Dick Fischer wrote:
Hi Glenn, you wrote:
GRM: Define human--someone that that looks like you and I? Someone with a
modern forehead? It is hard to know what you mean by the term, human, when
you won't define it.
Do I look like an anthropologist? Australopithicines have been defined as
apes by better qualified than you and me. Teeth has a lot to do with it.
Brain complexity, not mere size. Ability to vocalize. Apes don't make
stone tools or build houses out of mammoth bones and hide or track reindeer
herds or make bone flutes. All those things are hallmarks of man.
[Glenn Morton]
GRM: Dick, you didn't answer the question. I think I know why. I pointed
out that Ernst Mayr believed that even the piths should be in the genus Homo
and possibly even in H. sapiens. Now, you can say what you want but you
didn't define what a human is. Neanderthals made flutes, Erectines built
houses (see Bilzingsleben age 425,000 years ago). Even the Leakeys believe
they found the remains of a hut from 1.6 million years ago. The reality is
that evidence of humanity goes way back beyond your poor timeframe.
>>> Okay, in the year that the Mediterranean was filling up who would have
been stupid enough to drown? Just stroll north or south. What, me
prejudiced? Some of my best friends .<<<
GRM: Dick, you really shouldn't throw stones at my theory that equally apply
to yours. Who would be stupid enough to drown in the Mesopotamian flood?
Walk to the Zagros mountains. You have Noah poling a boat due north for a
year, when he could easily see the dry land of the mountains off to the
east. What a dummy Noah was, if your scenario is right. He stayed pushing
his boat north when he could have escaped the waters in a few hours by
pushing east.
[Glenn Morton] >>> GRM:That is interesting that you should say that. I
think recognizing art is a human thing--seeing a face in a naturally carved
stone is a human thing--not an ape thing. Apes don't keep items like that,
yet an Australopithecus saw a rock which had a face on it and he carried it
several miles back to his rockshelter. When was this? More than 3 million
years ago. It is called the Makapansgat pebble.
Why should that be surprising? You surmise farming, raising livestock,
tents, musical instruments and metal working two and a half million years
before that! I'm sure any verification of that would make the front page of
Natur <<<
You don't find the fact that a pith had the intelligence to recognize art
surprising? Most anthropologists did.
>>> GRM:Now, clearly this is not evidence of sin, but it is evidence of
human-like behavior. And another human-like behavior--only mankind makes
stone tools and they were in existence as long ago as 2.6 million years.
Why do you call them apes? No animals chips stone except mankind. I think
my point is that you are a sapienist.
Add that to my list of faults. I don't know any undisputed stone tools
dating that far back. What's your source?<<<<
Maybe that is because you haven't studied anthropology. They are dated by a
volcanic ash just above the tool bearing layer.
Gona Ethiopia 2.5-2.6 million years ago sharpened stone flakes
"Ethiopian Finds and Feuds," Science News, April 15, 1995, P. 237
"In Hadar, Ethiopia, the earliest sites with lithic artifacts are
Kada Gona 2-3-4 (2.5-2.7 million years ago) and Kada Gona West
(2.4 million years ago)." ~ Vadim A. Ranov, Eudald Carbonell, and
Xose Pedro Rodriguez, "Kuldara: Earliest Human Occupation in
Central Asia in Its Afro-Asian Context," Current Anthropology,
36:2, April 1995, p. 337-346, p. 342
"At the dawn of stone-tool production around 2.6 million years
ago, our human ancestors already showed considerable insight into the
task at hand. They worked mainly with rocks that they had carefully
picked as suitable for being fashioned into sharp-edged implements,
says Dietrich Stout of Indiana University in Bloomington.
"Stout and his Indiana colleague Sileshi Semaw focused on 894
stone artifacts that have been found at six ancient sites in an
Ethiopian region called Gona. These are the oldest stone tools known,
dating to between 2.6 million and 2.5 million years ago.
"Most of the tools were made from trachyte, a rock with a much
smoother surface than that of other rock types available at Gona. On
close examination, Gona finds exhibited a suite of characteristics
conducive to toolmaking, including smooth and often polished surfaces
and an internal composition that resisted cracking as one stone was
pounded into another to shape it.
"[Stone Age] toolmakers were highly selective in choosing their
raw materials, even at the earliest stages of tool use,' Stout says,"
Bruce Bower, "Rock-solid Choices of First toolmakers," Science News,
April 17, 2004, p. 254
>>> So the problem is missing human fossils? You're waiting to find a
hominid fossil dated earlier than 5 mya? So your whole thesis rests on
finding evidence of humans who had to have lived over 3 million years
earlier than can thus far be confirmed. Why wouldn't you simply accept the
judgment of paleontologists who make their living at it? <<<
Hey, Dick, Australopithecines are called HOMINIDS, so they have already
found them going back to 6 million years
GRM: You seem not to understand that most of this is a relatively smooth
transitional sequence.
>>> What causes you to think I don't understand that? Did I say anything
about a jerky sequence? <<<
Then in a small step smooth transition, why is one hominid called an ape and
his child a human?
