The SJMN has a habit of always taking data to support a materialist view. They
also recently had an article on the concept of a single eve and adam. I
monitor it regularly to see what is new from this viewpoint. Bert M.
glenn morton wrote:
> 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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