Human Evolution Part III

vandewat@seas.ucla.edu
Wed, 29 Nov 1995 17:17:58 -0800 (PST)

Greetings and Salutations,

Jim Foley recently responded to my suggestion that hominid species might
be ecological placeholders:

>Nice idea, but it doesn't seem to fit the data. Australia and the
>Americas didn't have any such placeholders, and humans adapted just fine
>to those places. What ecological niche would the placeholders have
>filled? Agriculture? None of the other hominid species are thought to
>have practiced that. In what way would having Neandertals hunting
>before them have helped the later Cro-Magnon arrivals? The hunting
>would probably be better if there were no previous inhabitants.

Then again, I have no idea how the Hivites, the Canaanites and the Hittites
would prevent ecological catastrophe in the promised land over the course
of a few decades either. It is sheer arrogance to assume you know enough
about a system as complex as a biological ecosystem to predict what might
happen if different creatures were introduced. Take your Australia example
as a case in point. Human beings introduced rabbits to the Australian
ecosystem and this had devastating effects on the local ecology.

>BTW, Cro-Magnons are us: Homo sapiens sapiens. Maybe you know this; but
>it isn't obvious from your wording.

I was aware of a consensus among evolutionary biologists that Cro-Magnons are
Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but unlike other people on this reflector I do not
accept the consensus of the evolutionary community until I have done research
into the subject myself. As I have not done the research on this topic, I
tentatively accept that Cro-Magnon are Homo Sapiens Sapiens but I am not
entirely certain this "fact" would survive enlightened scrutiny.

In Christ,

robert van de water
Associate Researcher
UCLA