>Glenn has *not* "documented a mismatch". He set out to refute the
>view held by Hugh Ross, Jim Bell and myself that modern man arose
>"within 50,000 years" and then produced evidence that indeed
>he did. Glenn then changed his argument mid-stream to claim that
>"Adam arose 50,000 years ago", which is *not* what we believe.
>
Stephen,
You miss entirely the arguments I have made. My arguments are not at all
based upon Adam being created exactly 50,000 years ago. They are against ANY
view which believes Adam was created LESS than at the very least 2 million
years ago! I don't care whether you believe in a 10,000 year old creation of
Adam, a 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000 year creation of Adam. There was evidence of
human activities and human characteristics much longer ago than that!
I have outlined lots of traits that fossil man had, prior to 50,000 years ago
which unite him with us. These include art, spears, Broca's area for speech,
woodwork and leather working. There is one trait I didn't go into last
night. That is the predominance of right-handedness in us and in fossil man
Schick and Toth write:
"In modern human populations approximately 90 percent of people are
dominantly right-handed (dextral) and about 10 percent are dominantly left-
handed (sinistral). This is a very unusual pattern, and it is unique to
humans. In the rest of the animal world, including nonhuman primates, the
breakdown of handedness (or pawedness) tends to be about 50 percent
left-handed and 50 percent right-handed."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth,
Making Silent Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p.140
Thus if we can find evidence of right-handedness in the fossil record it
supports the idea that these fossil men were more like us than the animals.
The first place we find evidence is in the brain.
"By 2.0 million years ago, when the first relatively complete skulls of Homo
are found, these show evidence of profound increase in cranial capacity as
well as possible reorganization of brain structure (as seen in the casts or
impressions of the brain's lobes that appear on the inside of the skull), in
contrast with australopithecines, who show no such evidence for cerebral
reorganization. Such extreme asymmetry is evident in modern humans, in whom
it appears to be correlated with lateralization, between left and right
hemispheres, of various functions of the brain. Such asymmetrical
organization may also be correlated with preferential right-handedness (we
will return to this question later). But australopitheciens do not show such
asymmetry in their brain. It seems that this evolved when the larger-brained
hominid was doing someting critical for its survival that depended upon and
selected intelligence."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent
Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p.103
"Physical anthropologists have noted that early genus Homo skulls have
asymmetries associated with right-handedness, while australopithecines do
not."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 221
Sometimes there is physical evidence of right-handedness on the teeth.
Stringer and Gamble write:
"An additional conclusion we can draw from endocranial casts is that
Neanderthals and early modern humans -- like people today -- had cerebral
dominance, i.e. the right and left halves of the brain were specialized for
particular functions. In living people, there is a clear statistical
relationship between having a larger occipital lobe on the left side, a
larger
frontal lobe on the right side, and right-handedness. Most Neanderthal and
early modern human endocranial casts display a similar pattern, indicating
the predominance of right-handers even in prehistoric times -- a conclusion
reinforced, as we have seen, by their stronger right arms, by the cut marks
on several Neanderthal front teeth, and by evidence from the resharpening of
stone tools."~Chris Stringer and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals,
(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 82-83
Sometimes there is evidence in the stone tools for right-handedness.
Schick and Toth write:
"Let's look at what a right-handed tool maker typically does during
hard-hammer percussion. As outlined above, a right-handed individual
normally holds the hammer stone in the dominant right hand (which gives more
precision and power to the flaking blows and lessens the chance of hitting
one's fingers) and the core to be flaked in the more passive left hand. The
left hand essentially acts like a vise to securely grasp the core during
repeated blows from the hammer stone, orienting the core properly for each
successive impact.
"Now, what effect does this setup have upon the flaking process? If a
sequence of flakes is removed from one face of a core, there is a tendency
for the left hand holding the core to rotate it in a clockwise direction as
the
flakes are removed. One hits off a flake, rotates the cobble a little, and
strikes off another to the right of the first, rotates it slightly again and
flakes again, and so forth. If the core is made on a cobble or thick
coritcal
flake, we can see this clockwise rotational bias by examining the flakes that
have been produced. Successive flakes tend to have part of a flake scar on
the left (where the previous flake had been struck off) and part of the
cobble's cortex on the right. Thus, large samples of these flakes can tell
us something about handedness: whether the cobble was being rotated in this
way, as would a right-handed person, or whether it was being turned by a
left-handed person, in the opposite hand and producing the opposite pattern.
Experiments show that right-handed tool makers produce significantly more
oreinted flakes. In our experiments, (we being right-handed), a ratio of
57-43 of right-oriented flakes was produced.
"This is an experimental result that can be applied directly to early
Stone Age artifacts. So far, every site we've examined from the early Stone
Age, including those at Koobi Fora dated from about 1.9 to 1.5 million years
ago, shows exactly the same pattern. Thus it appears that by the time of
early toolmaking in the archaeological record, these ancestral hominid
populations may have already become preferentially right-handed. For
whatever reason or reasons, right-handedness seems to be an ancient trait in
humans."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 142
Stephen wrote:
>>Pearce believes that Adam was Gn 2 Adam and earlier hominid forms
were Gn 1 man.<<
Yeah but does Pearce explain why the word for man in Genesis 1 is Adama and
the word for Adam in Genesis 2 is Adama? They are the same word. Thus I see
little justification for this view.
You wrote:
>>Peace does not believe that Adam was "50,000 year old". If you are
going to reject a view, then please first take the trouble to state it
properly! :-)<<
As mentioned above, it doesn't matter if he believe man was created less than
50,000 years ago, his view is contradicted by the data.
I ordered Pearce's book today.
glenn