the spiritual realm has value that even an
materialist would find useful. Afterall, a healthy society requires that we
understand the feelings and intents of our fellow citizens. Apparently this
is slower to develop in the absence of knowledge about the spiritual side of
life. I am not a psychologist, but one type of disorder (I forget which)
entails the victim failing to impart humanity to other humans.
Secondly, it shows something that I have argued long an hard about on this
list. Language is very important to our ability to understand that there is
a God. Language is prerequisite for spiritual things. We must have it in
order to understand right from wrong (see Morton, G. R. (1999) Planning
Ahead: Requirement for Moral Accountability, Perspectives on Science and
Christian Faith, 51:3:176-179 ). Because of this, we can look for evidence
of religious relicts to know a minimum time for the appearance of language
and the appearance of the theory of mind mentioned in the above story. So,
when are the oldest religious artifacts found? Quite far back. At
Bruniquel France, more than 47,000 years ago, Neanderthals went deep into
the cave, built a square structure and burned a bear in the middle of the
structure. This smacks of an activity with a religious purpose.
Anthropologists believe it is also indicative of language:
Bruniquel
"Because they were found so deep in the cave, there is no question that the
burns on these bones are the result of human activity, says Helene Valladas
of the Center for Weak Radioactivity near Paris, who performed the
radiocarbon dating. As for the date, Valladas says that her estimate of
47,600 years represents only a lower limit. 'It could be much older,' she
told Science.
"Either way, it is far older than the cave paintings that up to now have
provided the earliest evidence of human activity deep inside caves, says
Rouzaud. The oldest known cave paintings, found in the Grotte Chauvet in
southern France, were recently dated at 31,000 years. The Bruniquel cave,
he says, 'shows that prehistoric men frequented the deep underground world,
in total darkness, long before they began to paint on cave walls."
"But they could not have done so without a sophisticated use of fire, says
Randall White, a paleolithic archaeologist at New York University. "It
would have been hard for them to find their way' in the total darkness, he
says. 'They would have needed to use fire, torches, lamps, some sort of
portable light'--techniques considerably more advanced than those usually
credited to Neandertals, who 'have usually been considered to have had an
extremely rudimentary mastery of fire,' White says. Coppens adds that the
discovery of such a complex artificial structure deep underground may also
bear on the question of Neandertals' language abilities. To coordinate
their work, he says, its builders would have needed to communicate." ~
Michael Balter, "Cave Structure Boosts Neandertal Image", Science,
271(January 1996), p. 449
Homo erectus built a structure that closely resembles some modern religious
altars.
"But Mania's most intriguing find lies under a protective shed. As he
opens the door sunlight illuminates a cluster of smooth stones and pieces of
bone that he believes were arranged by humans to pave a 27-foot-wide circle.
"'They intentionally paved this area for cultural activities,' says Mania.
'We found here a large anvil of quartzite set between the horns of a huge
bison, near it were fractured human skulls.'" ~ Rick Gore, "The First
Europeans," National Geographic, July, 1997, p. 110
This dates 400,000 years ago. But evidence for language among our genus
goes even further back. Homo erectus clearly built boats and crossed the
ocean. This required language in the opinion of Robert Bednarik. He
writes:
"One of the most significant finds in the history of
Pleistocene archaeology is the discovery that hominids
800,000 years ago managed to cross the sea to colonise a
number of Indonesian islands. The islands east of Bali
(Wallacea) have never been connected to either the Asian
orthe Australian plate, but they were found to have been
occupied by Homo erectus as well as by several endemic
species of Stegondontidae at the end of the Early
Pleistocene. The seafaring capability of this hominid,
first proposed in this journal, effectively refutes the
widely accepted hypothesis of a very recent origin of
language and 'modern human behavior'." Robert G. Bednarik,
"Maritime Navigation in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic,"
C.R. Academie des sciences, Paris, 328(1999):559-563, p. 559
He continues:
"There are no known depictions of water craft in
Pleistocene art, and no physical remains suggestive of
navigation older than 10 500 year have ever been found.
Nevertheless, indirect evidence of Pleistocene seafaring is
available from two regions, the Mediterranean and eastern
Asia. The occurrence of obsidian from the island Melos in
Frachthi Cave, on the Greek mainland, indicates wide-ranging
seafaring in the easter Mediterranean by about 11 000 BP.
Much earlier are the human remains from Crete, combining
Neanderthaloid and modern features, and apparently about 50
000 years old. Crete was not connected to the mainland
during the Pleistocene, nor was another Greek island,
Kefallinia, where Mousterian tools have been found. But the
earliest European evidence of island colonisation comes from
Sardinia, which was at times connected to Corsica, but not
to the mainland. At Sa Coa de sa Multa near Perfuga,
Clactonica-like stone tools have been excavated in Middle
Pleistocene sediment, suggesting that even Lower
Palaeolithic hominids managed to reach Mediterranean
islands.
