RE: Human speech 350,000 years ago?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu
> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Dick Fischer
> Sent: Saturday, July 03, 2004 1:24 PM
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: Human speech 350,000 years ago?

> > Where exactly did I speak in my post of Japan and China?
>
> Why would you bring up anything that invalidates your own theory?

Why? Because I am more interested in truth than propaganda. I would be
delighted to bring up things that contradict my viewpoint. I try to
behave a bit better than most apologists.

>
> > And the Sandawe and Hazda are not based on fossils and are
> based upon
> > genetics and linguistics. No one said that every single
> language must
> > show the very same connections or must be click languages.
>
> I don't think Africa and Tanzania helps your case. Tribes in
> Africa separated by only a few hundred miles speak unrelated
> languages which comes closer to confirming my view that
> language suitable for writing flood narratives, or tales of
> Gilgamesh was a more recent innovation (< 15,000 years ago)
> rather than an archaic invention.

Have you ever heard of migration? I can point you to places in the UK
separated by 5 miles which speak separate languages. Ever hear of Doric
or Orcadian? How about Gaelic, Welsh and English? Multpile migrations
into the island caused this set of circumstances. Your objection is moot
because you think that everyone who lives next to each other must have
the same language or even be related.

> > Bull roar. There is no reason to have all the facilities of
> language
> > 350, 000 years ago but no one knew what to do with those facilities.
>
> I'm sure vocalization was helpful in shouting a warning when
> an enemy tribe approached, and so on. But, "Pardon me Fred,
> could you please pass the reindeer meat?" I don't think so.
>

Do you believe in pre-evolution of features? The evolution of all the
hardware for language, but it remains unused until Dick Fischer thinks
it should be used? What about villages and probable religious sites
made 400 kyr ago? You believe that mere animals who couldn't communicate
made them?

See http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=15840
for a picture of the village and realize

    "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

That looks like a religious site, of course for you to be right, this
must be a religious site for kitty cats.

> > You know, your view on this is biased because it violates
> your ideas
> > about Adam.
>
> Actually, my ideas about Adam are confirmed by a wealth of
> historical data and evidence. My comments here were simply
> to point out that the Japanese and Chinese have been isolated
> less than 15,000 years ago, and the languages they developed
> bear no similarity. That would infer that the advent of
> language sufficient for pre-flood Genesis conversations, at
> least in this one example, occurred less than 15,000 years
> ago, not 350,000.

Boy is your history highly flawed. The Japanese didn't come from the
Chinese.

"In the 1980s, new research on DNA taken from burial remains revealed
even more startling results: The islands' first inhabitants had little
in common with most modern Japanese - but were almost identical to the
Ainu, a tiny indigenous group found on the northernmost island of
Hokkaido.

The same analysis also showed modern Japanese are close genetic kin to
Koreans and Chinese.
"http://www2.nando.net/noframes/story/0,2107,87161-137711-915236-0,00.ht
ml accessed 8-30-99

The Japanese language is in the Altaic family, Mandarin is in the
Sino-Tibetan language family. Altaic languges are spoken from Japan, to
Mongolia, to Hungary as Magyar is related to Japanese, but Mandarin is
much more distantly related.

The Japanese didn't come from the Chinese, they came from the
Koreans--something the Japanese don't like to admit. This is from a web
site which was the easiest thing for me to find about where the Japanese
came from.

"
   The Jomon culture, in essence a Mesolithic culture (although they
display Neolithic traits, such as pottery-making), thrived in Japan from
the eleventh century to the third century B.C., when it was displaced by
a wave of immigrants from the mainland. These were the Yayoi, and their
origins lay in the north of China. Northern China was originally a
temperate and lush place full of forests, streams, and rainfall. It
began to dry out, however, a few thousand years before the common era.
This dessication, which eventually produced one of the largest deserts
in the world, the Gobi, drove the original inhabitants south and east.
These peoples pushed into Korea and displaced indigenous populations.
Eventually, these new settlers were displaced by a new wave of
immigrations from northern China and a large number of them crossed over
into the Japanese islands. For this reason, the languages of the area
north of China, the language of Korea, and Japanese are all in the same
family of languages according to most linguists. Because Mongolian
(spoken in the area north of China) is also part of this language family
and because the Mongolians conquered the world far to the west, this
means that the language family to which Japanese belongs is spoken
across a geographical region from Japan to Europe. The westernmost
language in this family is Magyar, spoken in Hungary, and the
easternmost language in this family is Japanese.
"http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/ANCJAPAN/YAYOI.HTM

Language studies do link the Japanese and Koreans:

"K'OLO meaning 'hole' has been traced in the Khoisan language
group (Kxolo, 'nostrils' i.e. nose hole), Nilo-Saharan (as
in the Saharan language Kanuri kuli, 'anus', East Sudanic
language Nandi kulkul, 'armpit'), Uralic-Yukaghir (Finnish
kolo, 'hole, 'crack', Hungarian halok, 'incision', Zyrian
knoas, 'crack'), Altaic (Korean kul, 'cave', Japanese kur,
'hollow', coope out'), Dravidian (Tamil akkul, 'armpit'),
Sino-Tibetan (West Tibetan kor, 'hollow in the ground,
pit'), Austric Tagalog kilikili, 'armpit') and Indo-European
(English hole). " Richard
Rudgley, The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, (New York:
The Free Press, 1999), p. 44

So Dick, I don't see why you think the separation of Mandarin/Japanese
and Chinese/Japanese hurts my case. It seems that if you get your facts
right, your argument will fail.
Received on Sat Jul 3 15:44:48 2004