Many people consider the hominids who made stone tools to have been dumb,
brutish creatures with poor thought processes. Sometimes I think this is
because of a 21st century arrogance which believes that if stone-age man was
so smart, he would have invented the TV. Nothing could be farther from the
truth. They did different things with their intelligence. I just ran across
the report of an old work on stone tools from Boxgrove, England which
illustrates the depth of intellectual abilities of mankind 500,000 years
ago. Everybody seems to think that the manufacture of stone tools can be
done by apes--it can't. Experiments trying to teach apes to manufacture
tools have been miserable failures. One of the reasons for this is that
stone tool manufacture(especially the manufacture of symmetrical Acheulean
handaxes) requires exquisite preplanning. This preplanning extends not only
to the decision of where to strike the stone next, but also to the decision
as to what hammer to hit the stone with. Striking two stones together,
using one as a hammer (called hard-hammer) produces flakes with a
characteristic shape. Striking a stone with a soft hammer, like bone or
antler, produces a different shaped flake. One can do a multivariate
statistical analysis on the flakes to see what type of hammer was used to
create the tool. In this type of analysis one can distinguish between
hammers made of stone, bone and antler. Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts
write:
"This was no surprise, as knappers had been saying this was the case for
many years--although it was perhaps the clearest demonstration of the fact
yet presented. The most significant features were the presence or absence of
a point of percussion (common on hard hammer flakes, rare on soft) and the
surface area relative to flake thickness (soft flakes were wide and
thin)--see fig 42. But what was especially interesting was tht the flakes
from andaxes findished with bone or antler were also distinguishable from
each other. And furthermore, theflakes from the First Handaxe Trench, which
were clearly struck with a soft hammer, looked as ifthey might have been
made with bone.
"This was the first substantial demonstration that soft hammers had been
regularly used as much as half a million years ago. And as Francis wrote
inthe publoication of the project that eventually appeared in 1989, there
might be implications for the intellectual processes of early hominids. It
could not be assumed that suitable bone or antler for making hammers would
be just lying about at the very moment they were needed tomake a handaxe,
implying that a little future planning was necessary: a soft hammer would
likely have been made at some time before it was needed, and then kept.
'Once this level of planning is reached in any one activity', wrote Francis,
'it is reasonable to expect planning and organisation to be occurring in all
aspects of the life-style.'"
"And then, right at the end of NOvember 1994, seven years after two of
his former excavation supervisors sat down and made handaxes to prove that a
Boxgrove creature had once used a hammer of bone or antler, Mark, with a
beaming face and booming voice, held out some scraps of bone to attentive
audiences in London. They were, he said, by around 400,000 years the world's
oldest bone hammers. They had been used to make handaxes and this implied
something about the way the hominids thought." Michale Pitts and Mark
Roberts, Fairweather Eden, (New York: Fromm International, 1997), p. 220-221
Prior to this discovery the earliest soft hammers had been no more than
100,000 years old and it had been believed that only modern humans had used
soft hammer percussion techniques for the creation of stone tools. These
500,000 year old soft hammers showed that H. erectus (the type of hominid
alive 500,000 years ago) had the cognitive skill to manage several tool
types in a highly planned activity in the creation of hand axes.
On another issue, the reports of the Dmanisi, Georgia hominid finds came out
in Science a couple of weeks ago. I reported on this find a few weeks ago.
The find shows that the African variant of Homo erectus (with a brain size
of 650-777 cm^3 compared with ours at around 1300 cm^3) had left Africa,
traveled to Dmanisi, Georgia using only the most primitive of stone tool
types--the Oldowan (Mode 1). Oldowan tools were the tools used prior to the
invention of the type of hand axe discussed above. The hominids are found in
strata dating at least to 1.7 myr. This site adds to the list of ancient
sites which have been claimed hold mankind.
Early human sites
Longupo Cave, China 1.9 myr
Java 1.8 myr
Turkana Kenya 1.6-1.9 myr
Dmanisi Georgia 1.7 myr
Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania 1.2-1.8 myr
Ubeidiya, Israel 1.5 myr
Gongwanling, China 1.1 myr
Ceprano Italy 800-900 kyr
Atapuerca Spain 780 kyr
Tautavel France 450 kyr
Michael Balter and Ann Gibbons, "A Glimpse of Humans' First Journey Out of
Africa," Science 288(2000):948-950, p. 949
What is very interesting, in light of a criticism aimed at my views is the
temporal gap between the first and second documented human habitation in
Europe. Balter and Gibbons write:
"When it comes to Europe, the evidence is even more puzzling, for there is
an almost 1-million-year gap between Dmanisi and any European site." Michael
Balter and Ann Gibbons, "A Glimpse of Humans' First Journey Out of Africa,"
Science 288(2000):948-950, p. 950
The reason this is interesting is that I have been criticised for having a
gap between when the supposed flood occurred and the earliest example of our
genus, Homo. The earliest fossil record of our genus is 2.5 million years
ago and I have advocated that the Flood was 5.5 myr ago. Gaps like this are
quite common in archaeology and paleontology. Even in China there is a
800,000 year gap between the first claim and the second. Were there no
people in China during that time? Probably they were there--we just haven't
found them.
