"Religous relics and altars date back only 8,000 to 24,000 years. Thus, the
secular archaeological date for the first spirit creatures is in complete
agreement with the biblical date." [Id. at 141].<<
If the Golan Venus was a religious relic, then it is around 300,000 years
old, far,far older than Ross suggests. (see Alexander Marshack, "On
the "Geological' Explanation of the Berekhat Ram Figurine," Current
Anthropology, 36:3, June, 1995, p. 495.) It is generally believed that the
venus figurines are religious in nature. Several of the Neanderthal sites,
with bear skulls apparently treated with respect have been interpreted as
religious sites. These sites are earlier than the 50,000-60,000 years I have
quoted Ross as saying.
Jim Bell wrote:
>>2. Redesigned vocal tract making articulate language possible at the same
time intellectual capacity explodes in art, notations and tool types. [The
area of the brain that governs the fine actions of the hands required for
advanced toolmaking and art lies very close to the area of the brain that
controls muscular movements required for speech.]
Let's look at this language issue.
Brian Fagan wrote:
"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 Jeffrey 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
If Homo erectus' larynx had the position of an 8-year-old, so what? From my
personal observation, I can fully attest that not many 8-year-olds have major
problems talking my ears off! Nor do they have problems carrying out group
activities, like games and plotting ways to get in trouble.
Dean Falk wrote:
>> "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.
This would imply that Neanderthal, with the maximal development of Broca's
area was more capable than us of speech. So if, as you say, the "area of the
brain that governs the fine actions of the hands required for advanced
toolmaking and art lies very close to the area of the brain that controls
muscular movements required for speech." then maybe Neanderthal was more
manually dextrous than us! This data falsifies your suggestion.
There has been some suggestion that Neanderthals were unable to speak like
modern men do. Stringer and Gamble state,
Moreover, when considering the work done in reconstructing vocal
tracts in early humans, it should be remembered that some pre-Neanderthal
fossils ;show a cranial base of fundamentally modern type, and this includes
fossils such as the Steinheim and Petralona skulls which, as we have seen
(Chapter 3), may represent the ancestors of the Neanderthals. It seems very
unlikely that the ability to produce a human type of language was present in
the European precursors of the Neanderthals, with their smaller brains and
less sophisticatged behaviour, and yet was lost by their more advanced
descendants."~Chris Stringer and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals,
(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 90
More destructive of this view is the following information from Barnauw. He
writes:
"Criticism of the findings of Lieberman and his associates has come from
two articles in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, in which the
following points re made: (1) the brains of Neanderthals were at least as
large as those of modern humans; (2) the Sylvian fissures of the brain, as
seen in the endocranial cast of the skull of La Chapelle aux Saints, resemble
those of modern humans, implying that speech was present, (3) modern adults
who have features like those described by Lieberman et al., such as
prognathism and flattening of the base of the skull, are quite able to speak
complex modern languages; and (4) Lieberman and his associates have
reconstructed the hyoid bone of the La Chapelle aux Saints individual in a
position too high to permit swallowing, not taking into account the influence
of upright posture and bipedalism on the position of the larnyx."~Victor
Barnouw, An Introduction to Anthropology: Physical Antrhopology and
Archaeology, Vol. 1, (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1982) p. 151
If modern adults who have larynx's like those of Neanderthals can speak like
modern men, why do we then turn around and say that Neanderthal couldn't
speak like us?
Jim Bell wrote:
>>3. Tools are unlike their predecessors in many ways: utility, variety,
complexity. "Cro-Magnon man developed more effective flaking techniques such
as punch and pressure flaking, and learned to make tools from small blades
instead of flakes. The discovery of grinding gave Cro-Magnon man the use of
such objects as mortars and stone oil lamps....In addition to spears, the
Cro-Magnon arsenal included spear throwers (atalatls) and eventually bows and
arrows." [Goodman at 187-88]<<
In case you missed it, I documented a couple of days ago, that blade
technologies appear in Africa around 100,000 years ago. See Brian M. Fagan,
Journey from Eden, p. 46 This is quite a lot earlier than Cro-Magnon man.