>>> Or make vocal sounds. Chimps can make sounds and recognize speech.
<<<<
Dick, get real. All animals vocalize. The anthropologists who believe that
the Australopithecines could speak are not talking about vocalization. They
called it speech.
There is a really good case for speech in H. habilis:
They're hominids.
[Glenn Morton] So are Australopithecines
"Some physical anthropologists, among them anatomist Philip
Tobias of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa,
believe that Homo habilis was capable of articulate speech, on
the grounds that Broca's area is developed in early Homo's brain,
but not in that of Australopithecus." ~ Brian M.
Fagan, The Journey From Eden, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990),
p. 87
Course, you get to ignore this again just like the last time I talked about
this.
I read just fine. Hominids can talk, apes don't.
[Glenn Morton] Australopithecines ARE hominids. You tell me to pay
attention to the anthropologists, yet you don't. They all call the piths
hominids.
In part two you wrote:
GRM:As to you not knowing any digging, why not simply look at a geologic
map. Try the Geological Map of the Arab World, map 4 Ar Riyad, published by
the Arab Organisation for MIneral Resources Rabat Morocco, 1987. That has
the results (in map form) of all the 'digging' as you call it.
Even the archaeologist who excavated the central cities of Mesopotamia
didn't notice water-laid clay deposits until Wooley told them to go back and
look. Why would anyone make note of clay deposits when you're drilling for
oil?
[Glenn Morton] Those maps weren't made by people drilling for oil, they
were made by university types mapping the geology. You really don't know
much about the geosciences do you?
>>>Genesis says God created Adam. Then God fashioned Eve using one of
Adam's body parts. I don't know how He did either of those things. Do
you?<<<
[Glenn Morton] miraculously
>>Do I tell an oil man where to drill, or would I leave that to someone like
you? Yet, you presume to know more than paleo anthropologists do about what
constitutes humanity. I don't. <<<
[Glenn Morton]Well, Dick, given the amount of anthropology I have read,
starting in the anthro classes I took in College continuing up until today,
and knowing that I have corresponded with many of the bigger named
anthropologists, I don't think I am doing what you say. I think I am asking
you for a reasonable definition of what you mean by human so that one can
see if what you say is illogical poppycock or holds water. You are the one
who is insisting that the Australopithecines are not hominids, which means
that you don' t even know the definition of a hominid.
>>> GRM: Well, Dick, here is a quote from Niles Eldredge:
"Mankind was up and walking close to 4 million years ago, and quite possibly
a good bit earlier than that." ~ Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The
Myths of Human Evolution, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 7
He meant forerunners to mankind and you know it.<<<<<
[Glenn Morton] Give me a break Dick, you ask me if any anthropologists talk
about mankind earlier than 3 million years.I provide quotes and now you
change the goalpost and say that you know better what they meant than those
who wrote it. Doing this means that you have decided the answer a priori
and the facts don't matter to you.
>>>
"Though Mayr had not examined any of the fossils himself, he
ventured to suggest a sweeping revision: everything from the
earliest ape-man to the latest modern man ought to be included in
the genus Homo--possibly even within Homo sapiens. Pat
Shipman, The Evolution of Racism, (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1994), p. 185
I bolded part of that so your tired old eyes could see it.
Mayr retired in 1975. He was an eminent evolutionary biologist. However,
have we unearthed any additional fossils in the last thirty years? Do you
detect any push to adopt Mayr's idea? In fact, the number of species that
have been discovered between H. sapiens and the Australopithicines have
increased.<<<
[Glenn Morton] Well I will provide the evidence that there are some
anthropologists who would do this, but then you will merely decide what it
is that they REALLY believe and that will be whatever YOU believe, just like
you did above.
Homo erectus and Homo sapiens one species
Richard Leakey
"'I am increasingly of the view that all of the material
currently referred to as Homo erectus should in fact be placed
within the species sapiens [which would]project Homo sapiens as a
species that can be traced from the present, back to a little
over two million years.'
Emiliano Aguire, a prominent Spanish paleontologist, wrote much
the same.
"Jan Jelinek, a lifelong proponent of regional continuity,
focused on the lack of a clear boundary between Homo erectus and
Homo sapiens. He examined the transition in African, European,
north Asian, and Indonesian samples and concluded the changes
were not all that great. Moreover, he raised the issue of
establishing criteria for species definitions, questioning
whether global morphology, regional morphology, chronology, or
cultural traditions provide the more valid means of separating
the hominid species. Taking a global view of the problem, he
argued that the anatomical links between Middle and Late
Pleistocene populations in each of several regions make it
impossible to regard some, such as Ngandong, as Homo erectus
while other contemporaries are Homo sapiens. There was no
question of different times for crossing a Rubicon for Jelinek.
For him the differences were not great enough to warrant such
drama. jelinek had spent some time in Australia, living with
native peoples, and for him it was culture, and not any
particular anatomy, that made people human. He wrote:
'Have we any solid scientific grounds on which to consider Middle
Pleistocene European finds, with earlier morphological cranial
changes, as Homo sapiens and the extra-European finds evolving in
the same direction but in somewhat different degree and time
sequence of adaptation into different conditions as Homo erectus?
