Hi Shuan,
Sorry it took me a while to reply, I just got back from a business trip to
the States.
You wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Shuan Rose [mailto:shuanr@greenmount.org]
>Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 7:01 AM
>To: Glenn Morton; John W Burgeson; asa@calvin.edu
>Subject: RE: Glenn's comments
>
>
>HI Glen,
>I have recently been reading stuff from Johanson(Lucy's discoverer) who
>holds that Homo Erectus, our supposed ancester who lived a million years
>ago, was not very humanlike(no speech, questionable about using fire, a
>scavenger not a hunter). I also have read Richard Leakey, who thinks that
>Homo Erectus had rudimentary speech and a simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle,
>but who would be skeptical (I think ) about Homo Erectus having tents and
>clothing. You say that Homo Erectus was much more advanced than even Leakey
>would allow. What do other paleoanthropologists think?
Opinions vary widely but most seem to think that speech in some form has
been around for a long, long time--and of course there isn't any proof of
anything. However, that doesn't mean that we can't say anything. To me the
appropriate approach is to grant the minimum qualities required to account
for the activity that the archaeological record demonstrates. The Flores
Indonesia example below almost requires speech. But you asked about other
paleoanthropologists. Here is what they say. Remember that H. erectus are
found from possibly 30,000 years back to 2 million years ago. Broca's area
is a brain region associated with speech which leaves an impression in the
form of a bump on the inside of the skull.
"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.
To me the best evidence of speech 800,000 years ago is the fact that H.
erectus crossed the ocean at Lombok and Flores, Indonesia. There was no land
bridge for them to walk across.
"Both Lombok and Flores could have been reached only by crossing the open
sea, which, most archaeologists would agree, demanded considerable
linguistic capability." ~ Robert G. Bednarik, "Sea Faring Homo Erectus" The
Artefact, 18(1995): 92-92, p. 91
Of this crossing, the AP wrote:
"MARCH 12, 01:28 EST
Earlier Boat Existence Discovered
By MALCOLM RITTER
AP Science Writer
NEW YORK (AP) -- Stone tools on an Indonesian island show that human
ancestors crossed large stretches of water more than 800,000 years ago --
much earlier than scientists had been able to show before, researchers say.
The age of the tools indicates that Homo erectus reached the island of
Flores sometime between 800,000 years and 900,000 years ago, researchers
said. That meant crossing at least 12 miles of water, probably on bamboo
rafts, said archaeologist Mike Morwood.
The work suggests Homo erectus had better mental, technological and
linguistic abilities than generally realized, said Morwood, of the
University of New England in Armidale, Australia. "
***end AP**
Here is what Morwood wrote in the original report:
"The complex logistic organization needed for people to
build water-craft capable of transporting a biologically and
socially viable group across significant water barriers,
also implies that people had language. Previously the
organizational and linguistic capacity required for sea
voyaging was thought to be the prerogative of modern humans
and to have only appeared in the late Pleistocene. It now
seems that humans had this capacity 840,000 years ago." M.
J. Morwood et al, "Archaeological and Palaeontological
Research in Central Flores, East Indonesia: results of
Fieldwork 1997-1998," Antiquity, 73(1999):273-286, p.
285,286
Turkana boy dates at 1.6 myr ago. Note that Tattersall doesn't say 'no
speech'.
"The prime importance of the Turkana Boy is that he represented the earliest
kind of human we know of whose general body proportions matched those of
living people. Not that he was modern in all respects. The upper part of
the canal through which the spinal cord runs is narrow, perhaps suggesting
that nervous signals to the throat were limited. It's suggested that this
may even indicate a less precise command of voluntary respiration, which
might reflect a limited ability to communciate using complex and precisely
controlled sounds. " Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), p. 188
Schick and Toth may extend speech back to H. habilis--the predicessor of H.
erectus
"Studies of such casts have suggested that new morphological features (which
Australopithecus did not have) appear in the brains of Early Homo and Homo
erectus: these include larger frontal and parietal lobes and prominently
enlarged Broca's and Wernicke's areas, associated with speech."
~ Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 219
McCone seems to think they didn't speak:
"The physical changes needed for speech show that modern language must be a
very recent invention of our ancestors. The high arch in the roof of the
mouth that helps with voice production is about the only telltale sign of
speech that shows up on a fossil skeleton. This arch did not start to
appear until Homo erectus arrived about 1.5 million years ago, and even then
the arch was slight. Judging from fossils, modern speech came along about
100,000 years ago when the earliest examples of Homo sapiens were starting
to walk the earth." ~ John McCrone, The Ape That Spoke, (New York: William
Morrow and Company, 1991), p.160-161
Tobias is a very famous anthropologists (among anthropologists and
anthropological afficianados). In reading the following, remember that 8
year olds will talk your ear off, yet they have a vocal track that looks
like that of H. erectus.
