>On the other hand, your scenario has positive evidence that negates it.
Your reckoning that one or more speciation events
>occurs in the procession of mankind between Noah and Abraham will always be
ridiculed. And rightly so. Noah curses
>Canaan, the Canaanites built Ebla, and Ebla began about 3000 BC. Abraham
leaves Mesopotamia and arrives in the land of
>Canaan. It all fits in a recent timeframe and makes no sense at all in a
protracted millions-of-years between patriarchs idea.
>Indeed the entirety of Genesis 2-11 makes no historical sense divorced from
its ANE roots.
Sigh, I post things over and over, but no one remembers a thing. The data
below been posted now at least 3 times.
No, actually I don't believe that labels for bones makes a speciation event.
The reality is that there is so little difference between most hominid
'species' that some anthropologists believe that there is simply one
evolving species.
Ernts Mayr the great taxonomist said that there should be only one
genus--Homo for the entire past 5 million years. He said this in 1951 at the
Cold Spring Harbor Symposium which gave rise to the modern taxonomy. He
said that with any other lineage that is how it would be--Homo
transvaalensis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens.
"The biggest bombshell dropped on the Old Guard, however, came
from Ernst Mayr, a German-trained ornithologist and specialist in
the naming (taxonomy) of species in nature. Using the new
yardstick of variability within populations, he stated that
'after due consideration of the many differences between Modern
man, Java man, and the South African ape-man, I did not find any
morphological characters that would necessitate separating them
into several genera.' He suggested that all the fossil human-
like specimens that anthropologists had discovered after so much
laborious effort over the preceding century be simply ascribed to
one genus, our own--Homo. In other words, the entire 'Age of
Description,' from before Darwin to Cold Spring Harbor, was a
waste of time. His opinion was that the differences were not as
great as between genera of other animals. This assertion meant
that the wonderfully diverse lexicon of human paleontology, a
virtual liguistic playground for the classically educated, with
melliferous names such as Plesianthropus transvaalensis,
Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, Africanthropus njarensis,
Sinanthropus pekinensis, Pithecanthropus erectus, and so on, were
to be replaced. Everything was now to be simply Homo, with three
species: Homo transvaalensis, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens."
"Mayr's proposal went so far that even Washburn argued that at
least the South African Australopithecus be retained (instead of
Homo transvaalensis) because it showed such significantly more
primitive anatomy than members of the genus Homo. Mayr simply
countered that the population is what the species designates.
How one determines a genus is arbitrary. The definition is
gauged by the relative amount of difference that one sees
between the genera of other animals and, in Mayr's opinion,
hominid fossils don't show very much difference. To
anthropologists, this statement was a bit like telling a new
mother that her baby looks like every other baby. It did not go
over well." ~ Noel Boaz, Quarry, (New York: The Free Press,
1993), p. 10
"Summary
1.There is no conclusive evidence that more than one species
of hominids has ever existed at a given time.
2. It is proposed to classify fossil and recent hominids
tentatively into a single genus (Homo) with three species
(transvaalensis, erectus, sapiens).
3. The recognition of subspecies groups within the species
facilitates classification.
4.The ecological versatility of man and his slowness in
acquiring reproductive isolating mechanisms have prevented
the breaking up of Homo into several species." Ernst Mayr,
"Taxonomic Categories in Fossil Hominids," Cold Spring
Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 15(1951)pp109-117,
reprinted in William White Howells, Ideas on Human
Evolution, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp
241-256, p. 256
The anthorpologists rejected this. In part, everyone wants to name a new
genus, even if such a find would be more than a subspecies if it were a
bird.
Some biologists want us and chimpanzees put into the same genus!
"Traditionally, humans have been in splendid classificatory
isolation, the sole member of the genus Homo and the sole member
of the family Hominidae. Although many anthropologists are willing
to consider putting humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas in the same
family, to the exclusion of orangutans, in recognition of the
known genetic relationships, that is not far enough for Goodman.
Given our extreme genetic intimacy, says Goodman, humans and
chimpanzees should be not only in the same family but also in the
same genus, namely Homo." Carl C. Swisher III, Garniss H. Curtis and Roger
Lewin, Java Man, (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 139
If we are the same genus as chimps, it is much less likely that there are
multiple species of hominids.
The reality is that only a small difference exists from the neck down
"From the neck down, Homo erectus seems to have been much like
ourselves but the skull was low browed, keel domed and thick
walled, with a cranial capacity ranging between 780 and 1,300
cubic centimeters. Homo erectus had heavy brow ridges and
lacked a chin. Behind the brow ridges there was a post orbital
constriction. The proportion of arms to legs was greater than
for present-day humans." ~ Victor Barnouw, An Introduction to
Anthropology: Physical Anthropology and Archaeology, 1,
(Homewood, Ill: The Dorsey Press, 1982), p. 137
This neck down thing is true even for older 'genera' of hominids (anamensis
and afarensis are 'species' of Asutralopithecus):
"But however you slice it, the fossils from Kanapoi and Allia Bay
do not provide us with a simple picture of early hominid
evolution. Rather, if everything allocated to the species
anamensis goes together, then we have a hominid that
chronologically preceded afarensis, but was afarensis-like from
the neck up and Homo-like from the neck down. "Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey
Schwartz, Extinct Humans,
(New York: Westview Press, 2000), p. 93
And then there is this:
"
"From the neck down Homo erectus was, to all intents and purposes,
a fully modern human." John Haywood, The Illustrated History of
Early Man, (London: PRC Publishing Ltd., 2000), p. 30
One doesn't have to believe in speciation with this kind of data. Most of
our evolution has been in the skull--the big head, the thing which causes
pain in childbirth, hairlessness, the need for clothing and sweating like a
human.
But, among many anthropologists, they view the lineage as one species simply
changing morphology gradually over time.
"His use of 'Sinanthropus pekinensis' was a convenience
'...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, cited by Milford Wolpoff and Rachael Caspari, Race
and Human Evolution, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p.
186
"'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, cited by
Milford Wolpoff and Rachael Caspari, Race and Human Evolution,
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 253
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
Of course, this will all be forgotten again so that we can post this a
fourth time.
glenn
They're Here: The Pathway Papers
Foundation, Fall, and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/dmd.htm
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Oct 30 21:52:18 2006
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Oct 30 2006 - 21:52:19 EST