Re: [asa] The Bible does not require a Neolithic Adam!

So you quote all the lumpers and none of the splitters. Both sides KNOW
they are right.
Dave

On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:10:08 -0600 "Glenn Morton"
<glennmorton@entouch.net> writes:
>
>
> >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
>
>
>
>
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Received on Tue Oct 31 19:11:34 2006