Re: Human speech 350,000 years ago?

I wrote:

> > Why would you bring up anything that invalidates your own theory?

Glenn wrote:

> 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.

I see. Is this what you would call an ad hominem defense?

> > 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?

Mercy no! What is that?

>I can point you to places in the UK
> separated by 5 miles which speak separate languages.

I lived in the UK for five years actually. There was no place that I
traveled, Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man, that my coarse American accent
wasn't understood. But you are missing (or avoiding) the point. The
example of Chinese versus Japanese is valid. We have two populations
derived from common stock biologically separated geographically for a mere
15,000 years tops. Had any kind of language developed even as late as Hugh
Ross suggests at 60,000 years ago, then 45,000 years of language development
should have produced something that would have survived the separation. Yet
there are no commonalities whatever.

What you came back with is simply obscuration like this:

>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.

Are there no commonalties in the languages you enumerated?

> Do you believe in pre-evolution of features?

"Pre-evolution" escapes me. What is that?

>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. I give you a specific example and you counter with speculation.
Calling mounds of dirt and piles of rocks "religious" is a stretch you have
to admit. Are sand castles made by three year-olds religious? And how much
verbal communication is required to build them?

> > 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.

Okay, put together four groups of people with ten individuals in each group,
one group of Chinese, one Japanese, one Irish, and one Nigerian, and you
tell me if you can figure out which are more closely related. Japan was
connected to the mainland prior to 15,000 years ago, and morphologically
Japanese and Chinese people are nearly indistinguishible.

> Language studies do link the Japanese and Koreans:

Yes, just as Spanish is related to Italian.

> "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.

Glenn, the Korean language IS related to Japanese! Irrelevant facts simply
muddy the water. Did you ever read Lubenow's book "Bones of Contention," a
title he purloined from a legitimate book on paleoanthropology? With pure
drivel, Lubenow tries to convince his innocent audience that all the
hominids in the fossil record somehow lived contemporaneously. Extraneous
material, no matter how elegant, is still extraneous.

But even if you were correct, the insertion of Adam in the flow of human
history, long after language developed is my point. Whether rudimentary
language developed 15,000 years ago or 60 kya, or 350 kya makes no
difference. But there is no trace of human civilization in the
Tigris-Euphrates region prior to 4800 BC, and that is the starting point for
the adamic race. Why? They needed irrigation techniques to obtain fresh
water in what is otherwise a desert. No fresh water, no civilization.

If you wish to agrue that the entirety of Genesis history prior to the flood
happenened over 350,000 years ago you would need more than the mere
possibility ot spoken language. You would need evidence of farming and
raising livestock, relics of stringed musical instruments, and tools made
from bronze and iron. Got any?

Dick Fischer - Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
www.genesisproclaimed.org
Received on Sun Jul 4 15:05:23 2004