Re: The wrong horse in evolution education

In a message dated 4/14/2006 7:12:27 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
drsyme@cablespeed.com writes:
That is not my understanding of the RTB model.

Ross et al, are explicit that the homo genus is not equivalent with humanity.
 They would say that only those homo's that are specially created in the
"image of God" are human beings. They place the first human being, Adam, in the
Neolithic revolution. The archeological-cultural "big bang" is a result of
the presence of human beings, that is, because Man was created in the image of
God, he was able to produce this explosion in tools, agriculture, civilization,
etc.

This is not correct. In his recent book _Who Was Adam_, Fuz Rana was very
clear in putting Adam at about 90,000 years ago by identification with
mitochondrial and/or y-chromo convergence, plus a number of other DNA convergences that
have the same approximate date. These dates are all well before the
archeological big bang (ABB). I think RTB's earlier discussion of the ABB associated
Adam with it in part because the DNA convergences were not measured so well,
but now with the better DNA data it became clear that the ABB is too recent,
and so the model was revised. That's my understanding of why it was revised --
maybe I'm wrong about that, but in any case the RTB model does put Adam 90kya
and associates him with all modern homo sapiens well before the Neolithic.

Phil Metzger
Received on Fri Apr 14 21:46:16 2006