"One of the great moments in mankind's history, extolled in book after book,
is the first appearance of modern man in Europe 40,000 years ago. This
extraordinary physcial and cultural phenomenon was the cave-painting
Cro-Magnon man, anatomically indistinguishable from ourselves; his sudden
appearance in Europe has long been considered to be the world debut of fully
modern Homo sapiens sapiens on a worldwide basis.
"To represent fully modern man, Cro-Magnon or otherwise, as the final step in
the Darwinian gradualistic evolutionary scheme, the devotees of gradualism
have to overlook his sudden appearance and remarkable incongruity with his
predecessors. While modern man's skull on the average is not particularly
larger than Neanderthal man's, it has undergone great reorganization. Its new
and distinctive high-foreheaded shape packages an even more radical
evolutionary departure: the expanded frontal section of the brain, which
controls nearly every distinctively human activity. With modern man's
internally reorganized brain and high forehead to house it came thin skull
wals, weak if any brow ridges, diminished teeth (particularly the molars) in a
much less ponderous jaw, smaller eye orbits, a streamlined pelvis, a
redesigned vocal tract, and the first chin in primate history....
"According to the traditional view, approximately 40,000 years ago, at the
start of the last 1 percent of hominid evolutionary time, a natural miracle
took place: Within a critical period of 5,000 years--just one-seventh of 1
percent of the time that has elapsed since the first-known australopithecine's
day--we get more significant evolutionary change than the other 99 6/7 percent
of that time; we get a veritable explosion of change. This disquieting fact is
cheerfully overlooked by the gradualists....
"Homo sapiens sapiens' increased mental and physical abilities brought on a
parallel explosion in technology and culture. Changes in the brain combined
with changes in the vocal tract made articulate language physically possible
at the same time as the complex processes of human thought became
intellectually possible. This conceptual ability is evident in Cro-Magnon
man's art, notations, and new tool types. Interestingly, the area of the brain
that governs the fine actions of the hands required for advanced toolmaking
and art lies very close to the area of the brain that controls the muscular
movements required for speech.
"Instead of the same old tool types made in the same limited number of ways,
the toolkit of Cro-Magnon man is an astounding advance over those of his
predecessors in utility, variety and complexity. There are many new stone tool
types such as strangled blades for hafting into knife handles, precise burins
for engraving, and leaf-shaped points for streamlined projectiles. Cro-Magnon
man developed more effective flaking techniques such as punch and pressure
flaking, and learned to make tools from small blades instead of flakes.
Blades, while much more difficult to produce, can be made into a much more
complex variety of tools than flakes...." [The Genesis Mystery, pp 184-87]
***
Because "explosion" and "sudden appearance" are so far out of Darwinian
predictablity, we have to account for it in some other way. Naturalists are
holding out for a naturalistic answer. But I think God did it, and relatively
recently, too.
Jim