Thus Cro-Magnon was not the inventor of this technology. As to the claim
about spears, I documented earlier that the earliest spear is from Clacton
on Sea. Schick and Toth write:
"During the earliest Stone Age, however, there is little evidence for
actual weapons used for either offense or defense. It is not until much
later
in time, approximately four hundred thousand years ago, at the British site
of Clacton, that we are finally able to find an artifact that is almost
certainly
a weapon: a shaped wooden artifact with a pointed tip that appears to be a
spear."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p.172
Thus Cro-Magnon was not the inventor of the spear! What IS the copyright
date on Goodmans book?
Jim Bell wrote:
>>6. Bone awls, bone needles, and cave sketches show that Cro-Magnon man wore
tailored clothing of hides and furs.<<
So? What is the point? Does this mean that naked tribes in the Brazillian
rain forest are not human?
Jim wrote:
>>7. Art: "Cro-Magnon art was startlingly beautiful and highly sophisticated
in both style and technique." [Id.]<<
Once again, so what? The first cave paintings and the most venus figurines
were from the Perigordians who lived prior to 20,000 years ago. But their
successors, the Solutreans, were poor artists and did not paint in caves.
The Azilians who lived around 12,500 were incompetent as artists and left
little art other than painted pebbles. Art is always produced by humans but
it is not definitive of humanity. You can be human and never draw a single
picture in your life. In fact, lots of human cultures in other parts of the
world living at the same time as Cro-Magnon, did not produce any art of this
magnitude. Maybe those people were not spiritual? Dickson writes:
"However, none of these regions has ever produced parietal or mobiliary art
of the quality or on the scale of southwestern Europe and a satisfactory
reason for this has yet to be adduced depsite the imporance of such an
explanation to our understanding of the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens."
Bruce Dickson, The Dawn of Belief, University of Arizona Press, p. 105.
And considering the people in Europe who did not produce art at the time, one
must ask if they were not spiritual also. Fagan writes:
"In westeern Europe, both portable art objects and cave art tend to
concentrate at relatively few sites, at such famous locations as Lascaux in
the Perigord, Trois Freres in the Pyrenees, and Altamira in northern Spain.
No less than 60 percent of all Perigord portable art comes from four sites.
In the Ariege region of the Pyrenees, four caves account for nearly 84
percent of all the wall art."~Brian Fagan, The Journey From Eden, London:
Thames and Hudson, 1990, p. 171
Since only a relatively small portion of the European population produced
art, to say that art is definitive of spirituality condemns a lot of modern
looking people to a non-spiritual status.
Jim wrote:
>>11. Cro-Magnon burial practices "clearly demonstrate a belief in an
afterlife, a very advanced religious concept. Instead of merely disposing of
corpses for sanitary purposes, or out of simple affectio for the departed,
as appears to be the case in Neanderthal burials, Upper Paleolithic man
buried his dead ceremoniously with a great many objects." [Id. at 194]<<
Neanderthal's also buried their dead with more than just a "dispose of the
body' mentality. The recent Science News wrote:
"The infant's delicate skeeton lay on its back, arms extended and legs
bent upward, at the bottom of a 5-foot-deep pit someone had dug perhaps
50,000
to 70,000 years ago. A limestone slab nudged against the top of the shild's
skull, and a small triangular piece of flint rested at about the spot where
the
tot's heart had once beat.
"A team of Japanese and Syrian scientists unearthed the prehistoric
youngster in a cave at Dederiyeh, a site located near the Syrian city of
Aleppo. They consider the skeleton to be that of a Neandertal and call the
discovery the best evidence yet of Neandertal burial practices.
"'This child was no more than 2 years old, and its anatomical features
are clearly those of a Neandertal,' asserts excavation director Takeru
Akazawa, an anthropologist at the University of Tokyo."~B. Bower, "Child's
bones found in Neandertal Burial," Science News, 148, October 21, 1995, p.
261
Schick and Toth write:
"But there is a consensus among most Paleolithic archaeologists that many of
these claims of burial are probably valid, because humans are usually the
only species whose skeletons are found relatively complete, undisturbed by
predators or scavengers."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent
Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 293
To relegate all evidence of human activity from times prior to 50 kyr, one
must ignore a lot of data.
glenn