The whole mode and the process of the hominid evolutionary
process shows that there are not, and that in past [there] could
not have been differences at the species level, but only at the
subspecies level, whether the cerebralisation process--as only
one part of the mosaic of evolutionary changes--started earlier
or later. The logical consequences of such a situation is to lead
us to consider the different African, European, and Asian finds
of H. erectus type as Homo sapiens erectus.' "Richard Leakey
(above), "Recent Fossil Finds from East Africa,' in J. L. R.
Durant (ed.) Human Origins, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p.
57, and Jan Jelinek, "Homo erectus or Homo sapiens? Recent
Advances in Primatology, 3:419-429, p. 427-428 cited by ~
Milford Wolpoff and Rachael Caspari, Race and Human Evolution,
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 252
**
"Since these features vary among the recent races no less
significantly than between different fossil groups, or between
fossil and recent populations, it is impossible to draw a line
anywhere for species delimitation unless one intends also to
split up recent man into several species. Therefore it seems
necessary to include all of these fossil and recent groups in the
single species H. sapiens."~Helmut Hemmer, "A New View of the
Evolution of Man," Current Anthropology, 10(2-3):179-180, p. 179
Franz Weidenreich, one of the discoverers of Peking Man also thought that
Homo erectus was merely a subspecies of us.
'...without any 'generic' or 'specific' meaning or, in other
words, as a 'latininzation' of Peking Man....it would not be
correct to call our fossil 'Homo pekinensis' or 'Homo erectus
pekinensis'; it would be best to call it 'Homo sapiens erectus
pekinensis.' Otherwise it would appear as a proper 'species,'
different from 'Homo sapiens,' which remains doubtful, to say
the least.'"~Franz Weidenreich, "The Skull of Sinanthropus
pekinensis: A comparative study of a primitive hominid skull,"
Palaeontologia Sinica, new Series D, Number 10 (wole series No.
127), p. 246
"'If the differential diagnosis between Homo erectus and Homo
sapiens cannot be other than by convention, and...this convention
must be different for different geographical regions, then the
value of such a difference should be critically considered...It
is time to replace the paleontological species with a biological
one...Paleontological taxonomy cannot be in contradiction iwth
...biological facts.'
"Milford addressed the Homo erectus issue as well. Working
with Alan Thorne, as well as friends and colleagues including Jan
Jelinek and Zhang Yinyun, he proposed that Homo erectus should be
'sunk,' submerged within Homo sapiens." ~ Jan Jelinek, "Was Homo
erectus already Homo sapiens? Les Processus de l'Hominisation,
(CNRS International Colloquium, No. 599:85-89, p. 88
"We propose here to merge Homo erectus within the
evolutionary species Homo sapiens. The origin of Homo erectus
lies in a cladogenic event at least 2.0 myr ago. We view the
subsequent lineage as culturally and physically adapted to an
increasingly broad range of ecologies, ultimately leading to its
spread across the old world prior to the beginning of the Middle
Pleistocene. Homo erectus differs from Homo habilis in a number
of ways. The vast majority of htese distinctions also
characterize Homo sapiens. The few distinctions of Homo sapiens
that are not shared with Homo erectus appear to be responses to,
or reflections of, continuing evolutionary trends of increasing
cultural complexity, increasing brain size, and the progressive
substitution of technology for biology.
"Homo erectus is a polytypic species, divided into several
distinct geographic variants which each show at least some
genetic continuity with the geographic variants of the polytypic
species Homo sapiens that is reflected in shared unique
combinations of morphological features. There is no distinct
boundary between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens in time or space,
and cladogenesis does not seem to mark the origin of Homo
sapiens. Instead, the characteristics of Homo erectus and Homo
sapiens are found to be mixed in seemingly transitional samples
from the later Middle Pleistocene of every region where there are
human remains. The regional ancestry of Homo sapiens popultions
makes monophyly impossible for the species if the earlier
populations are in a different species. We interpret this to
mean that there is no speciation involved in the embergence of
Homo sapiens from Homo erectus. These reasons combine to require
that the lineage be regarded as a single evolutionary species."
Milford H. Wolpoff, Alan G. Thorne, Jan Jelinek, Zhang Yinyun,
"The Case for Sinking Homo erectus. 100 Years of Pithecanthropus
is Enough!" Courier Forshungs-Institute Senckenberg 171:341-361,
Frankfurt am Main 1.05.1994, p. 341
See also J. Jelinek, 1981, Was Homo erectus already Homo sapiens? Les
Processus de
l'Hominisation. CNRS International Coloquium, No. 599:85-89
M.H. Wolpoff, A. G. Thorne, J. Jelinek, and Zhang Yinyun 1993, The case for
sinking Homo erectus: 100 years of Pithecanthropus is enough! in J. L.
Franzen ed 100 years of Pithecanthropus, The Homo erectus Problem. Courier
Forschungsinstitut Senckberg 171:772-773.
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