I wrote:
>> After all, concluding that homo habilis had essentially modern
>> language capabilities on the basis of these cranial endocasts is
>> stretching it just a little, don't you think?
and Jim Foley responded:
>And who has ever said that?
Glenn has been arguing precisely that.<<
What I have been trying to get across is that if habilis had any language,
this qualified him as human. Now we will never know how complex his language
was. The man without a brain shows that even with small brains, a person can
have quite a lot of intelligence. Thus the fact that habilis may have had a
brain smaller than ours does not rule out the possibility that his language
was complex. Regardless of how complex the language was, do you deny
humanity to people today whose language is less complex? say like a down's
syndrome victim? If you don't deny their humanity how can you automatically
deny the humanity of another being with the only known fossil indicator of
speech?
Yes, it is a given that my viewpoint of how to fit geology into the scripture
requires mankind to have been around for quite a long time and thus I would
certainly use evidence like habilis' broca's area (since no animal has that
structure) as evidence of mankind's antiquity.
You wrote:
>>Now they could have used Broca's Area for something besides syntax and
grammar, but if they didn't use it for the same thing as we do, extrapolating
language from Broca's Area is inappropriate in the first place.<<
The only Broca's areas we can examine (ours) are used for motor control of
the larynx. Wernicke's area has more to do with understanding speech. Both
these areas are found in habilis and thus the only logical inference is that
they used these regions for the same thing we do. If dogs had them, and
didn't speak then you would have a point that there might be a different use
for the region.
glenn