Dmanisi also sheds light on the intellectual capacities of these people.
Wolpoff stated,
"If the Dmanisi people managed to travel thousands ofmiles with these simple
tools, 'this means that the Oldowan adaptation was more complex than people
thought,' comments Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor." Michael Balter and Ann Gibbons, "A Glimpse of
Humans' First Journey Out of Africa," Science 288(2000):948-950, p. 950
The Dmanisi discovery has some implications for genetics and the sizes of
ancient populations (which I will show below). There has been a tendency on
the part of many geneticists to beleive that the human population in the
past was quite small. This is the bottleneck problem which comes from
calculating the net effective human population in the past. It has always
been used in association with mitochondrial Eve to argue for a recent human
origin. The problem with this is that most calculations of effective
population size are in the range of 5000 people or less! Here is the issue
laid out in several quotes from a recent article (S(k) is a statistical
measure used in genetics):
"The studies populations are classified as having high, intermediate, or low
values of S(k) and genetic variation, and we used these to interpret the
data in terms of possible population dynamics. Observed values of S(k) for
samples of di-, tri-, and tetranucleotide data are compatible with
population expansion earlier than 60,000 years ago in Africa, Asia, and
Europe if the initial population size before the expansion was on the order
of 500. Larger initial population sizes force the lower bound for the time
since expansion to be much earlier. This analysis presented here suggests
that modern human populations departed from Africa long before they began to
expand in size." Lev A. Zhivotosvsky et al, "Human Population Expansion and
Microsatellite Variation," Mol. Biol. Evol., 17(2000):5:757-767, p. 757
**
"The second test, an interlocus test, showed signs of expansion in the
African data of Bowcock et al (1994). This expansion is estimated to have
occurred between 49,000 and 640,000 years ago." Lev A. Zhivotosvsky et al,
"Human Population Expansion and Microsatellite Variation," Mol. Biol. Evol.,
17(2000):5:757-767, p. 758
Here is the table of data which shows how long ago the human expansion must
have occurred given the initial population and the observed value of S(k) in
human populations.
Table 5
Predicted Values of Expansion Time (in thousands of years ago) Based on S(k)
with Different Initial population Sizes N(o).
Initial size Value of S(k)
N(o) .05 .10 .15 .20 .25 .30 .35
500 10 16 22 32 46 77 171
2,000 17 29 43 62 90 141 272
5,000 30 54 84 125 186 292 545
Lev A. Zhivotosvsky et al, "Human Population Expansion and Microsatellite
Variation," Mol. Biol. Evol., 17(2000):5:757-767, p. 761
Now, note the values of S(k) measured in Human populations:
Table 4
S(k) for various groups
Central African .38 (.28-.47)
Zaire .27 (.09-.44)
European .39 (.27-.49)
East Asian .40 (.28-.50)
Sahulland .30 (.13-.45)
Melanesian .24 (-.01 0.44)
Amerind .16 (-.07-.33)
Lev A. Zhivotosvsky et al, "Human Population Expansion and Microsatellite
Variation," Mol. Biol. Evol., 17(2000):5:757-767, p. 761
The S(k) values in the above table clearly show that human populations began
to expand long prior to the advent of anatomically modern humans! This means
that H. erectus played a role in our genetic legacy, i.e., we have H.
erectus genes. This of course contradicts apologists like Hugh Ross who
say that mankind is no older than 60,000 years. Genetics is showing that we
are much older than that. Zhivotosvsky et al write:
"A third important conclusion from our findings is that early modern humans
may have had a low effective population size, on the order of a few hundred.
Indeed, since the point estimates of S(k) for the Central Africans,
Europeans, and East Asians are 0.38-0.40, with the lower 95% bound about
0.28 (table 4), it follows from table 5 that several hundred thousand years
would be required to achieve such values of S(k) if the effective population
size were 5,000. In the framework of the multiregional hypothesis, our
analysis suggests that initial effective population sizes prior to
expansion would be 5,000 or larger. However, from the viewpoint of an
African origin for modern humans who replaced earlier populations between
30,000 and 100,000 years ago, even Ne = 2,000 is still too large to be
consistent with the data (tables 4 and 5)" Only an effective size as small
as 500 is compatible with the high values of S(k) observed in the main
regions." Lev A. Zhivotosvsky et al, "Human Population Expansion and
Microsatellite Variation," Mol. Biol. Evol., 17(2000):5:757-767, p. 763
Where Dmanisi comes into this issue is that if all there were were 2000 or
less people on the surface of the earth, there would not be enough of them
to populate Africa, Asia and Europe, which as the list of early hominid
sites above shows, the earth was populated by around 2 million years ago.
Adam, therefore, is much older than that!!!
Two thousand people is not enough to populate the earth, pure and simple.
And in order to maintain the fiction of Mitochrondrial Eve being the Eve of
the Bible, one must postulate that 500 people can populate the earth.
Because of all this it is clear that Christian apologetics must deal more
substantively with the anthropological issues.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jun 04 2000 - 11:35:37 EDT