"Some physical anthropologists, among them anatomist Philip Tobias of the
University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, believe that Homo habilis was
capable of articulate speech, on the grounds that Broca's area is developed
in early Homo's brain, but not in that of Australopithecus. Most experts,
however, believe that speech developed much more gradually. Anatomist
Jefrey Laitman of Johns Hopkins University has studied the position of the
human larynx by examining the base of hominid skulls. He found that
Australopithecus had vocal tracts much like living apes. He was unable to
study the base of Homo habilis crania as they are fragmentary, but Homo
erectus had a larynx with an equivalent position to that of an 8-year-old
modern child. He beleives that it was only after 300,000 years ago, with
the appearance of archaic Homo sapiens, that the larynx assumed its modern
position, giving at least mechanical potential for the full range of speech
sounds used today." ~ Brian M. Fagan, The Journey From Eden, (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1990), p. 87
Gamble seems to think that H. erectus had all the components for speech:
"Speech and language require more than a voicebox. Lateralization of the
brain is also a necessary but not sufficient requirement, with Broca and
Wernicke's areas controlling speech in the dominant hemisphere. In
particular Broca's area, as Passingham shows, controls the sequencing of the
vocal cords and directs them according to context. This adds up to extreme
vocal skills. The earliest brain cast showing Broca's area comes from the
1470 Homo habilis skull from Koobi Fora. Indications of asymmetry, and
hence lateralization in the brain, have been traced through preferred
handedness in the manufacture of stone tools as well as endocasts of the
brain of Homo erectus to 1.5 Myr." ~ Clive Gamble, Timewalkers, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 172
Lieberman who is a critic of Neanderthal speech does think erectus spoke:
“Judging from anatomy alone, speech of some sort—although
not like that of modern humans—has probably been around for
at least a million years, says Philip Lieberman of Brown
University. Based on comparisons of modern humans with
fossils and living apes, he says, the hominid breathing and
swallowing apparatus were even then beginning to reorganize
in areas affecting the capacity for speech.” Constance
Holden, “No Last Word on Language Origins,” Science,
282(1998):1455-1458, p. 1455
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
>Behalf Of Glenn Morton
>Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 12:05 AM
>To: John W Burgeson; asa@calvin.edu
>Subject: RE: Glenn's comments
>
>
>Hi Burgy,
>
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: John W Burgeson [mailto:burgytwo@juno.com]
>>Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2001 11:41 AM
>>To: asa@calvin.edu; glenn.morton@btinternet.com
>>Subject: Glenn's comments
>>
>>
>>Glenn wrote, in part: "The record low temperatures in Beijing which is
>>near the Majuangou site is 1 degree Fahrenheit with average low
>>temperatures below freezing from November until March!"
>>
>>The implicit assumptions you make here, and it may well be justified, is
>>that weather temperatures 2MY ago were comparable to today and also that
>>the hominids then were comparable in skin protection (I.e. were not much
>>hairier) to humans today. Can these assumptions be supported?
>
>Yes. As to the first one, according to Elsievier'sGeological Time table, 2
>million years ago was the time of the Biber glaciation in Alpine
>terminology. So most likely the weather was colder than today in Beijing.
>
>
>
>If not --
>>particularly the second one, we know that animals with hair survive very
>>well w/o tents and clothing today in the Arctic; if the hominids of 2MY
>>ago had similar body hair, they might well have done so too, and this
>>would weaken your argument somewhat.
>
>I would point you to http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/sweat.htm for
>the reasons most anthropologists believe that humans lost their hair
>somewhere before the advent of Homo erectus. That site has all the
>requisite documentation to let someone follow up on this if they want. One
>other thing, fur had less survival value for humans when carrying infants
>after our feet evolved to bipedal locomotion. A baby chimp can hang on to
>its mother's fur at four points of attachement--both hands and both feet.
>But bipedal feet don't let the baby hang on. Thus from Australopithecus on,
>mothers had to carry the infant as the infant probably could not dangle by
>hands alone. This fact would make hair lose its beneficial effect for
>infant carrying, thus making it more likely that as the brain got larger,
>the hair had less use. See
>http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/birth.htm for more details.
>
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