On Sat, 30 Sep 1995 20:45:38 -0400 Glenn wrote:
GM>"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.
GM>This is one more data point in the attribution of human-ness to
fossil man.
>If there is physical evidence for a language in fossil man, then how can we
>exclude him? I know that we can never prove that KNM-ER 1470 spoke nor even
>prove that the language was complex, because there were no tape recordings
>but the physical evidence is the next best thing. Other than the FACT that
>Broca's area exists in KNM-ER 1470 anything else we say about the quality or
>lack there of to the language this structure might have produced, is
>speculation. And yes there is the possibility that the structure did not
>produce a language. But given all these caveats it is fascinating that the
>only creature on planet earth today which has this structure, is man.
GM>I will save Stephen Jones some time here. Yes, this will fit
>within your two Adam theory.
Thanks to Glenn for this ray of hope! :-)
BTW, Prof. Spanner, a theistic evolutionist in "Biblical Creation and
the Theory of Evolution", Paternoster: Exeter, 1987, p109ff, suggests
that God taught Adam the use of language, and that was the essential
difference between pre-Adamite hominids and Adam.
Pearce, "Who Was Adam?", Paternoster: Exeter, 1969, p52, suggests
that God taught Adam farming. BTW, this is a useful book, but
not as much on the two-Adam theory, as I had hoped.
There is some Biblical evidence for the above in that God is depicted
telling Adam to keep the Garden (Gn 2:8,15) and asking him to name the
animals (Gn 2:19). Not to mention God speaking to man (Gn 1:28-30;
2:16-17).
As I have just posted to Dennis Ford, Oller & Omdahl's chapter in
Moreland's, "The Creation Hypothesis", p235, entitled "Origin of the
Human Language Capacity: In Whose Image?", presents a very strong
case for the uniqueness and important of human language in the image
of God.
Presumably naturalists would rule this possibility out, apriori?
God bless.
Stephen