You wrote of brain size and human functions.
>>My original point was that size was a weak argument. Thank you for
confirming this point.<<
Well if size of the brain does not define humanity then I am sure that you
would agree that Homo erectus, with his smaller brain, might be as human as
you and I?
You wrote:
>>I believe that there are brain areas associated with language, but where
they are varies from person to person according to Terence Deacon. To be
able to discuss this topic more thoroughly, I would have to do a great deal
of research and I simply don't have the time. Contact Deacon and if he
agrees that these endocasts are conclusive evidence of syntax and grammar
among homo habilis, I will yield the point.<<
Do you have his E-mail address? Does anyone?
On a separate topic. A few weeks (95-12-20 18:12:49 EST) ago you stated:
>>A while back, Glenn claimed that the age of Mitochondrial Eve (approx
300,000 years) contradicted Hugh Ross's creation time frame. I have
researched this claim and fount it to be based on circular reasoning.
<pre>
As a further check on the data, Ruvolo calculated the diversity
between humans and chimps, and she came up with a figure 27
times
the diversity within humans. She then used estimates of the time
when the two species diverged (6 million to 10 million years ago)
and derived a coalescence time for the human population of between
222,000 and 370,000 years. (Ann Gibbons, Science, vol 259, 26
February 1993, p. 1249)
</pre>
So Eve's age was calculated based on the assumption that chimps and humans
had a common female ancestor 6-10 million years ago. <<<
I would like to point out that subsequent work using the New Guinea
population, (which does not involve any evolutionary assumptions) confirms
the order of magnitude of Eve's age. Shreeve writes:
"In his talk, Stoneking took the offensive and unveiled a shocking new age
for Eve. For several years, he had been examining mitochondrial evolution
within the populations of Papua New Guinea. According to the latest
thermoluminescence dates, New Guinea and Australia were first colonized
around 60,000 years ago, when they were still joined to the greater continent
of Sahul. Given the sheer physical difficulty of reaching New Guinea before
modern times, it is unlikely that there was much gene flow back and forth to
the mainland after the original colonization. Most native New Guineans can
therefore trace their common ancestry back to a single point in time.
Equally important, they are about as far off the human mainstream as people
can be. The rugged, jungled mountans isolate different tribes--almost a
thousand separate languages, or one-fifth the total on earth, are spoken
there--and the sea isolates them from everyone else. This isolation,
combined with the likelihood of a single, known point of common origin, makes
New Guinea the best possible natural laboratory for studying the rate of
human molecular evolution.
"Stoneking explained how he and his colleagues had sampled the
mitochrondrial DNA of fifty Papuan New Guineans from various highland and
coastal tribes. He compared their mtDNA to that of individuals from
Indonesia, the nearest part of Asia and hence the likely jumping-off point
for the New Guinean gene pool. Assuming that all the genetic diversity they
witnessed among the samples had accumulated in 60,000 years, and that New
Guinean mitochrondria evolve at the same pace as other human populations, he
figured that it woudl take roughly 133,000 years to account for the amount of
mtDNA diversity seen among humans from all over the world. Thus the
mitochondrial mother of all humans, whether she is African or not, lived
around 133,000 years ago. 'These results provide the strongest evidence yet
for a relatively recent origin of the human mtDNA ancestor,' Stoneking
concluded.
"The new date nudged Eve astonishingly close to the present. But the
number gathered even more intriguing overtones as the meeting continued.
French paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin presented new information on
the Jebel Irhoud skull from Morocco, including a new date for the fossil.
Once thought to be only 40,000 years old, it is now pegged closer to 125,000
by new ESR studies of the site. Henry Schwarcz mentioned in his talk that
uranium-series dating tentatively puts the nearly modern Omo skull from
Ethiopia around 130,000. Using the same method, the Ngaloba skull (Laetoli
18) from Tanzania appears to be about the same age. So do some quasi[modern
teeth from a nearby rock shelter called Mumba Cave. The Florisbad fossil in
South Africa, another nearly modern human skull, could date from the same
period as well.
"In short, the age of the alleged common mitochrondrial mother and the
age of the transitional African fossils--the ones no longer totally archaic,
but not yet fully modern--seem to coincide. Eve could thus have been a
member of the first anatomically modern population, an original modern
woman."~James R. Shreeve, The Neandertal Enigma, (New York: William Morrow
and Co., 1995), p. 255-256
So using data which does not make ANY evolutionary assumptions, the answer
comes up very close to the same. And the issue is NOT circular reasoning.
glenn