Among the reasons given - no art-work, no farming, no written language, no
complex language, no animal husbandry, no belief in the one true God - to name aa few.
Let's consider the Bushmen of the Kalihari.
They don't farm; it is too dry for most if not all cultivatable crops - they
eat roots and tubers that grow wild.
No animal husbandry; I believe for the same reason, the animals must be permitted to range far and wide to find their own food and water. The Bushmen can move wwith them and hunt them or just eat roots when the animals move.
I don't believe they have a written language.
Complex language??? Suppose the Bushmen had died out 1000 years ago. With no
written language, how would we know whether or not it was complex?
No artwork?? So what!! How many of us produce art-work? If we don't does
that make us less human? If most of my time is spent digging for roots, and
hunting gazelles, I don't think I'm going to expend any energy on artwork.
No belief in the one true God? Bushmen have been known to have contact with
Christian missionaries, come to a saving knowledge of the one true God and
return back to their people and the typical nomadic Bushman lifestyle. If
this had happened 1000 years ago and the Bushmen had died out since then,
what evidence would we expect to find attesting to their belief in the one
true God? None that i can think of; we wouldnt expect a Bible or other writings
because they don't have a written language.
Now having said all that, are we prepared to conclude that the Bushmen are
less human than you and I?? To answer "yes" is at least consistent with the
the claim that glenn's fossil people were less than human. It is also the
same type of belief that allowed the Nazis to justify their genocidal behavior;
wiping out Jews, gypsies, Ukranians, and other "Untermenschen" because the
Nazis believed them to be less "human" than themselves. I have no reason to
accuse anyone on the reflector of being a Nazi, but these sort of beliefs
expressed as "science" and other polite terms helped to give them justification
for what they did.
I myself believe that the Bushmen are just as human as you and I, and this
is consistent with my belief that Glenn's fossil people were just as human
as you and I.
JOE REIMERS