"This raises the issue of having to account for the
similarities between Acheulian artefact traditions in
northwestern Africa and on the Iberian Peninsula, which
Freeman already attributes to an ability of Acheulian
hunters to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. Although 14 km
today, its width is thought to have been as little as 5-7 km
during times of lowest Pleistocene sea levels. The
proposition of a hominid crossing at Girbraltar may remain
tenuous, but the late arrival of handaxe traditions in
southeastern Europ is conspicuous. MOreover, the
evolutionary trajectories of the Maghreb and Iberian handaxe
industries seem identical. This issue needs to be re-
examined in the light of the evidence from Indonesia, where
maritime navigation capability evidently developed towards
the end of the Lower Pleistocene.
"There is evidence of Pleistocene seafaring elsewhere
in eastern Asia. For instance, Japan my have been settled
via a landbridge from Korea, but the presence of obsidian
from the Japanese island Kozushima on the main island of
Honshu some 20 000 to 30 000 years ago indicates
considerable navigational ability. The sea distance is about
87 km today. At that time, much greater distances had
already been traversed by colonising mariners further south.
Their cultural remains have been detected in Golo and Wetef
Caves on Gebe Island (between Sulawesi and New Guinea), up
to 33 000 years old, and from around the same time on some
Pacific islands: in the Bismarck Archipelago (Matenkupkum
and Buang Marabak on New Ireland) and Solomons (Kilu
Rockshelter, Buka Island). The distance from New Ireland to
Buka is close to 180 km. The Monte Bello Islands are 120
km from the northwestern coast of Australia, and were first
settled prior to 27 000 years ago. Between 20 000 and 15
000 years ago, obsidian from New Britain was transporte dto
New Ireland, and the cuscus, a Sahulian species, was
introduced in the Moluccas at that time. Importantly, all
Pleistocene seafarers in the general region of Australasia
possessed an essentially Middle rather than Upper
Palaeolithic technology." Robert G. Bednarik, "Maritime
Navigation in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic," C.R.
Academie des sciences, Paris, 328(1999):559-563, p. 560
**
"The latest and most important developments in this work are
discoveries made in late 1998 near Atambua, West Timor. At
the sites Motaoan and To'os, hominid occupation evidence was
recovered in the Weaiwe Formation, a fossiliferous
conglomerate stratum containing also remains of stegodon.
This includes a retouched stone tool found together with a
stegondon molar, and a burnt stegodon bone.
"The evidence so far assembled warrants a number of
important propositions. The presence of Homo erectus
populations at several Indonesian deep-water islands
indicates the navigational ability ofthat species, which
probably commenced about a million years ago in the region
of Java and Bali. It presents sound evidence of
'reflective' communication, most probably in the form of
speech. Replicative experimentation has shown unequivocally
that island colonisation by maritime navigation is
impossible without numerous interdependent technological
capabillities, long-term forward planning, the support of a
social system, and effective communication. Such replication
studies have resulted in the complete rejection of the
concept that the settlement of Wallacea could have occurred
unintentionally or accidentally. We can only know about sea
crossings that resulted in successful colonisations capable
of being visible on the very coarse and taphonomically
distorted 'archaeological record'. To achieve such
crossings, a sufficient number of males and females to found
a new population had to survive the journey, in each and
every case. This required adequate vessels to convey these
people, their supplies and equipment. To suggest that such
sea-going vessles were built without a deliberate plan, and
that an adequate number of people was in each case swept out
to sea on them against their will is not just illogical, it
is symptomatic of a discipline that perceives hominids as
culturally, technologically and cognitively inferior, much
in the same way Europeans once treated indigenous peoples in
other continents. These kinds of minimalist arguments,
which permeate many aspects of Pleistocene archaeology,
indicate a lack of knowledge about the practical aspects of
the human past. To appreciate the circumstances in which
the 'archaeological record' formed requires understanding
derived from practical experimentation with the materials in
question, under the conditions in question, and involves
appreciation of taphonomic processes and metamorphological
biases." Robert G. Bednarik, "Maritime Navigation in the
Lower and Middle Palaeolithic," C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris,
328(1999):559-563, p. 563
And even further back the first skull that contains the imprint of Broca's
area, a part of the language region of the brain, is KNM-ER 1470 which dates
to 2 myr ago. Falk writes:
"The oldest evidence for Broca's area to date is from KNM-ER 1470, a H.
habilis specimen from Kenya, dated at approximately two million years ago.
From that date forward, brain size 'took off,' i.e., increased
autocatalytically so that it nearly doubled in the genus Homo, reaching its
maximum in Neanderthals. If hominids weren't using and refining language I
would like to know what they were doing with their autocatalytically
increasing brains (getting ready to draw pictures somehow doesn't seem like
enough)." ~ Dean Falk, Comments, Current Anthropology, 30:2, April, 1989, p.
141-142.
The evidence for language goes way, way back. And if these early hominids
had language, they would be able to discuss the 'unobservables' like
spirits. They would be able to understand moral imperatives and plan ahead
not to sin. As I pointed out in the PSCF item referenced above, there is
physical evidence of hominids carrying objects more than 100 km, requiring
an ability to plan ahead as long as 3-4 days. Chimps can't do this (20-30
minutes seems to be their limit), but language capable men can.
And in spite of all this data, Christian apologists continue to try to avoid
the data and exclude the earlier fossil men from the human family,
presumably for theological reasons. THere is certainly no reason to do it
based upon the data.
glenn
see http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
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