At 07:17 PM 2/27/00 -0500, Dick Fischer wrote:
> Glenn wrote:
>
>> Homo erectus did just that.
>
> Or maybe God told Adam to fill those post holes left carelessly by Homo
>erectus some 500,000 years earlier.
In my previous reply to this I had been looking for something I had read
about a few years ago. It wasn't in my database and I had to go on a
search. It says something important about who and what humanity is:
"What made us human and how did our humanity evolve? My aim in this book is
to examine not only the evidence for human origins and evolution but also
the framework for explaingin why change took place--when, where, and how.
To obtain the answers I believe we need to investigate the neglected
question of why we are the only animal with a near-global distribution.
This topic is the overlooked subject matter of human prehistory.
"Let me start a long story with an example of recent exploration. It is
Christmas 1776. Captain Cook whose discoveries unveiled the shape of the
world, is on his third and final voyage. He is anchored at Kerguelen Island
in the southern Indian Ocean. Although it is summer the place lives up to
its other name, The Desolate Isle. By sailing round it Cook has just
punctured the optimistic reports of Kerguelen who discovered the island
four years earlier and named it after himself. Back in Paris, Kerguelen has
magnified his glimpse of land into part of the sought-after southern
continent. He described it favorably and inaccurately as like 'Southern
France' to potential backers of a return voyage, but he never tried to go
ashore. This was one of the few places visited by Cook where neither
natives nor their fires greeted him as he sailed into the bay. REmoteness
and desolation provided a ready explanation. Even so, John Webber, the
ship's artist, painted emperor penguins as a welcoming party onthe shore.
"I began this book out of curiosity. Seeing Webber's picture in an
exhibition in the British Museum, it struck me forcefully that people were
expected everywhere. Like penguins, they were another bipedal part of the
fauna. Their presence proved so universal that when found int he normal
course of discovery they merited no comment in the ship's log. If natives
were absent, the nearest representative was painted in their place.
"But why did the early European explorers show so little surprise at their
discovery of the unrecorded colonization of the globe? Their journals never
raise the presence of these natives either as an issue for speculation or
later, during the scientific voyages of men like Cook and Banks (1768-71),
as a circumstance requiring systematic investigation. Nor did this fact
depend upon religious or scientific convictions. The journals from the
voyage of the Beagle (1831-6), which saw DArwin sharing a cabin with an
ardent fundamentalist, Captain Fitz-Roy, contain many comments about the
indigenous peoples they both saw but few about why or how they got there.
They could have been placed by God as part of the natural fauna and flora
of a region, or migrated there in some slow manner from a center of origin.
The nearly universal distribution of humanity, which so exceeded the
geographical range of any other mammal, never drew their attention. One of
the great Victorian naturalists, Alfred Wallace, who arrived at the
principle of natural selection independently of Darwin, expressed this
indifference perfectly. In the preface to Island Life in 1880, a work which
founded the study of biogeography, he commented that, while there was a
great deal to understand and describe about the geographical distribution
of all other species, with Homo all that could be said what 'the bare
statement--"universally distributed"... and this would inevitably have
provoked the criticism that it conveyed no information.' So he left us
out.'" Clive Gamble, _Timewalkers_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1994) p. 1,2
Homo erectus was the beginning of that ubiquitous dispersal of humanity!
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
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