The San Jose Mercury News has an article on speech in the ancient hominids
and how speech was evolved. While I don't agree with much in the article, I
think that Christians need to pay attention to what is being said here. Even
if one accepts what the article is saying (which is a very conservative
view), it has tremendous theological implications for who and what H.
erectus and Neanderthal were. Basically, the article says that every hominid
from H. erectus on, had some form of speech. If so, the question becomes,
how much speech is required before they are human?
today we have people who have speech impediments, or who are mentally
retarded and can't speak very well, but we consider them to be human and
made in the image of God. But when it comes to the hominids, we seem to
chicken out and claim that unless the hominids were absolutely identical to
us (those of us who are no handicapped), they can't be spiritual beings.
The facts are as follows.
1. H. rudolfensis had the imprints of Broca's area on the inside of their
skulls. Broca's area is part of the speech circuitry of modern brains. Falk
writes:
"The oldest evidence for Broca's area to date is from KNM-ER 1470, a H.
habilis specimen from Kenya, dated at approximately two million years ago.
From that date forward, brain size 'took off,' i.e., increased
autocatalytically so that it nearly doubled in the genus Homo, reaching its
maximum in Neanderthals. If hominids weren't using and refining language I
would like to know what they were doing with their autocatalytically
increasing brains (getting ready to draw pictures somehow doesn't seem like
enough)." ~ Dean Falk, Comments, Current Anthropology, 30:2, April, 1989, p.
141-142.
2. By 300,000 years ago, the enervation for speech as we know it was clearly
evident in the skeletons of archaic Homo sapiens:
“Earlier this year, anthropologists at Duke University
reinforced that notion with a comparative analysis of the
hole that carries motor nerves to the tongue, called the
hypoglossal canal, in several hominid skulls. Chimp-sized in
the 2-million-year-old australopithecines, the canal is
significantly larger, falling in the modern human range, in
both Neandertals and an earlier 300,000-year-old skull.
This suggests that ‘the vocal capabilities of Neandertals
were the same as those of humans today,’ Richard Kay and
colleagues wrote in the 28 April Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.” Constance Holden, “How Much Like Us
Were the Neandertals?” Science, 282(1998):1456
**
“Empathy, intuitive reasoning, and future planning are
possible without language,’ he says. So are impressive tools
such as the aerodynamically crafted 400,000-year-old wooden
spears reported last year to have been found in a German
coal mine. But ‘it’s difficult to conceive of art in the
absence of language,’ says Tattersall. ‘Language and art
reflect each other.’ Both involve symbols that are not just
idiosyncratic but have ‘some kind of socially shared
meaning,’ adds Randall White of New York University.”
Constance Holden, “No Last Word on Language Origins,”
Science, 282(1998):1455-1458, p. 1457
**
“Klein, for example, posits a ‘fortuitous mutation’ some
50,000 years ago among modern humans in East Africa that
‘promoted the modern capacity’ for rapid, flexible, and
highly structured speech—along with the range of adaptive
behavioral potential we think of as uniquely human.”
Constance Holden, “No Last Word on Language Origins,”
Science, 282(1998):1455-1458, p. 1457
And for Neanderthal:
"Perhaps we should slow down and consider a more
parsimonious explanation for why Neandertals seem so human-
like in brain size and anatomy, the speech-related details
of the hypoglossal canal, hyoid bone anatomy, burial
behavior, hunting prowess, and invention of a true Upper
Paleolithic industry in Europe. If it looks like a duck and
quacks like a duck..." Milford H. Wolpoff, "Neandertals: Not
so Fast," Science 282(1998):1991
And even if Lieberman is correct that Neanderthals had a speech impediment
that made it difficult for them to pronounce certain vowels, i and e, then
their speech would have been similar to modern victims of Apert's syndrome.
Here is what some researchers said about t that:
"Apert and Crouzon syndromes is reflected in aberrancy of both the acoustic
and perceptual structures of their vowels. Nevertheless, our investigations
have shown that their vowels, and their speech in general, is fairly
intelligible. Our research to date has provided some insight into ways in
which the speech production system (taking into account the speech
perceptual system) is plastic in the face of abnormalities to vocal tract
structure." Karen L. Landahl and Herbert Jay gould, "congenital Malformation
of the Speech Tract in Humans and Its developmental Consequences," in Robert
J. Ruben, et al, editors, The biology of Change in Otolaryngology, (New
York: Excerpta Medica, 1986), pp 131-149, p. 148
Humans have had at the very least, some speech for the past 2 million years.
It is time that apologists accept the data of modern science and deal with
speech and humanness going back at least that far.
The Mercury News article can be found at:
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/scitech/docs/language24.htm
glenn
see http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
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